Fun With Editing

As I write this, the second draft of my book, as I proceed through the first round of editing, is 52,027 words long.

I'm pretty excited about that number, because while I'm getting close to the end, I'm not there yet. That means the book will be long, but not too long. The other week I put together an estimate draft of all the rough pieces, not altered at all, copied and pasted into one document, just to see. It had 52,269 words.

Yes, I did add some story at the beginning, to ground the main characters and allow a picture of them at the most normal their life will ever be for the rest of the story.

I'm excited that this book is getting longer than I thought it would be, and intimidated by the fact that other books in the genre have more words. The Hunger Games, for example, has around 90,000. I Googled that, by the way. I don't nerd that much.

Me and editing have a love/hate relationship. I love that the story is taking shape and becoming more of what I want it to be. I hate that I can't just turn out the perfect book in one shot, but that's really not possible.

So it's been quiet on my end because I've been trying to truly finish this book. This draft is for working out all the typos that resulted when I typed from the raw draft and only focused on getting words on the screen. Working at an insane pace means I can get to the meaty editing, where all the story kinks will be worked out. Hopefully that means I'll have some bits at the beginning of the book, which I'll up here and probably on Wattpad or something. Fiction Press, too, if I feel so inclined. Once I'm happy with it, it's time for formatting and cover design, because this baby's gonna be an e-book first. Then I'll dive into print book design.

Whee.

Also, it's Friday. Who doesn't love that?

Vampires Make Good Business Partners

And they won't bleed you dry, pun quite intended.

Knowing that this book, when it's done and ready, will be shoved out of the nest and into a crowd of other self-published books, is a scary thing. I mean, I like my ideas. I like that I have control over the project. I sort of relish the idea of producing this book by myself, because I promise I'm gonna make it sweet.

But it's scary and off-putting to most people because they're afraid they'll never experience what I call (and there are probably other names for it in this line of work) the Twilight effect.

It has very very little to do with vampires, and a heck of a lot to do with how the publishing business works at its best and most organic moments.

In the fall of 2008, I worked at our local Books-a-Million while taking a semester off of college. If you remember, that was the year that the first Twilight film was released, in November, just before Thanksgiving. I honestly didn't know much about that series except for that they had vampires and were really popular.

I was working the day after the movie came out, and I obviously hadn't seen it yet. A lot of customers who came in that day requested at least one of the Twilight books, often the first one. Why?

They liked the movie.

They liked it so well, they bought the first book, and maybe the second. Eventually, we actually ran out of copies of New Moon (which was frustrating, because Christmas.) We sold a lot of copies of Twilight that season. The best part was that people who enjoyed the first book would come back and buy all of them. This meant a larger audience for the next film. That meant more books sold.

It did help that the series was already a bestseller, of course. Money was spent to produce the book and film series.

I'd say they got a return on their investment. That's how business works.

One of the hesitations in the decision to self-publish is knowing that it's very, very likely that there won't be a film franchise to boost sales.

But seeing that demonstration of how the publishing business works is encouraging, because ultimately, during that Christmas season, that bookstore did really well because of word of mouth business.

It's exciting because communication is at the heart of society now. Of business. When given two differing reviews of a product, people are autonomous enough that they want to find out for themselves. And maybe they'll talk about it.

People talk.

And that's awesome.

Slower Day

Today, I only wrote four pages in my book. I'll probably work on it a little more before I go to bed, but I'm starting to think that maybe the raw draft will be done sooner than even the time frame I set. That means I can finish typing it.

Which means I can edit it.

Which means formatting.

That means distribution.

So I might be able to give myself the birthday present of a finished book after all.

Hey, that frees NaNoWriMo up for the second book. Nice.

Horror Vacui Is Now Free!

Okay, so, after some consideration, I've decided I'd really like to get some of my work out there as best as possible.

So my short story collection, Horror Vacui, is now free at Smashwords.com.

I also have it available at Amazon.com, but Amazon won't let me change the price to $0.00, so Smashwords.com is the place to get this collection free in a bunch of different formats.

So here's the book at Smashwords if you want it free.
If you really want to be nice to me, here's the book on Amazon for $0.99.

Also, I've decided to close my Etsy shop and reopen on Storenvy under the name 12:01. Here's the link to that shop. I'd love for you to stop by. Also, 12:01 has a blog, which will be updated weekly.

In other news, the book is coming along nicely, and I'm very happy with the direction it's taken. I can't wait until it's finished!

Horror Vacui: Short Story Collection I Wrote

And here I present a short story collection that I've written. Most of it was practice, from dialog rolling around in my head. It's more character centric, though it is sci-fi. I suppose you could say it's about interactions that fill the empty spaces.

The picture is a link, but if you have some trouble with it, click here to get to the book. It's only 99 cents on Kindle, and the Kindle app is free to download. I hope you enjoy it.

Featured Book: For the Wounded Soul

Hey y'all, I'm back after quite a while (sorry about that...) and today I'm featuring a book by author Cheryline Lawson, and it's just one of a bunch of books she's written. The title is For The Wounded Soul. A couple of links to the book are below, and it's available in Hardcover at Lulu.com and in Paperback at CreateSpace.com.

Here's a picture of the paperback copy for your reference.

And here are the links.

Hardcover: http://www.lulu.com/product/hardcover/for-the-wounded-soul/18311668
Paperback: https://www.createspace.com/3708353


Accompanying text.

The deep wounds described in this book tell the tale of these real, compelling and chilling short stories of individuals who have experienced unusual childhoods, abuse, incest, living with alcoholism, obesity, eating disorders, infidelity, rape, addiction, prison conviction and more. Learn what they went through and in some cases, how they came out of it. If you or anyone you know has experienced anything like this, you know it isn't easy. This book will encourage and motivate you that you are not alone.

This book has just come out this week, so check it out.





All text and images from this book belong to Cheryline Lawson, and I own none of them.