WIP: Daring to be Different

Trella Dare from Storm Runners–a Game-4-Love book

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
– Mark Twain: Notebook, 1904

I like exploring boundaries and discovering new ways to do things. Some folks are really happy with consistency and familiarity.  That’s okay, but if you’re an author trying to get your book seen in the 35 million + books on Amazon, you might try, just once, going outside your comfort zone and doing something no one else is doing.

For the first few years of my publishing career I was confined by what my publisher was willing to allow, and they did make room for a little experimentation. Snatch Me was the first virtual world romance I wrote and I had more planned for that series, but my former publisher ran into hard times and eventually closed down. My new publisher, Troll River Publications, is more daring and my first book with them was a merging of the worlds of my shifter series and the Quarterz game-world for Snatch Me. The reader/reviewer response to that has been amazing. But those were first steps toward something more daring.

Storm Runners is my current project and due to release this spring. It’s a merging of romance and multi-path story, with virtual reality motion graphics sprinkled throughout. This addition to the Game 4 Love series will be a true game book, but still a book with an emotion-packed story. Readers will decide which path is the right path to give Trella the happy ending she needs. That might not be the path she thought she wanted.

With VR poised to be the next disruption of the fiction markets, authors need to start exploring the possibilities the genre presents. Creating books that link traditional story with virtual graphics is one way to brand yourself as an innovator ready for the future of storytelling. A good place to learn more is the free Future of Fiction magazine. I write a monthly column for it in which I walk you through the process of creating Storm Runners.