Sorry I didn’t get this up yesterday. It has been a crazy few weeks and we ramped it up for the final push. We got my first novel published today!!! Hooray! It’s under a pen name and I’m really excited about it. There’s still a lot of marketing to do, but getting the file ready was a ton of work. But it looks gorgeous thanks to my husband, and has great editing thanks to Julie.
I wrote 4000 words in edition to all the other work. It’s been crazy.
How did you do?
I’m so happy for you, Melinda. Again, congrats and I will make myself a note to look for it on Amazon tomorrow morning.
I didn’t do much better this week. Too much came at me and the store was insanely busy. Yay, but damn I’m tired. I managed to add about 600 words. That’s all, but I also edited my first chapter again and struggled to rewrite the first paragraph with a better hook. I think, maybe, just possibly, I might have it!
I was so tired last week when I posted, I don’t think I did the greatest job communicating what I meant. I saw this on Chuck Wendig’s Terribleminds Blog, and he says what I meant to say so perfectly, I had to copy it.
The young adult market is strapping and robust, like a young Russian lad thick on borscht and vodka. Last year sales in young adult were up 13%, and up 117% in e-books which is more than twice the digital growth in adult markets — plus, by most reports, young adult fiction yields bigger advances, too. And it’s these bigger advances right now that maybe suggests young adult authors are better leaning toward more traditional publishing than self-publishing (whereas in other areas, like in romance, the reverse may be true).
Also the reason I have so many books is because I get at least 2-3 e-mails a day for free or low cost e-books, so I know I could easily market a self-pub Romance. Shoot me an e-mail if you want the names of the sites. Also, with the poor quality out there, I think a well written story can rise above the others pretty easily, if it’s been professionally edited and has a professional looking cover. Some of them are really bad and a book is judged by its cover.
I wish you the best of luck, Melinda.
Thanks, Tina! Any marketing advice you have I would love to hear. I know you are a savy business woman.
The front money for a book makes me nervous with a big publishing company. If an author recieves a huge advance and doesn’t sell enough to recover the advance in the first year, it’s likely the author is never going to be published again by the publishing house. I’ve never been in a position to turn down huge amounts of money, but if I was, I’d have to think carefully about the long game.
Something I’m sure I’ll cover in a blog is enjoying the control I had over how the book is formatted and appears. Thursday, Friday and Saturday were very intense between Julie, David and I shooting emails back and forth to get everything just right. There’s probably stuff we missed, but I think overall we created a pretty good product. So even my Gwen stories I will probably try to self publish even though they are YA. I have a very particular vision for them and one I don’t want to turn control over to publishers who want to make it their vision.
We’ll see. So far, the process has been very interesting, very time consuming, but overall very enjoyable.
Congrats on your publication!!!! I officially have my copy. I’m so excited to read it. As for word count, I wrote 5,000 words on my sci-fi sequel and 500 on a non-fiction article. Not much else to report this week.
Congratulations again!
Thanks for buying it Holly!! I hope you enjoy it
Good word count this week.
Congrats, Melinda. I’m excited for you. I didn’t write a word this week. I did do some editing and sent in a story I had to shorten by about 500 words. I had a dr. appointment and a test this past week, so I have a valid excuse. I haven’t got the results but it could mean surgery of some kind. Hope not. Have a great writing week. Email me your pen name, Melinda, so I can take a look at it.
Thanks Shari! I hate waiting for test results. I hope your come out OK. I’m thinking of you.
Horray for the book being published! That must be such a relief to get it off.
Late to the party, but I was traveling this weekend. But I was in San Fran. and am considering a follow up book to be set there so I am considering it research
But before I left though I had a good week with 3,500 words. I a polished my prologue, which became a chapter, which then topped out at 7000 words. I know I need to whittle that down a bit, but had a blast writing it. Polishing chapters two and three this week. But the way things are going, my stand alone novel is getting a little pregnant, I think.
Thanks Dave! Sounds like you’re on a roll with your manuscript. Keep it up!
Hopefully your next followup can be somewhere exotic like Singapore. If you have to go across the world to do research, then you just have to.