@titania Having had a minute to think about it, my big hangup is that I, personally, am not drawn to abstract-looking covers. If I’m in a book shop, I am going to be drawn to the covers that depict characters or at the very least spaceships or creatures from the book. They can be stylized or abstracted, but they still need to be specific to the story. I’ve self-published a short and had a novella digitally published through a small press and in both cases I insisted on putting a character on the cover, which meant commissioning someone to do the cover for the short.

tl;dr: Self-publishing already feels like giving up, I’m not ready to give up so hard that I don’t even have the cover I want.

Thinking about the whole novel thing some more and wondering if I want to rewrite the romance subplot as sapphic or just be satisfied that the male love interest is absolutely the kind of male love interest a lesbian would write, just big Hozier energy here.

@trixter i vote rewrite sapphic, i need more wlw books...

@Weebism There are supporting lesbians! Just not the main relationship. Though the guy is genderqueer enough that if I wrote him as female I’d feel like I needed to rein in the femme a little. It’s a very bi4bi pairing. But I also want to see more wlw in the adventure fantasy world. Maybe if working on this can get the rust out of my writing gears…

@Weebism Actually, that’s right! I was poking at a story that’d be a prequel to this, in that it’s unrelated characters during a historical event in the same setting, that’s a princess-and-her-knight story but the knight is a lady knight. :3

@trixter OUGHH NEED

@Weebism (The Princess has to be saved from her own father, who is going to sacrifice her for necromantic power, because I’m all like “Tee hee a novel!” but honestly this is pretty metal.)

*opening up my old novel project folders and immediately going to the text files of smutty non-canon drabbles*

Look, this isn’t monsterfucker romance, it’s adventure fantasy with a monsterfucker subplot

@trixter My partner wants you to write this, and will read it as soon as you publish it.

@drwho It’s finished! I’ve just been sitting on it for a decade as I got more and more disillusioned with traditional publishing and now I’m thinking I might as well just self-publish.

@drwho @trixter I self published a book last year, the main thing with smutty books is to watch out for what is and is not allowed. Like Amazon is pretty strict on some things. Smashwords, not so much.

PS, I do not plan to share my smutty self published books at this time, that's why pseudonyms exist.

@drwho @trixter Also, I used Draft2Digital, it was pretty easy and straight forward. The hardest part was waiting for longer than it felt like it should for it to get approved on Smashwords and Kobo.

@RamenJunkie @drwho I mean, it’s not a smutty book, it’s a book with some smut in it. There’s a difference!

I’ve both self-pubbed and small-press-pubbed actual smut so I can manage. Though I’m wondering if I’d rather go back to my smut pseudonym for this or, like, doxx myself if I promote it on main.

@trixter Please publish it!

@drwho I’ve got one bit I do want to rewrite and I need to commission cover art (I have feelings about cover art) but I’m pretty much settled on it.

There are two important reasons why this is not a “romance” or “romantasy” novel and one of them is that the main plot isn’t about the romance, it’s about the main character rescuing her twink brother from his evil boyfriend, and the other is that everyone is absolutely miserable at the end.

Yes, it’s planned out as a trilogy. Does that mean that it takes until the end of the third book to get to the Happily Ever After? No, of course not, you absolute fool.

(The romance is just the raven-man psychopomp she tragically falls for on the way.)

Doing my best to fight the urge to just make a new playlist for this novel instead of working on it. That Transformers fic I was getting back into is currently all of 3 chapters and about 3 hours of playlist.