Reflections on Miracle Nick

The last month has been wild. I've actually been working on the Miracle Nick revision since February 15, making it a full month of tinkering with that project and going from deciding to do new art for it to press. In retrospect, I think I should have approached that differently. Instead of working in seclusion, I probably should have been showing demos as I went and getting feedback. However, I did end up doing the "preference survey" which was all about thinking which models I wanted to use toward the end of  the book for the best most satisfying images. But I didn't advertise that as a Miracle Nick rework. I probably should have been teasing at it over the month while I was working at it.

I think I didn't because there were just so many unknowns about the release. There were huge questions at pretty much every part of the pipeline--do I release a pdf on Gumroad? Do I do kindle? Will people even buy a book that's been out for 5 years? Do people actually like reading on pdf?

I suppose I could have done a survey for every single question, but honestly so many of them are contingent on execution that I don't think people would have felt like they were giving meaningful answers. I definitely would do new surveys for any future huge projects. I'm still second guessing whether two columns in the PDF were preferable. I thought it was great because I wanted to see an image beside the text, although now that I've seen the kindle version I think that's probably much better for phone reading. But even in the process of doing that, I only realized after pushing to publication that I think I would have been better off doing  a different aspect ratio more optimized for phone reading.

It's definitely been a learning process, and I'm really thankful to everyone who bought any of the versions of Miracle Nick, as well as those who have joined the Patreon.

It has raised new questions for me. One thing I noticed is that out of the three formats I offered it through (Gumroad, Kindle, and DeviantArt) the one that so far no one has bought it through is DeviantArt. I think the way DeviantArt handles premium downloads is confusing both for me but ESPECIALLY for the end-user, who probably found the simplicity of gumroad better.

I'm still debating a ton of other things for future releases. Would people prefer to not buy through Amazon and instead do Barnes and Noble? Should I set up a Paypal purchase option on Gumroad?

Of course, it's also a bit too early to ask for feedback. "Do you like the Miracle Nick" revision is what I want to ask, but in reality people bought it like 2 days ago and it's pretty certain they haven't really had time to digest it. I'm really hopeful I get some feedback, but I also appreciate that people just like to take things at their own pace.

In the end with the moment I'm filled with questions, even though I'm thrilled that there's still some people that enjoy the story 5 years after I did the rough draft. Even after all this time it's still pretty close to the chest for me.