Sunday, March 31, 2013

Here I am, with nothing better to do on Easter Sunday than write another blog. Well of course I do have other things to do - clean the spare room, polish the furniture, get started on readying the book for publishing. However, I am the consummate procrastinator so instead I took the dog for not one but two walks (she is still astonished), watched two episodes of David Attenborough narrating Planet Earth on BBC Knowledge (because if it has Knowledge somewhere it is not in fact wasting time but enriching the mind) and am now writing the next episode of my publishing story. You will note that I have written this much without as yet even starting the publishing story. Procrastinator, remember?

In truth the next two steps of the publishing story are quite mundane. No real frustration here, just large chunks of time that I will never get back. I went to the trouble of creating an Excel spreadsheet before beginning the research on book reviewers with online blogs, procrastination masquerading as organisation. I happen to excel (haha) at online research so it didn't take me all that long to create a list of 120 reviewers expressing an interest in the genre of book I have written. I stopped there, but according to my initial research this is not nearly enough reviewers so once the book is published I will have to go back to that. But I figured that was a good start. I can't send the book off to any of them until it is published, so my line of thinking is that I will send it to those on the list, and then search for more. Stagger my book review requests, as it were.

Step 4) in the process I thought was going to be a doddle. RESEARCH YOUR KEYWORDS  was stressed in every item of research I did, but I still thought how hard can it be? Until I started and found that there is actually a science to keywords, and in order for my book to be that metaphoric squeaky wheel that gets noticed, I really do have to be extremely careful in my choice of keywords. I have a short list of about 20 keywords, and I'm hoping that when I follow the mystical steps to publishing on Smashwords and on Amazon, the correct keywords will pop into my brain like magic. Sadly, magic is not the genre of the book and I say sadly simply because of the incredible number and variety of magical themed books available, and the demand for them.Then again given the variety and number of magical themed books, perhaps it is a good thing that mine has no supernatural aspirations.

I should perhaps give an idea here of the genre of the book - not using the keywords garnered from the internet. I wrote this book quite simply because I woke up early one morning with the entire outline sitting in my brain. I was, believe me, astonished. I have always loved to write, I have many times coerced myself to sleep by writing myself a deliberately boring story in my head. I have composed in my head short stories and novels (the latter chapter by chapter night by night) as a way of entertaining myself before sleep. I even wrote a first book which I never finished because I was unhappy with how the characters were  behaving and too lazy to go back and rewrite.

But this book practically wrote itself. I would love to attach here the book summary that I spent three weeks sweating blood over, but sadly my desktop computer has crashed and I have lost the thumbdrive that I kept all this vital information on. Go me. So I will attempt to give a quick outline of the story now.

If you woke up one day with no recollection of who you are, or even where you are - and more immediately the identity of the person sharing the unfamiliar bed with you - what would you do? That's a very brief outline, and I'll give you more as we go along. Mainly because I want you to buy the book, so I can be a full time writer because that's what I want to do, and because I have a series of four books trying to fight their way out of my head and I want to write them!

I will leave you now with a photo of where my procrastination led me this morning :)

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