(…Or edit until you drop, the self-publishing edition)
It started out simple enough. I have a book and I want to publish it. The first time I rewrote the first book in a different POV I should have known things weren’t going to be simple. As I’m preparing my first book, I have this great conversation with a freelancer about Amazon’s advertising. She says if you publish a book every 3 months, there are some free advertising perks.
And thus, a goal was born.
Now I’m the determined sort. My husband says he doesn’t know why I ask his opinion because I’m going to go do the thing I am asking him about regardless of what he thinks. My friends don’t pull punches, they tell me I’m bullheaded. I have a tendency to do the thing I set out to do. Period.
This is how I ended up printing out a 250 page book (single sided, 1.5 line spacing, and 2 inch side margins for note taking) on 32 lb paper (because highlighter ink sinking through the page makes me twitch) with my little home printer and doing all the edits for book 2 in 2 days with about 6 hours of sleep. I didn’t stop there. All those edits? Were on paper.
I’m stubborn, not perfect.
The last two days I have poured through the entire stack of paper and put those edits in the computer–one delete, comma, em dash, and capitalization at a time. I got about 6 hours asleep… (okay, so there’s a pattern here.) Why??
Because the second book is now ready for Beta readers and I have both of those wonderful humans on board and ready to go. Book 1 (Becoming) should be released in the 4-6 weeks.
After the detailed revision of book 2 (Rescued) I’m sitting down now to read the final Beta-Reader draft as the reader. I hope I don’t find any major problems because my fingers are crossed this will be going out this weekend and I will (finally) have some time back next week to do something other than type, edit, and read my own work. There are some personal projects eagerly waiting for me and let’s not forget book 3…
Book 1 is coming my way on Monday printed on normal paper by Staples for my last read through including the changes made by my wonderful editor. It will then be heading to proofread and format. You can look for that to become available in the next 4-6 weeks.
I had a chat with my very talented cover artist yesterday and he has some great ideas for the cover of book 2 as well as a couple surprises for my Instagram/Facebook advertising. So exciting to be thinking up ideas for the art already!
I can’t wait for you to meet my characters! Book 2 has lots of action and it pulls you into the world, I know you need to read book 1 first, but in my world it’s already time for Book 3…
According to my (terrifying) timeline spreadsheet, it takes 22 weeks to publish a finished book from Beta to ebook/print edition–but when you need to publish one every 12 weeks, there’s this painful overlap phase I’m almost through. Just gotta. keep my head down and #hustlehard.
Love and Gratitude,
P.S.
Due to some chronic health issues, I had to make a few… adaptations to be able to work for long periods. I do other creative things with my computer as well, so I repurposed some things. I don’t know how many of you struggle similarly with your hands, but maybe my ergonomic setup will help a fellow spoonie or two:
- I use a Kinesis Advantage 2 keyboard for my prolonged typing. I had to take a couple online typing classes to tidy up my habits so the keyboard would work for me. Now I free-type 100+ words per minute for hours without pain.
- Enter the Wacom. I use a small bluetooth Wacom Intuos Pro tablet (but any cheaper similar device would work, its Word not Procreate) with stylus in my right hand.
- Check out all the customization and system accessibility options!
- I found programming the on-stylus keys for “backspace” “Space” and “scroll down” and the 6 quick keys on the tablet for Command-Option-Space and Enter-Shift-Delete worked the best to stay keyboard free.
- For my left hand I have a Kensington Orbit ball mouse mostly for rapid scrolling.
- That brings me to dictation. I used Mac’s native Voice Control and a headset with microphone. Voice control has to be activated in Accessibility Options for it to continuously listen–Just don’t start singing song lyrics in the middle of edits.
- Don’t give up! It takes time to become more accurate but after even 10 pages I noticed a gradual improvement..
- As an added bonus, the experience with my voice has made the Siri on all my devices 100x more accurate.
- This combination sped up edits tremendously–I did over 120 pages of grammar and wording edits in 12 hours yesterday–and helps with the next day flares from body abuse. 🙂