The book has been out for almost 2 weeks now and it’s gone well! I’ve gotten the word out to my immediate circle effectively. Just about every sale I’ve had has come from those much-appreciated people. Now comes the hard part, getting those who don’t know me to give me a shot.

Marketing is a much different animal from the rest of the book making process. Writing is what I do. It’s what I’m most comfortable with. That’s where I feel I’m in the most control and where I can let my head and my heart guide my story. Getting to do a public signing is proving to be much more difficult than I had anticipated.

Then comes getting the book ready for the public. That is an incredible amount of work. Tons of reading and revision along with many technical hoops to jump through to get a finished product. This section has it’s up and downs. Sometimes it felt like I’d never finish but each stage of the project that got finished, felt like an accomplishment. As more gets done, the vision of the final result gets easier to see. Once the cover is done? That’s the biggest visual representation and it’s a great feeling. I don’t like all the technical aspects of this process though. Ticking all of the checkmarks Amazon requires (any publisher, really) to make sure everything is right can feel like rolling down a hill that will never bottom out.

Getting the book in hand is hard to describe. It’s a sense of accomplishment I haven’t felt since graduating college. I’ve seen it all on a screen for years. I’ve seen every chapter printed out onto standard paper size more times than I can count. But to have it all put together with all the flourishes and specs all measured out correctly in my hands is something else. I can say that his object, this work, is part of me.

So now I’m working on getting the word out even farther. Totally different job from the rest. It takes a lot of research and work. It also means engaging people in a way I’ve never had to on a personal level. I have to sell my wares, my work, me in essence. Hey, look at this! Look what I’ve made! It’s totally worth your time and money! Tell a friend! Marketing these days means spreading yourself over the internet, which is tough to do. Engagement means a lot. Just making an account on a site, making one post to sell the book, doesn’t really do anything. There’s no engagement there. It comes off as spam which does you no favors and can look bad.  Reaching out to those you know is much easier and rewarding. That’s the way I struck a deal with my local comic book store, The Joker’s Child, to carrying my book. Actual brick and mortar retail space! I’ve known Caren and Len for ages and they have been happy to help me get my work out to the public. That’s been a lot of fun and very exciting.

This second wave of marketing is what’s brought up my Iconic Image ideas. As you can see with Pennywise from IT just above, I’ve got a bunch of images in the pipeline to filter out in the next few weeks to keep things fun and interesting. This also keeps my creative mind in gear as I come up with concepts and lines for each one. I want them all to be funny/weird to get the most attention. Just plastering text of “My book is available!” gets old real fast. We’ll see how well it does in the coming weeks.

I’ve gotten great responses so far. Everyone loves the cover and every person I’ve given a business card to goes “Oh wow.” I have 4 five star reviews on Amazon right now! The most amazing part is that one of them, I have no idea who it is! I don’t know the name at all and they really liked it! Strangers picking it up is so exciting and scary at the same time. I’m still getting those weird waves of doubt and fear about the public at large being able to read it, but those moments are fleeting.

Onward and upwards!

Holy animal, the paperback edition is available right now!

Amazon processed this way faster than their timeline showed me so this is a surprise. I made the Kindle Edition a pre-order for the 17th because I didn’t think the paperback would be ready this soon. Amazon won’t let me unlock the pre-order right away, but I’ve moved it up to Monday the 10th. The page should update soonish to show that change. Once the Kindle Edition unlocks, the product pages (paperback and Kindle) should merge on their own (probably Tuesday, the 11th).

This week has flown by, everything came together so fast at the end I’m stunned.

Let’s get the word out!

It’s been a productive week and things are happening fast!

On Tuesday my business cards came in and they are awesome.

The trade paperback proof of the book came yesterday and today I approved it to Amazon. The notice said that it will be up in 3-5 days which means I will need to change the date on the Kindle Editon when it’s ready! The release is very close now, which is hard to believe. I’ll blast out the release when it’s all ready.

In the meantime, would you like to get a preview? You know the title and have read the synopsis but that’s not a taste of my writing or the book! You can download a PDF of the first two chapters HERE.

Big news!

Ok, the wheels at Amazon are spinning! All the files have been completed and submitted.

Today I got word that the proof has been shipped. I don’t expect to get it until Friday, at the earliest. This is the last main hurdle for the paperback. In all the digital previews it’s looked good but this is the ultimate test. If I see any printing problems, they’ll have to be fixed and the file resubmitted to Amazon for review. That would be a major set back but I don’t expect this to happen.

I finished the Kindle version last night and submitted it to Amazon. I just got notified that it’s through the system and you can now pre-order it!

The book will be available on Monday, September 17th!

It’s almost here, I can hardly believe it.  Now purchase options are only for the Kindle version as I haven’t approved the paperback version (waiting on that proof to get to me). Once that’s through I’ll be able to get the paperback and Kindle edition to appear together.

Two notes for the Kindle version: If you pre-order, the book will automatically appear on your Kindle on the 17th. I have it set up that if you buy the paperback, you’ll get a discount on the Kindle edition. It’ll be .99 instead of $3.99 so if you intend on buying both (making you an All Star in life), I suggest you wait until the paperback is ready and that option is available to you.

This is nuts.

A major milestone was reached today. I submitted the book to CreateSpace. They are the part of Amazon that does physical book printing. A humanbeing is now reviewing the files to make sure everything is suitable for print. I should be contacted tomorrow. Assuming everything is ok, I order a proof and that gets delivered to me for review.

That proof is the book in my hand. I’ll check it out to make sure it’s printed right and nothing is wrong with the physical copy that will be printed whenever someone orders the book off of Amazon. This step is to insure the book I intend people to hold in their hand is being made.

So this is project is rapidly coming to completion. Release is very close, I’m thinking in a week depend on how fast I get the proof (and it passes my standards).

I still have to prepare the ebook file for Kindle. That’s a separate arm of Amazon. That is a much faster process than the physical book and I believe that will take a day or too to get sorted. Since today is Wednesday, I’ll probably get that done Friday.

Then it’s marketing time. So everything is coming together and I’ll have a release date for you soon.

I hit my two week deadline and completed my final edits. The text is done! That’s a major milestone, it means the book is done, the story is there, and I’m never going to edit those words again.

It’s been a long journey. I’m so familiar with the story having worked on it for so long that it’s rather mundane to me. These past 2 weeks I took a slow pace to keep myself from rushing and skipping over parts. Even though the story is old hat to me, I still really love the work. I had some much needed help in this last stage from two people to  stomp out typos and continuity errors. I’m very proud of what I’ve written and I think it’s a great first novel.

Yesterday, as I was bringing it to a close I went back to some final notes to make sure I was happy with those parts. I came to realize that those last bits were nit picking. I was looking for things to change based on very little. Can I write this sentence better? Does it need to be altered? Should I change it? Will someone get hung up on this sentence or word choice? Often times when I tried to change something for the better, or an attempt to make it better, I was just changing it to change it. Or, I was making it worse. Stuffing too much detail in and making it more complicated than it needed to be. Overthinking things can make it feel like you’re drowning. With that feeling coming back more and more, I relaized the book was finished.

The cover isn’t complete, but it’s very close. I have a lot of details to hammer out, but the bulk of the work is done. I’m confident I’ll have the book for sale this week and it’ll be a hell of a day to share with you.

Hit a milestone today. Received the full manuscript back from my editor this morning. The book is in good shape now and this marks the last half of the project starting. I’ve slotted 2 weeks for myself to do my final read through. One last check for typos,  continuity errors and any other small changes I may want to make. It’s content complete, now it’s just the details to iron out.

While I do this last bit of editing, cover work begins. I’m aiming to have that done in 2 weeks as well. Once that’s done all that remains is typesetting and getting the final file to submit to retailers (it will definitely be available on Amazon, I’m going to look at getting it on the iBook store as well, Barnes and Noble Nook too).

That last bit shouldn’t take long. An August release is very much possible and is the goal. Expect an update in 2 weeks.

We’re getting close!

Another milestone has been hit. I finished editing the 3rd quarter a few days ago. It was much simplier to complete as I didn’t change as much. What I did change didn’t require any major reorganization, I just needed to take care to fix any continuity errors that came up due to the edits. That made my life simpler.

Today I got the next chunk back from Wil today so I’m getting close to the end. I have a bunch of edits in mind but I’m confident I’ll get through it at a good clip. More 3rd quarter changes than 2nd quarter. As I was thinking about getting started today on this new material, I had a realization about a detail in the second quarter that doesn’t make much sense. So I’m going to change one detail about what Tim brings with him on the trip (which will alter 3 paragraphs total, so it won’t take me long to address it) before I dig in on the 4th quarter.

Progress is being made, looking to finish the whole project next month. Book cover design will be starting soon.

I’m halfway through the final edit of the book. The second quarter took me way longer to do than I ever intended.

A large part of that was procrastination, which I have come to realize is my mortal sin. There’s no good reason for it and it bugs me how easily I can put something off. The strange thing is how great it feels to accomplish a major milestone. You’d think that would always be the main driving factor but my mind doesn’t seem to regard that reward as strong enough. It’s something to work on.

But I digress. The edits I did took way more work to do than I initially thought. Making changes to how Tim gets his plan out turned out to be more complicated. I read the whole section and made notes on where what I needed to change was. I first organized my thoughts and ideas that way. Then I started moving things around. Deleting sections or maybe just some dialog. Move entire sections forward or back.

The first big thing: moving sections makes gaps. So continuity gets broken and the parts don’t fit together. That meant I needed to write new transitions. So that was easy or hard depending on what it is. And whenever I write something new, sometimes I like it a lot, sometimes I know I need to come back to it and sometimes I think it’s good but then I read it and I hate it.

Rewriting those parts happened a lot. Which meant a ton of tweaks which meant I thought and rethought everything. I did a lot of pacing around in my head. For a while there it felt like I was focused solely on punching things up and changing conversations to ensure it makes sense.

So I’m on to the next chunk. I have some serious tweaks to do in this section for the city scene. I have a good idea of what I’m going to and in this part, I don’t think I’m going to have to move anything, it’ll be more like tailoring a suit. Change details to get my intention across better (very important…it’s a sensitive scenario) and do some better world building to bolster that.

Right now I’m thinking it’ll be pretty easy but that’s exactly what I thought when I was going into the section I just finished. So, well see. But it will be done and it will be better.