Back on Track

In which our heroine gets out of her own way...

I got a mental chiropractic adjustment on Wednesday. During our monthly meeting, my mentor Donna let me know that I’m making this self-publishing thing too hard. She voted against the LLC (which I now recall Nathan Van Coops did too). Fine with me. I hadn’t made any progress on it anyway.

I’m getting clear on this habit I have of overcomplicating things to the point that I freeze. Part of it’s research to know what I’m getting into, but there’s a point where the fulcrum tips and I’m paralyzed in the land of TMI. Like with that LLC. It might be that in talking to so many other people I confuse myself, or I get confused and can’t find the way out. Thankfully, Donna laid down a crumb trail to lead me out of the foggy info forest.

First I learned that Amazon can do everything I need. There’s no need to form a company. Amazon can buy the ISBNs; they can create the cover; they can format the dang book. All with the click of a few buttons (which Donna promises to look over my shoulder while I click, thank the stars).

The part I don’t like is that my books will then say they were published by Amazon. I might hold out on this. I want All Point South Press to exist, to have a cute logo on the front page, to allow me to say “my imprint.” I am quite possibly motivated enough by this ego-centric desire to figure out how to make that happen. Stay tuned—maybe I’ll do that this week.

The outline Donna laid out for me was this—Step 1: I need to revisit the first novel in my Gods on Earth series to prep it for publication. I just finished drafting the second one, “Apollo in Love,” but it’s time to move back to the first one since it’ll go out first. (Meanwhile, I’m beginning to draft the third, “Diana on the Hunt.”)

It’s been about a year since I tinkered with “Eros on Earth.” By tinkering, I mean querying—writing a hundred synopses, filling out a zillion Query Tracker forms, and personalizing a gazillion cover letters. None of that actual writing, per se.

But in the time away, and through the lens of those query turndowns, I see how the first chapter can be stronger. They do indeed say not to query a project until it’s the best you can make it, and “Eros” was the best I could make it….last year.

And sure, folks say to put a novel aside and let it sit so that this sort of thing can happen. Great advice. But the process of querying itself takes so long I feel like we’d all be a hundred-and-five years old if we took all the time they all tell us to take. Plus, I had worked on it for over a year, so I was impatient to get it “out there” as they say. Who wouldn’t be with thirteen other novels moldering on the hard drive?

So actually, Step 1 is to polish that first manuscript. Step 2 is to find a proofreader for it. Step 2A is to decide if I need a content editor—who looks for things like the guy loses his phone but in the next sentence he looks something up on it—or “just” a proofreader to find typos, wrong words, bad verbs, etc. They routinely do ten pages for free so I can see if I like their style. And I *wouldn’t* like their style if they changed my wording—aren’t to are not, etc.

Step 3—get a cover designed. Nathan stressed making sure a cover fits the genre standard—colors, images, layout, etc. His friend Lucy Score’s publisher took a bad misstep when they changed her trademark flowery cover to cartoon people. No one knew it was her book, so no one bought it! I’m going to start looking at covers and picturing mine in my head—which I don’t think will overwhelm me since I love visuals. But please throw me a lifeline if it does.

After that, Donna promises, it’s a few clicks to get the book published. But then the marketing begins. More clicks—which she promises to guide me through too. How lucky can one girl get?

This week, I’m going to tweak the second novel in the series to submit it to the Georgia Romance Writers Maggie Awards. Last year, “Eros on Earth” got first runner-up. So cross those fingers while I throw my hat back in that ring with “Apollo in Love.”

What do you think a cover for books with those titles should look like? I wanna know.

Me, chugging along….