I’d quite deliberately handed ATLANTIS FALLEN over to beta readers who didn’t know the world the serial numbers had been scraped off, in order to see if the worldbuilding held up! Because that was my big concern! Except I also sent it my cover artist, who did know the old world, and she emailed me in the middle of reading it and said “So how come you didn’t do X with this instead of sticking with the Y you had in place?” …well, because I didn’t think of that. God…
Part two of my series on all-out self publishing, a project I’ve taken on with MAGIC & MANNERS, a Jane Austen pastiche in which I wondered what would happen if the Bennet sisters had too much magic rather than too little cash. Part One, which focuses on finding and working with a production team as well as developing a work flow (including a Helpful Check List) is here. This week I’m going to look at the actual publication process. I’ve been working through Amazon and Ingram, who are both doing…
I did something very unusual this weekend, which was send a book out to beta readers. Normally I…don’t do that. Broadly speaking I feel writing a book is largely a closed loop between myself and my editor: she’s the source of feedback that I need, and I generally find adding more people in to that cycle to be very stressful. I am, in fact, finding it very stressful, which is totally on me, not the readers: they’re providing feedback in exactly the way a writer wants them to, which is…
About four years ago I got it into my head to wonder what PRIDE & PREJUDICE would be like if the Bennet sisters were plagued by an excess of magic rather than a dearth of cash. In a fit of inspiration, I wrote a first chapter, and then over the next year, a second and a third. By then, Patreon was a thing, and I decided to write MAGIC & MANNERS as a serialized crowdfunding project. It took longer than I expected and brought me to the conclusion that serializing…
Oh my *god* the ATLANTIS FALLEN manuscript ended up a mess. I found an entire chapter and a half that hadn’t been in the version I was working from, and a scene that had been referenced but wasn’t in the version I was working from so I had to go find it and @.@. Fortunately it, most of it at least, could more or less slide right in with just a bit of massaging, but ye gods and little fishes. The manuscript is 20K longer than the one I started…