Things I'll Be Doing Differently the Second Time Around
If you read my last blog post, then you probably caught one of two things.
One, you probably noticed that I said my next blog post would be up the next day. I have since edited that line as it's five days later, but in the last post, we already went over the fact that I am a flawed human being with consistency issues. But, I am extremely proud of myself for shortening the length of time between posts.
Two, I mentioned that my release date for Clean Slate has officially been pushed from September 18th to October 16th. During the process, I was able to learn things that I never thought I would need to know, but now that I do, I know that I'm capable of more.
Since I'm a college student on a budget, the fewer people that I have to hire, the better.
One of the things that I did on my own and didn't hire someone to do for me was the formatting. Thanks to Jenna Moreci, the queen of writing advice, I found this incredible program called Vellum to format on. Once I figured it all out, again, thanks to her video, it was relatively easy. Vellum is a relatively straight forward program that you can play around with and no purchase is required until you are happy with your product.
Vellum has two payment options; create unlimited ebooks for $199.99, or created unlimited ebooks and paperbacks for $249.99. Being who I am and trying to save money anywhere I can, I picked the latter.
Something that I'm really excited about for this next book is how much cheaper the process is going to be. I won't have to pay for formatting at all which is beautiful. Another thing that I won't have to pay for is ISBNs and barcodes. I bought those in bulk, too.
Things that I'll do differently this time around probably overwhelm the things that I won't have to do or purchase.
Let's start off with the fact that I never outlined Clean Slate. Then, let's turn our attention to the fact that I had to kill my darlings in the last round of edits that I did. I tried to stuff these little subplots in wherever I could to add "depth", but I never followed through with them.
I never really understood the whole "kill your darlings" thing, but I do now. Except, I'm not really killing them, I'm just making a note and holding onto those darlings for different books where they'll have a purpose.
Seeing as how I want this to be my career and I seem to have no shortage of ideas thank god, I strongly believe that everything will find its place.
I'm a firm believer in trust the process, but I also realize and appreciate that real work and effort have to be put in in order to achieve anything, so I'm going to cut this short so I can get to creating for you guys!
Before I sign off, my heart is with all who lost someone on this day nineteen years ago and at any point since then due to the consequences that innocent people faced. Never forget 9/11.
With abundant love and appreciation,
Alyssa