As a book The Lord of the Rings does not exist. Even after it was published J. R. R. Tolkein insisted that his story was contained in three separate volumes; The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. I can understand the attraction to the publisher for being able to offer readers the opportunity to buy all three books in one volume, however. In fact I have decided to do the same with my trilogy.
At what now appears to be regular intervals I go back to my books and read them with a view to improving them. It is self-editing really. I always seem to find something that I am not particularly happy about, be that a typographical error, an example of poor grammar, or the notion that I could have phrased a sentence better. As a writer I believe in continuous improvement for myself and my work. Another thing that I have a habit of doing at this juncture is reviewing the covers of my books. I design them myself; it is something that I enjoy doing. Only The Queen of the Mountain Kingdom and The Devil Within Us retain their original covers at the moment. A single volume of The Sorrow Song Trilogy would obviously demand a new cover and, I have a suspicion, that this might lead me into designing new covers for each of the individual books as well.
By the end of the month I will have left my current fulltime job and I will have more time to dedicate to this sort of project. My plans also include totally revamping my marketing, which has always suffered by a lack of that most precious of commodities; time itself. My intention is to reach out to a much wider audience. Getting your work known is by far the biggest hurdle that any author or creative person faces. I find that I now have more energy for this kind of activity.
This project will begin with me loading a Word version of the manuscript for The War Wolf on my laptop, saving it as a new document, then reading it slowly and making corrections and improvements as I go. I use a very general style of formatting at this stage as eBook publishers all have their own format requirements and they are never the same. It is easier to write first and format second. There will not be an end date as I am not in a rush. I will also be writing Pomerania and developing a new marketing strategy at the same time. Fortunately, I have no problem with occupying myself with multiple tasks, well, not when I find all of them interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment