News
...came true today! My urban fantasy novel, Corrupting Alicia, is now available on Amazon. No more physical proofs or cover art revisions to review, no more edits or rephrases or flat out cuts. No more questioning whether or not it's is good enough to let people read.
For better or for worse, it has gone from WIP to reality. You can the paperback version here, and the Kindle version here.
Thank you to everyone who helped me on this journey!
#writer #indieauthor #corruptingalicia
The final cover art for my urban fantasy novel, Corrupting Alicia, is in! I am now one step away from realizing a dream nineteen years in the making...
Thanks to JD&J for all of their hard work and patience, and to my small circle of reviewers for helping me through the process. What an amazing journey this has been!
The last revision pass and final selection can be found here.
I received the third set of cover art options earlier today, and it is so close to being finished! Just a few more tweaks for Gisele, as she would never stand for looking anything less than perfect.
You can view the latest version options here.
Unfortunately, having to go back for a third round of revisions is almost certainly going to push the release into August. I mean, what good are self-imposed deadlines if you can't break them when necessary?
Who would have thought I'd be so picky about a cover?
#firstnovel #coverart
Well, I managed to choose just one, and after some time spent reviewing and thinking, the decision turned out not to be all that difficult. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on them! My apologies for those of you who liked a different cover option...
Earlier this afternoon, I received the updated revision passes for my chosen cover. More awesome work from JD&J Design LLC!
To view them, click here.
I just finished submitting my requested changes, so now I'm taking the rest of the night off.
#firstnovel #coverart
Another amazing day in my journey to publishing my #firstnovel! I received the initial cover art drafts for Corrupting Alicia, and I was very impressed with them! Completely worth the wait.
Awesome work from JD&J Design LLC!
How am I going to pick just one to start the journey to final cover art?
You can view all four drafts here.
Back to battle.
So I have finished making and uploading all of the changes from the physical proof. It only took me 20+ uploads before I managed to work all of the formatting issues out of the interior! Considering that I had to bounce back and forth between two computers, one which couldn't use Interior Reviewer and the other which did not have Word, I'm surprised I'm still sane... or rather, as sane as I was before I started reviewing the physical proof, which may not be saying much.
There is nothing quite like the feeling of finally getting that little green check mark next to a section in CreateSpace.
In other news, after a wait that was almost the death of me, the cover art project for Corrupting Alicia has finally begun! I am incredibly excited and cannot wait to see the first drafts on Tuesday! I try very hard not to look beyond days, but I can't express how tired I've grown of looking at the terrible temporary cover I created just to get the physical proof in my hands.
It's really starting to look like having the novel available by the end of this month is really an achievable goal.
#firstnovel
It's truly amazing to me how much of a difference a few simple changes can make. Well, they're simple now that I actually know about them; not so much when they wouldn't have even occurred to me. Throughout this entire process of setting up a web and social media presence, it's been the most amazing thing to get outside advice and opinions from professionals.
Thank you to Joelle Reeder of Moxie Design Studios for all of her help, input and patience! And thank you to Reedsy for helping me find her in the first place.
Finally done! I can't tell if I was tired of milking it, or if I just got to a part of the book that I wasn't yet sick of reading... It's exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. Exhilarating for the accomplishment; another (first) stop on the road to finally publishing it. Exhausting because I will soon need to do it again once all the changes have been uploaded. On the bright side, I didn't feel as much need to change everything this time around, so I remain hopeful that it will diminish even further for the next round.
Back to battle.
#amwriting #firstnovel
214 pages completed. I think I've done an admirable job of drawing this phase out so I'm not simply waiting (and going crazy), with nothing to do until July 10th. If I'm being honest, it hasn't been very difficult to draw out the process as it is a chore to work through the physical proof, more than any other edit pass thus far.
I'm not sure how many more times I can actually read this book. Start to finish, I'm easily in the multiple dozens by now. I can't tell if that's normal, or if I'm just trying to lessen my dissatisfaction with my work by repeatedly subjecting myself to it over and over in an attempt to desensitize my brain. Kind of like playing the same wrong note over and over again to lessen its impact.
Thankfully, most of the edits so far are related to formatting. Haven't yet found a single typo, although I cannot for the life of me figure out why that makes me so absurdly happy.
#amwriting #firstnovel
So I'm on day seven of reviewing the physical proof of Corrupting Alicia. I'm on page 113 out of 390... and I'm starting to drag. It is much harder than reviewing the changes from my editor, and is not anywhere near as fun. I often have to read a page multiple times because I get to the end and realized that I "skipped" chunks of words because I've simply read them so many times.
Oh, well. This really should be relegated to "problems that are nice to have." I would say that I should stop complaining and get back to reading, but the truth is that I'm trying to stretch out the review as much as possible because I've got to wait until July 10th for the cover art project to begin, and at least July 16th before I will get the first items to review.
Waiting has never been my strong suit, though I've gotten better at it with age...
Back to battle.
#amwriting #firstnovel
