Thursday, June 24, 2010

Waiting for the Blue Knight


The proofs are in, changes are made, now we wait for Tales of the Blue Knight: Becoming a Knight. I am waiting for my book to be set at the printer and it will be published. They will send me a copy of each to proof and make certain that the printer setup didn't mess up formatting. I am now moving on to marketing. I am working on printing the materials i will need (business card, bookmarks and postcards). I was told about a great site that prints them for cheap called gotprint.com (thank you Robin).

I am very proud of this book, it was the first novel that I ever wrote and I have a draft of the sequel written and the third book mapped out. I actually started writing this book back on college and my last teacher encouraged me to keep writing after I graduated. I remember sitting in his office and being blown away when he told me to take a menial job after school to give myself time to write. That was Wayne Ude, he is a great teacher.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Proofs and Editing

Well, the good news is that I have sent the final changes out to the proofs for Tales of the Blue Knight: Becoming a Knight. The cover art has been approved and is much better than I was hoping for at the outset. The initial reaction of the cover is good and everyone is intrigued to read the book that have seen the cover.

The bad news is that I paid for a professional edit, and unfortunately I paid way too much for the professional edit, but I was very disappointed with the results. We had 29 changes to the book in the final proofs. Now, take away the 4 changes I wanted to make, that still leaves 25 changes, misspellings, missed quotation marks. There were a couple of instances of the wrong word. I had lighting instead of lightning and singing instead of swinging. I plan to go back to see if the issues were there from the intial manuscript of if they were introduced at some point. I also plan on complaining; not that it will make a difference, but it will make me feel better.

I also have my current novel, Scout Squad: Going Native out with a book club. When they are ready to discuss, I am going to go to speak to them and answer questions. I told my friend, who is in the book club, that I would offer up the books for free to read and if they wanted the books after reading them, I would sign and sell the books to them. I am excited about it...my friend already told me one of the readers said he likes the book and wants to buy it.