After a full day of finessing, the sort of day I used to think of as a normal 9-5 day, I’ve finally got a cover template and a nicely assimilated paperback version of the seventh draft of Biome NE47: A Novel up and ready to publish on the Amazon platform.
I think, however, that I’ll wait to hit the ‘publish’ button until I’ve had more time to consider tiny editorial challenges, as special beta readers gambol through the pages and feed back their comments over the next week or so. But I’m delighted at the layout that’s happened in this new paperback version: the vignettes of individual characters that populate the book are separated better into their individual pages, for example. I like the visual representation of these characters’ personae more as clearly demarcated sections.
I imagine that readers might go through a book, as I do, by reading a scene or two before sleep. Biome NE47: A Novel is laid out in just such a convenient way, of course, into bedtime sections, each of which, I hope, progress the narrative that incremental bit.
But the long marketing odyssey is winding its inexorable way towards a resolution, and soon I shall be able to divest myself of that mantle and resume work on Sequel. Just a few more cheerful reviews for the series will help on the advertising front, when I get to that point in the promotions journey, and then if I can manage to complete Sequel by the end of this year, I can hope to have built up a small readership base eager to peruse that effort too.
I think one of the challenges for an emerging writer must be to lower their expectations; the yacht isn’t going to materialise over the horizon any time soon! But slow and steady appreciation of the ideas and concepts developing in the series is an aspiration that seems achievable, if I can just unlock the genre and write from the soul, as it were.
I tell myself: write and write and write. Get better and better as you go along. So that’s the ambition, really, and the novels must emerge along the way.
Biome NE47 