The time has come upon us.  Brace yourself for a (hopefully) short blog post full of shameless self-promotion and a stupendous amount of links as I explain the release of my very own self-published novella called The New Colony.

What is a novella, you may ask?  Well, basically it is a shortened novel.  In the case of The New Colony, it is only around 10,00 words long; more like a short story than a novel, but technically too long to fit into most short story categories.

The idea behind the story has been accumulating dust in my mind for several years now.  I was always intrigued by the Lost Colony at Roanoke Island back in the 16th century.  There has always been a lot of mystery surrounding the events and this caused my thoughts to go bonkers with ideas of what may have happened.  Plus, I have for a long time now desired to write a story in journal entry form.  Thus the story was conceived.

As I await the finished edits of my full-length novel, which I hope to have published this year, I wanted to get my feet wet in the book selling world and gauge what kind of response I would get out of The New Colony.  I was unsure of how to publish it at first.  But after doing some research, I found the best way to release it to the most widely distributed channels would be by using Smashwords for the e-book copies and Createspace for the print copies.  And I could not be happier with the results!  Both distributors were surprisingly easy to use, once I grasped the concepts of formatting and such.  And to top it all off, both services are free to use, which is great for someone with little to no publicity (Createspace does offer some professional paid services which you can also use).  I highly recommend both of them and will more than likely use them again in the future.

Before I get into posting a bunch of links on where to find the novella, I want to give a huge shout out to Celora Blair for designing the cover art for The New Colony.  It is indeed wonderful and exactly as I had imagined it!  She is also a tremendous writer and you can find the link to her blog “In [The] Deep” here.

Now we may begin the links.  Bring on the links!

To purchase The New Colony in print for $4.99, you can find it at:

Amazon

Createspace E-store

Otherwise for E-book versions, you can purchase it for only $2.99 at the following:

Smashwords

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Inktera

Scribd

Finally, I just wish to say thank you to all who take the moment to purchase and read this story.  None of this would be possible without your support!  Here’s to the beginning of the journey and hopefully further up and further in, as C.S. Lewis would put it, to the next step of the way. Cheers!

Love Unlimited

C.J. Huffman