With five days till Rise comes out, I find myself going over and over things in my head, trying to make sure I've done everything I can to make this all come together well.
I'm stupid excited one minute, and terrified the next. The excitement usually eclipses the terror (usually).
Today I got a few more of my editorial reviews back, and was glad to hear their comments. It's kinda surreal reading them all, and finding they all have very nice things to say. For those that don't know, editorial reviews are unbiased reviews from reputable sources. You see them on book covers, on Amazon, on author websites, in newspapers, things like that. They give readers a cleaner idea of what to expect, as reviewers pay attention to the plot development, general writing style, character development, and how it rates against other books in the genre.
It's a nice bit of affirmation that people who have no skin in the game or personal attachment to me rate The Rise of the Raidin. The fact that they all have said that the story is solid and there's a lot for readers to be excited about and look forward to in the story. I'm curious to see if those reviews will help gain some traction with fans of the story.
In other news, I'm about a third of the way through minor formatting edits of book 2 (title and all coming soon). The hope is (again, Lord willing), that book 2 will release in November of 2022. We'll see if it all works out! I'm working through post-book release stuff, and how I want to promote book 2 and all the subsequent books that follow.
It'll be interesting to see what comes in the next few months. What sort of growth (hopefully), will come for The Rise of the Raidin. What sort of excitement (hopefully), will happen for the rest of the series.
T-minus 5 days!
Just keep breathing...