Category Archives: Editing

How having goals keeps me motivated

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, Freelancing, indie authors, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Writing by

Having goals gives you a focus

The UK lockdown began on my 55th birthday – what a way to celebrate… At first, I found it a bit of a novelty to have the rest of my family at home, but I realised pretty quickly that I would need to use goals to motivate myself if I was to get any work done. Thankfully, I had the final edits of my latest book, Starting Over at the Vineyard in Alsace, to work through and send off to my editor and proofreader. Those deadlines are actually a lifesaver if you’re a full-time author. Without them, I might not have got so much done. But I gave myself those deadline goals, knowing that they would motivate me, and I published my book on 14 July, 2020.

Establishing a routine

As an indie author, I’m very familiar with self-discipline anyway. After reading some good advice from marketing guru, Nicholas Erik, I have always aimed to spend one hour a day writing or editing, one hour a day on marketing, and one hour a day reading non-fiction books associated with my writing. I also work part-time as a freelance proofreader and self-publishing consultant, so I factor in at least one hour’s freelance work every day as well. I’m usually doing some kind of training associated with my writing or other skills, so that adds another hour. And so you can see, I have pretty full days, and that’s what gives my day structure.

The benefit of daily exercise

However, as you’ll know, being stuck indoors all day during the lockdown was very hard. Thankfully, I wasn’t someone who had to shield and so in the beginning, I made sure to go out for my one hour of exercise every day. I started with a daily walk, and often my younger daughter accompanied me. Then one day, when no-one could see us (!), we tried running for a short distance as part of our walk. No-one was more surprised than me when I found I could run for short bursts without collapsing in a heap. So I decided to download the Couch to 5K app and to give it a go, never expecting to finish the 9-week course. But I liked the format of running every other day and building towards that final goal, and I liked the fact that I could do it even more! The last time I did any running was under duress at secondary school (37 years ago!)

After my very first run

My Couch to 5K graduation message

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I write this post, I have just started my 20th week of running. I run three or four times a week now for a minimum of half an hour, sometimes longer as I chase the elusive 5K. I’m almost there but I’m not despondent about it because at the beginning of April, I couldn’t run for five minutes, let alone 5K! After all these years, I’ve realised something that they don’t teach you at school – it’s not about being the fastest. It’s about building your stamina and sticking at it, qualities that have also stood me in good stead as an indie author as well. So I know I will crack 5K eventually because I have the persistence to keep showing up.

Finding new challenges

This month, to give myself extra motivation, I signed up for a Race at your Pace challenge to run 35 miles in the month of August. When I complete it, I’ll get a medal, which is motivation enough for me! Seriously though, it’s about finding interesting ways to keep challenging myself because I really want to continue with this habit and as we still don’t have the full freedom to go wherever we want yet, it’s important to keep finding new ways to motivate myself. I have also been eating more healthily and this has helped me to lose some weight as well, which was an even greater bonus, and certainly helps with the motivation.

Goals = Motivation

So, just like writing a book, I’ve had a goal and I’ve had motivation to achieve it, despite the conflict the lockdown has brought. I still walk on the days when I’m not running and I thank goodness every day for the countryside where I live, and I appreciate how lucky I am to live here. I miss travelling but I’m grateful for all the wonderful places I’ve been in the past that I can look back on. And I can look forward to visiting new places again in the near future, I hope.

I hope you and your families have found a way to get through lockdown, and that you’ve all been keeping well. Let me know in the comments if you’ve found a way that works for you.

 

A Long Hot Summer

Posted in Blogging, Books, Cover Reveals, Editing, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Short Stories, Writing by

Holidays

I’m just back from a lovely holiday in the Lake Garda area of Italy where it was mostly hot and sometimes thundery. It’s a beautiful area though and we explored it to the full, taking in Milan, Verona and Venice, as well as some of the beautiful villages around the southern end of the lake itself.

Back home now in the UK, the long, hot summer we experienced in May, June and July seems a distant memory and instead, apple crumbles, Halloween and Bonfire Night are on my mind. There is no thought of the C-word as yet though so please don’t even go there!

New Boxed Set

I have spent most of the last few months wrestling with the creation of a boxed set of my From Here to Nashville novel and its sequel novellas, and I’m pleased to say I have finally finished it. I now have an ebook and paperback version of my From Here to You series with beautiful new covers ready to go. These will be publishing shortly and I’m going to have a special offer for my newsletter subscribers which I will be revealing soon. However, I thought you might like to see my beautiful new cover for the series which I am so pleased with. I have Mary Jayne Baker to thank for the vibrant new covers of the rest of the series and I think you will agree that she has done a wonderful job for me.

Marketing

I have been concentrating more on marketing over the summer as well, learning how to advertise my books on the various platforms with some success, and some failures of course! But I seem to have got my head round it a bit more now. I have also been steadily building my newsletter list and this has been very successful. When people join, they now get a free download of the prequel novella to the From Here to You series and this has been very popular. If you’d like to get a copy, you can do so here.

Writing

Writing wise, I have been steadily keeping up with my 12 Short Stories Challenge so that I have now written 9 this year and as soon as the year has finished, I will be editing and publishing this collection for you all to read. My next big job though is to get on with the editing of my next book which is long overdue. This is the one set in a bistro you might remember, and I really need to get on with it now. To be fair, I have had a few unexpected obstacles to overcome, including being taken into hospital at the end of June, and subsequently, being off work for a few weeks. I am feeling much better now but I still don’t have a diagnosis as yet so I need to keep myself busy! Being able to go on holiday really helped and was great creative inspiration 🙂

So that’s all for now. Look out for more updates soon!

 

Author Talks, and a Crazy Month of Marketing

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, indie authors, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Writing by

Another month in my writing life has gone by, and at times, it feels like I don’t have a lot to show for it. However, all the marketing work I’ve been doing this past month will hopefully yield some results in the very near future.

Author Talks

Firstly, I gave a talk at Flitwick Library at the beginning of May, which I had been really looking forward to. Then on the morning, it absolutely bucketed down with rain. I knew that as the talk was free, this would probably put a lot of people off from venturing out. And sadly, I was right. I had the grand total of 4 people at my talk and one of those was a lady from the library! However, they were a lovely group of people and all very interested in my writing and how I self-publish my books. The lady in the front row was in her eighties and still adamant that she would finish writing the book she’s been writing all her life. She was such an interesting person and asked lots of questions about self-publishing. I wouldn’t put it past her to finally get her book out there now. Having so few people in the audience does at least mean they can stop you and ask you questions when they want to, and the time flew by. I sold a couple of paperbacks to that same lady and I enjoyed giving the talk, so it’s never wasted. But it would be nice to have a few more people at my next library talk.

Then towards the end of May, I was invited by a former teaching colleague and friend, to come and talk to her book club. They’d all bought and read The Vineyard in Alsace before I came, and they were all very keen to talk about it and my writing. This time, there were a good dozen people there and we had a great chat about writing, in general and mine specifically. It was a really good atmosphere, even when they gave me some critical feedback. It was useful feedback though and delivered kindly so I took it on the chin 🙂 One of the book club members was a man, and he made my day when he said he’d read my book in one sitting, even though romance isn’t his preferred genre. He gave me some useful feedback too so overall, it was a great experience.

My next talk will be at Hitchin Library in Hertfordshire on 28 July. My Society of Authors group is running a Saturday Series of talks at the library over the summer and into the autumn. I went to the first one given by Hugh Bicheno, a military historian and fiction writer, and he had a full house in the audience. The talk he gave was absolutely fascinating, all about the Wars of the Roses in Hertfordshire. I even got to try on a sallet, which is a medieval helmet! Here’s Hugh wearing it on the day. I couldn’t even see out when I put it on 😉

 

The full list of talks is very varied and you can see it here on The Society of Authors’ website. If you are nearby or in the area, it would be lovely to see you in July. There’s even a Facebook event page in case you want to show your interest!

Marketing

Over the past month, I have finished off two courses I’d enrolled in from The Self-Publishing Formula team; one was about cover design and the other was a self-publishing 101 course. I took the cover design course so that if I did ever want to have a go at creating my own covers, I’d have a better chance of knowing what I was doing. I’ve worked in marketing myself for many years, either side of being a teacher, and so I have quite a bit of experience of designing things, but it’s one thing to be doing posters and leaflets, or even annual reviews but it’s another to do your own covers so that they look professional. It was a great course, led by Stuart Bache of BooksCovered, and it was very practical so I had a go at making a fair few covers of my own. But, crikey, it is really hard work! Just sourcing the photos could take a whole day. I really learnt a lot and I think I could have a good go at a cover in Photoshop now. However, I don’t think I could ever do as professional a job as the designers I have used to make my covers for me. It gave me even more respect for those professionals, and a better understanding of what they do for me at the other end.

The Self-Publishing 101 course seems a bit crazy for someone who has now self-published 5 books, I know, but after the success of The Vineyard in Alsace, I wanted to be working out how to move myself up to the next level. It was a big investment but it has already proved useful. So this month, I wrote a prequel for my From Here to You series, and I’m offering this free to people who sign up to my email list. Once written, I had to commission a cover for it, and send it round to my wonderful beta readers to get feedback on it. Then I had to advertise it in the back of all my other books and set it up on Book Funnel so that readers could download it. Then I had to advertise it on my website, and set up automated emails for new subscribers to make sure they received it! In the middle of all this, we had GDPR-mageddon (as Book Funnel called it rather wittily) and I also migrated this website over from a free site to a self-hosted one. So now you know what I mean by a crazy month! I’m very pleased with the finished novella though. Here it is in all its glory:

On top of this, I was finalising the last novella in that same From Here to You series which is now up for pre-order here, and updating all my other books with details of this new one, Finding You. The final piece of the plan will be the issue of a box set of all three books in the From Here to You series. The cover isn’t ready yet so I’m thinking carefully about when to release it but it will be soon-ish!

I have learned all these things from that course, and more besides, so it has already started paying for itself. But it is fair to say that I will be glad to get back to editing my third novel when all this is done, and you never thought you’d hear me say that! It just goes to show though how much more I could have been doing to market myself and my books. I’ll let you know how that all goes next month.

One thing you learn very quickly as an indie author is that there is always something else you could be doing. I just hope that some of this activity will pay off soon!

Thanks for reading, and if you go ahead and download Before You after signing up to my list, do please let me know what you think of it.

Until next time.

A Month of Learning Opportunities

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, indie authors, Self-Publishing, Writing by

March has been another busy writing month for me but this time, it has mostly been because of so many new learning opportunities that have presented themselves to me. One of those has been being invited by Amazon to have The Vineyard in Alsace included in a Prime Reading promotion for three months. Since I signed up, my book has risen up the charts to a high point of no. 7 so far, which as you can imagine, has been fantastic to see. I am learning new things about how it works all the time and delighting in the recognition my book has been getting. I have Amazon Prime myself but I had no idea that it included books! How mad is that? So if you do too and you want to read my book for free, get yourself along to my book page here and download it! And if you could please write a review when you’ve finished, that would be even better!

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So what else have I been up to? Well, first of all, I decided to sign up to the Self-Publishing Formula Podcast’s Cover Design course. I do some design work in my day job, and I used to do design when I worked in marketing before I became a teacher many years ago. I enjoy doing it but have never taken any courses, and as I enjoy the cover design process so much, I thought it would be useful. I don’t really have any plans to make my own covers, although there might be some circumstances when I could in the future, but I thought it would help me to understand the process a bit more. And it really has. The course is delivered on behalf of the SPF team by Stuart Bache, who designs all of Mark Dawson’s covers. Stuart’s own company is called Books Covered and you will see many familiar covers there from the romance genre. You do need Photoshop to get the most out of the course but you will then get such a lot of practice in from trying to create your own covers and seeing what goes into the process. The course is still open but is a bit more expensive now. I’m still working my way through but enjoying it immensely.

Then after I heard about the Cover Design course on the podcast, they re-opened their Self-Publishing 101 course. Hopefully, you’re thinking ‘Why would you need that course, Julie?’ when you read that! Well, that’s a good point and one I had worried over myself since I first heard about the course opening late last year. It’s quite expensive and I didn’t want to make an investment like that if I wasn’t going to learn anything new. However, even after indie publishing three books now, with a couple more to come this year, there are still things I’m not doing to best effect. I haven’t really built a proper mailing list and for that you need a reader magnet (which I haven’t written yet!) and to promote that in various ways to encourage people to sign up. One of those ways is via a landing page on your website, which is when you realise that a free WordPress website doesn’t have the scope for you to do that kind of advanced stuff. It has been on my mind for a while to migrate my website again but I just haven’t done it. So really, doing this course is about helping me to work out what I still need to do to move myself to the next level, writing a checklist and then doing it! Fortunately, you can pay monthly for the course and it is still open for a few days. If you should want to take a look, the link is here. If you can’t stretch to that kind of investment, you should listen to the podcast because there are so many useful hints and tips in each episode – it really is great!

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Finally, this month, I went on my first ever writing retreat, just in time for the second wave of snow. It sounds terribly self-indulgent but I was given it as a birthday present from my family! Last weekend, I drove up to Warwickshire to a lovely hotel and joined about a dozen other writers at various stages in their careers for a weekend of writing and learning. The course was run by two RNA members, Alison May and Janet Gover. You can find out more about their courses here. They’re both traditionally published and have lots of experience between them.

Before I got the schedule, I was expecting to spend most of the weekend holed up in my room, bashing away at my laptop in isolation. However, that wasn’t the case. There was writing time, of course but there were also tutorials and workshops, which were really helpful. The most helpful ones for me were the ones on plotting and editing. I also had a one-to-one with Janet about there first three chapters of my next novel which I’m calling The Bistro for now. One of the things I struggle with is knowing where to start with the editing process when I get my first manuscript appraisal back from the RNA. It all seems insurmountable! But as a result of this course, I now have a proper plan to work to and I made a start on the plan while I was there so when I come back to it, I feel that I will be better prepared to make a start and not as daunted as I normally feel.

I learnt a lot from my fellow writers too, and the weekend was a very sociable experience that I would really recommend to you. I switched everything else off and just spent time on my writing, and that felt wonderful!

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I can’t finish without mentioning that I also published a new book this month! Over You (Sam’s Story) was published on 12 March, 2018, and already has a few good reviews. It means that I now have a series – the From Here to You series – and this is book 2 following on from the end of From Here to Nashville. The third and final sequel will be out around May, I hope. If you haven’t downloaded Sam’s Story yet, it’s only 99p on Amazon and tells a story of heartbreak, love and healing. You can get your copy on Amazon now.

If you want to know when my next release is out, why not sign up to my mailing list here?

 

 

Until next time, thanks for reading!

 

 

Improving Your Writing Craft

Posted in Blogging, Books, Camp NaNoWriMo, Editing, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Writing by

The Punishment of Sisyphus

At the beginning of October, I had my first round of edits back on my From Here to Nashville sequel novella, Over You, with suggestions as to what I might rewrite before submitting it for the final, final edit. As I wrote this book some time ago, before The Vineyard in Alsace in fact, there were a lot of things that I thought I had improved on since then. So I got to work and sent it back to the editor again, hoping that I had put most of those rookie errors right.

Then while I was waiting for that one to come back, my latest novel, let’s call it The Bistro, came back from the Romantic Novelists’ Association. This is a first draft that I had sent in for my final New Writers’ Scheme assessment. I told one of my writing friends that I thought this was the best first draft I had ever written. Famous last words! The report I had back is nine pages long and very thorough, and also very supportive, but I was gutted to see the same comments coming up about where my writing isn’t quite hitting the mark. You know: show don’t tell, ‘goal-motivation-conflict’, make sure you describe the setting etc. And my heart sank because I really thought I had worked on all those things and cracked them. Still, I left it for a few days while I tried to think positively about where I stand with my writing craft four years down the line.

And just as I was getting there, Over You came back with its final edits as well. Many of the comments are about things I really should have got to grips with by now – or at least, I feel I should have. Everything I have to do is manageable but it still leaves me feeling like I’m not making any progress, and that is so disheartening. It has left me wondering whether if I was traditionally published, with an editor guiding me, I might actually be a better writer by now. Don’t get me wrong, I know in my heart that I am a better writer in many ways, but the progress really does seem slow sometimes 😦 I keep reminding myself that a first draft will need work, and so will the second, third etc, and that the final draft is the one that needs to be the most polished, so if it’s not perfect yet, it doesn’t matter. And that’s what we use an editor for of course – to help us produce the most polished version we can. I can at least say that I have been very lucky with the majority of editors I have worked with.

I have picked myself up enough to make a start on the novella edits from tomorrow and then I’m going to push on and write the next, and final, From Here to Nashville novella which will tell Jenna’s story. Then I hope to publish them both together early next year. After that, I will come back to the next novel and hope that with the passage of time, I will feel better about my report and not so vulnerable about my weaknesses as a writer.

I’d be interested to know whether anyone else feels like this when they get their edits back and whether, if you’re traditionally published, you have an editor who is more like a mentor for you?

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News

As you know, in September, I auditioned to be added to the WI’s directory of speakers in my region. At the audition, I was really nervous but it seemed to go well. I have heard back since the last time I posted to say that I have been accepted into the directory and I am really pleased about it. I have also received my first booking but incredibly, it is for January 2019! I thought it was a mistake at first but it’s not – they just like to plan ahead! Still, I’m looking forward to it and I’m glad I applied.

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Marketing

As you may know, I did a Kindle countdown deal last month for From Here to Nashville, which saw my debut novel reduced to 99p. I tried to get a BookBub featured deal for it but to no avail – apparently, they only accept 5% of the submissions they receive so that did make me feel a bit better! I did have some success with some smaller promotion companies but although I sold a fair number of copies, it wasn’t earth-shattering. Many people supported me though, especially on Facebook where I also did a promotion, and for that I was very grateful. I also sent out a newsletter to my subscribers (you can join it here if you’d like to be kept up-to-date with what I’m doing), and this was well-received and widely shared.

I have now taken FHTN off its automatic re-enrolment to KDP Select and towards the end of the month, I’m going to expand distribution to other platforms again to see what happens. However, I should say that this year, since The Vineyard in Alsace came out, I have sold five times as many copies of From Here to Nashville as I did last year, so that is good news.

I have had a number of guest appearances on other blogs since my last post was published here. I was featured on the Love Books Group blog for their #FavFive feature and I was also on Delightful Book Reviews talking about a typical day in my writing life as an author. Not only that but The Vineyard in Alsace was also reviewed in France magazine and it was a favourable review too!

 

 

 

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Social

Next week, I will be giving a talk at our monthly Society of Authors meeting about how I use Scrivener in my writing. Scrivener’s not for everyone but it works for me and our group of writers is very interested to know more about it. If you’re engaged in NaNoWriMo at the moment, Scrivener is usually offered as a prize if you make it to the end. I bought my copy for my half-price way back when I did NaNoWriMo and it has been worth every penny.

I’m also meeting up with my local RNA group for lunch this coming week. Next week, I will be attending the RNA Committee’s Christmas lunch to which I’ve been invited as the Deputy Editor of our quarterly newsletter, and after that, it is our Winter Party in the evening. The week after that I’m meeting another RNA friend for a writerly catch-up as well so will be keeping myself busy, and full (!), with all these social activities.

In the final week of November though, I’m going to The Society of Authors’ AGM because they’re holding some workshops as well, one on ‘Building Your Brand’ with Joanne Harris no less (swooning already!) and one called ‘Beyond the Book’ which is about innovative ways to market your book and reach new audiences. I will report back on all this activity next month.

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As always, another busy month lies ahead and that’s all before we even get to Christmas. I hope all is going well for you with your writing. Please do leave me a comment below and tell me how you’re getting on. Thanks for reading!

 

September Brings a Fresh Challenge

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, Freelancing, indie authors, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Writing by

My Indie Writing Life

I’m going to be trying a different format for my posts from here on, making them a bit more like a diary of what I’ve been up to between posts. I hope you find it useful 🙂 You may also have noticed that I’ve changed the title of the blog – it seemed like as good a time as any!

 

 

Writing

This is what I imagine Sam to look like *swoon*

The good news is that, as promised, I started editing Sam’s Story this week, one of the sequel novellas I’ve written to From Here to Nashville. I don’t really enjoy editing as I may have mentioned before (!) because I find it much harder than writing the first draft. When you’re writing the first draft, you can let your imagination run wild but once you get to the second draft and you already have a story in place, it becomes much harder to make changes without it having an impact on lots of other parts of the story.

This was the first book I wrote in third person so it was always going to be a challenge for me and I sent this one in to the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme for its first read in 2015, two whole years ago now. My writing has changed a lot since then, improved even and so it is hard to deal with some of the simple mistakes I was making back then. For example, head hopping, where you switch from one character’s point of view to another’s right in the middle of a scene, making it unclear who’s talking. My RNA reader mentioned this and so did one of my beta readers so I didn’t have to wonder about whether they were right – if more than one person mentions it, it’s clearly an issue and you just have to accept it. And for the most part, it wasn’t actually that hard to deal with but I was annoyed with myself for having done it. However, I think I have moved on from this now and will be able to spot it more easily in the future.

The hardest thing to deal with has been the fact that, as always in my happy ever after world, my characters fall in love far too quickly. As Sam is only just getting over the loss of Rachel to Jackson, it’s important that he doesn’t come across as shallow when meeting someone new, and perhaps falling in love on the rebound. This means that I have to make it all take a bit longer – I have this problem all the time – and in having to do that, I have to change lots of other things as well.

Unfortunately, what I find when I reach a difficult point with editing is that I just stop doing it altogether. It’s simply too hard and I will never be able to master it, is what I tell myself as my excuse for not doing it. I have been trying to do an hour a day but honestly, by the end of the first week, I have the attention span of a gnat and I’m starting to get very frustrated with myself. I’m forcing myself to stick with it because I want to get it finished but it really is proving hard!

Upcoming WI Audition

The other thing I’ve been working on this week is my 15 minute talk for my WI audition next Saturday. They are very strict about timings and I won’t have a full 15 minutes so obviously, I can’t do the full talk I would normally do. I started off by paring down my usual talk about my self-publishing journey to the bare bones confident that this would be more than enough. Then I practised saying it out loud using a stopwatch only to find that I had the grand total of just three minutes! So I have spent the whole week adding content back in – this was only supposed to be a flavour of the talk, not the whole thing! I have now reached seven minutes and I am desperate to get to 10 but I can’t think what else to put in. I never thought I would struggle to find words 😉 Anyway, I will have to plod on as best I can and finish it because the audition is next week and I want it to go well of course.

Marketing

I have been experimenting with Amazon ads again this week for From Here to Nashville with some success but it’s not been brilliant. It is a constant challenge to keep the momentum going with sales of both books really and I feel that I am now approaching the end of the peak for The Vineyard in Alsace so I need to think carefully about what to do next.

Social Life

I am looking forward to another meeting this week of my Society of Authors group, where we’ll be discussing the topic ‘What Makes a Good Story?’ I will also be attending my first RNA AGM this week now that I am officially an independent member. The meeting also includes a talk by Julie Cohen on Pacing and how not to let your reader get bored, which I’m really looking forward to as Julie is always interesting and helpful. I’m travelling down to London with another RNA friend so it will be good to catch up and be writerly for an afternoon 🙂

Freelance Work

Finally, I started a proofreading job this week for an author who writes courses on Teachable and who contacted me as a result of seeing my name in connection with the Open Book festival. It’s funny how you make these connections quite out of the blue but I’m very glad I did.

 

Thanks for reading. Please do leave me a comment if you’d like to talk about anything I mention in the post. It’s always good to chat 🙂

An Eventful Summer in my Indie Author Life

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, indie authors, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Writing by

As always, it has been a busy time since my last post. I have an update about the talk I gave at my first literary festival which took place at the end of July; news of how book 2, The Vineyard in Alsace, continues to do well; progress with book 3, and finally, what I have coming up.

Open Book Literary Festival, Hitchin

It has been a bit of a while since my last blog post because I have had such a busy summer in my writing life. As I told you then, I was going to be taking part in my first every Literary Festival in Hitchin, near where I live. Before the event, I was incredibly nervous, not knowing whether anyone would turn up for my talk about my self-publishing journey. Well, the day dawned and it was rainy, just for a change. Our festival was mostly indoors but it would have been nice to have a bit of sunshine! Still, my talk was a great success with lots of people attending and a knowledgeable, interested audience who asked good questions.

We had a good turnout for our first ever festival and I spoke to a lot of people on the day. I definitely noticed an impact on my ebook sales afterwards too, and it looks like we will be doing the festival again next year. So all in all, a good thing to have done to raise awareness of my books. And look at this lovely cake made by Carol Deacon especially for the occasion!

 

The Vineyard in Alsace

My second book continues to sell well and if you are a regular visitor to my Facebook page, you’ll know that I’ve had some wonderful guest posts and interviews over the summer. First of all, I was on the lovely Tara Greaves’ website in her excellent A Look Behind the Book feature. You can read it here. Shortly afterwards, Tara posted a glowing review of my book on Amazon, which I was delighted with:

A story that warms you, like sitting outside in the late evening sunshine

More recently, I was on Linda Hill’s blog here, with a post about why I write Happy Ever After endings. I got a lot of feedback about this post because I think it struck a chord with a lot of readers. One of my writing friends even chose this theme for his MA in Creative Writing! Linda has also very kindly offered to read my book so I’m looking forward to reading her review sometime in the near future when her TBR pile has gone down a bit!

I also heard this month that my book is going to be featured in Living France magazine’s October issue as a result of me sending a paperback copy to one of their editors for review. I have absolutely no idea whether they liked it but I’m keeping my fingers crossed! I’ll let you know when I find out.

I had another milestone with The Vineyard this week when I woke up one morning to find my book in the top 100 Holiday fiction list on Amazon. It’s still hanging on in there for the moment, which is wonderful to see.

Book 3

Once the LitFest was over, I had to knuckle down in my writing cave to finish the first draft of my third book by the deadline of 31st August. It was a bit touch and go at times but eventually I did it and sent it off to the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme for its first professional read. By the time I got to the end, I honestly felt it was the best first draft I’ve ever written but only time will tell! It will be interesting next year when I’m no longer a member of the NWS and I will have to find someone else to fulfil that function. I will be a fully fledged Independent Author member by then and will have to find my own way with that first assessment of each manuscript. There are no shortage of people offering that service but they want a lot of money for doing so. Anyway, that’s something for another day 🙂

Coming Up

Next week, I will begin editing (I will, I will) the follow up novella I wrote for From Here to Nashville some time ago. I have booked this in with my editor so I really can’t afford to put it off any longer. Anyway, I do want to get on with Sam’s story now because I hope to publish it before the end of the year – ambitious, I know. Ideally, I would get it off to my editor before book 3 comes back and demands my attention. When it’s ready to go out, I have a plan for its launch that I’ll be looking for people to get involved with so keep an eye out for my next post!

 

I think that’s all the news for now, and is probably quite enough to be going on with. Do leave a comment here on my website if you’d like to or alternatively, contact me on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks for reading. And if you’ve recently read either of my books, do please take a moment to leave a review – they’re so important for indie authors especially 🙂

 

My First Week as a Freelancer

Posted in Blogging, Editing, Freelancing, Writing by

Clued Up PublishingMy husband started his business over twenty years ago and I always remember admiring his self-discipline when he first began as a sole trader, getting up at the same time as I did to get ready for my normal, boring job and usually at his desk before I left for my daily commute to Stevenage and corporate life. The fact that he is still running his (now limited) company today shows how hard he has worked at it during the intervening years.

As I began my first week as a self-employed freelancer last week, I worried that I wouldn’t be as self-disciplined, especially now there are all the distractions of the internet but I can safely report that I have probably never worked so hard in all my life. The reason is of course that everything I achieve is now going to be down to me and I will only reap the rewards if I put in the maximum effort. I don’t really know why I doubted my ability to be disciplined in my approach to this new life – I am one of the most organised people I know and everyone who knows me says exactly the same of me – but I suppose it’s all just new to me and I needed to see whether I could hack it.

So what did I do during my first week? Well, the first thing I decided was that there would be certain things I must do every day, specifically, three things:

  1. Complete and mark a new proofreading exercise from the book I am working my way through at the moment.
  2. Write at least 1,000 words a day of my current WIP.
  3. Edit my second book for at least an hour every day.

I am very pleased to report that I did these three things every day and felt happy with myself about that. I was at my desk before my husband left for work every day as well (it does help that my daughter has to leave for school at 7.45am and I always want to see her before she goes) and generally, I continued working till about 5pm, with breaks for talking to my daughter etc in between.

Apart from my three important things, I also set up a new website for my proofreading business. You can see it here: Clued Up Publishing, or just click on the picture above, and I created a poster on Canva as well. I used Canva for the pics on my website too and found it incredibly easy to use once I got going on it. I have had some really positive feedback on my website and it made me realise that it’s something I’m quite good at (if it’s okay for me to blow my own trumpet!) If anyone needs a WordPress website setting up or indeed, if you need a proofreader, please do get in touch either via the comments below or via the new website.

I am now the proud owner of two Twitter accounts as well! Crikey, I thought that would be much easier to set up than it actually proved to be but I got there in the end. If you’d like to follow me in my alter proofreading ego, I’m @Clued_Up_Pub. On my list of things to do this coming week is to set up a Facebook page for Clued Up Publishing as well so that will probably take most of the week to achieve.

I have signed up to a freelancers job website as well and hope that something may come of that in the future and I have kept my eye out for any part-time jobs I could apply for locally that would be less intensive than teaching but would ease the pressure on the finances a little. One job I saw looks very promising on the creative front so I’ll just have to wait and see 🙂

On the writing front, I also did some more research into writing short stories for women’s magazines, something I’ve wanted to do for a while but have never really had the confidence for. If I’m honest, I still don’t have a lot of confidence that I can succeed at this but I’m going to give it a try.

My husband popped into his accountant’s this week and brought them up to date on my new circumstances so I now have the form to fill in to register as self-employed to HMRC. It felt very good to receive that form, I can tell you.

All in all then, it has been a busy and satisfying week. I have realised though how lonely it can be being at home on your own all day. There was a time when I would have given anything to just be on my own for a minute, let alone a whole day but oh, how times change when your children have grown up and no longer define your identity. If you watched the BBC programme, The Age of Loneliness, this week, you’ll know what I mean. It was a very poignant programme and I shed quite a few tears watching it. I have gone from being surrounded by people in a very busy environment, yet sometimes feeling quite lonely amidst all the chaos, to being totally on my own. However, I think I just need to make sure that I socialise enough to keep that part of me ticking over and to that end, I have arranged a couple of visits with friends, family and the RNA to keep me going over the coming week 🙂

Thank you for reading, as always and do leave me a comment about how your writing life is going so far this year.

5 Things I’ve Learnt from Writing my Debut Novel

Posted in Editing, Formatting, Writing by

strasbourg-90012_1280Now the euphoria of having sent my debut novel ‘From Here to Nashville’ to the proofreader has died down a little, I have no more excuses to stop me from starting the rewrite of book two. Just to refresh your memories, this is the book that I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2013, yes, nearly 14 months ago 😦 After NaNoWriMo and a few more writing chunks some months later, it stood at 80,000 words. Not bad for a first draft, I hear you cry!

However, when I got to that point and read it all through, I could see that the story had veered off in the wrong direction and that I was really going to have my work cut out to get it back on track. So it has been really easy to put off doing anything to move book two forward, especially as I’ve been so busy with finishing my first novel and getting it ready for publication next month.

This weekend, I decided I had to get on with it at last. I have been thinking about it on and off for weeks and adding new thoughts to my outline so when I went back and reread it, things didn’t seem so bad. By the end of the day yesterday, I had almost finished my first rewrite of chapter one and I was buzzing with excitement for my new story, which was a great feeling. I could also see that I’d grown as a writer since the very first rewrite of ‘From Here to Nashville’ and it was a pleasure to implement some of the things I’d learnt from that experience as I was actually writing.

So here are some tips I’d like to share with you today.

1. You don’t need to write your characters’ names into every single line of dialogue. As long as it is clear who is talking, your reader will be fine without the reminder. When you think about it, you hardly ever say the name of the person you are talking to because it’s not necessary. I only use my husband’s name for example, if I’m calling him from afar. I certainly don’t use it in texts or on the ‘phone but my writing was littered with names. I have been really brutal about cutting them out and the result is much more realistic dialogue. Similarly, don’t put in too many examples of ‘er’ and ‘oh’ etc because they clog up the dialogue.

2. The reader does not necessarily need to have the timeline spelt out for them, even if you need to know it to make sure it’s consistent. I had put in dates for all my scenes in ‘From Here to Nashville,’ partly to help me keep on top of the timeline but also to show the whirlwind nature of the romance. I have now taken them all out because I could see that I had explained the timeline in other ways so the dates weren’t necessary. I have also put days into my second book which I’m going to keep there for now but as I progress through my drafts, I will finally remove them. As well as this, my scenes often started in the morning and ended in the evening to give me a structure to work through and to show time passing so I had to work hard to vary this and not start and finish the same way all the time.

3. To help with pace, it’s a good idea to check the length of your sentences and your paragraphs. A shorter sentence every now and then moves the action forward and keeps your reader reading and if you start a new paragraph every time a new action occurs, it makes reading easier and maintains the pace and excitement for the reader. You don’t need an empty line between paragraphs either, you just need to go to the next line. This formatting issue took me ages to put right. An empty line signals a new scene.

4. As a new writer, it is very easy to fall into the trap of over-describing physical movements. By this I mean, the ‘then I did this, then I did that’ style of writing. More often than not, you can cut this and jump straight to the action because that is what your reader will do and if they’re skimming your words, not reading them, they’re going to feel disappointed when they get to the end of the story. This is especially useful at the start of chapters, which don’t need to be bogged down with interior monologue like ‘The next day dawned bright with another beautiful blue sky,’ for example. Instead, jump straight to the action and draw your reader in.

5. Even by the time I sent my book to be professionally edited, I still hadn’t included enough detailed description of people and settings. Even my hero, Jackson needed to be better described the first time Rachel saw him. I think that I’d made it a glimpse for the reader like it was for her but the reader wants more than that so I had to rewrite that first sight of him to include a lot more detail. Similarly, I needed to develop some of my descriptions of settings, from quaysides, to weddings, to apartments and much more detail about Nashville and its iconic sights.

These are just a few of the things I had to deal with when I got my final edit back but they are all things I’m taking on with me to book two. The new book is set in France, in the picturesque region of Alsace which is near the German border (see the photo above). It is a story about self-discovery, as well as being a romance and I look forward to telling you more about it as I progress. I hope you find these tips helpful and I would love to hear your comments on them. Thanks for reading as always and have a good writing week 🙂

My Piece of Sky

Posted in Cover Reveals, Editing, Formatting, Marketing, Writing by

DSCN3409A long, long time ago, I sat down at this computer to start writing a story. The date was Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013 to be precise and fuelled by the TV programme ‘Nashville,’ I’d come up with an idea for my own story. I had no idea whether I would get to the end of the story or not at that point, I just wanted to write it all down before I forgot it! 😉 Today, 642 days later, I’m about done with my story and I’m just a few weeks away from self-publishing my first novel as an ebook in the first instance, followed shortly after by a paperback version.

I have spent a fair bit of time over the holidays (understatement of the year!) wrestling with formatting my novel in Scrivener, accompanied by the brilliant book ‘Scrivener for Dummies’ by Gwen Hernandez. It is now formatted to my satisfaction, I think (eek!) I have also worked my way through my own and my beta readers’ edits and got to the end of them without doing myself an injury. Finally, I contacted my proofreader to see if it would be possible to send it to her a bit earlier than we had planned. Her answer to this was yes and all of this means that I can look at a publication date of sometime during the week of the 16th February, 2015 which will be half-term week for me and therefore, a bit easier to manage. As it can take a few days for your book to upload to Amazon though, I’ll probably aim for a ‘soft’ launch in the week before to deal with any major upsets before the proper publication day.

My next task then is to send out my first newsletter. I have already started designing this and it will include my Cover Reveal and also the Book Trailer I’ve been working on. If you want to see both of these before anyone else, don’t forget to SIGN UP to my newsletter! All you have to do is click on the link. I will be doing a blog post soon about how I made the book trailer as well.

The next major thing to think about is marketing: yes or no? I have taken part in some giveaways myself run by authors and I even tried running one a while ago on my Facebook page but there wasn’t much take up. Similarly, although I have enjoyed ‘attending’ a number of Facebook launch parties, the attendees always seem to be other writers so I’m not sure how useful they are in terms of sales to new readers. Finally, there’s the issue of book blog tours. I know of many lovely people running these but I have no idea how useful they are to writers. Obviously, we all want to make our book stand out in a veritable ocean of others out there. So, if you have any advice on this topic, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Some of the more experienced self-publishers believe that the best marketing is to get on with your second book and don’t worry, I fully intend to do that! I feel that some other marketing is necessary though and should be fun.

This is where I’m at for the start of 2015 then, folks. Thank you for accompanying me along the path so far. I hope you’ll keep on reading over the next few weeks and holding my hand as I edge closer to publication. Thank you for reading and supporting me with your advice and I look forward to reading your comments 🙂