The Emotion Engine is up for pre-order.
I've been waiting a while to write that sentence.
The Kindle edition comes out on November 23 at $5.99. The paperback follows two days later, on November 25, at $14.99. If you pre-order the Kindle version now, it'll land on your device on release day.
Back in September I wrote that the draft was sitting at 71,197 words with about two and a half chapters left to go. Those chapters are done. The manuscript is at 76,216 words right now, and that number is still moving because I'm in edits. It'll probably shift a little more before it's finished. But the story is all there, start to end, and that's a different feeling than seeing the finish line from a distance.
Making It a Real Book
Most of my time right now is going into the paperback. The book is 5.5 by 8.5 inches and 309 pages, and that page count matters more than you'd think. The width of the spine depends on how many pages are inside, so every time edits add or cut pages, the spine changes and the cover has to change with it. If it's off, the title slides onto the front or the back of the book. So I've been checking and rechecking that the front, the spine, and the back all line up. It's tedious. It's also the moment the book stops being a file and starts being an object you can hold.
About Advance Readers
I'm running an advance reader campaign through Booksprout. If you want to read The Emotion Engine before release, you can join the campaign here.
Letting people read it before anyone else is nerve-wracking. You've spent months alone with these characters, and suddenly strangers are walking around inside your book.
Then there's the part I hate. A lot.
Every so often I think I've found a reader, and it turns out they're not there to read. They're there to get paid. Amazon doesn't allow paid reviews, and even if it did, I wouldn't do it. A review someone was paid for doesn't tell you anything about the book. So I remove them from the campaign, and the spot that should have gone to a real reader got wasted on someone who was never going to open it.
If you actually want to read it and tell me honestly what you think, good or bad, that's who I'm looking for.
What Comes Next
I've started thinking about another story set on the same planet. It takes place in the extreme past, long before the events of The Emotion Engine, back when magic wasn't just fantasy.
That's all I'm saying for now.
You can pre-order The Emotion Engine here.
—Charles