Two Posts in One Day???

Like I said in the last post, I’m setting goals this year. The number one goal is to be a traditionally published author with one of these damn books that are piling up. A few posts back I listed all of the works and some little blurbs. You can scroll back to see what I’m talking about. The important thing to note is that I have six novels that are unpublished. Early in my novelist career, I self-published two novels back to back without really understanding the business. We’ve all experienced it. The vanity part of wanting to get our stories out into the world.

Ten years ago, self-publishing was just finding its footing. The resources that are available now weren’t available then. I published them, and no one read them. The six people who did read loved the story, but everyone commented on the lack of editing and the numerous errors throughout the book. I’m still cringing over it. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

I have these grand designs in my head to get myself back on track, and it starts with getting those other two books up to snuff. I tackled Seven Isaacs a year or two ago, but Alice the Fifth is a developmental nightmare. And damn it, it’s on Amazon. Ugh. It’s so bad. So, I’m diving headlong into it to fix it. As I set out to rewrite, I quickly discovered that, somehow, the book was completely missing from my cloud. That’s not good. I spent HOURS scouring my cloud, my laptop, and my desktop and finally came across a file that was allegedly the “second draft.” I spent the afternoon today merging it over into Scrivener, the best writing app out there, and began to edit the prologue. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as terrible as I had feared, but it needs A LOT of work.

Thirty more chapters to go until I re-release my second novel, Alice the Fifth. After that, I dig into the others to decide if they will go the self-route or the traditional route and work accordingly toward those goals.

The time for novelist as a hobby is over. It’s time to get paid.