indie books: April 2010 Archives

Welcome back to indie books. Before I go on I have to give a link and hat tip. A lot of my first ideas and current stats on book publishing come from a site called No Media Kings. 

It has a slightly different ideology to this site. Jim worked in publishing and noticed that if you are not a million selling super star author but one of the majority then it's better to self publish. Financially. 

Anyway, on to my novel. So, the first draft.

Everyone thinks of good ideas. Everyone. It's quite easy to think of a story or premise and even flesh it out a bit in your mind. We all have a take on the vampire genre after we watched whatever vampire movie, for example. It doesn't take too much effort to list some chapter headings or scene ideas either. I find reading around a topic or researching fun too. What's even better is editing and playing with a story. 

Alas, there's an annoying hard work part in the middle - the first time you have to sit down and write the whole thing out in long form. 

This is tough, every page you manage to write you want to be perfect or you change your mind about, you have to just suck it up and keep going no matter how much you want to edit and play but it's so hard. You get writer's block, you get distracted, you give up or forget about it. But have no fear, the way through is to have some awareness of the numbers before you go in.

This is the first project in books. I have recently made some breakthroughs with full length novel writing. I have chosen one to go with and self-publish for the experience.

It is called Love in the Time of Black Magic. 

Here is the overview of this project in it's crudest form:

1) write the book

2) have a cover designed with ISBN and barcode

3) have it typeset and formatted

4) have 500 copies made via proper offset printing and 'perfect' binding

5) hold events, flog them via indie shops/cafes and send them to reviewers etc etc

I won't need anyone's blessing for this, every stage of the process can be accomplished by paying for a service, including getting an ISBN and bar-code (you just buy them).

Stage one is by far the hardest part and the lion's share of the work, but more on that in upcoming posts. At the time of this post i'm half way through the second draft and the whole thing will be about 80 000 words (200 pages paperback). I'm using fellow writer and confident Tom Mangione for feedback and comments.

By the end of the project we should have a bunch of posts detailing all the stages. Wish me luck.