Musings About Writing Another Novel

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Revised and Extended Walker I

 

After editing Walker Chronicles IV, I wanted to let it sit for a week before the last reading.  However, I also sent it off to Forest for a healthy grammar and spelling check – he is picky and finds all sorts of stuff I never notice.

Part of my advertising plan is to offer the first Walker novel at a reduced price and also free for a couple days.  I’ll do that in hopes that folks will get interested in  the series and then buy the next three novels.

So, I read the first Walker over again to see what kind of editing it may need.  The first thing I noticed was that my writing has improved a lot between the first and the fourth novel.  That is, I didn’t really want to use the first Walker novel to represent the others because the writing quality was not the same.

Nonetheless, I wanted to keep the storyline of the first novel.  Actually, I had to keep the storyline of the first novel because some of it was mentioned, in passing, in the following three novels.

Which means . . . I had some work to do to bring the first novel up to the quality of the others.  And, that took a while!

As soon as I got Walker IV published on Amazon, I went right back to the first Walker and started editing.  Really, in this case, what I call editing might better be called “revising and extending” because that’s exactly what happened.

Along with correcting a few things, another 18,000+ words got added.  The characters are better described and some technical aspects of the story are downplayed some.  Oh . . . and I made a better cover for the book:

DSC00038  

That done, I sent the text over to Forest to see what he thought about the changes.  Turns out, he had a lot of suggestions, all of which I used.

That project ended up being quite a lot of work.  But, truth be told, I actually enjoyed doing it.  To me, it was almost like writing a new novel, but without needing to develop a whole new storyline.

Actually, I was surprised how easy it was to slip in another 18,000+ words and none of the editing I did was really that difficult.

So now Walker Chronicles I is reposted on Amazon with the new and reduced price of just 99 cents.

As part of my advertising plan, I’ll eventually be offering Walker I free for the three days allowed by Amazon – probably one day at a time every other week for six weeks.  I hope that will stimulate interest in the series. That’s worked well for others and so may work for me.

But first . . . I think I’ll take a critical look at Walker Chronicles II to see what that might need to bring it up to the level of the fourth novel. 

That’s what I’ll be starting this week.  But first I want to catch up on a few articles on writing and publishing and see what I might learn.

 

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Monday, May 21, 2012

Walker Chronicles IV is Published

 

Walker IV has been available on Amazon for a few days now.   Amazon had it up about five hours after I hit the post button, which is fast for them – they say it will be twelve hours. 

Funny thing happened when I went to see if it was available:  Someone beat me there and bought a copy.  That’s okay with me, of course, it just seemed strange because it couldn’t have been available more than a few minutes.

Ann looked over some of the text and found a couple of my errors.  I went over it multiple times.  Then I sent it to Forest, who won his masters in teaching before I was even born (he’s old!).  He found some grammar he wanted changed and even found a couple more spelling errors. 

Each time I “edited” the word count grew.  After Forest got done with the text, I read it over yet again and again made more changes and added a little more here and there.

Oh, and I used a different cover, too:

IMAG0263

 

For some reason, I liked this one better than the one posted below.  The one below might fit in with the text a little better, but I guess it doesn’t matter all that much. 

Will there be a book five in  the series?  Yeah, probably.  That was the plan, anyway.  I thought that I would start a little advertising with the fourth in the series while writing the fifth.  Then stop writing for a while after the fifth was publish and dedicate some of my time to advertising. 

Meanwhile, now that I have some writing practice, I’ll go over the early books to insure the quality is the same in all of them.  Because, when I reread the first novel I saw that it needed work. . . .  

Hey . . . I’ll admit it.  The first one was practice.  I’ve improved a lot since then.  So, I’m working on the first one to raise the quality a lot. 

I don’t expect to win any writing awards with this project, but I want the novels to be readable and interesting.  And I sure do not want any glaring errors to distract from the story.

So, I’ll be busy for a while.

 

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Sunday, April 1, 2012

Walker Chronicles IV Almost Ready to Release


It’s taken me a while to write this novel.  That’s not because I’m slow or didn’t work at it, either.  Nope, part of it is because I ran way over the Amazon suggested word count for a Kindle novel.  Also, because I’m becoming more fussy, I guess. 

The Prologue isn’t written yet.  But the text is probably done and mostly edited.  I’ll give it another read during the week and see what kind of errors I can find.  The problem with that is that I usually add more to the story line and then have to edit again.  

Okay, so now we come to the part about making a book cover again – which is never one of my happier moments for the project.  I was playing around with this for a while.  It sort of works with the storyline:

IMAG0256

I’m not sure that will be the one to get published, but it might. 

So then I’ll have four novels at Kindle.  They’ve been selling a little, but not all that much.  Of course, I haven’t done any advertising yet.  And by any, I mean nothing whatsoever.
Three guys have been helping me in the background just a little, though.  As I mentioned before, two big city politicians took an interest in my books.  It wasn’t exactly a favorable interest, either.  Now a third from another city joined in. 
I have no idea if these three guys know each other, but their questions and comments seem to be similar.  

Anyway, I’m not writing about their city.  As readers may realize, no city is mentioned in the novels.  The setting could be any large city.  That most large cities have the same types of crime by politicians is understandable – there are only so many types of illegal things they can get into and keep their office.  

The ideas for the novels come from reading the newspapers from major cities over the past fifty years.  So, yeah, most of these things happened in one form of another somewhere.  And, unfortunately, most of them are still happening in big cities somewhere.  Such is the nature of life. 

Therefore, when a politician writes to question me, I just kind of chuckle a bit and wonder if maybe they are not seeing some of that at their city hall.  Who knows, they could even be part of it.  

More importantly to me personally, now that I will have four novels published on Kindle, it becomes time to try to market them. 

And, sure, I’ll admit to being a newbie at that.  Fact is, I know absolutely nothing about promoting and marketing books.  So, I just started learning. 

All of the “best sellers” on Amazon have blogs and a few have written “how to do it” books.  Nowadays, sometimes when I should be writing, I’m reading about marketing tips instead.  

Along the way I’ve noticed that there are many people marketing their services and “expertise” on various aspects of editing, formatting and marketing novels.  But, when I search for the novels they sold, I find zero.  They push themselves as experts, but never did it themselves.  I’m staying away from those. 

On the other hand, there are quite a few authors who make a very good living selling novels on Amazon.  Some of those are nice enough to give out some rather useful tips.  So, I have a lot of reading to do in the next few weeks.  Studying, actually. 

When I’m not around, it’s not that I wouldn’t rather be blogging, writing zappy one-liners on Twitter, of browsing Facebook.  But for me this is like going to school again and carrying twelve credit hours.  Yeah, when it comes to the marketing aspects, I often feel like I’m pulling a few all-nighters studying for the finals again.  

But, in this case, a better score on the tests will mean more money in my retirement account. 

So, after a couple weeks of fooling around with marketing ploys, I’ll start on novel number five.  Actually, I already have a good start on it because it has been well foreshadowed in books three and four.

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