The Indie Process

I suppose while I'm in the midst of going indie I could keep you abreast of the process. So, I've already put the covers out there, which you've seen and weighed in on, and I've done some research on young adult covers and chosen one. I know many of you like the glass heart, but after the research, the cover needs to convey what the story is about, and young adult readers like to see a person on the cover, so this is the one I went with.

I've already done the formatting for the most part. Now I'm waiting to hear back from my beta readers. I've heard back from three of them, and here is a couple of things they had to say.

"Dissected is amazing, but it's a hard, painful read. I believe it's important because it reminds me so much of Go Ask Alice, which changed my life." ~ fellow writer

"I started reading it and well I couldn't stop until I finished it. I love the detail that you put into and it makes it seem like you are right there with Syd." ~ reader

"I liked it. I am disturbed by it. I was sucked in by it...... Your writing allows you to speak to the reader's heart, and that is a gift." ~ school librarian

Once I hear back from the others (I think there are two more), I will press on from there. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. There is definitely a learning curve to this process.

Formatting and other tragedies

First I'll give you a monkey, because there was no monkey in my blog yesterday.

There's a lot to do when you decide to become an indie publisher. Formatting is one of them. It's really not THAT difficult. Createspace has pretty clear instructions on how to do it. But unfortunately, I apparently was not indenting my manuscript correctly and that made it a little bit of a bitch. Luckily I have some Facebook friends that are Word masters and they helped me through my idiotic mistake and now I'm cruising along, in fact, I'm pretty much done with the formatting part.

Next step is more editing. I have some betas reading it as we speak. One is already finished with it. He read it in a day. Good sign. I'm hoping the others will have it done in two weeks time. I'm hoping for an April release.

After that, I have a friend who is a great editor who is going to go through a all in one editing process for me. She's going to go through my formatting, do line editing and copy editing.

Then I had an offer from someone to help me with formatting, so I hope she'll also take a look at my formatting, just to have one more set of eyes look at it.

Then the hopefully last round of edits, formatting fixes and voila, finishing up the other details and I have a book out.

If you're thinking about self publishing, my friend Karla Brady has a great blog that lays out the process for you step by step. Check it out here.

That is all. Have a great Tuesday!