Newsletter 030 – January 13th, 2023
Hi,
Welcome back. I hope you had a good winter break, and are experiencing a new year full of new possibilities. The next few newsletters will look back on what I’ve been doing this past year, and how that relates to what I have ahead of me in 2023. Most of this one will be relatively short in comparison with some previous newsletters.
Let’s start with the first novel I published, The Jagged Man. That was in 2015, and it was only released as an ebook. I had no idea what I was doing. Other than a few mentions of it on social media, I did no advertising, and hadn’t developed a mailing list yet (that didn’t happen until late-2021). In other words, no one knew about the book so it sold very few copies. It’s a good book, a thriller. I hope to re-publish it this year, but not wanting a repeat lack-of-sales performance, I developed a different game plan for If a Butterfly. I’ll cover that in one of the upcoming newsletters.
Normally, re-publishing a book would just involve creating a new cover (to distinguish it from the first edition) and making a few minor edits. When I read through my copy of Jagged Man, though, I saw that I had rushed to publish it too quickly. There were quite a few typos and grammatical errors, and that’s not fair to you, the reader. I always strive to give you the best quality reading experience I can. So I knew I would have to do a careful line edit of Jagged Man (which is time consuming). To prepare it for printing I would also have to do an internal layout (another time-consuming process).
I planned to do all of that work on Jagged Man during the first few months of 2022, but it didn’t happen. I had just finished publishing both of the If a Butterfly books (in December 2021), so I needed to spend time marketing them before I could work on anything else. Doing that took much longer than I expected. In fact, everything I needed to do was time-intensive. While I was marketing I couldn’t write or edit anything else, at least not effectively.
So, while I don’t make New Year’s resolutions as such, I do have a set of plans going forward (let’s call them fluid deadlines). Hopefully I’ll be able to complete them this year. More on that next time.
See you then.
Michael
[“Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht,” Old Yiddish proverb.
“Man makes plans and God laughs.”]
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