Sci-Fi Novel Update

After receiving some wise counsel from several of my author pals, I've decided to go the Kindle Scout route with my space opera novel. As my friends pointed out, the concern about "having to do a lot of promotion" to get people to nominate my book is a hollow one. I was reminded that even traditionally-published authors have to self-promote like crazy these days (unless they're already big name authors or celebrities) and self-published authors definitely have to do that. The consensus: if I was fortunate enough to get a publishing contract with Kindle Press, it wouldn't be so bad to have Amazon as a marketing ally. In other words, worth the effort.

So...

Sci-Fi Wallpaper from Fond Décran (not my cover art, but cool nonetheless)

To get things just right, I'm in the middle of a heavy-duty polish edit of the manuscript. I lopped off the first chapter to get things moving right away and am currently involved in the somewhat tricky process of seeding anything of importance from the former Chapter One into the rest of the book. Somewhat tricky, but also fun in a jigsaw puzzle kind of way. I'm also doing a chapter-by-chapter edit for continuity and overall readability. At the end of the above edit I'll go through everything one more time by having MS Word read my words back to me in its quirky Text To Speech voice (I use "David" because he sounds like an authoritative robot 😉).

Then...

I'll get everything together--manuscript, cover, logline, brief summary, etc.--and submit it to the folks at Kindle Press. At this point, the self-promoting (begging) will begin in earnest, and for thirty days I'll be promoting  the link to my "Kindle Scout campaign page" and asking friends, family, and interested parties to go there and nominate my book for publication (free and easy, all you need is an Amazon account). Expect this to happen within the next week or so.

On a related note: I commissioned a super-cool cover for my book and I'm very much looking forward to showing it to everyone when my campaign launches. See ya soon!