We are rocking and rolling now!

I just got off of my first scheduled call with my content editor. I was happy to know that he really liked my writing. As far as gaps were concerned, he advised I go through the manuscript and add more description. Completely understandable. You know how authors get. Its in your head and you forget to put it down on the page so that everyone else can experience the same thing. After all it must make perfect and logical sense to the reader by now, right? Wrong!

For the most part the content editor said I had “really good writing chops.” 😀 Outstanding as far as comments go. He also had some suggestions for font choices for the computer that I have talking at certain points throughout the book. Nice creative touches. He also suggested that I add an epilogue and tie this book into a sequel! I originally thought of this book as a standalone, but I always have another story in me. The ball is back in my court now. Time for me to go through the manuscript again. I feel that I will be doing a lot of this going through the manuscript again. Its going to make it really easy for me to miss stuff because I know what it is supposed to say. But it is also an opportunity to make real corrections. I also have my brother (a recent author himself–I’ll have to do a separate blog post for his book) doing read throughs for me. Once I am done and have a final consultation with the content editor its off to proof reading.

Wow! Here I am in Hawaii for the very first time. The landscape is not the beautiful image that you often think of from the things that that we are exposed to. There is s a lot of volcanic residue and we were greeted by wild goats and wild turkeys. This is an island! How did they get here? Well that’s neither here nor there and has absolutely nothing to do with my publishing journey.

I got a message from the Art Director at Atmosphere Press today. He requested information to help with my book cover design. This included submitting covers of books that I likes and books that I thought I would want my cover to resemble in some aspect. NOTE: All work is original. They don’t do any copycat work. They also asked me for a synopsis of the book and a description of the main character. This will, I assume, help them to get into the feel of what my character should look like.

I did not expect to receive any of this while I was on vacation, but that’s why I bring that iPad with me everywhere I go. I immediately got to work to send them the things that they needed. If anything stops up the works, its not going to be me! Can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Full Steam Ahead! I got, virtually, introduced to my Managing Editor today. This ship is starting to make some headway. I’m just days away from going on vacation and I am very excited about the progress that is being made. I had to send another copy of the manuscript to day in MS Word format. I guess it will be easier for them to work with. I see that they have setup a folder structure for me in the cloud so that we can share files easily. I am patiently waiting for the results of my content review. This is NOT the proof reading stage, but it is the stage where I get constructive criticism of what needs work with the book to make it publish worthy–then we’ll get to the proofreading phase. I don’t know if you can tell from these brief posts, but this is getting very exciting.