An Editing Update

I’m chugging away like a madman on the second draft of My Last Days, editing out long unneeded parts, making my characters stronger and solidifying the story itself.

By my math, I’m about 30% done with the second draft and Lauren (my editor extraordinaire) is ready in the wings for when I’m done and will tackle her part. I’m hoping to sit down with her and show her the app I’ve been using to write in, in hopes that we can both work in the same application to make life that much easier for me. Thinking back about how we did it with “track changes” in Microsoft Word last time is giving me anxiety all around. It was daunting and time consuming and to be honest, I hated every second of it.

My goal is to be done editing by mid-January to hand it over to Lauren and let her churn away at her process and then hit the ground running for the final draft.

I’m hoping I can have this done and published by mid-May again, which’d put me at the exact year mark since A Sour Chord went on sale. If I can churn out a book per year, I’m pretty happy with myself.

If you’re interested in checking out My Last Days (as it stands now) to offer some feedback, reach out (either via the Contact form above, or Twitter or Facebook) and I’ll hook you up with a copy!

Back on Track!

I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling a little defeated lately. The lack of sales of A Sour Chord – though mostly my fault for not really marketing it – have me questioning why I’m even doing this. Not because I want the money, that’s not – and never has been – what this is about. I just want people to read what I write.

If I could make it completely free all the time, I would.

I’ve started diving back into My Last Days now, reading it aloud, to try to get to a second draft. I’ve been making notes as I go along, hoping that I can refine the story and get to a better place with it.

It’s such an arduous process to read and re-read and re-read something over and over again. Well, reading it’s not the problem. Trying to separate myself from it to the point where I can constructively criticize my own work is what I’m having a tough time with.

I was hoping that I could have outsiders do that for me, and provide objective criticism, but a lot of those people who offered to read the first draft and provide feedback flaked out for whatever reason. That, in and of itself, had me questioning whether or not the book was so bad that those people didn’t even want to finish reading it.

Though the few that did said they enjoyed it, so it’s tough to say.

Regardless of what happened with those people (maybe they’re just flakey people, who knows), I’m pressing on and going to get through this first draft re-reading by the end of the month. Then I’ll move on to a second draft before sending it to my editor to run through.

My goal is to have this completely done and ready for publishing around the same time that A Sour Chord went live in the bookstores, which was mid-May of this year. So, fingers crossed that I’ll get it done on the same schedule.

How do other authors do it?

I published A Sour Chord on May 18th of this year and immediately went back to work on My Last Days, trying to finish that book’s first draft.

Since then, sales of A Sour Chord have dropped off significantly, selling maybe one or two copies a month on Kindle or iBooks, none on the other platforms. I don’t know how other authors do it, really. Mentally focusing on finishing writing one book, while still trying to promote the other.

I imagine that the more books I write and publish, the harder this will become. Trying to promote four or five books while finishing a sixth seems like an impossible feat.

I supposed in some cases, successful authors have marketing people or teams that handle that aspect of their business. But since I’m making less than a buck a month selling A Sour Chord, I can’t really afford to spend any money to hire someone to run that part of this for me.

It gets you down a little bit, seeing your hard work get lost in a seas of a million or more other self published authors, all trying to get the attention of someone looking to spend a buck on a book they haven’t heard of. But then something magical happens. A message, a tweet, a random email from a stranger. Someone telling you that they read your book and loved it.

That happened last week, and it made me smile all through the weekend.

A friend’s dad read it. Someone I’ve never met in my life, but I’ve known his daughter for 20+ years. He stayed up past his bedtime for weeks reading it, and really enjoyed it. He sent me a Facebook message to tell me that he really liked the book and couldn’t wait until the next book was released.

It’s the small things. The lives you get to touch, the emotions you get to evoke, the smiles you know you caused. It’s those little things that make this all worthwhile.

This may never be a full time job or a business for me, or frankly anything more than just a hobby. But I think it’s something I’ll always do and always want to do.

I’m still progressing along with My Last Days. I have a few folks still reading it now and hope to incorporate their feedback before getting into the second draft. It always seems to take longer than I’d like with this process, but it is what it is. I’m doing my best to not get discouraged (and also to not just start on a third book while I’m waiting on this one.)

Spinning My Wheels

I’ve got a handful of people reading My Last Days right now. Not to tell me that I missed a comma or a closing quote or the like, but to tell me what they think of the story. I read through it twice when I finished the first draft and I’m not fully sure that I love it. I like the idea, I like the message I (think I) conveyed with it. But I’m just not sure that I’m in love with the whole thing.

So I’m hoping for some good feedback from those folks that are reading it now. So far, nothing either way, but hopefully soon I’ll get some feedback.

In the meantime, I feel a lot like I’m spinning my wheels. I feel as though if I’m not writing anything, I’m wasting time. Which is a weird feeling, given that this is not only just a hobby, but it’s not like I have a drove of fans waiting for my next book, or a publisher that’s hounding me to get something written.

I just feel like if I’m not doing something, I’m wasting the day.

Sure, I’m working my day job, I’m working on a website or two for fun. But other than that, every day feels more of the same. I wake up, eat breakfast, sit at my desk for eight hours and then do some chores and tasks, make dinner and watch TV. It feels very repetitive lately and I don’t know why I’m in this rut.

Maybe it’s because subconsciously I wanted A Sour Chord to do better than it has done. Maybe I wanted someone to email me, call me or write a review online telling me how much they loved it. Maybe, on some level, that’s done some damage to my mentality and it’s starting to hit me. Maybe the book’s not as good as I wanted it to be.

When I first started working on A Sour Chord, I didn’t tell anyone. I did that on purpose because I’ve, many times in the past, started things and not finished them. That’s sort of my motus operandi. I’ve started and quit so many things in my lifetime, I didn’t want to get anyone excited about this until I knew I was done.

Then when I finished, lots of people were excited. Friends and family wanted to read it. So I, foolishly maybe, started sending it out. I realize everyone’s busy and have their lives to think of, but some people that were so excited to read it still haven’t. It’s been almost three months since it was entirely done and for sale, and some of those folks still haven’t read it yet. Am I being sensitive about that?

I’m wondering if I should start working on something else while My Last Days is being read. I don’t know how long that whole process will take this time. From the end of the first draft through editing, through artwork, through re-reading, through reader feedback until publishing for A Sour Chord was more than a year.

I’m hoping, based on what I’ve learned from last time, My Last Days will go faster. I’m also hoping that once it’s published, I’ll sell some copies. While it’s not — and never has been — about making money for me, it’s sort of nonsensical to spend thousands of dollars on editors and artists to create the finished product when it’s only going make a couple of dollars.

Maybe I need to hire a marketing person. I’ve learned, quite quickly, that I have no idea how to market anything. I was hoping that I’d publish and people would just find the book, but that appears to be the wrong way to think about things. Maybe it’s time to regroup and rethink my strategy.

That’s all I’ve got for today. I realize this is mostly me rambling the thoughts I’ve been trapping in my head for the last couple of weeks, so I apologize.

My Last Days First Draft is Complete

It seems like it flew by once I started working on, it really did. Once A Sour Chord was published and for sale, I started hitting My Last Days again. And hit it hard I did.

The total word count is just over 92k, and the story seems to all warrant such a word count. I’ve read through it twice now since I finished writing — to do a rough edit for punctuation, grammar and spelling — and I think I enjoy it. I’ve got it out with a half dozen people to read and give me their feedback, so hopefully they’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

When I first started writing it, I was lost. I didn’t really know where it was going or what I was trying to say, but as I progressed the story sort of unfolded on its own.The characters told their own story and I was just their narrator.

One of the most interesting things about My Last Days, at least to me, is that it’s in first person. I don’t often write in first person, but it was a fun and unique challenge to do so.

From here, we begin the process of gathering feedback from people, incorporate any feedback into the story and then move on to the editing process. Once that’s done, we do artwork and then we publish. It really is pretty simple.

The hardest part, from here, will be the editing. It sucked my will to live last time and I really didn’t enjoy it much. Not even a little bit. But it’s necessary and has to be done, so we all do it, right?

If you’re interested in reading My Last Days to give some pre-edit feedback, I’d love to have you check it out. Just drop me a line either on Twitter, Facebook or via the Contact page and let me know which format you’d prefer (Kindle, PDF, Nook, iOS) and where to send it and I’ll get it over to you.

I look forward to finishing this up and picking what I’m going to write next. I’m thinking, after two of them, maybe it’s time to write something a little less dramatic. Maybe a suspense novel? I’m not sure I can pull that off, but I have an idea and am willing to try.

The End is Near!

Perhaps that’s not the best title for a blog post, but it’s true. The end is, in fact, near.

The end of the first draft of My Last Days, that is. If all goes according to plan, I should finish this week and start my first round of edits either this weekend or early next week.

I’m really excited about it and think that it came together quite nicely, though I fear it’s going to need quite a bit of editing. When I write, I tend to just go and go and go without thinking too much. Sometimes that works in my favor, sometimes it means I have a lot of word chopping and scene re-arranging to do.

The story, as a whole, really works. I think I can say that honestly without any bias. But I think there’s some reworking that needs to happen and some more emotions that need to be put into the story near the beginning and middle (the bits I wrote in late 2013.) When I picked it back up again this year, I had a really good sense of where I was going, so I think that helped me stay on the right track.

I’m really stoked to finish this up and get on to the second draft. I hope you’ll check it out when I’m done! In the meantime, grab a copy of A Sour Chord if you haven’t already. It’s on sale everywhere for just .99 cents and that’s a bargain you can’t beat!

A Real Website is Important

Over the past year and a half, since I started this journey, I’ve been to countless websites, blogs, Facebook pages, GoodReads profiles, Amazon Author pages and a zillion other services for authors. What’s the most surprising to me is how few authors have real websites, on their own domain.

As someone who works a day job building and maintaining websites, this causes some great concern. Not just because that’s my bread and butter as I sell copies of my book, but because it’s not always safe to do that.

Here’s some reasons why having a real website is important.

You control your data.

With a hosted service, such as a WordPress.com website, a Facebook page, or a Blogspot blog, you don’t own your content. If you read the fine print carefully in the terms of service, the service you’re publishing through owns everything you publish (in most cases). Which means you’re basically giving away your bread and butter.

More control over aesthetics

When you run your own website, you (generally) have much more control over how it looks and what features you can use with it. Granted, this can be limited by your personal skills, the skills of the person you hire to manage it for you, or the budget you have to spend on it.

I realize that most people go with a hosted service for one of three reasons: 1) Cost. 2) Easy. 3) It’s all they know how to do.

Security

It’s usually more secure to run your own website, because you have more control over what’s allowed. When you have an account with a hosting service (such as GoDaddy, 1&1, etc.) you can run your own software of choice, opting to keep it up to date and make sure that your content is as secure as you want it to be.

When you use a third party service, let’s use Blogspot for example, you have no control over the availability of your content. What if Blogspot goes down right as your book goes on sale? What recourse do you have for a service you’re getting for free? You can complain, but ultimately it’s not in your control of when your page will come back up.

If you run your own site you’ll have as much control as you want over that outage. In most cases you can get your site back up pretty easily, usually with just a call to your webhost.

A domain name

This one should be a no brainer! How much easier is it to tell someone you meet at an event or a book signing that your website is yourname.com or yourbook.com?

It’s easier to tell them and easier for them to remember. If you have to tell them it’s mybook.blogspot.com or mybook.tumblr.com, they’ll be less likely to remember when they get home. Having a custom domain name means that you have something more memorable.

Not to mention that the .book domain is coming in 2015. That means you can have title.book as your book and have it direct right to your website.

There are countless other reasons why you should have your own website and these are just meant as examples. In this self-publishing world where we all want to appear like we’re professionals with years of experience, dozens of books, and a literary agent that’s a big deal, having a real domain name with a real website is a must.

Back to Work on My Last Days

Now that A Sour Chord is fully done and for sale in the various market places, I’ve decided to put off all of the other real-world tasks that I have to complete and get back to work on My Last Days.

Last week I started re-reading everything I’d written so far, so I can be familiar with my characters again, as well as the story lines I’d written. I probably could have skipped this process, but it’s actually pretty beneficial for a few reasons. Primarily because I’ve already found mistakes and inconsistencies in the first draft, but also because I’m getting back into the head of my main character, which is important for this particular work.

My goal is to finish reading the last 40 pages by Wednesday and get back to writing later in the week or early next.

This is such a fun journey and one that I’m glad that I’m able to do without very much effort or money. (Though, let’s be honest, I spent more than I thought I would on A Sour Chord, but that was worth it.)

I’m shooting to finish the first draft, first round of edits and a second draft by the end of the summer before turning it over to an editor. Then, this time, I’ll do a bigger group of beta readers than I did with A Sour Chord. Hopefully that’ll spark more interest.

I’m also hopeful that a second book will inherently draw more attention than the first anyway, now that I’m not an “unknown” anymore.

If you grabbed a copy of A Sour Chord, thank you! If not, it’s still on sale for 99 cents through the end of June across all platforms. Grab a copy before the sale ends and read it whenever you’d like. Once it’s yours, it’s yours! Also, if you have grabbed a copy, thank you so much. I hope you enjoy it enough to leave a review on the site you purchased from. I’d love that very much!

Published Author: Three Weeks Later

I clicked the “Publish” button across all three of the major publishing platforms three weeks ago today, at least what I thought was the three major platforms.

It was quickly requested to be published to Google Play, which I hadn’t even thought about, as my sister has an Android device now. And I figured I’d publish to Smashwords, too, since that seems to be big amongst the indie author scene. Why not, right? The more places people can find the books, the more likely someone may be to buy it.

Last week I ran one of Amazon’s free book promotions for the full 5 days (Monday – Friday), and got a huge number of free downloads.

So let’s sum up where we are after a long week of pushing hard to get people to buy the book on both Twitter and Facebook:

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Of the 87 sales on Amazon, 77 of them were free copies during the promotion week (which speaks volumes for the free promotion tool Amazon gives you). Which means I’ve sold a hard total of 19 copies so far. Not as great as the the 96 total downloads, but I’m overall pretty happy with that number. Given I have no idea how to market this book and am basically begging and pleading with people to buy it and read it at this point, I think I’m doing a-okay.

I’m hopeful that as these people get free copies and read it, that they’ll like it. And they’ll leave reviews of it, which will help other people to want to read it as well. That’s my hope anyway.

If you’ve grabbed a copy, please leave a review (though an honest one) when you’re done reading. I’d appreciate it.

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