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Posts about writing, getting ready to get published, getting published, and what happens next.
Mostly I'm writing, rather than writing about writing, so you might want to see, instead:
In the indie author forums, authors talk about good and bad reader reviews, and new authors often ask about how to respond to the bad ones.
There’s a universal answer: Authors don’t reply to reviews, no matter what the reviewer says. You don’t offer explainers; you don’t try to set things straight.
The Gunners Trilogy has been my main project for years. Some of the themes and storylines started coming together a long time ago. I wrote an early draft of the Armin/Vanessa story over ten years ago, and thought about releasing it, but didn't.
Why not? Although I was (and still am) attached to the characters and storyline, I had a nagging concern about that early version of the story becoming "dated" too soon.
When I started working with an editor who also professionally checks typesetting of pages for book printing, I discovered a new set of things I didn't know about.
As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I keep a running QA list of things to check. Now I have a new section, for typography. Here’s my short list of typesetting things-to-check, and how I fix the errors and inconsistencies.
Recently there was a back-and-forth in a indie author group about whether or not to use the Oxford comma. Some of it was kind of funny. One person asserted that when she sees someone use the Oxford comma, she assumes it's someone over 60. I posted a link to a FiveThirdyEight post on a survey that showed that younger people prefer it by a wide margin over the 60+ group. So she said that's only a U.S. thing. Evidently in New Zealand, only old people use it.
Recently I've been reading a lot of posts from indie writers about working with an editor. ... Many of these posts are about a writer not getting along with an editor and asking for advice, or a writer trying to justify not accepting edits.
When it was time for me to create a Kindle version of my latest novel, I read a lot of posts about converting from WORD to .mobi format. Things are always changing. How do you do it now?
Here's what I did, step-by-step
Here’s my editing process, up to and including professional editing. I’m not proposing that this is the only or best way to do it; just outlining my approach.
This was my indie approach to getting a particular book published. For the first book of my Gunners Trilogy , I had a specific goal: Get the book out there.
Here are a few things I recommend for the writing stage. I’m mostly talking about trade fiction, but I think these apply fairly generally.
What, more commentary about writing? Isn't there enough of that?
I've been an "indie author" for over ten years. In 2006, I set up my own publishing label, figured out how to format / prep my WWI naval history book, got it printed ... the whole deal. (You can see it here.)