What happened in the past week
Books published: Rosemary Kids Book 1 (Nuclear!)
Books sold: 5
KENP read: 0
Overview
This week marked the official start of my journey.
- I created all the social accounts for AlanFrenchBooks (FB, Twitter, Medium). Goodreads and Amazon I had before. And I connected everything, so that one post on my blog now posts on all the other platforms (except Medium, which is a manual process).
- I started posting on AlanFrenchBooks.com. I also put out one post by accident before it was ready, which was stupid. I blame the mobile WordPress app.
- I started participating in Facebook groups for writers, and connecting with other writers on Medium.
Writing
This week I finished the editing of Summer Island, the second book of the Rosemary Kids series. I printed it out and went through the thing with a red pen, and there was really a lot to do.
The pictures from the artist are coming in. I have about half of them in colour now, the other half as pencil sketches. The artist, Dave Windett, is great to work with and he created brilliant pictures for both books so far. I hope to have him on board for the next book too.
Here’s a sample:
I have the goal of writing a number of books this year. Ideally nine or ten until the end December, which means about one a month, with some breaks. Now I’ve finished two and it’s mid-March, so I’m not far behind the schedule. Of course, these are short books (15,000 words each), so it’s not like this is some Herculean feat. Still, I’ll be proud of myself if I manage to do that as planned.
With this schedule, I’ll need to be writing and editing in parallel. So now I’m already writing the third book in the series. I just did a first attempt at collecting some ideas. I report about that in another post.
Editing
My own editing pass looks more at the big, structural issues: the characters, their motivations, the plot, whether there is enough conflict. Then I do a pass where I look at the language. Since these are children’s books, I try to make sure that all sentences are relatively short, and that the vocabulary used is not too difficult. It is okay to present new words to the children, I think, as long as this doesn’t happen too often and frustrates the reader. Children want to learn new things, so completely dumbing down the language is not good either and takes away some of the fun for the reader.
After that I’ll send it to the copyeditor, who is also looking at continuity issues and story holes. She is really great, and very good at also smoothing out my broken English (I’m German, so English is a foreign language to me, and I still make the silliest mistakes sometimes).
Usually that’s enough editing for me. I will explain my editing procedure in more detail in another post.
One thing I missed for most of this week: I didn’t write any new words. I did plan the next book (Rainforest), but this was just collecting ideas and outlining, no actual drafting. I must improve this next week.
Marketing
I have an Amazon ad running, which I created before I knew what I was doing. It has around 5000 impressions, and has cost me to date USD 18.13. Clicks: 41. Sales due to the ad: zero.
Obviously, this needs some work…
I don’t want to put more money into ads for the moment, as long as I don’t have the second and third books. Selling one book is not really going to be profitable. Everyone seems to agree that you need a series of books in order to make the best use of ad money, so I’m going to wait until I have a series.
I created Pinterest boards this week for the whole series. I should have done this earlier. They are a great support for my own research, and they also help visualise and describe the settings to the artist who paints the pictures. So they are really useful (and fun, I hope).
Socialising and publicity
I wrote four posts and one substantial article on Medium (the present one doesn’t count, it will count next week). I connected to some other writers in various Facebook writing groups and on Medium.
Contests and awards
I submitted “Nuclear!” for the Purple Dragonfly Awards.
I created a Press Kit (PDF), blogged about it, and sent it off to Treehugger. This was more a token thing. I don’t expect Treehugger to hug my book (yet), but I wanted to be able to say that I tried. So now it’s out. (Not that anyone replied, though).
Goals for next week
- Two blog posts here (this is one of them; the other is Motivation for Writers).
- Finish editing book 2, “Summer Island,” and send it off to the editor.
- Outline book 3, “Rainforest!”