So much to do, so little time…

As blog posts go, this one is a check-in to let you know that I haven’t been eaten by an Alsatian (or the cat). I’ve just been busy doing things.

In my last post I talked about sending my manuscript to a small army of beta-readers for the very first time, and joked that I might have to write something to take my mind off the fact that people were READING my STUFF.

So I did. I wrote an 8,000 word chapter book for a competition. The comp only required the first 1000 words but heck, I’d started so I figured I should finish. Plus I read the first 4 chapters to my boys, who wanted more; in fact the older one said I had to finish the book before he went off on his residential trip – no pressure! And I wanted to know how the story ended too, of course. So I finished the draft last Tuesday, let it sit, and then got the red pen to the first chapters and sent it off on Friday. It was lots of fun to write, and definitely took my mind off what my beta readers might be thinking. Keep your fingers crossed for me, please!

In other news, my wonderful beta readers have already started to give me feedback, and so far it’s pretty positive (I knew I liked them all). I won’t be taking any decisions until the feedback’s all in, but so far everyone has different favourite stories, which is cool.

Yesterday, spurred on by the nice things my betas have said (so far), I decided to grab the bull by the horns and get on with some of the other bits of the self-publishing process. I’m planning to release the ebook first and see how it does before making a decision about print copies, so there’s a bit less to do. However, when I made a list of all the different bits and pieces, there were still 50 items on it!

After a brief panic, during which I freaked out about front matter, back matter, and possibly anti-matter, I took a deep breath and concluded that it must be possible to get it all done, since there are so many self-published books out there. I picked 5 tasks which it seemed sensible to do first, and one by one, I did them. That felt better.

Today I’ve been writing book descriptions, blurb, bio, afterword, and acknowledgements. It feels very strange, and ridiculously grown-up, but this collection of words might turn out to be a book after all!

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The featured image is What? by Ron Frazier, and is reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons license 2.0. No changes were made.