Writing a book and getting out to the public was quite an experience and learning opportunities abound. I have been asked a few times about how long it took to get the book written as well as what was my writing process and insperations.

First thing in the process was ideas for stories, my book is a themed set of short stories. Then making the commitment to write. No matter what get up in the morning, do morning chores, get coffee and write. Now I may write in a note book, in my reMarkable, or on my PC. Write and write until you can’t. That is ok, get up and finish household chores, go shopping, read, anything to revive.

I did this every morning, getting up at 7.30A. Doing my morning ritual and writing. My first story took two weeks doing this. I was happy with it, made some edits over the next week and had friends read it to give me feedback. I also will sometimes sketch drawings of main characters or locations. I include some of them in my books as the opening page for a short story.

During the writings of the main part of the book I am also working on the opening poem. Once satisfied with “Demon Tears” I moved on to writing the next story. The next story “Statue of Love” only took three days to write the raw story. The first day was my usual get up and write. I wrote a bit then went out and ended up at my friends house for the evening. Coming back home I was inspired. I sat in front of the PC and started banging on the keyboard, I wrote and would cry. I would get up and pace the length of the house. Coming back to write more. I did this all night to the dawn of the new day. At that time I all I needed was to write the ending I had already seen. Exhausted I climbed into bed and slept most of the day. I got up and finished the story that evening and the following day.

“Heart of the Dead” took much longer. The story took almost a month to write and have my friends read it. Once I had all three of the main stories written and edited by me; now I started putting the book together, writing the three 6 line stories to introduce the main set of stories. Once done, another week, I go through the set of stories, editing, and making sure that they hang together in this collection.

At this point I needed to have the document gone through and professionally edited. I looked on line and found Readsy.com where I could find the professionals I needed. I went through the listed professional editors finding a group in my genre I sent out requests for bids with a sample and what I needed. I got back a few rejections and two bids. I hired one of them and plan to use her again on this current book I am putting together.

Now while my manuscript is with my editor I begin to look for a typesetter and graphic designer for book cover. Once I found my designer we began to work together off of a brief I sent him. After a few rounds of examples and finetuning color pallets I have a draft to use on my website to start promotion. It took about a month to get the book cover finished and ready to use for production.

Now with the cover finished I can move on to the typesetting and internal images to open each main story. Not having the edited copy back yet I focus on the three images for the book. This I work with my graphic designer to take my drawing and create the graphic plates for the book. This took a bit to do and some back and forth.

During the back and forth of the image creation I received my edited copy back. Here I go through the edits that have been made and approve them or change the wording to what I want. Now also at this time I have blocks where my editor would tell me “show don’t tell.” She pushed me and my manuscript is better for it. With her guidance on this book, my next set of stories will be a bit longer and will have four stories in “Cost of the Heart; Vol II Ghosts from the Machine” This process I thought would be a few days turned into two weeks.

I am roughly two months into the book now. I am ready to start the process of the book layout and typesetting.

I will post about that process as it took the longest and was the most frustrating. It also ended up adding another $800.00 to my cost already of just under $3K, with my book awareness ad campaign this puts my cost now at a little over $4K. More on this next post. See you Thursday.