Removing most of the cursing in Lucifer’s Odyssey

After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to remove most of the cursing in the latest e-book editions of Lucifer’s Odyssey. I’m still pondering whether or not to pay for the additional ISBN and setup for a new paperback edition. I’ve also removed all of the f-bombs and curse words from the Goblin Rebellion that are especially extraneous. I’m doing this for several reasons, some of which I’ll outline below.

With my decision to join KDP Select next month, I also have plans to make Lucifer’s Odyssey free to the KDP Select crowd very soon. My first experience with going free on Amazon resulted in a one-star review for cursing that dropped the downloads from 2,000 in the first few weeks to 1-10 a day for a fun, free, well-edited short story collection. I had dozens of 3-5 star reviews on this collection across Apple, Sony, Good Reads, etc., but no one bothered to post them to Amazon and this killed the book. And this was important to me because I get practically no business from outside of Amazon. Let me rephrase that. I’ve literally never received a check from anyone but Amazon.

There have been other comments I’ve come across in blogs and emails about trying to read Lucifer’s Odyssey and becoming disengaged in the story due to f-bombs and cursing from the ignorant demons, and I don’t want to distract readers from the story. The cursing was a sign of how frustrated the immortal demons had become being trapped on Earth and forced into their roles due to their society, the Council, etc. Lucifer’s Odyssey being my first novel, I guess I used a cheap technique–cursing–to drive this atmosphere home when it was probably unnecessary and counterproductive toward making readers happy with the series starter. With the series starter likely to hit 0.99 or even free for a few months, the importance of listening to reader input and responding accordingly to get new readers interested shouldn’t be understated, and I plan on hearing you guys out and following through.

You deserve that kind of attentiveness. It’s your money.

Anyway, that’s why Amazon is showing a 3rd edition now of Lucifer’s Odyssey. If you purchased Lucifer’s Odyssey from any online vendor, check the Lucifer’s Odyssey pages and you should be able to download a new copy. If not, contact these companies and get them to send you one. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me or respond to this post. I’m listening ;).