Jeremy's Kiss started in the mid 1990s as an idea. I had my group of friends that I hung out with and we did all kinds of games and spending time together. One of the games we played was to create vampire characters, create a storyline, and through the course of an evening (or several) each would share what our characters did as the situations developed.
I created one of the story lines, but we never got the opportunity to play it out.
So the idea sat in my head.
In the early 2000s, I sat down and started typing out a short story about a runaway girl. It was just something that came to my mind, and I just let it out. I realized as that short story developed that it would go very well with the idea I had generated as a game with my friends.
I followed that thought, and it clicked. It really worked. I had more than a story line. I had the makings of a book. That was when I had to write. It needed to move out of my head and into a file.
I wrote for about a year. Then I spent another year just going over and going over what I had written. I wanted it to be something I would want to read.
Then came the really hard part. Finding someone to edit the story for me. That didn't happen while it sat on my computer. Then I heard about self publishing. I didn't think of myself as an author at that time. I just knew I had written a book and that was something kind of cool. So I went to Create Space and got it started, but I didn't "release" it for sale. I ordered the proof copy and went back to trying to find an editor. In the meantime I worked on it myself. I grabbed the red pen, and went through the print edition and found all kinds of corrections I needed to make. Then I found an editor (call her Teri). She read through it all, and added her corrections.
I poured over it making all those corrections. Then in April of this year I officially released it for sale. I didn't expect much. I was happy with what I had done. Then the first reviews come in. Wow. I was really struck. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. People who read the story really liked it.
One of them did some freelance editing, and she sent me another page of corrections to make. I went back through and made the corrections. Then put it back up for sale.
That is where it is today. I still hear amazing reviews from people who read it.
There is the story of how Jeremy's Kiss came to be.
Sounds a lot like what I've been going through with my "Immortal Relations" series. Book one has been out for ten months and I've given away almost 100 print copies and did the KDP "Free" thing for five days giving 1,019 away through Kindle, yet I've only had five reviews (all five star) but AMAZON took two of them off for whatever reason. I've been told I have to publish three books before people will start reading my first book and the second in the series will be out around the end of this month (October) titled, "Immortal Relations, Love & War." Both books are adult paranormal-action stories and I've never had a hang up about sex and so I didn't feel my vampires would follow human mores either (thus some have said the first book is erotic). I did not need to "prove the point" in the second book and have found a way to tame the sex down. For one thing the action is so fast, there isn't as much "play time" (yet both of the main ladies have children). I hope to have the third book out early to mid 2013, so maybe I'll see some movement then?
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