This is something I have done. What it the best book in the entire universe? No, but it was enormously fulfilling, and valuable for me to do.
Many students decide to publish books in college. Many people at my school, MCLA, certainly have. For some, it’s almost a right of passage, as writing to that back cover is an enormous task for anyone to do. It doesn’t matter if the book isn’t perfect, many authors’ first work isn’t their strongest; the book has to be good enough for the student to want their name associated with it.
I believe I’ve made this threshold, even though my debut work “X-O Manowar: A Man of Death,” was a book that nobody read. This happens quite often with “Kindle Worlds” titles, as the properties that program allows you to write under tend to be obscure, and not everyone is into the ebook craze (by default, “Worlds” titles can only exist in a digital format).
It was a title that went through painstaking revision, one that I had multiple people read over to make sure what I was writing was worthwhile. At the end, you never truly know, all you can do is do your absolute best to make the best product possible and leave the judging to others. After you put your work out into the world, it is quite literally out of your hands.
Would I do anything differently? First and foremost, I would not write my first book through Kindle Worlds. Especially for new writers, it’s important to use your own IP. I think the “X-O Manowar” hurt the type of story I was allowed to tell and definitely hurt my book’s visibility. “X-O Manowar” is a property published by Valiant Entertainment (a comic book company only comic book fans have heard of).
What made this program so attractive to me was that there seemed to be a lot of interest in the “Manowar” license, at least when I first scouted the site, and the universe itself hadn’t really been fleshed out all that much. The series was recently rebooted, and basic questions, such as who made the titular “Manowar” armor, and I wanted to answer that question. The “Manowar” ebooks under the license were also decently entertaining, but nothing I couldn’t match in terms of quality, save “Noughts and Crosses” by Stuart Moore, who writes for a living.
However, none of the titles attempted to explore or flesh out what still is a barren world. My main pet peeve was that all of the “Manowar” books were told from Aric’s perspective, and at most added a new villain for him to fight. Nobody was interested in the Vine’s point of view, nobody tried to explain where Shanhara, the titular “Manowar” armor came from, and nobody wanted to do the classic fanfiction/licensed novel card of bringing a beloved character back to life.
Over the course of a few months, I slowly drafted a basic narrative where Gafti, dead companion to main character Aric, is resurrected by a new alien race, and has to do their bidding to return to his best friend. This eventually turned into a first draft, which turned into a second draft, which turned into me getting into conversation with a mentor figure to look it over, which turned into a whopping total of seven drafts (not uncommon for first books).
I thought it was going to be a success, but it appeared that I waited too long to publish. By the time “A Man of Death” came out, all interest in that section of Kindle Worlds evaporated, both because of the addition of new worlds and the fact that mainstream readers stopped taking it seriously. You’re on bad footing when you market your platform as monetized fanfiction, when you meet all the qualifications of being licensed worked (even if “Worlds’s” bar of entry is pretty low).
The response: I got a few sales, a lot of congratulatory remarks from fiends and family (most of whom couldn’t figure out how to download the book), a swell of pride, and then, nothing. It fell and it fell hard. I tried marketing the book, but I found that I didn’t know who to market it to. The initial success of this “Worlds” license was attributed to the commissioned titles by Shane Berryhill and Stuart Moore (published when the “Kindle Worlds” first opened its gates) and subsequent titles seemed to be riding the sucess of those initial titles. After a while, people stopped publishing under the license, save a book here and there, and people stopped checking hat section of Amazon.
It seems that “X-O Manowar” didn’t have fans in the same way a Marvel or DC property would have; it had readers interested in work similar to what the established authors published when Kindle Worlds launched. There wasn’t much room for new authors to flourish, or to find their footing.
I’m lucky I even got a review, albeit it is from someone who didn’t buy the book and lacks any commentary on anything in the book whatsoever. The review, responsible for the incredible one star rating of what was a one year project, reads “needs more anime,” published on the anniversary of September 11th, authored by Amazon user “skonaog,” who has yet to review anything else on Amazon.
I’m still incredibly proud of this project. I didn’t think I could write a book, let alone publish it, but I did. The fact that it’s not garbage is a plus. It still would’ve been nice if anyone read the thing, but the journey of making and publishing it taught me a lot about this medium, and storytelling in general. Some of my strongest pieces of writing are in this book, whether they need more anime or not.
Yes, this book has faults, but it has enough good moments in it that I’m proud to have my name associated with it. I often use excerpts from this book as an example of what I can do, not to mention that I somehow formatted it into an ebook all by myself (an experience that is like slowly turning screws into your eyes).
Most importantly, I know I can sit down and commit to writing a book, start to end. I know that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and I’m willing to sit through all of that bullshit. I know that no matter how much time, effort, and love I put into a book, there might not be any reward other than proving to myself that I can make that thing exist.
Sure, it was disheartening and soul-crushing to see my first book get received this way, but that’s just part of being a writer. There will always be another article, another book, if I can scrounge the strength for it. Nobody is stopping me from coming out with my next great piece of work but myself.
Whether anyone reads or likes what I write is their business, but I’m a writer. It’s in my blood. I’ll write regardless, and who knows? I might just learn to do something wonderful.
I’ll end with an excerpt from the book. It’s one of my favorite passages from it, and I had a lot of fun writing it. It’s my explanation of how Shanhara landed on the Vine home world (part of it anyways).
“Gafti’s vision shifted to a single suit racing through the sky as if it were a shooting star. He instantly recognized Shanhara’s blue leaking multicolored fire. It was clearly damaged, but what it was doing hurtling through space was a mystery. Its descent accelerated as time passed. Stars flew by like cars on a darkened highway. Trails of light soon merged into a black and white blur as the suit hurtled through time and space.
Then everything stopped.
Shanhara lay in the midst of a crater.
Again, the camera focused on Shanhara; everything else was irrelevant. Day and night blinked in and out of existence. Rain came and went. Grass sprouted and died. Animals stopped to sniff Shanhara only to be struck dead seconds later, rotting into nothingness. Nothing was constant in the time-lapse world save an emerald stem creeping from the orb’s insides. Gafti stopped paying attention to the background, though if he had, he would have noticed that a jungle had sprouted around Shanhara. Her stem soon stroked the ground, sprouting roots that penetrated soil. The stalk thickened, growing taller and taller; gently lifting her into the sky. At its climax, she stood majestically atop the very first Hara tree. The image dimmed into darkness just as primitive Vine started crawling up her boughs.“
“X-O Manowar: A Man of Death” is available for the Kindle for $1.99, and can be read on any device.
https://www.amazon.com/X-Manowar-Kindle-Worlds-Novella-ebook/dp/B0145TF8Q2?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
To read it on PC, I reccomend using the “Kindle Cloud Reader,” which allows you to read ebooks in your browser window.
Mitchell Chapman 