Febuary Update

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When you finish a new show and remember you have to wait another whole year before the second season comes out. I will let you know about one of my favorite new shows but first books!

Writing Update: Editing

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125 pages have been edited with 232 pages left! I would prefer a bit of a faster pace but so far Saturday mornings are still the only time I am finding to make heavy progress, but any progress is good progress. At this rate, by mid-April the red pen edits should be done and then I’ll implement those edits into the Word document. The timeline of aiming for an early 2024 release date still looks possible but could be a bit close. I would like to give my test readers a good four to six months to read it. A few other steps will have to happen before but there would be several more if I was going with traditional publishing. Shedding light on that process I hope will give you an understanding on why I chose to go back to self-publishing.

Traditional Publishing Process

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If an author had a finished book and found a golden ticket to speed through the traditional publishing route, they would find their book on store shelves around two years later. Again, that is if everything goes better than perfect.

The normal path is to find a literary agent that wants to represent your book. They get about fifty submissions a day, so they see a lot of query letters and are careful on which ones they pick because they are only paid when a book sells. This can take several months, if not years, with a lot of rejection letters. Harry Potter was rejected twelve times while Stephen King’s first big hit book, Carrie, was rejected around thirty times.

If a literary agent decides to represent you, they will then take your book around to various publishing houses, from the Big Five to the small indie ones to see who will take it on. They are basically pitching the rights of printing your book.

This can be a difficult task because only about one million books are published a year, not counting self-published. So, while you had to fight for the agent, the agent will have to fight for the publishing house’s attention. A lot of other pitfalls can come into play as well. Your agent could be dropping the ball and not putting your book in front of enough publishers. All the publishing houses could have already hit their internal quota of publishing that genera that year and pass up on it. Or the sad state of no publishing house wants to pick it up because the topic you wrote is not trending now or is over saturated.

If your agent finds a publisher and the contracts are all negotiated and signed, the book goes through edits again, and these could be huge edits. Edits you will have a deadline to meet for the publisher. Cover designs also begin with little to no say from the author as the publishing house has a market team that knows what cover types are trending to grab the reader they are aiming for.

Finally, they begin to print them and put it out there and in stores and online.

And that is it!

Because of all those hoops to jump through, the time it takes, and no guarantee, that is one reason why I chose to stick with self-publishing. Another reason was because deep down I wanted to say I was traditional published. When, in the end, self, traditional, indie, or a mix they all give the same result, a book in your hands.

There are positives and negatives to them all but behind my first thoughts of doing it was a pride issue, to have that clout, which is not a good reason to do anything. Especially in art when trying to express yourself.

Seeking clout is like trying to grab a cloud, you can’t grab it and there is always another bigger cloud in the distance.

But enough of that here is the TV show I Highly recommend!

Andor

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​The best written Star Wars, and I may dare to say the Best Star Wars… It is That Good!

Andor