Son of the Siren was published July 2, 2024. It’s been out there in the world for over a year! This was my baby and my induction into the world of publishing, and being an official author for the first time.
There are definitely lessons I’ve learned from my first experience. I thought I’d share them with you!
The biggest lesson: I blew too much money on ineffective things
I wrote about the money I wasted on promotion in this post but if you want the gist of it, I spent money from my Japan pension and an inheritance from my uncle to pay for marketing materials and promotion for Son of the Siren–otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford to do anything. I went through about $3,000.
And gosh, did I make some stupid choices. I didn’t think they were stupid at the time, of course–I seemed to be doing things a lot of other authors were doing. But so much of what I paid for just didn’t move the dial. At all.
The good news is I kept track of what worked and what didn’t, so when I move ahead with The Name and the Key and its sequels, I won’t throw away money on the same things that didn’t work.
Another lesson: I don’t know if I worked hard enough talking about the book
I made really pretty things for social media promotion, but didn’t do it consistently enough. I haven’t talked about Son of the Siren as much as I’ve seen other authors talk about their books online because I can’t think of clever things to say about it.
I post about maybe 1-2 posts a week, sometimes with an even longer gap in between posts, and it’s recommended you do multiple posts a day. And that doesn’t exactly mean reposting or sharing someone else’s work, either.
I’m mostly a lurker, a re-poster, and reactor (liking posts). That doesn’t equal book promotion.
A sad lesson: I can’t count on my local bookstore to stock or sell or promote my books
I won’t share the name of my bookstore, but I called them once Son of the Siren was published and found out that they don’t work with POD (print on demand) books, which is what my publisher utilizes. I’m not a self-published author. I’m traditionally published by a small press (although Oliver Heber Books’ output is pretty impressive). That wasn’t enough for the bookstore, so alas, no local support for me. This means that my upcoming trilogy won’t be stocked by them, either.
Perhaps a lesson: maybe I shouldn’t have featured a sexual taboo in the book as part of the plot
This is really tricky. Son of the Siren hinges on the disaster of when Lirien sings the siren song. Lirien doesn’t realize that sirens sing to seduce their victims, and when his stepmother, the Queen, overhears him sing, she becomes completely obsessed with him and is filled with a distorted desire, which leads to a series of catastrophic events in the plot. Those catastrophic events couldn’t happen without the Queen being under the spell.
I do not glorify incest in any way. Lirien is disgusted, horrified, terrified, and filled with guilt. The Queen crosses the line several times with unwanted touching and forced kissing, but it never gets into actual sex. I kept it this way because I was writing YA and while the subject is incredibly taboo, I knew I didn’t want to cross that line.
Um…despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews I have now, the book didn’t start out in good shape. The first reviews were three and two stars, which kept my ranking on NetGalley, Story Graph, Amazon, and Goodreads low. And most of the lower ratings were due to the stepmother/stepson relationship. The people who reviewed felt it was either unnecessary to the story (I disagree), too gross (understandable), or, and I directly quote, ” just seemed like a teenage boy’s fantasy” (whaaaat? where did they get this from?). At one point my publisher said if worse came to worst (based on the way things were going then), we could do a rewrite and relaunch. I prayed so hard for this not to happen. Luckily four and five star reviews have come in to balance out all of that negative, but I think those early bad and lukewarm reviews kind of set the book off to a rough start, and I don’t know if that had a long-term effect or not.
My trilogy, The Name and the Key, does not feature any sort of taboo like that. It has dark magic featuring demons, grimoires, and alchemy, which might bother people with certain kinds of belief systems, but I don’t see anything controversial about this series. I think because I’m not risking the series with something that’s technically disgusting like stepmother-stepson incest, it will have an easier time of it than Son of the Siren has had.
Now, all of the above makes it sound like my time with Son of the Siren has been negative. That’s not true in the least. It’s just, negative things tend to be a better teacher for me than the positive.
However, lots of positive things happened. I’ve gotten good reader reviews and editorial reviews that were favorable. My book was chosen by Ingram Spark to be featured at their table at the huge ALA conference this year. My book got selected for an ever-elusive Book Bub promo, which I’ve heard are very hard to get. And, perhaps my favorite thing, is that Son of the Siren was given an audiobook with an incredibly talented narrator who not only created separate voices for every character in the book (there are a lot), but he also created the tunes for the songs I wrote in Son of the Siren so he could sing them. And he has a nice voice!
First books are hard. They are an experiment. They are a milestone. They are a lesson. They are a blessing.
I’m always going to have fond memories of Son of the Siren. Even though my brain is focused on my next work, my goal is to not neglect it with all of the new things coming my way. I’ve been told new works help sell the backlist, so I’m hoping readers of The Name and the Key will find my precious baby Son of the Siren and give it some more love.
In the meantime, onward and upward we go!
Kristina Elyse Butke 
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