Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Unexpected Trials of Going Independent

We spent months working hard to produce a unique, well written, and entertaining story. Since then we’ve made an effort to produce a quality eBook. Too often independent writers stop after the first part. We can understand why. Your heart is in the story and you want to share it with the world. But as readers we are often saddened when the package the story is wrapped up in doesn’t do justice to the author’s creativity.  That’s why we took the time to get it to readers and are paying to have our first release professionally edited.  Sometimes, however, it seems like the book gods are stacked against the independent author.

We are just a few short weeks away from releasing our first eBook and now suddenly we feel compelled to make some extensive changes. Our eBook was titled Bobbie Pharaoh and the Mark of Kane. The play on words will be obvious by chapter two. Unfortunately, just this morning we discovered that our title could be confusing to the large number of loyal readers of Rick Riordan. He’s the talented author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. His latest work is based on siblings named Kane. This time he’s using Egyptian mythology and legend as the background for the supernatural, so of course there are pharaohs involved. There is even an important secondary character with the same name we chose for the person who discovered the cure to the disease that our protagonist has, a cure whose application has such unexpected and life changing side effects.

While both our works deal with young people and the super natural, the two works are not remotely similar. Mr. Riordan’s falls squarely within his sweet spot of mythology brought to life. Ours might best be described as Hogwarts meets Marvel Comics. Still, our protagonist’s name needs to change as does the spelling of the scientist who discovered a cancer’s cure that causes super powers in teenagers. So now the title of our eBook is Bobbie Titan and the Mark of Kain. In some ways this actually works better. Our scientist is of German heritage so spelling his last name the way they do in Germany isn’t so bad. And of course our friends at Poway High School will know where we came up with Bobbie’s last name.

We really hope there isn’t anything else like this that is going to bite us. We did searches this time on everything related and we don't think anyone will inadvertently confuse our work with someone else’s. We are proud of our unique twist on the super teenagers and paranormal boarding school genres. We really want the reading world to like us for ourselves.


1 comment:

  1. I told you the very first day I got the book about the Rick Riordian series. Why did you have to pay for advice I gave you for free months ago?

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