Karen L. Mead

After two years of being unavailable, the fifth book of Demonic Cafe is now back in the Amazon store. I thought I would take this time to go into what happened with this book, which may be of interest to some readers; if you’re not interested, I won’t be offended:).

A few years back, I was really into the self-publishing book culture. If you want to be serious about making a living from self-publishing books, you need to release a book every few months; there are other ways of doing it, but that’s the most common way. I really wanted to be a full-time writer, so I sped up my writing process for Book 5 and swore I would put it out on the deadline I had chosen, come hell or highwater. I made my deadline, but I definitely cut some corners.

After the book was released, the first review I got was a one-star rating. That’s not meaningful in and of itself; virtually every book gets at least a few one-star ratings. But what bothered me is that when I asked myself “What did they think was bad about this book?” I could think of about 20 possible answers. I wondered: Why am I putting out work I’m not proud of? So I took down the book, with the intent of reworking it.

Obviously, this didn’t happen right away, in part because I wasn’t sure how to make it work mechanically. After all, if I released a new-and-improved version, it wouldn’t be fair to expect readers who had already bought it to buy the book again. So I would have to give the book away to readers, except I have no way of knowing who actually bought the book the first time around; it would have to be on the honor system. If I were to distribute the book as a gift via Amazon, it would cost me a few dollars each time. I could send the book out as a PDF, but a lot of readers would probably be annoyed by that. You CAN send a PDF to your Kindle, but not everyone likes doing that.

Anyway, to make a long story short, revising the book and trying to sell it would open a can of worms. Recently I realized that I had been sitting on this project for way too long and took out Book 5 to maybe do some work on it, finally; to do that, I had to read it.

To my surprise, I enjoyed it a lot.

I can see areas where it’s weak compared to the other books in the series, or things that could have been fleshed out more. But on the whole, I liked the book, and I think it advances the overall story forward properly. Rather than revising it, which was always going to be a nightmare, I decided to just make it available once more and move on to working on book 6. Sometimes a series has a book that’s not as popular as the others; it happens. Maybe readers will think Book 5 is the weak link in the series, but the point is that it’s a series: it’s meant to continue. Being stuck in this revision situation has stopped me from writing, which is obviously not good.

So the book is available on Amazon, and in Kindle Unlimited– I recently enrolled the whole series in Kindle Unlimited, but that’s another post. If people want to give the book a low star rating, that’s their right as readers; flaws and all, I still think it’s worth reading, so I’m going to move on from it and focus on making the next book ten times better.