What’s Going On With My Novel?

As you may have guessed from all the Q&As, I’ve been gathering as much info on self-publishing as I can.

After reading Jenna’s responses to our Q&A, I decided to engage CreateSpace to design the interior formatting of my paperback. I’ve uploaded all the files for their review. We’re going to do a quick conference call at some point and then they will provide me with a mockup of the first few chapters to approve.

I get to include images inside the book and really make it a personal experience for the reader. I’ve visited every place in the book so I have my own photos to use.

I’m engaging Kirkus Indie Review to write a review of the book prior to publication. This will push the publication date into May, but I think it’s an important step to give readers a little more certainty about the quality of my book. I’ll be including a Kirkus blurb on my back cover.

Jenna’s and Audrey’s posts also made me feel confident enough to take on the e-book formatting myself in March.

Audrey’s and August’s posts made it clear I wanted a great cover, so I asked my website designer, Jian Chan, to take on that task.

One thing I took away from all these amazing Q&A posts was the need for an editor and a copy editor. I have one person I trust completely with my novels. My critique partner, who has always given me top-notch advice even when it took me a few months to see the genius in it, Katrina Bender. Having seen what her edits did for my YA story, she’s the only person I wanted to work with on my adult novel. She talks to me in a way that I don’t just hear what she says, but I understand what she means.

My copy editor is my mom. She’s a grammar stickler and catches every little mistake. Even the intentional sentence fragments. But I love her eagle eyes.

I’m really happy to have had such awesome people help me make the decision to self-publish and to have such a talented team help me move forward!