Writing, editing, organising and preparing. That’s been me this week.

A Milestone!

As it has been two months since the end of the month in which I released In The End, I have received my first payment from Amazon! I say payment, it’s actually about five as the payments come from each marketplace and for each of the two formats sold in November. This represents the first time in my life that I have received payment for an artistic piece of work. Yay me!

The New Blurb

The hotly anticipated (by me at least) new blurb arrived this week and I love it, as do many other people according to the comments I’ve received so far. You can check it out here if you haven’t read it already. It’s a whole different style to my attempt and really encapsulates the story. A reader who picks this off the virtual shelf would be under no illusion of what they were going to read.

Now the book jacket has been updated, the description on my Amazon product pages too and this site. This has enabled me to order my author copies for the book signings and hopefully in plenty of time!

Book Signing Events and A Surprise

Following a recommendation from one of the author groups I belong to on Facebook, I posted up my book signing event onto a local community website for Uxbridge, where the first signing takes place. A few days later I get an email from a local internet radio station Uxbridge FM asking me if I would do an interview.

In the spirit of 2019 being the year I throw myself out of my comfort zone, I I immediately said yes. I did the interview on Wednesday and despite the nerves, which vanished after less than a minute, I think it went really well. The audio should go out in a couple of weeks and of course I’ll post up the link so you can hear if I made a fool of myself or not.

I can’t forget to mention that I’ve organised my second signing event. This time it will be in Reading (pronounced as Redding for those who don’t know) Town Centre WHSmith. This store is much, much larger than where my first signing will be and after speak with the lovely Books Manager I couldn’t be more excited!

Advertising

I’m back advertising again. Now only in US as I finally have confirmation that you cannot get a UK Amazon advertising with only two products (the kindle and paperback). You need at least four products before you can be considered a publisher and therefore be eligible for the account.

I’m experimenting with the new blurb, lower prices and low click budgets. I’m getting the clickthroughs and at a good rate, but the conversions have been underwhelming to say the least. However I won’t let this dishearten me as I keep telling myself this is just testing and I need to concentrate on building my portfolio of books.

Before The End Progress

The first major edit is done and now I’m getting into the detailed analysis of the storyline and at the same time I’m trying an approach I haven’t used before because I feel the MS is a little heavy and needs slimming down to keep up the pacing I want to achieve whilst focusing more on plot than action.

I’m running through the MS and writing a chapter by chapter synopsis whilst determining what the main purpose of the chapter is. I’m considering each chapter to see if it is primarily character development, plot or action.

Using scrivener I can colour code each chapter to see how well the different types of chapter are spread out and if I have too much of a long run of one or the other, in particular action which is not necessarily progressing the storyline.

I then plan to take a detailed look at the action scenes as candidates for shortening or cutting. The MS is currently 115,000 words so I’d be fine with cutting out 25,000 or so.

And here’s what it looks like (the first time I’ve ever let the world see inside my writing environment)

The blue documents are where I have yet to review and the note pages contain issues or additional information I need to add in or make sure I have included. This way of working is one of the great things about drafting in Scrivener.

By the way, the names of each chapter on the left hand side are not headings as I use only numbers, but are cues to remind me at a glance what is contained inside.

That’s the lot for me today. As always I welcome your feedback in the comments!

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