So, it’s the end of September—a month that has zoomed past me with the speed of a runaway train. Which was rather rude of it, to be honest. It has been a fruitful month though, writing-wise. I’ve finished the first draft of a new short story (sword and sorcery with a jailbreak, feline war steeds, and a poisoned whip—it’s been a good time) and I’ve made solid progress on publishing the first book in my epic fantasy trilogy as an indie novel.
Investing in Myself
I thought it might be interesting to chart my progress during the publishing process, if for no other reason than to keep it as a personal log—mostly so I won’t forget how to do all this again for book two. I’ve already talked about my previous self-publishing experiences (spoiler: they weren’t great) but that was all so long ago, I’ve either forgotten the details or the things I learned are now obsolete. And the learning curve is steep. Like scaling-a-slippery-mountain-with-one-arm-in-a-sling steep. Marketing is particularly terrifying, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Why don’t I start with introducing the novel?
Also, if you’re not at all interested in anything to do with indie or self-publishing and you just want me to get to the Web 1.0 Website of the Week for crying out loud, please feel free to scroll to the bottom.
Drum Roll Please…
The novel is called The Obsidian Druid: Book One of The Age of Aikana, and I’ve been writing it for years. Far too many years to spend writing and perfecting if I want to get the second book out in a timely manner and have any hope of keeping a reader’s interest. The fact that I’ve lived with it for so long has made it very important to me though, and determined to press it into readers’ hands. Here’s the blurb as it stands today:
Three monstrous Tumaris escaped the labyrinthine dungeon beneath the sea. One made its way to the frozen homeland of the Asrai, ripping apart all who stood in its way and staining the ice crimson with their blood. One blundered its way into the ancient forest of Nymed, and one rose in the city of Armoria, crushing buildings and bone beneath its great webbed feet. Only Dewer—ageless High Lord of the city—knows the truth behind the creatures’ wanton destruction, and he hasn’t trusted anyone with his secrets for over one hundred years.
The blurb’s okay, but it’s not great and will need some serious work (if anyone reading this has any ideas for improvement, I would love to hear them!) For one thing, it explains very little about the three central characters, who are all women having to deal with the destruction wrought by Lord Dewer’s loosed Tumari monsters in various ways.
I’m currently giving the draft one last polish before I pull the trigger on begging an editor to take my money. It’s incredible to me that I’m still finding small changes I want to make at this stage, or fixing sentences that read like clunky nightmares. This is a novel I’ve already queried to over 150 agents and several smaller publishers, and I’m realising that it wasn’t yet ready. Which may explain a lot. I’m not self-publishing as a last option though, I want to get that clear right off the bat. There were still avenues I could have explored and other agents I could have tried. The Obsidian Druid actually started life as a web serial called Maiden’s Moon (I hate that title now). I posted it to Royal Road and other places, as well as on its own dedicated Wordpress blog (which was seriously pretty—I outdid myself). I pulled it halfway through though and scrubbed it from the internet because I realised what I really wanted was to see this novel as an actual printed book (or e-printed, if that’s the way your particular cookie crumbles). I still feel that way, but I also started getting really excited about the idea of doing it myself. It takes a long time to put together a half-decent query and send it out to agents and publishers. It takes even longer to wait for a response, and that’s if they bother to respond at all. This book had already taken long years to gestate and come to fruition, I was done waiting. Plus, I like making things, although that doesn’t mean I’ve always been good at doing everything myself. The first step then, was to commission a cover.
Step One: Awesome Cover Art
I looked at a lot of cover artists and Fiverr gigs, and I studied a lot of other people’s cover art. In the end, I landed on miblart and decided to go ahead and commission them to design all three covers for my trilogy at once (the book series bundle: ebook plus print). I did this because I liked the way their website worked, I liked the example covers, the reviews were good, and I thought the price was decent. As an enthusiastic but ultimately amateur-level graphic designer with no idea how to make a book stand out amongst all the others on Amazon, I was also emboldened by this statement:
“We research typography, layouts, and color themes common to your genre to make sure that your book cover design will fit the market.”
Sounded good to me. The month of free revisions for each cover didn’t sound too shabby either.
I was surprised by the turnaround speed. I had the first version of my first cover in about a week, which blew my hair back just slightly. And I loved it. I had a few requests for revisions to the model they used, but the typography, the colours, and the background were all solid awesome. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve been sneaking looks at it for the past two weeks just to get a sweet, sweet dopamine hit. Because the cover makes it all feel real, somehow. This book’s actually going to happen.
As it stands now, I’m waiting for the final revision to come back, and then they’ll start on book number two. There were a couple of things that gave me pause, all due to my own inexperience. The main one was when I was asked how many pages the printed novel would be, so they could adjust for the size of the spine. This was a head-scratcher. I hadn’t yet thought about the book size or page count. Plus, I’m planning to hire an editor. What if the word and page count changed drastically during the editing process? I was able to work out what size book I wanted, and miblart say they can change the size of the printed novel version at any time to fit my book, but this did seem like a rookie mistake. If I was to do this again (and hopefully I will), I’d probably get the edits out of the way and have a finalised and typeset book ready so I’d know the exact dimensions.
No regrets, though. I might just go and have another look at that cover while I’m thinking about it. Sweet, sweet dopamine.
Current Favourite Website
Hazenworld - First Created 1998 - Last Updated - 2014
How to best describe this noisy, blinking, colourful behemoth? It describes itself as “Home for music, lyrics, pics, info, Animated Gifs, Elvis Costello Stuff”, and it hits all the classic Web 1.0 tropes. I’m talking inescapable background music, starry night background, a large spinning globe on the front page, and a multitude of animated divider bars. It’s truly glorious stuff. Also, this guy really loves Elvis Costello.
My personal highlight is a preserved copy of an old Geocities guestbook—surely one of the wonders of the ancient world. There’s also a page that I think hope is a joke, called ADULT PIX OF ME! Click at your peril (the bone-eating troll in the Complaints Department is cute, though).
That’s all for now.
I'm on the same journey- it's tough, but you get to be your own boss, so that's nice.