This is just a sprinkling of books I’ve read to help improve my writing.

It’s been four years since I first published The Redemption. I thought I might sell a few copies. It’s up to around a thousand. The Switch, which I thought was actually a better book, sold in the low hundreds. Great, you say!

So I pressed on and wrote Five O’clock Follies with Dick Brundage. A lot of fun and I learned so much about the Vietnam war. And now, I’ve gone back and finished my first (unpublished) book, The Connection. The latter is out with my larger group of beta readers, another first for me.

The point of this post (and parts 2 and 3) is to pass along my experience to other self-published writers or anyone thinking about going down this path. I hope it helps.

The Finished Product

So you’re going to write a book. It was kind of a bucket list challenge to me. To finish a first draft is a real accomplishment. I found out I have a knack for this. It’s the part of writing I enjoy tremendously. With four books under my belt, I’ve put together about 450K words. I’ve found I can gen-up a first draft in about four months (even while I’m working full-time). My only advice here: Don’t stop. Write through the first draft. Get it on “paper.” Work from there.

I wonder how many never make it this far. Everyone seems to have a book in their head, yet few finish a first draft. Since I can do it somewhat effortlessly, I believe there’s a writer in me somewhere!

So you have a first draft. Here comes the fun. Revise…revise…revise, find outside editors and beta readers, and copy edit (grammar, spelling, etc.). Then of course, there’s the book cover, the blurb, generating the ebook, and putting the word document into a printable format followed by determining where to publish, advertising, etc. I DID ALMOST ALL OF THIS MYSELF, though now I’m turning more and more to others to help.

It’s a ton of work! I have some advantages. I have a lot of technical skills, and my other hobby is photography. So I do have a bit of head-start on some people.

First thing after the draft is done, I let it sit for a few weeks. Then I start the revision process, It takes me 4 months for a first draft, but 6 months for revisions. I revise, revise, revise until I have a nearly (90% done) completed product. Then I would hand it off to my trusty beta readers, my spouse and my daughter, both ridiculously avid readers. (For my latest book, I’ve expanded to a much larger set of beta readers.) At this point, what I really want from beta readers is whether the book makes sense and is it something they enjoy reading. That’s partly why it needs to be nearly complete. In the traditional publishing environment, I would have an agent and a paid editor (and a publishing house). I couldn’t see plucking down as much as I might make on a book for an editor. Editors would argue that their service would increase the readability and value of the book enough to justify it. That may be true. I wasn’t willing to do that on my first few books.

After clearing it through my personal editors and beta readers, I returned to revision. Painstaking revision. Then the copy-editing. I did this part myself. Spent a GREAT deal of time re-learning and learning grammar-related info. Strunk and White, WD Grammar Desk Reference, Chicago Manual of Style are some of my go-to books. I’m sure there are a few grammatical mistakes in my books, but my readers have only pointed out one error so far.

Finally, after about a year, I’d have a finished manuscript.

The Cover

Two different ideas.

The experts will tell you the cover is a big part of whether someone will buy your book. They will say it needs to give some indication of what the story is about. The latter statement is debatable. Go to a bookstore (yes, they still exist) or look on Amazon. Covers might give you a sense of the book (is it dark, lighthearted, emotional?), but it won’t tell you what the book is about. I think the cover simply needs to grab your attention.

For my first novel, The Redemption, I used the Cover Creator from Createspace (which has been absorbed into Amazon’s KDP platform). I selected the picture (my photo) on the right cover above. The original cover (not shown) was kind of amateurish but that’s what I had. Back then, all I wanted was to publish a book. One book. I didn’t really care much about a cover. It would only sell a few copies anyway.