Hey!
You might recall back in mid-March that I had completed the third draft of my first novel (title: Pyramidion), and was ready to pass over to professional editing. If so, you might be wondering where things are at now, two months later. Good news! That’s what I’m here to tell you!
When I’d done my third draft, I was pretty happy. If you’ve read the article, you’d know. But I didn’t mention anything about my editor.
I didn’t know where to go, originally. I considered a few people online – I frequent several writer’s groups on Facebook, you see, and there are several editors there, all of whom were reasonably priced with their offers. I also checked Fiverr – a website where one can hire another person to do… pretty much anything. I’ve used Fiverr a couple of times before, and I always found them hit-and-miss. Not only do you get what you pay for, but you really don’t know if that person is trustworthy. I wasn’t sure I could trust my book to Fiverr.
And to be honest, many of the editors I found on Facebook were similar – they were either of limited experience, or their portfolio just wasn’t satisfying (or… successful, in many cases, which I’m not sure is a good sign… perhaps I’m being too picky).
So I was stuck.
In the end, I came across a helpful website for writers – Reedsy. It’s full of articles and free videos/courses, many of which are very useful for new writers. Plus, there’s paid content as well, and – more importantly – a service that puts writers in contact with editors, effectively allowing a writer to propose a job to a select few editors, who can then make an offer for this job, should they choose to.
What makes this system better than Fiverr is the amount of information each editor provides: current day job (many of the editors do this as a side job), previous employment, previous edit portfolio (and links to the books themselves), plus testimonials from previous customers. Even better? Many of the editors already work within the publishing industry – in fact, many work for traditional publishers and do this editing work on the side, which feels like a bonus for those of us that are looking to self publish.
But it’s not the cheapest. In fact, it was about double what I was quoted by the Facebook editors… It was a tough decision, but I wanted what I felt was the best. I wanted to give my book the best chance.
Anyway, I don’t want to go into this process too much, but suffice it to say that I chose one of the offers, and the editing is well underway – in fact, it may even be completed in the next couple of weeks.
At the same time, I engaged an artist friend who had previously done some design work for me, and asked him to create a cover for me. He has experience in cover design (quite a lot, actually), so I trusted he would be able to come up with something original. I provided him with a copy of the third draft to help him understand the story, and he came back to me with a first draft at the end of last week.
And he damnwell knocked it out of the park. The image you can see on this page is a tease – it’s cropped from the cover art itself. I can’t wait to show it off in full, but not until I’m ready to publish. You can bet your ass it’s worth waiting for.
Soon, my pretties.
Aaaand… this is true. It will be soon. In fact, all going well, I hope to publish sometime in June. But there’s still a fair amount of work that needs to be done first – completion of the editing (which will require a full follow-up re-read by yours truly), typesetting, finalising of the cover (front, back, and spine), official ISBN and barcode… and then off to publishing!
Sadly, as a new author, I can’t publish on a specific date, so I won’t be able to give an exact release date, but I will be within a day or two. And I don’t want to do a cover reveal until I’m probably around a week from publishing…
So June may be optimistic, but I’m going to go all out. Hopefully the next update will be a full cover reveal and estimated release date… time will tell.