OK, two days of aggravation, but it's back in place and working, as far as I can see. No doubt the eagle-eyed will spot typos or broken links, but I think it's pretty much all where it should be:
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Where’s it all gone?
New website? All done
Uploaded and tested? Oh, yes - no problem
Visible to the rest of the world? er, nope.
My hosting provider has "a problem", which - apparently - they're aware of. Great.
Spreading the Word, part 2
Next on the agenda is a new website. The old one has sat there, mainly acting as a repository for odds and ends, for about five years now. This is partly because I designed it myself from scratch as an experiment to see what I could do with css, and as I have become busier and busier, I never did get to tidying it up and making it easy to update.
So when I had new things to add, it was easier just to stuff them in wherever I felt they fit than to rewrite the code and make it all plug and play. Whatever the excuses, if I want to market this book (and possibly the other one which has been 'under consideration' with a local publisher for a number of years now; I reckon I could do that myself now as well) I need a website which people will want to visit, and which offers some kind of experience other than "my word, that's busy". I also have this blog now for odds and ends, so the website needs to become more of a marketing tool.
So I took a deep breath, bought a template, and have been hacking it about for most of this week. I reckon the big relaunch could well happen over the weekend, given that there is once again no soccer game on Sunday. I realise this also means remembering how to hack the template of this blog as well, to make it all look seamless - just add that to the list; I'm not busy otherwise!
Watch this space...
What do you mean, displacement activity while I wait for my beta readers to finish reading?
Spreading the word
The book has a cover!
Well, let's be honest, the book has a proposal for a cover. I'm actively considering starting a competition to have people choose things like the cover or the back cover blurb or a hundred other things I need to do before actually pushing the boat out on this. I do now have a selection of beta readers (thank you, beta readers), which is encouraging Thanks to a post on a messageboard I don't usually frequent, I even have a couple of beta readers who are complete strangers to me, which is at once encouraging and terrifying. Feedback form the beta readers will go into tidying up and refining the text, and then...
And then I need to let the world know that there's a book out there which they might like to read. This part is trickier than it sounds, and it sound pretty damn tricky. There are literally hundreds of ebooks published on Amazon every week; how to stand out from that sea of words? Clearly, there are no easy answers, but I do have some ideas. Twitter and Facebook obviously have a part to play, as does the website (note to sef; really must do something with that), but there must be other ways to get the word out - other avenues I'm not yet reaching.
I'm working on it. I'd rather be writing, but this is all part of the process.
How Long (has this been going on?)
Apologies for the earworm!
This has been a weekend of discovery. Among the many things I have discovered are:
- Putting your book out there, even if it's mostly to people you know, is scary. Thanks to those who have already agreed to be beta readers - I'm open to more offers...
- I can quickly create an iBooks version as well as a Kindle version of the text.
- I can very slowly begin to see how hard this next bit is going to be. I knocked up a quick cover last weekend so that I could get stuff out on Kindle, but doing it properly, so it looks like an actual book cover? Whole different box of frogs.
- I've also rewritten the back cover blurb more times than the rest of the book put together, and I'm still nowhere near happy with it.
- I've been reading and researching the pros and cons of 'traditional' vs self-publishing. I'm old enough to remember when 'self-publishing' meant 'vanity publishing'; I'm delighted that it's no longer the case, but I'm a little daunted by how much work it's likely to be. I'd still like to have, you know, an agent, an editor, a publisher; all that good stuff, but I know how hard that is from here. Let's say I'm working on all possibilities right now.
- (I also discovered that it's possible to self-publish and almost immediately be rolling in film offers and champagne!)
- Yes, I know that's not going to happen to me.
- I also discovered something else, which needs its own paragraph:
Someone who I have never met, and who has never read my book thinks it's too long. I don't doubt his expertise, and I am quite prepared to bow to his superior knowledge when it comes to this sort of thing. Agents probably don't ever look at books over a certain length, publishers even less so. But I can't help feeling there's something wrong with the way that works. When people ask me how long my book is, I tell them, and they tend to be impressed by how it's possible to produce so many words in one go. The truth is, there are that many words in the book because that's how long the story is. How do I know? Well, I cut several thousand words out of it without losing the sense of it, but if I cut more, I'll start to lose elements which have already fought their way in. If I take any more out of part 2, for example, part 3 won't make sense, and I do have a real fear that 'shorter' would mean 'simpler', and this is not a simple tale.
The story is as long as it wants to be. Just as some characters don't conform to how you think they should behave, so stories have a life of their own. Sure, I could make Going Back shorter, but then it wouldn't be the story I want to tell. More importantly, it wouldn't be the story it wants to be.
For that reason, if no other, I suspect that self-publishing is going to be the way forward. Which means I have to get my cover right, and I have to do my own market research, and I have to figure out how to market it, and how to price it, and a million other things I haven't really considered yet.
But I also think it's going to be fun. Wish me luck, won't you?
The end of the beginning?
Funny thing - going through parts 1 and 2, I had no real difficulty chopping and revising; I knew they needed work, and I was quite prepared to do it. Part 3 has been a quite different story although I'm more or less done with it now as well.
My trouble with part 3 has been the same through four full drafts now - I get absorbed by it; I stop thinking critically about it, and just read it. This is somewhat counterproductive, since whatever changes need to be made don't ever get made. Today has been a little different; I have made changes. Not significant changes; I still find that I'm happy with it, with the pacing and the way the threads all come together at the end, but I've corrected typos and inconsistencies, which I've never been able to do before, which must prove something.
And, to some degree, it's done now.
By which I mean that the major structural problems I had with the thing are gone; I like the way it flows now; I think it all makes sense, and I've even had more than one positive review of parts one and two. I'm prepared to redraft if need be; I'm even happy to make more changes if they make it work better. But I'm also at the point where I might just allow myself to think: OK, that's done. I've written it; I like it, and I'm ready for the next thing to happen. It's been a long time coming; this feeling of satisfaction, and I'm sure my opinion will change again, but...
I'm done. I've written a book, and I'm happy with it. That has to count for something.
And in the end - does it read like a proper novel? We'll see. I went into today's work ready to change the ending if I didn't like it, but - aside from some chopping out of a plot point I'd already removed from part 1, and which I knew didn't work - I read it again, and I still liked it; it's true to each of the characters, I think.
Full text now available (in two chunks for now!) for anyone out there with a Kindle and time to give it a read through. Bonus: you'll almost certainly appear in the acknowledgements page (hey; I have to write an acknowledgements page!)
Word count: 136,855 - down 7.8% from the third draft (told you I didn't change much in part 3!)
New Adventures in Kindling
Um, I mean...
There's now a Kindle version of Parts 1 and 2. I can send this to anyone prepared to read it through and give some feedback. You do need to have a Kindle and a Kindle account, and you do need to help me understand where I need to go next, not just say 'Yeah, it was OK', or "Nah, not my kind of thing'.
If you are interested, please let me know via info@richardwatt.ca and I'll send you the details.
No new progress today (yet) - going to start on Part 3 soon, though; I'd like to have something more complete by the end of the week if I can, before coaching, school and all the other daily fun stuff starts to intrude.