My
youngest sister, AKA, my Initial
Reader, is a busy college student, so when I need her to read a manuscript,
I have to catch her during school breaks so I can get her full attention. She read “Sweet Little Lies” over the Christmas holidays and as always, gave me valuable
feedback on what I needed to fix. I also
let my other sister read it, though she almost got fired because she took so
long, but in the end, she also provided some great ideas on how to enhance the story
and characters.
With
their suggestions in hand, I was ready to start the process of getting the book
ready for a Winter 2013 release date.
It
was in the middle of implementing revisions based on their comments, that I got
an email from a potential critique partner who found me through the www.ladieswhocritique.com website,
inquiring if I’d be interested in partnering up. After a few back and forth emails, my
potential critique partner and I exchanged manuscript samples. We decided we would be a good fit and forged
ahead with providing each other deep critique on our manuscripts.
While
I was definitely on a particular timetable for releasing “Sweet Little Lies,” I’m
glad I took the time to get another set of critical eyes on the manuscript. My (new) critique partner, Emily McDaid, gave
me sound insight and awesome perspective on how to round out my story and
characters a bit more. She was also a wonderful
sounding board for story points I was trying to muddle through and has provided
some great marketing tidbits – always helpful in the indie world (more on Emily
the Awesome in a future post. In the
meantime, check out her book, “The
Boiler Plot,” a suspense novel with a white collar twist and a candidate
for Amazon Breakthrough Novel).
Being
able to self-publish with the click of a button has been nothing short of
revolutionary. But it’s also a bit of a
cautionary tale. Because it’s so fast
and so easy, it’s that much more tempting to rush through (or ignore) some important
steps in the process and put the product on the market before it’s ready. Sadly, the indie landscape is littered with
books bursting with typos, mangled syntax and poor story structure. In the mad dash to get the book out into the
world, a lot of indie authors haven’t given their work enough time to cook.
Quality
control is one of the most critical phases in the development of any product (and make no mistake, your
book is a product) and to skip it shows a lack of respect for both the product
and the audience. When you’re producing
a book, that means running spell check, finding at least one brutally honest person
to vet the manuscript (if the person who reads your manuscript only says
gushing things and tells you nothing needs to be fixed, keep looking – find that
person who will give you good, honest critique about what works and what doesn’t)
hiring a professional proofreader and cover designer and unless you’re a whiz
at it, a formatter.
Are
you putting your manuscript through quality control before it goes on the
market?
Think
about it this way; wouldn’t you clean your house before showing it to
prospective buyers? Wouldn’t you wash
your car before showing it off to potential customers? How pissed off do you, as a consumer, get when
you buy something only to get it home and realize it’s full of bugs or just flat-out
broken? You curse and rail against the
manufacturer for putting out the product before it was ready.
Why
should your books be any different?
As
for my own product, I am coming into the home stretch on releasing “Sweet
Little Lies.” It will be going out for
proofreading in a few days and formatting immediately after that. For more information on release dates, sign
up here.
While
I won’t be putting the book out as soon as I planned, I’m glad I took the time
to put it through one more inspection, because it only made it better, which is
a good thing.
And
now, back to writing.
I've always been a fan of doing things right the first time and not rushing things. Like you said it will only make it better at the end. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI 100% agree. Patience will pay off in the long run. Short-term sacrifice for long-term gain :)
ReplyDelete