I’ve taken the first steps towards self-publishing my new novel – Flying through Clouds – a follow-on to Racing the Moon. After attending an excellent two-day indie publishing seminar at the NSW Writers’ Centre in August, I put together a project plan and launched straight into it. I’ll be sharing my experiences on this blog over the next few months.
I’ve hired a professional editor to copy edit my manuscript – to check for consistency of style, grammar, spelling, sentence structure and punctuation, and make recommendations for appropriate changes. They will also look for consistency of voice, characterisation, narrative and format. When they send the copyedited manuscript back to me, I’ll systematically go through the Word Track changes and comments, accepting or rejecting them and making further changes where necessary. Based on my previous experience working with editors at Allen & Unwin on my first book, I’ll be accepting almost all of the track changes, and taking on board the advice to make further changes to the manuscript. I estimate this process will take me at least a month. I also had a structural edit done about a year ago with a different editor who advised on structural aspects of the manuscript, and as a result, I made significant changes to the manuscript – deleting some chapters, writing new ones, moving a few chapters around, developing voice, the characters and narrative, and a sense of time and place.
While the copy editor is working on my manuscript, I have been busy buying ISBNs, a barcode and QR code from Thorpe Bowker. As I intend to publish Flying through Clouds in different formats, I need more than one ISBN – one for the paperback book and one for each different eBook format. I bought a set of ten ISBNs, one barcode of the ISBN for the paperback, and a QR code, which links to the Books page of my website:
There is no information about Flying through Clouds on the Books page yet because I need to hire a book designer to do the cover. I recently put together a book design brief and contacted a few book designers whose book covers I liked and obtained quotes. My book designer is working on some concepts at the moment.
In my next blog post, I’ll give an update on the copy edit and new book cover. I also have to put together a media list and investigate printing and distributors.
So much to do but one step at a time.