Out of all 4 of my current books, there’s one that I’ve pretty much been neglecting.
So far I have ‘Immunity’ (dystopian horror), ‘The Last of the Missing’ (crime thriller), ‘Imaginary’ (drama) and ‘A Shot in the Dark’ (coming of age romance). One of these books has been ignored and not given much love by myself, which in turn has affected how successful it’s been.
And that book is ‘Imaginary’.
There’s a few reasons for why I’ve been ignoring it, but they’re not exactly good reasons. And I am starting to try and promote it a bit better now, if that’ll help at all. I’ll explain my reasons though.
1- It took f o r e v e r to edit and format.
I’m usually pretty speedy with editing. I’m not great at it, but I can get it done quickly. Formatting, however, was a different issue. It’s something that, at the time, I hadn’t done before. My first two books were formatted by someone else, and looked so professional, so I tried to copy it. But there were a lot of issues with how I did it and Amazon KDP wouldn’t accept the document so there was a lot of back and forth, trying different templates, and so on.
This took about 2 months to finish. For me, that’s a very long time. It drained all of my excitement about the book and once it was formatted correctly I wanted it out of my sight because it caused me so much stress.
It didn’t help that I accidentally repeated a chapter twice when I first released it…. and I had to go back…. and format it again….
2- I thought the story was risky
The story itself is as goes (this is the blurb): Jackson wakes up one day in a strange house. He has no memory of how he got there and no way back to his old life. Invisible to others, the only person who can see him is a young girl, Sasha. Forced to work together, the pair must confront dangers that run deeper than either of them first believed.
The blurb is quite vague, admittedly (though this wasn’t by choice) and the story is a lot more dramatic and sensitive than you’d think. It discusses very sensitive issues that I was worried about misrepresenting, and I was worried that by putting the reader in the protagonist’s shoes, they’d be too confused and not know what’s going on.
I want to be both a fun writer and a serious writer. I want to write stories that aren’t realistic, but more of me wants to write and include real problems that many people face in a more casual way. But this wasn’t casual. It’s in your face and I was worried that it’d be too much for some readers.
3- I felt very strongly about the characters
I related heavily to the two protagonists, Jackson and Sasha. I could really relate to Jackson’s feeling of having to protect others and feeling like he doesn’t belong. And as for Sasha, she was essentially a combination of myself and my siblings, who are all autistic. Therefore, I felt really strongly about them. I really wanted people to like the characters and possibly to relate to them as well. A scary part about being an author is that when you put your work out there, you can’t see how people think and react to it. Barely anyone posts reviews as it is. So when it came to how they’d react to the characters (especially Sasha) I was worried that I’d take it too personally.
Those are pretty much the reasons behind my neglecting of ‘Imaginary’. As I said, I am working on it and I plan to put ‘Imaginary’ on sale for free for a week soon, but I doubt I can recover much of its success. Ah well, these things happen.
I wrote this blog post because I felt like I needed to explain myself, even if no one noticed it in the first place- I want to be honest and open with you guys.
Thank you for reading this though. If you haven’t read ‘Imaginary’, check it out on my Books page and on Amazon, where it should hopefully be up for free on Kindle sometime soon.
Alexandra Killworth: Author, Photographer, Artist 