It’s been a tough and almost traumatic weekend here in my little writing room… As I have mentioned previously, my latest e-book, has had a long and quite challenging history.
- 2004-2005 – ideas I’ve had for a while inspired by but not based on my own lovely family, and the stories my husband has told me of the bands he has been in the make-ups and break-ups, and bands I follow and go to watch – these ideas finally begin to find their way out of my head and onto the paper (well, computer screen)
- 2010 – the story of the Portbraddon family is complete, but sits on my virtual shelf as I can find no-one to publish it
- 2011 – I give up my day job to start writing full-time, and find out I can publish for free through Kindle Direct Publishing, and publish my first e-book, Farholm
- 2011-2016 – I continue to publish off my virtual book shelf, but also write four completely new novels
- 2016 – January I decide I have to start work on my Portbraddon novel, thinking it might be ready for early summer
- 2016 – 12th September, I upload Lucky Portbraddon
This makes it sound like a smooth journey, especially as the novel was complete when I started editing it… it was quite a bumpy ride, for several reasons:
- the book was far too long, over 300,00 words… it has been a slash and burn exercise to reduce it to a more manageable size
- there was a whole back story, maybe 30-40 thousand words I had not included in the first draft which needed to be put in, in the right places, and within a context – this added to the total length, but I still pared it down, and now it’s about 190,000 words
- a cover had to be designed – yes, KDP will help you design your own… maybe I should try this next time, but for my Portbraddon book I had a design in mind and eventually got it right (apart from the font… I may have to change the font if I put out a second edition)
- I did a heck of a lot of editing, reading the whole thing through on the computer four times, on my own Kindle three times, plus all the spell-checks, eradicating too many repeated words (I noticed too late that ‘crass/crassly’ figured rather too frequently)
- at the last-minute – like, three days before I had announced it would be published, I decided to read it through one more time out loud. I always do this, but this time, put off by the length, I hadn’t… Lesson learned… note to self, however long a book is, read it out loud, it will throw up so many errors! I stayed up till 2, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I was up at 7 over the weekend… I got through quantities of tea and throat pastilles, but I did it.
So at 2 o’clock this morning, all was ready all done, all I had to do was press ‘upload’… which I did…
Technical error… what? Technical error and the blasted thing wouldn’t upload, no matter how many times I tried it, and tried different ways and saving the document into different files. Disheartened, I left it, went to bed and got up this morning to try again… technical error… and by this time I’m remembering all the little things I had realised over night I wanted to change, and wondering whether I should…
We had to go out briefly, and when I came back I tried something different… and thank goodness! All is well and shortly you will be able to read Lucky Portbraddon!
Here is a link to my other books, and you may be one of the first to read my new e-book!
Lois Elsden 