This is a post about the difference between a story being apparently ready in a series author’s head, and it being ‘uploadable’ ready and the work that’s needed to move from point A to point B even if you’re a ‘lite’ style author who’s not interested in beta readers and the usual publishing paraphernalia.
So. A little background. And this takes the form of a cautionary tale.
I’ve just had a bit of a mad rush to get two of the short stories (not so short as it turned out) uploaded to Amazon. I’d originally planned for the first two of the prequels to go up over this month, the first on or around the 15th, the other on the 29th.
Due to some dramas (which I won’t go into here. they were very little fun,) I was forced to shunt the first release date forward 14 days to the 29th. That was my one chance to do so allowed for by Amazon pre-order rules and made a heap of sense at the time.
Then follow up on said drama, and a burst of family CoVID amongst the kidduns, led to me finding myself two days off the absolute final deadline with two books to upload.
Okay, I thought. I’d got these two into pretty good shape. I’ll take the Friday off work and then have a nice relaxing weekend.
Oh hell no. That’s not what happened at all.
As it turned out although I had thought that the first prequel was in good shape when I read it I suddenly realised that six of the twenty chapters were not much more than outlines, and even those that were fully written were a weird mix of American and British spellings, they reflected several different ‘versions’ of the story that had run through my head over the writing period (and so the story was not particularly integrated) and to add insult to injury the start of the story was about two-thirds of the usable writing with the rest crammed in at the end and what had looked like the final chapter being notes for another book entirely.
Oh well, I’ve got two days. How bad can this be?
Obvious answer? Pretty bad. I cut maybe 10k words and rewrote the whole thing from start to finish. From a 30k unfinished draft with 21 chapters. it got formatted on the fly on Vellum into a 46k completed draft, spell checked, with a workable story about five hours before the upload deadline. Then I slapped together a cover… and here we are.
Or so I thought. I’d forgotten the other story.
Thankfully this was in a lot better shape, needing maybe a thousand words of rewrites just to link up a couple of borderline bits, and formatting etc. It took an hour and my wife sorted out the uploads.
Still. A good reminder to myself that although I may think something is finished, writing me is a very different and somewhat more lackadaisical person than formatting and uploading me has to be.
Am I entirely happy with those two Kindle Unlimited files that are up? Of course I’m not. Give it a month and I’m going to double check both and sort out some basics like an ‘about the author’ page, and a list of other series books. Both would also benefit from a long hard look and a bit of cutting.
Am I happy they’re up and I’ve retained the ability to set up pre-orders? Very much so.
Onwards and upwards. Next to release is a full novel (Watcher on the Water) with a paid for cover and I’m suspecting that I’m going to be giving myself a hell of a lot more time to get the damn thing up (particularly as one of the characters will need a little rewrite to reflect 20k of character development from Friday and Saturday’s rewrites)!
Ice Age in Scarlet 