I’m get­ting more and more excited by the day as I approach the end of the first act of Bilqis, the first book of the Hin­ter­land Chron­i­cles. Upon com­ple­tion of the first act, I plan to go back, fill in any miss­ing his­tory, repair plot holes and clean up any major lan­guage issues. I am finally able to see some progress in this story that has been with me for years.

I am already think­ing ahead to the release, which I don’t expect will be until some time next year, although I am push­ing for Decem­ber. I already have one will­ing beta reader in the wings and well… this type of progress after so long feels really good.

I started think­ing though about the idea of a pen name. My first novel, An Unpro­duc­tive Woman, is listed as con­tem­po­rary, women’s lit, or gen­eral fic­tion. Bilqis will be some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent though. We’re talk­ing near future, dystopian, SF.

Big dif­fer­ence, yeah?

I recently read an arti­cle that highly pro­moted the idea of using a pen name when writ­ing works in dif­fer­ing gen­res so as not to con­fuse or dis­ap­point read­ers. This makes a lot of sense to me because the peo­ple who loved AUW, will likely return to me look­ing for some­thing sim­i­lar and if so, they would be ter­ri­bly dis­ap­pointed. My inter­ests don’t lie in the realm any­more. That said, I don’t want to write under a pen name. I sim­ply do not.

What do you think?

Then I started to con­sider that per­haps I could used a pen name that was merely a dif­fer­ent form of my cur­rent name. Khaal­i­dah Muhammad-Ali could become K. M-Ali.

What do you think of that?

Hmm.  Deci­sions, decisions.

The An Unpro­duc­tive Woman book give­away began on Wednes­day, April 3rd and con­cluded Wednes­day, April 17th. A total of 482 peo­ple entered the give­away and 235 peo­ple added An Unpro­duc­tive Woman to their “to read” list on Goodreads. I’d call that a per­sonal suc­cess although I can’t say how that com­pares to other books. I don’t see any sig­nif­i­cant change in terms of sales on Ama­zon or oth­er­wise, but I still see this as a boon since An Unpro­duc­tive Woman has drummed up some added inter­est.
Inci­den­tally, I made AUW free on Ama­zon early dur­ing the give­away, but that drummed up incred­i­bly lit­tle inter­est or down­loads.
My error? I ran it dur­ing the Easter week­end. That is a major over­sight and fail on my part.
I am cer­tain that I’ll run another give­away some­time in the future. Per­haps early this fall. Next time, I think that I may run the give­away for a shorter time. Give­aways tend to drum up more inter­est on the first cou­ple of days and the last cou­ple of days as they will fall on either the “recently listed” or “end­ing soon” lists. Run­ning a give­away for four or five days will ensure that a book remains in the most notice­able spots for the dura­tion.
Con­grat­u­la­tions to Cathy Bell of Vir­ginia and Becca Warner of Michi­gan! I hope you ladies enjoy An Unpro­duc­tive Woman!