Monday is the official launch of Awake My Soul!

How exciting is that?! I'm giving myself the weekend to pimp the book out and give away a few copies in hopes of reviews, but launch day is this coming Monday and I hope everyone has a chance to check out Awake My Soul!

In the mean time I'm working on a few things. I'm still working away at Lay Me Bare and I'm probably about 90% done! I've also started laying the ground work on a sequel to Awake My Soul, which I've tentatively titled Betray My Heart. Besides that I'm taking some time to work on some shorter pieces I've been playing with. I hope to have the first one, a modern short erotica piece, available come December. I might test the waters of KDP Select with that.

So go buy Awake My Soul come Monday! I'd love you for it if you did.

Release time is finally here (ish)

Awake My Soul is formatted, converted, and finally, mercifully ready to go. I plan on officially clicking the PUBLISH button on Amazon on Monday, November 18th. 

I guess what I'm announcing now is a semi-soft launch through Smashwords. Awake My Soul is available through them at the moment and with the coupon BG75G you can download the book for free for any ereader. Yes, 100% for free until the end of the month. It should work for any ereader. Through Smashwords it will become available through the rest of the online retailers (IE: Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Apple, and so on) hopefully in the next few days once Smashwords accepts it into the premium catalogue.

Again, the code is BG75G and the link to the book is here. Thank you for your patience! Now go download it for free!

So close I can taste it!

Time to bite the big one. It's time I finally buckled down and bought Word. The real Word. Not the fake one I've been using for years. Seems like the Works Word Processor just isn't going to cut it when it comes to the final touches of formatting. If I'm going to continue epublishing, it's a necessary step.

What does this have to do with anything? It's me saying I'm almost done! I've done all the formatting I can on Awake My Soul (which is everything save the table of contents and chapter headings!). With Word I can add those last touches and it's done.

Of course, my anxiety is finally starting to ebb away at my stomach. I'm so close to being done that it finally feels like it's really happening. With that comes the fear that I wont sell a single book. Or that if I do, people will hate it and then I never sell another book again.

There are so many historical romance novels out there, how can I even dream mine will stand out? I need to keep reminding myself is all I can do is work hard and do my best. If people buy it and like it, amazing. If not, at least I tried.

In a quick note of other news - I finally started writing more of Lay Me Bare! Added another 1000 words so far today. Since I'm stuck on Awake My Soul until Word gets installed, I might as well get some words on paper for Lay Me Bare!

Faster Than Expected!

This morning I finished my second edit of Awake My Soul. I edited it once already, sent it to an editor, and now I've edited what they looked at. I hope going through it once or twice more will be the last I need before it's time to publish. Probably twice, just to be sure!

I've looked into KDP Select and honestly, I don't think it's for me. The more I hear about Smashwords and the accessibility, the more I like it. So of course it will also go on Amazon, but not on the 'select' feature. 

I'm hoping to reach out to a Romance Novel blog about a cover reveal soon. It would be a nice way to generate some publicity and get the ball rolling. Of course, the cover needs to get made soon too!

In the end, I'm beyond excited about how things are going. I absolutely cannot wait for people to be able to read my book!

Productivity

Today is the first day since I officially became 'unemployed' that I haven't done any work on my writing. Not because of laziness, slacking, or anything of that matter. No, simply because we're getting ready for our Halloween party! Yes, I'm aware it's a couple days late, but it was the only day that worked.

But the real news is I'm almost done what I hope is my second or third last go through of Awake My Soul before I put it up for sale. Free time today has been spent looking into Amazon's new KDP Select incentive and I'm curious if I should try it.

For those (probably most) of you who haven't heard of this addition, what the new incentive lets you do is create sale days for you book. So say your book is $4.99, for 24 hours it would be $1.99, the next 24 hours would be $2.99, and so on until it's back to its normal price. Whether this incentive will actually add to sales is still largely untested, and I hope to see feedback soon from authors who have used it.

Tomorrow I hope to get lots more editing done. Hopefully soon Awake My Soul is done and dusted and ready for sale!

Finally, time

I've neglected my blog. Dare I say it, I've mostly neglected my writing and editing, too. Why? Time. As they say, there are never enough hours in a day and lately I've been feeling so overwhelmed that I just couldn't continue.

Don't worry, good news is coming.

Like many writers, a full time job is something that is a necessity and I was sad to say mine was consuming my life. Even when I wasn't at work my mornings before I started were spent not editing, but sending resumes. My nights involved a few glasses of wine and unloading to my husband after a long day's misery and then falling asleep on the couch. Days off were consumed with being depressed at the thought of going back to work after only two days' escape. In short, my job was making me miserable and despite how hard I tried to force myself to get my editing and writing done, it just didn't happen. I was maybe, at most, dedicating two hours a week to it.

Again, there is good news coming

The worst part is, if I had full time hours available to finish Awake My Soul, I'd probably be done in two weeks. Working at it like a nine to five job, eight hours a day, it would be done. That's about eighty hours, give or take. Now take eighty hours and only do two hours a week of work, that's forty weeks. As I said, that's a good week, so it's realistically a year, minimum. At this rate, honesty, I'll never finish.

Now the good news. I'm not longer at said job. Yesterday was my last day. Though things didn't quite go as I planned and I would have preferred to have another job lined up when it happened, I knew for a while it was coming. My position had become redundant and I was the odd man out, so it was time for me to go.

The really good news is now I have time, and in accordance to employment laws, I'm still getting paid. For the next few months I'm getting paid to finish Awake My Soul. This is my first full day of being a full time writer and aside from writing this blog and maybe some puttering around the house, my day is dedicated to editing. So is tomorrow. And the next day. And so on.

In even better news, my husband is a graphic designer and hopefully soon I can get his butt in gear designing a cover that I can reveal here. It was hard to convince him to do the work when I wasn't getting anything done myself. Now I can tell him to do it and soon there will be a reveal. I promise!

I know being let go can be scary, but I'm taking this as an opportunity to do something I truly love. I really hope that I can have Awake My Soul complete and available as an E-book before Christmas, and I hope people will love it as much as I do.

Finally sent to an editor!

Big day for me folks, I've finally sent my manuscript off to be edited. I've sent it to Coraline Denhart (http://coralinedenhart.com/index.html) out of California to go over and fine tune the more minute details. I know I'm behind schedule, but I do truly hope I can have my book ready to publish by early fall at the latest.

Now that Awake My Soul has been sent off to an editor I hope to get a bit more time to work on my other projects that are on the go. I really, really hope to get time to finish Lay Me Bare within the next few months. Editing has taken a lot of time and has, to be honest, zapped my energy while I was working on it. I should have expected it to happen, I was warned that editing is the hardest part of the whole process, but I thought I could power through.

Boy was I was wrong! Editing took four months and each time it was a struggle to sit down in front of the computer and get to work. Every time I went to write for another project of mine I felt guilty I wasn't editing Awake My Soul and gave up on both and went and watched TV.

Now that it's off to the editor I have to wait and see from here. I'm very, very excited and proud of myself I've gotten this far. I've doubted myself a lot and it seems every time I was ready to give up I received feedback or messages from people pushing me to keep going. Well, it worked and I'm done (for now)!

I am still waiting on the cover, I've asked a friend to make it and right as I asked he got a new job and has been very, very busy so once I get my manuscript back from editing I'm going to push him to get something done for me. 

Then once that's in and my final edit is complete, yes I'll finally be publishing it as an e-book! Way, way behind schedule, I know. But I am working hard and trying my best to get this done. Who knows, it might be out sooner than you think!