Been about a month since I talked about what I’m doing, so seems a good time for an update on that end. Never expected it to take this long for me to get back to a normal blog post, but then I guess things sometimes just happen. With how focused I was on getting In Honor’s Shadow out the door perhaps that is to be expected.
I suppose that would make it seem like my table is clear now, but in fact I’ve already built up a brand new to-do list. If anyone’s interested in that sort of thing, here’s what I have planned going forward:
Compile Lessons Learned
First off, I’m going to be compiling a list of things I learned from the publishing process and try to come up with a system that I can use to guide myself in the future. A lot of this is going to deal with how long things take and how I want to run book launches going forward. Since this was my first time doing this there was no way to avoid stress and some measure of confusion, but now that I’ve done it once I have some clue of what I’m getting into next time.
Mostly I want to have notes on how long I should expect different phases to take. Come up with a checklist to guide myself and make sure I don’t miss steps. Have notes and reminders on tricks I learned or areas where I noticed I could have done things better. Completely getting rid of the stress is probably impossible, however it would be nice to feel like I have a road map going forward. Better still, I’ll probably learn/notice new things with every book so over time this’ll be something I can refine and improve.
Book 2
I haven’t actually come up with a title for the book yet, that seems to be getting ahead of myself. Mostly I’m just eager to really get to work on it. To some degree I was already ready to dive in earlier, but I stopped work because I decided it was best to focus on getting my first book out and really pay attention to the process so I could learn.
Compared to In Honor’s Shadow I expect this will go more smoothly (haha! let me dream), though there are some details I need to work out with how the story’s going to head. Thankfully I’ve got the major points and goals already laid out, as well as the early chapters, so on some level I’m expecting things to clarify a bit as I begin writing. Not sure how long this book will be, but I do know it is longer than In Honor’s Shadow, and my gut tells me it should be around 120k words or maybe even longer.
Regardless, as much as I want to rest on my laurels now just doesn’t seem to be the time. Now that my hat is officially in the ring I can’t afford to slack off.
Newsletter
Starting March I will begin sending out monthly newsletters. I’ll be trying to have them land on the first week of every month.
This is a small thing at present, but I consider it a critical part of what I’m doing. Right now what I can do with the newsletter is limited. My subscriber base is minuscule (single digits), but I consider the people who joined to be my strongest supporters. That is a thing I want to build on and reward as much as possible. As time goes on I hope to be able to do that more and more. Just how much I can do, and how often, depends on how many books I have out and what my success with them is. Regardless I like to believe that I can push this angle more strongly as time goes on.
Webpage Facelift
No, this isn’t going to be some huge redesign. There are a few tweaks to look into though. Mostly stuff like widgets and the like. At some point I’m sure a major site redesign will be necessary, but for now I’m QUITE happy with the layout. Even if I do end up updating stuff it will likely be restricted to art assets and a redesign of how pages are handled.
