It’s been a month since good fortune befell me and my book. There has been a lot of soul searching involved, not just with my literary pursuits, but with DayJob(tm) and my recreational hockey career. I think the best I was able to explain it to Liz was, “There’s nothing wrong, per se, and that’s the problem.” When things are bad or broken, I shift into problem solver mode and try to fix things, but there’s been nothing to fix because nothing is actually bad or broken. What does all of this rambling mean?
Heads-up, this is going to be a brain dump and it will be long. I can’t promise it’ll be coherent, I can’t promise it will make sense to anyone but me, but there will be some important nuggets contained herein. I think it’s also important to point out that, while things might seem self-deprecating or dismissive of my accomplishments, I assure you they are neither. It’s a concept I have struggled to explain to a lot of people. Just because I say something like, “I’m not the best writer in the world,” doesn’t mean I believe that I suck. It means that there are many writers out there far more talented than I am, and THAT’S OKAY. I happen to be a big fan of my work, but I also see the places where I can improve. I always say that a day I didn’t learn something is a day wasted, so that’s a big part of this post.
Let’s start with writing. I’ve had some very good, if cryptic, conversations with the TTP team. I say cryptic because I didn’t really see the wisdom of them until days later, not that they were confusing or deliberately obtuse. I’ll start with the big reveal and then I’ll get into the details.
I have decided to relaunch the book later this year. This is going to include a new title and a new cover. At present, I am NOT planning any rewrites to the story or to change the direction of Book 2. This also does not mean the end of Her Violet Empire, as I’m planning to use this as the new name of the series. “Verse” themed series titles are absurdly overdone right now, so that wasn’t a hard decision.
To dive into my thinking process here, I’ll rewind back to December 2021. I had a more or less complete book and had decided that I wanted to publish it. I went into the whole thing with a Jeremy Clarkson kind of mentality: “How hard could it be?” Here’s where I made Rookie Mistake #1: I didn’t have a firm enough grasp on my book as a product before I produced it. My conversations with TTP really made me consider my goals as an author and I missed this crucial step before jumping in. I now understand that whatever high and mighty ideals I may have, this is a business, your writing is the product, and you need to understand any product before you sell it.
Expanding on the goals part of this, my goal is not, has not been, and will not be to become a full-time author. On this point, I am very clear. I don’t anticipate that anything I write is going to be our retirement check and I wouldn’t end my current career even if it did. I write because I discovered that I love to do it and I publish because I believe in the story and it’s the best way to get the story read.
Back to Rookie Mistake #1. When I was setting up my ISBNs, it asked me for genre and classification. I had no idea. I used a General Fiction category (that seemed nice and safe) and went with Urban Fantasy as the second, presumably because it takes place largely in an urban setting. DO NOT GUESS AT YOUR GENRE!!! I can’t stress this enough. Every other decision you make from this point forward depends on this. You don’t want to name your book The Happy-Go-Lucky Rainbow Club if your story is a dark mystery (unless you have a finely tuned sense of irony). Also, hands off that title, I may use it later. 🙂
Corollary to Rookie Mistake #1: know your story from an outside perspective. As authors, we get so close to the subject matter, we often have a laser focus on one point or another. What we might think is an afterthought may prove to be the central theme of the whole narrative and vice versa. When my best friend and literary Sherpa told me her thoughts on the central theme of my own book, I was stopped cold. Light bulbs went on, all of those wonderful cliches happened. I took myself out of the author role and looked from that perspective and realized just how right she was and how that simple fact also invalidated every other decision I had made in my journey.
After I confronted that reality, I realized where I made Rookie Mistake #2: “Go Fever.” Space nerds like me will understand this one, but if you don’t, it’s really simple to explain. You’re in such a rush to get to the end, you often overlook critical decisions or plow straight through them. I set completely arbitrary deadlines on myself, but with the best of intentions. I was terrified that I would get bored of the process and never follow through with publishing. YOU CANNOT RUSH THIS!!! Reading back through my own blog, I can see the places where I settled for “good enough” because it was another box checked. I even saw where it cost me money in change fees, but yet I forged forward to get to my stated and completely random goal.
So this is where I now sit. I look at my published book with immense pride. I did it, I completed it, I even won an award for it, and yet I see enormous opportunity unrealized. Two very important things have become clear to me in the last month about my book:
- I now understand my genre. This story is a mystery and techno-thriller. I focused too hard on the paranormal aspects of it, not realizing that the supernatural is often a critical plot device in these genres.
- I now understand my central theme. This story is about confronting a bad guy, plain and simple.
With those two realizations, it becomes extremely clear that I missed the mark with my title and cover design. Again, I’m proud of what I did in the moments where I did them, but I have learned so much in the last six months. The most important thing I’ve learned, though, is that it’s never too late to correct yourself. So thank you to Simon and the Twin Tales team for helping me see that, even if I didn’t get the message at first. This time, I plan to take my time, rediscover the story I wrote, and re-publish my story the way it deserves to be seen.
If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you coming along on this journey with me and hope you stick with me as I learn and grow, succeed and fail, put words to paper and (hopefully) into your hands.