Or, “Things I wish someone had told me before I tried.”
Keep scrolling for a free sample and the story of how book 2, like the Maker, laughed at my plans.
When I published the first book in the 7Elements series, I felt like the process was smooth and easy. How hard could it be to replicate that process with book 2? I’m an adult.
After I was burned by older writing mixing with the new and undermining readability and a third (unplanned) round of editing–which increased costs–I thought I was finally through the worst of it. If I had paid closer attention to the review by the beta readers, I may have avoided all of this. As it turns out, the experienced reader loved the newer writing and had hangups with the older content, they just didn’t know it. The issues became clear once the book flopped out of round one editing. Though, after extra work for me and my dear editors, the final version I got back from proof was on point and it flowed nicely.
Lesson learned: Save money on editing. Pay attention to the beta readers–read between the lines of their comments! The clues are there….
I have to admit when the editing issues happened, I was a little hesitant to pay the extra money to put the manuscript through a third time. I am so glad I did. Any issues my editor caught I was able to fix after the (second) line edit and the end result was beautiful. My decision to put the work through proof had more to do with my fears of grammatical oversights than the skill of my patient line/copy editor. Turns out, it’s a good thing I did because stricter adherence to comma rules made the final product read (and sound) much smoother. I made changes for the future.
Lesson learned: If you see something, say something, but never argue with an editor.
Book 2 wasn’t done with me yet! It was time for the cover art.
Now my artist is a patient human and does beautiful work, however, being something of a traditional artist myself, I sometimes forget the need for artistic license. This comes out as a whole lot of advice for the man who knows more about covers than I do–and has a bustiness to prove it. The first few versions of this cover were rough, but only because I contributed entirely too much to the plan. As soon as he got fed up and just churned out what he wanted to do, it all came together perfectly.
Lesson learned: You do the words, let the cover artist do the pretty pictures.
Finally, cover in hand, I head into format with a strange request–because the POV changed from scene to scene in some cases, I needed to emphasize the first word (always a proper name) of each scene… somehow. Usually, the first line of a chapter is emphasized with that big, beautiful first letter. It isn’t a straight forward thing to change all the first words to small caps, large caps, bolded, or a larger size. However, if I bolded and changed to caps the names myself at the start of each scene, it translated into the final PDF quite nicely.
Then there were the flashbacks.
Ok so… confession time: I hate flashbacks. Always have hated them. I am that terrible reader who skips the darn things in every book I have ever picked up. I don’t like time travel and I think it throws me out of the story. Except, then I wrote a book series with a watershed event.
What’s a watershed event? Well it’s that BIG thing that happens to all the characters at once and they all then need to talk about it for books to come. For my books? It was the raid on Santo’s compound. This brought together many characters and changed Jared and Sarah’s lives. So… Jared had some dream sequences where he remembered falling in love with Sarah. The overlapping timeline (Maker save me from overlapping timelines in a series…) meant I needed to bring the reader back to what had happened only between these two characters while the events of book 1 were taking place elsewhere in the building.
These dream sequences needed separate spacing, italicizing, and formatting to ensure the reader didn’t mistake them for a change in POV or a scene in real time. Cue the added cost.
Lesson learned: Format whatever you can ahead of time to the exact specifications of your formatter, and avoid any avoidable flashbacks. They suck.
Finally, at last… I’m ready to do the upload. Now to meet the fictional “summer 2023” deadline I had given myself I had the bright idea to do the upload to KDP while busy with other activities. Huge, monumental, cataclysmic error.
I typed the title for book 1 in as the title for book 2 when I uploaded the ebook–the only saving grace was that the book’s ISBN on Bowker’s site was accurate.
Apparently, you can’t change a title on Amazon once you publish a book nor can you delete said book. Screw it up and you’re going to need to make calls to customer support for wayward authors, read a dozen help articles, and resort to Reddit. As it turns out, a second edition of the Ebook had to be created–uploaded from scratch–in order to fix the issue. It took me almost a week to figure this out however. It is now finally fixed, but the lag has resulted in an unexpected delay for the hard and paperback editions.
Lesson learned: Double check, triple check, possibly have someone else check that all metadata details in the book upload fields are correct–before you click publish. (Read that again).
As to the relative success or failure of the book series? Well I don’t know, jury is still out and probably will be deliberating for a few years yet. I guess I’m going to just keep hoping.
Lesson learned: Work the problem. Don’t give up.
Love and Gratitude,
