Well, my plans to have my 2nd novel out by the end of the month are looking less and less likely. I have been fighting with the cover to get it uploaded to both sites different specs for over a week now, and to say I'm frustrated would be a colossal understatement. I just uploaded it to both sites for the umpteenth time, and fingers crossed it finally meets their specifications. Gods know, I'm not a visual artist, I'm a writer. And it isn't the fault of the guy who designed my cover; he used the specs that had worked for my last novel, but unbeknownst to either of us, the sites had changed what they would or wouldn't accept. Part of the fun of being self-published, I guess :/
I submitted my fantasy detective novel to Angry Robot, which is an offshoot of Harper Collins (a huge name in publishing). Every 18 to 24 months they open their site to manuscripts without agents, and I'm hoping I will be one of the ones they pick. My beta readers say it's amazing how much my talent has grown in between my first 2 books and this one, and I think it is an amazing piece of work (not to toot my own horn or anything), so fingers crossed it gets picked up. Gods, that's all I want to do, just write for a living and have tens of thousands of people reading my work.
Somebody asked me if I thought about translating my work into other languages, thereby opening up more markets to sell my work in. While I would love to do that, that kind of work costs good money; you can't just use Google translate for something like that. You need someone who not only speaks both languages fluently (the language you wrote the book in and the language you are translating it to), but they have to be something of a writer themselves, to be able to point out if something that makes sense in your language doesn't make sense in theirs and what to use in its place. Don't get me wrong, I would love it if my work appeared in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese or Russian (just to name a few); one day, perhaps. One day. I hope that everyone has an amazing weekend!