I am thrilled to officially announce the release of my Young adult Science Fiction novel REX RISING on Amazon Kindle and Smashwords.

In case you wonder, this wasn’t a sudden decision. Granted, a year ago I wasn’t considering self publishing anything – but that was still the pre-eelectronic-self-publishing era. 🙂 Publishing for free on Amazon and Smashwords was already available then but few of us knew about it.

Since then I have also published a novella with a small publisher and plenty of short stories with publishers and magazines, so getting to see what traditional publishing was about (even though that is also mostly electronic now). I learned what it was like to work with deadlines, content and line editors, cover designers, how the royalties system works, what to look out for and what to appreciate.

It has been a fascinating year.

And somewhere along the way I decided that I really wanted to try publishing a book on my own as well. I wanted to design my own cover, do my own formatting, set my own deadlines and price and not to have to wait for a year until my next book came out (as it would with a traditional publisher).

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear about trad publishing again – on the contrary. My experience with MuseItUp publishing was great and I intend to submit more novellas to them. But I also loved the self publishing experience and look forward to publishing more stories on my own too! 🙂

REX RISING is a project I started years ago. It was a novella, which I expanded into a novel as I revised it. It plays on my fascination with parasites and all the ways in which they change us.

Parasites have evolved alongside us since forever and may have been one of the forces that pushed forward the creation of complex organisms. They affect our health and our behavior in many ways, and our bodies are so adapted to them that not having them causes the illnesses of our century: autoimmune diseases where the body, not finding any parasites to fight with, attacks itself.

What parasites can do verges on magic. We barely understand all the ways in which parasites control us. What may sound like demonic possession or superpowers may be explained by parasites.

I loved the process of researching my novel, then writing and editing it, and then creating a cover for it that pleases me. I always wanted to work with images! Now I hope to start a blog tour to advertise Rex Rising before I move on to writing the sequel.

I have created a page on this blog for Rex Rising which I will be updating regularly. Visit it to watch the trailer, read an excerpt, see the map, and read more about it:

http://chrystallathoma.wordpress.com/rex-rising/

Thanks for standing by me on this wonderful journey! 🙂

Watch the trailer:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-6Gxf8oQas]

You can find Rex Rising at the following distributors:

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Amazon DE

Smashwords