Progress – M. Jandreau

Having Trouble Finding Motivation

It’s not writer’s block. For the purposes of the final draft, I’m “done” writing. It’s all about editing. It’s all about taking feedback from everyone who took the time to read the various drafts of the book (some of you multiple times) and making sense of it, and making the story make sense with it.

So why am I having a hard time motivating myself to do it? To finish it? To publish it?

Every day I have a recurring task in my to-do app, simply titled “Edit,” in the My Last Days project. And every day, I check it off and move on with my life. I tell myself things like “I’ll do it tomorrow”, or “there’s no sense in editing it, you don’t have an artist lined up to do the artwork” (don’t get me started on what a pain it’s been to find someone for that.

Is it because my hand hurts so much and typing is painful sometimes? Maybe. Is that an excuse? Possibly. (On a related note, I’ll be seeing the interim head of Orthopedics at Mass General in April about my hand, in hopes they can help more than the guy who cut me open two and a half years ago did).

I started reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” last week on the recommendation of my boss. It’s supposed to help you become a better person by making tiny changes in your habits. I’m hoping it’ll help me work through whatever it is that’s blocking me from finishing My Last Days.

And since I have so many ideas on the book I want to write after I finish My Last Days, I really want to get it done. I also want my hand to not hurt so much while typing, which is the reason I haven’t started writing the next book. If you recall, I wrote the entirety of the first draft of My Last Days while editing A Sour Chord all those years ago.

Thinking back on that, it seems like forever ago.

Copies sent to test readers!

I’m very excited to report that, as of yesterday, I’ve sent copies of My Last Days off to my test readers.

They’ll read through it and give me their feedback about the story, characters, plot, ending, etc.

Hopefully they like it and then we move on to the next steps.

Things I still need to do: read through it one more time myself, start to finish, get artwork done for the cover and jacket, remember how to publish the eBook to the various ereader websites that exist out there.

Then it’s just a matter of getting it all done and publishing it. Then, the hard part starts; marketing. The part I’m least good at. Fingers crossed! My only internal goal is to sell more copies and have more readers than A Sour Chord. Which wasn’t much, so it shouldn’t be too hard to beat.

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.

Apple’s Publishing Platform is Terrible

Part of this whole “I’m writing a book” process has been to educate myself about how it works from start to finish — what it’s like to write a book, edit a book, have artwork designed, and finally publish the book.

I’ve been rolling with the proverbial punches since I started this journey in March of 2013. I haven’t been frustrated at all, despite many parts of the process taking much longer than I wanted. Until this week.

I was finally done with everything. Artwork done, book compiled into eBook format, ready to publish and start marketing myself and the book.

I uploaded the book to Barnes & Noble first, typed in a few bits of information, uploaded my file and had a button that said “Publish” in a matter of minutes.

Amazon’s process was similar — ready to publish in just a few minutes.

Apple’s process has been frustrating and confusing, to say the least.

I found out that you need their own proprietary publishing software, called iTunes Producer. After downloading 3.0 (the latest version), I had nothing but problems. Even on my brand new Mac Pro (one of the most powerful computers on earth), it just kept freezing.

Google suggested that it was the same for most people who’d upgraded. So I found an older version and used that.

After two, or maybe it was three, hours of confusing unhelpful error messages, I finally got the book to compile into their iBooks format, and started the upload process.

My 1mb file took ten minutes to upload. Ten minutes!

Once that completed I was happy. I was ready to go!

Wrong. Then Apple’s “review process” began. They, much like apps submitted to their store, review your book for quality — though it’s unclear what they’re looking for.

This was Monday morning, around 10am. Cut to Friday, they finally approved my book and made it for sale immediately.

I wasn’t ready to be on sale yet, so I went in and turned off the “Cleared for Sale” option on the United States store, which then triggered an error message in their system. It eventually fixed itself, but now I see a big error of “Not available in 51 stores” on my book’s management page. I filled out the contact form yesterday asking for help, but I imagine it’ll be a few days before I hear back.

While the book was up for sale, the “Sample” file that was provided (which may have been my fault), was the entire book, not just a sample. Clearly no one’s going to buy the book if they can get it for free through the sample.

I’m hoping I can get all of these issues cleared up next week and finally be on sale.

I do have to say, though, seeing the book on an iBooks page and in the iBooks app made me feel an extreme sense of accomplishment. Even if no one buys it and no one cares about it or likes the story, I did it. And that’s the most important thing for me.

Uploaded and Queued Up

As of around 24 hours ago, I’ve uploaded A Sour Chord to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble were quick and painless. After mucking around with my eBook format a few times and testing it on their preview systems, I got it right and had it queued up, selected what countries I wanted to sell in, and set my price. All I have left to do there is click the Publish button on both platforms.

Apple, on the other hand, has a review process built into their system. I won’t even get into what a pain it is to upload your book to their service if you’ve never done it before — they have their own proprietary app that only runs on OS X (not a big deal, I’m a Mac user), which the current version doesn’t work properly — but I managed to get that all sorted out.

I couldn’t find anywhere in their membership agreement, or documentation when I signed up that they can take up to 30 days to approve your book. Apparently it’s the same review process that apps for the App Store go through. I’m not sure if that means I have to wait for someone to actually read the book, or if they just download it, scan through it, and then approve it.

At this point, I’m at the mercy of the might fruit company. My plan is that once they approve the book, I’ll flip the switch on all three services and be for sale all at once. Then I’ll have some updating to do here on the website, including publishing the book details, updating the navigation menu, adding buy links, etc. My task manager app is brimming with things I’ll need to do once I go live.

In case you’re curious, I settled on $3.99 for my initial price and will play with that over time. It’s surprising how much of that money the companies selling for you take. For example, of that $3.99, Amazon will give me $1.40. That’s 35% if you wanted to do the math.

It varies by country, but given that most of my sales will be US based, I’ll get $1.40 per copy sold.

I’m hoping for, and will consider this endeavor a success, if I can sell 100 copies. Fingers crossed! Once this waiting game is over, it’s game on. I don’t want to say that I’ll have to start pimping myself out, but it almost feels that way.

Editing Continues and Some Thoughts

I’ve been chugging away at the edits that Austin sent over before he left for a vacation in Greece (I know, I’m jealous too!) and I’d guesstimate I’m a little less than halfway through the list of edits he had.

So far I’ve trimmed a few thousand words out through the various edits, which I think is good.

Going back through and editing has allowed me to read a lot of the actual book myself. It’s helped me realize that there’s some changes I’d like to make.

Most notably, I want to change my lead female’s name — for reasons I won’t get into here.

I also want to change the name of the band — as a placeholder I’ve been using Resolute Resolve, which makes no sense and is flat-out stupid. I’ve known since I started writing that this would be a placeholder, I just have to spend the time to come up with a different name.

I need to revisit describing some of the characters — I’ve done this twice so far already, but need to do it again as now months after writing some of the characters I’m having a hard time remembering what I wanted them to look like.

The story needs some work — there’s certain keys that I wanted to hit to make sure that the end is really powerful. It’s not a twist in the traditional sense, but I think the ending comes as somewhat of a surprise. My hopes is that I pulled it off well, but I know that there’s some work that needs to be done.

I’m still pretty well on schedule for where I wanted to be at this time. I’m hopeful that when Austin gets back from vacation we can plow through the rest of the edits, and then I can use my (fancy new) printer to fire off a printed copy to mark up with a pen.

I was hoping I could do that on the plane on the way to my vacation at the end of the month, but I don’t think that’ll work out with the timing. Perhaps I’m wrong, but time will tell.

Just about halfway through

I’ve been chugging away at doing my first read through and am just about halfway there. It’s such a surreal experience to read your own work, especially since I’ve been reading it on the iPad.

Though I decided the other day that once I’m done with Austin’s edits (which should hopefully be soon), I’m going to print a hard copy to markup with my changes. I’ve been finding things as I’m reading through that would be easier to just jot down on paper, and go back and make those changes. Nothing major, but little things here and there: this reads funny, this character was taller earlier. That sort of stuff.

I also started interviewing some editors through a number of online services, and will hopefully be able to nail that down before I’m done with the actual first draft.

The whole process is taking quite a bit longer than I anticipated and I still have quite a bit of work to go. But I’ll get there. Seeing as how I don’t have a deadline or a publisher to report to, there’s no immediate rush on getting everything done at a specific date or time. Being my own “boss” has its rewards.

Will editing ever end?!

The longer and longer the editing process takes, the more and more I feel like it’s never going to end. It seems like we’ve been editing for months. In some aspects, we have, but it feels like a lot longer than it actually has taken.

My buddy Austin, you know him — the one that’s doing the editing — has been finishing up his Master’s Degree, which is why he hasn’t had a lot of time to finish reading and putting together his edits. I think he finishes up this week, which should allow him some more time to get things done.

I’ve been reading through some chapters in random order myself from time to time. Reading the chapters on their own, and not chronologically, has given me some good insight into each chapter on its own. It’s allowed me to see whether or not the story in that chapter is written well enough to stand on its own.

I haven’t officially written any edits on those chapters myself. My plan is to wait until Austin’s edits are done and then read through the whole thing on my own again. That’ll give me some more insight into the story as a whole, to make sure that I’m comfortable with it before I send it off to a select handful of people I know to read and give their feedback on.

Hopefully I’ll have that process done by the end of June. I’ll gather their feedback in July, incorporate that by mid-July, get it off to a story editor and get it back to finish the last draft by September.

I’ll record the audio book version in early September, and get it all for sale.

All in all, not a bad project for 2013. Keep myself busy, put out a book, and check off something on my bucket list all at once. Not a bad 2013 at all.

Even more editing!

Despite going through his last few weeks of his Masters program, Austin’s been awesome at doing this editing project. I imagine that when all is said and done, he’s probably going to hate me a little bit. I don’t think he realized how much work this would be when I asked him to do it. In fairness, I am paying him, so there’s that.

I did the addition on word count of what we’ve edited so far, and we’re roughly a third done with the first draft’s edit. Making good progress, but I think it’s definitely taking longer than either of us expected it to.

Remind me to never think writing a book is easy ever again. The initial draft was an easier process and took less time than editing it. It’s kind of surprising, when you think about it.

On the upside — once the first draft is edited, all of the spelling and grammatical mistakes should be caught, and I can focus on the content of what it all says in the second draft.

My plan is still to hire a professional story editor once the second draft is done, to make sure that the story works. I may also solicit some friends to read it and just let me know what they think of it. I’m still not positive that the story itself is even any good. Hopefully it is. I’ll be able to solicit Austin’s opinion on the story once he’s done reading everything.

The process has been slow, but rewarding. Having someone else make comments on the work, chapter by chapter, has been great. Though there have been chapters that have comments that make me discouraged, overall the editing process is going quite well.

My goal is to be done with the first draft’s edit by the end of May, and then work on the second draft through June. I’m shooting to have everything done and self-published by the end of September. That includes recording the audio book, which I obviously can’t do until the story is done and completely edited.

That’d make the total turnaround time for this whole project about seven(ish) months, as I started in early March. If I sell 1000 copies, I’ll be happy. That’s my goal. For something I just decided to do, have no backing on, and am financing myself, I think that’s a completely realistic goal. Anything more than that will be cake.

Plus, at 1000 copies, I’ll have made my money back on what I’m spending out of pocket to have the book edited, published, the audio book recorded, and the various other costs associated with this whole thing.

Fingers crossed!

Editing Continues

I’ve been hard at work with my editor buddy chugging our way through the first draft edit that we’re doing. It’s been a pretty slow and grueling process, but on the bright side, we’re making good headway.

Based on the progress we’re making, I’m guessing this will take another 6-8 weeks.

Once that’s done, I’m going to do a whole read-through myself, to see if there’s anything that I want or need to change for myself.

Once that’s done, I’ll hopefully have found a professional story editor to go through the whole thing. That’s assuming of course that Austin and Jen (my friend I’ve mentioned many times) think the story is worth moving forward with. Like I’ve said, I think the story’s good, but others may not like it.

I think I also decided this week that I’d like to do an audio book version too. Not because I think it’ll sell any better than anything else, but because I think it’ll be fun to record and produce an audio book!

The Editor’s First Feedback

I’ve been working with my good buddy, Austin, lately to have him go through my first draft and do a rough edit. From what I’ve read online, that means he goes through and reads the whole thing, pointing out typos, grammatical errors, etc. Of which there are plenty, I’m sure.

He’s also been pointing out things that I haven’t noticed as I wrote: describe this character better, this character said this here and something contradicting here.

We decided, rather than waiting for him to finish the whole thing, that he’d send me a few chapters at a time. That way I can read his feedback, incorporate what he’s said, and not have the daunting task of doing that all at once.

One thing’s obvious — the editing part of this is going to not only take way longer than I thought it would, but it’s also going to take a lot longer than writing the initial first draft.

I went through the feedback this morning for the first four chapters. It took me about 3 hours to incorporate the changes into my first draft. There weren’t that many of them, it was just that going back and forth between his PDF with his notes on it and the editing application I’m using was time consuming. Looking from one screen to the next and trying to find where the two words line up was taking more time than I thought it would.

So the good news is that we’re progressing with the editing of the book! The downside is that it’s taking much longer than I anticipated. With this new schedule and the rewrite I’ll have to do, I’m hoping that I’ll have been able to get the book done by September. I’m setting an internal goal of having it be for sale before my birthday at the end of September.

My best friend is also reading the book, and I’ll be interested to hear what her feedback is. So far I know she’s read through the first five chapters, and she said that it started a bit slow but once she got to chapter 3 she wanted to keep reading to find out what’d happen next. I guess that’s a good sign.

I’m still worried about the whole thing. It’s nerve-racking not knowing whether or not people will like what you’ve written, or sympathize with your characters or story. It’s scary that you’ve invested so much time in something, and it may turn out your story is a giant pile of garbage. I’m hoping that’s not the case, but only time will tell.

If you’ve read the book, I’m hopeful that you’ve enjoyed it. Or if you are reading the book, I hope you like it so far!

Editing Continues

While waiting to hear back from my friends with their feedback and comments, I’ve continued to think of ways to improve the story. Which is kind of backwards, given that I’ve asked someone to edit the first draft.

I’m thinking the characters need to be painted more as pictures. I tried to do my best to describe them as people, but I’m realizing that it’s likely going to be tough for people to imagine what they look like, based on how they’re written. Perhaps going back through the scenes where we meet our main characters and doing a better job of describing them would be beneficial.

I also have some notes about the story itself. While I’m confident that the meat and potatoes (so to speak) are there, I think there’s some tweaking that can be done; dialog enhanced, scenes fleshed out more.

To be honest, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never done this before, I’ve never taken any real writing classes (aside from high school English). I’m dying to know what other people think about the story, but don’t want to be that guy who’s nagging them all the time. So I’m trying to be patient and hang in there, waiting for the time to pass and for them to finish reading.

For now, I’ve started outlining the story for my next book. I suppose I have nothing better to do while I wait, right?