Hello again, and welcome to a new issue of Aphelion!

We're having a bit of a break on the weather around here. Cooler days with warm nights tend to be much more pleasant. I've been enjoying it change in seasons. I'm well aware that Autumn will be far too short, and the cold of Winter will be upon us again far too soon.

I had a small change in plans as far as my music albums go. In last month's editorial I said my first album would be released soon, and my second would be old recordings from my days in several different garage-type bands. Once the first album went live, I had about 25% of another one left over. So I decided to take advantage of that and write enough new material for fill the second album. The garage band stuff is pretty much ready to go. I did get bogged down in the search through my photo collection for something suitable for cover art for it. But I did find suitable photos for a different album. I've been having fun with the music programs in my computer lately. I'm just about ready to release my second album. There's just the file conversions, some cover art, and the uploads left to do. Probably another day or two for me to do the, another couple of days for the approval process, getting the proof copy to make sure everything looks and sounds right. Perhaps a week, all told, before I'll officially announce the release. My first album was released a couple of weeks ago. It has its own page over on the Create Space publishing site, and a listing on Amazon. I'll put a link to a page where you can go take a look at the end of my editorial.

It's the same sort of process used in getting a POD book published, in fact. The final steps can even apply to getting any manuscript published, in fact. You send off your complete, edited, final draft to the publisher. Then you wait for them to go over it and see if there are any changes they want made to it. If it passes their approval, you get a proof copy for you to examine. If necessary, you make corrections and re-submit that version. Once everything is finally ready, the work gets published. Then you have to worry about marketing. After all, no one will buy something they don't know exists. With a traditional publisher, most of that marketing is done by their staff. With an indie publisher, almost all the marketing has to be done by the artist, or writer. Telling your friends and family about it is the fun part, but once you run out of people you actually know, it gets a little harder. It can get to be a bit of a downer, putting the word out to all the social media you can find. But you have to keep slogging away at it. After all, there's just you, putting the word out. If you quit, someone who might buy your work might not find out that you've got it out there.

One trick I've seen work for others is to post snippets of the work out there as previews. Some pro writers will post part of a particularly good scene. The kind of thing that will grab a reader's attention and make them feel like they might like to buy a copy of the book when it's finished. I've been doing the same sort of thing, posting a link to a particularly good song. In fact, one of my Facebook friends told me that he liked two of the newest songs I'd linked to so much that he was sure he was going to buy a copy of the album when it comes out. There are a couple of people on my Sound Cloud friends list who have marked some of my songs as Favorites. Others have added themselves to the Following list. That means that as soon as I upload a new song, or a better edit of an older one, Sound Cloud messages them to let them know. I did one song that just so happened to have a Doctor Who-related title. I did the upload, set the downloads option to disabled, added a thumbnail of the cover art, and clicked the Save button. Then I discovered that the song already had 10 plays between the time the upload finished and the time I had finished editing the settings. That gave me a pretty good feeling, right there.

Right. It's about time I quit boring you all to tears and let you go read the new stories. So final words and linkage time!

The first album is titled Never Bank On A Learning Curve and it's available on the Create Space site, Amazon.com, and will be available on Amazon's digital downloads site. The digital downloads have not gone live yet. Oddly enough, I make a higher percentage from sales on the Create Space site than I would from the Amazon listing. It's been out for a couple of weeks now, and I sold two copies the first two days it was out.

The second album is titled Second Helping and it should be released in the next two weeks, or in any case by the time Aphelion's October issue goes online. I'll be posting a Preview song on the Create Space site so people can hear one song all the way through to see if they like my work.

And as always, my Sound Cloud page allows people to listen to all of my music, for free. You just can't download it from there. Plus, you don't have to join Sound Cloud to listen.

Here's a link to a page I have up promoting the music. Rob Wynne is working on another one that will fit into Aphelion's page format, so that our readers will have a far prettier promo page to read. There are links on that page to the Create Space Preview song, the Create Space page for the album, and the Amazon.com listing. I will add the link to the digital downloads page whenever it goes live.
Dan's Music Page

And here's a link to my Sound Cloud page:

Dan's Sound Cloud Page

And once again, thank you for your time,

Dan