Week 4 – Countdown to Book Launch – The Hard Way
34 days from today!
I find it funny that they call it a book launch. I guess it is the day you launch your book out to the world. At this point, April 15th will be that day for The Hard Way.
The day of the book launching becomes the book’s birthday. Just like the birth of one of your kids, this day will stick in your mind as one of those important ones.
Publishing a novel the traditional way has a very worn path. For a long time, it was the only way for an author to make that dream come true. The decision of whether a book was published or not was up to the publisher. There were many books that were never published for that very reason. It was up to the author to find the right publisher who would take a chance on their book. This is still an available option for authors to pursue and has its own amount of work in sending copies of ones manuscript to agents or directly to publishers. If they are able to find the right match for their book, the publisher will cover the costs. For some authors, it is the route they choose to take.
Now, an author can choose put in the time and money and do what the traditional publishers do, but publish it on their own. Some authors prefer to be more hands on in the publishing of their manuscript, but this option will cost the author in hiring people to do the editing, cover creation, obtaining ISBNs and a copyright. Having a choice of how to publish has made the decision a more personal one for the author. It seems to be based on what the author wants to get out of their book. Are they looking to just make money with it? Or, are they out to share their book with others?
I did a lot of thinking about it and I know that there are pros and cons to either route. But, I decided to self publish my first novel.
So, where am I at in the process,
Last week I received a final edited copy of my manuscript from my editor. After multiple edited versions going back and forth between us, we still had a couple of outstanding questions about wording we wanted to finalize in this last edit. Glad we did this step. There was a piece of the story line that was not resolved. I found it and tweaked it. Now it is resolved.
While trying to save money for the editing and publishing of this one, I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) two years in a row and got drafts of books two and three in queue. For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. It takes place every November. It is a challenge for writers to write 50,000 words in 30 days with the goal to have a novel by the end of it.
I consider myself very lucky to have the draft of my second book already written. By having it done, I had the opportunity to read through the beginning of it to make sure the flow of the first one would work with how the second one starts. So glad I did. I found the time line in book one wasn’t going to work well with where book two starts.
Now, I could have left book one alone and modified the start of book two. Instead, I made the changes to my final edited manuscript for book one so the timeline works the way I want going forward, which seems to work better for the series as a whole.
Other milestones accomplished this weekend, I purchased my own ISBNs through Bowker so I can start assigning them to my novels. I’m also researching the publishing options through Createspace and Ingramspark. I’ll talk about that more next week and let you know what I decided to do. I’ll also be working on marketing strategies for the launch and a cover reveal will be coming up in the next week or so. So much yet to be done but I’m excited and scared at the same time. It is a big step to making my dream to write and publish a novel come true.
Have a great week everyone. Stay tuned for more news leading up to launch day, April 15, 2017.
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