Thursday, February 9, 2012

Progress Report

So, I started this blog with the intent of chronicling my journey to publication, and there's been some mission creep, I think. It's evolved into more of a way to get myself out there, as a person. Which is an important part of the process. I mean, there are a lot of independent authors out there, and you have to stand out. Avoid being another face in the faceless mass.

But the bigger reason why you haven't heard a lot about the process is that frankly, the process isn't very interesting. It's mostly busywork. The entertaining part, as far as I'm concerned, is mostly over when the book is done. Nevertheless, I figure maybe my followers might want to know how things are coming.

The past few weeks have been focused on finding two important people: a proofreader and a cover artist. I was looking for a third person, a developmental editor, but then I realized I've been working with those all along, calling them "beta-readers". Huh. Power of Friendship FTW! This last week has been kind of busy, because I've narrowed the pool of potential proofers to the point where I almost have a decision made. Likewise, I've narrowed down the field of cover artists to a few distinct possibilities who do good work. All of this is turning out to be not such a wallet-buster as I imagined, which is fortunate. Day jobs are still hard to find and unemployment ain't paying the rent.

The major hump right now is going to be typesetting, or more broadly, formatting for both print and e-book. I've been procrastinating on that, partially because I didn't want to go forward without an editor, and partially because it's intimidating. Smashwords provides a lot of good advice and tools (including their famous "meatgrinder'), but the body of the work still falls on the author's shoulders. I haven't taken the time to familiarize myself with the tools I'll be using. Still and all, I can't put it off much longer, so I'm going to have to pull up my big boy pants and get to it.

And after all this, the question of promotion comes up. Here, I'm going to be leveraging the blogosphere as hard as I can. Through Blog Hopping and promoting my review blog, I've developed what I think is a good understanding of how the book blogging world works, and I think I know how to get my fellow bloggers on board with cross-promotion. I've also got an idea that may or may not come to fruition, and if it does it will definitely get people involved.

So, while there's a lot of work that still has to be done, It looks like I'm on course for a May release. Good times. ^_^

1 comment:

  1. Keep at it, LupLun, and thanks for the update. :) I really hope you're able to stay on course and look forward to seeing your book out there.

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