I am writing the ending of Frosthold, and I can say this is the messiest draft I have ever written. It has by far pushed down Queen of Sind, which held the top position for a long time.

Yeah, yeah.  I know that first drafts are supposed to be messy, but I normally don’t realise while writing the ending that  the male POV character is wrong.  Yeah.  The scenes are sound, but the POV is wrong. Marius is simply too passive.  I could almost hear a loud click when I realised that.  So many things fell into place when I realised that.  I could feel a missing spark enter the story.  I also realised that I hadn’t told a large chunk of the story.  So even if the first draft will end at 15 000-17 000 words, the second draft will be much longer.

Hopefully when I am done revising the first half, I will know if the second half should be a part of the draft or not.   Right now it could go either way.

I just returned from a weekend at our summer house. In many ways it was a great weekend. I wrote, I read, I picked mushrooms with my mother.  But it was also a weird weekend.   Why?

I saw a blooming wild strawberry, a forget me not flower and a budding rose bush.  All of these things are normally viewed as a sign of spring.   It has been a warm september, as well as a warm August.  To me this is a small, but important sign that climate change isn’t coming soon, it is already here.

Don’t believe me? Take a walk and count how many flowers that are blooming out of season.

 

 

Earlier this week, I discovered that Kobo finally updated the price for Exile (Still no sign of it at other stores). Which should be good news, right?

It would have been, if the price listed had been the 0.99 I entered at Publit. It wasn’t. Instead the price was 2.71 dollar.

I cursed, and changed the list price at Publit. It will take a while before I see if the price changes at Kobo.   Hopefully by then it will be available everywhere. 🙂

At least that answered one question for me: If the retailers would sell my books at the list price, and take a cut out of the price. Or if they would take my list price and add to it.

I’ll admit that I would prefer if it was the first option, but it isn’t. The only thing I say is that the likelihood of me running any sales just dropped drastically.

I am also glad I discovered this now.  It would have been worse if I entered 2.99 as list price for a novella and then later discovered that it was over 5 dollar.

Even if there have been some fumbling from my side, I am not planning on abandoning Publit yet.  Their customer service have been patient and responsive to my inquiries. Are there things I wish were different? Yes.  I am also aware that some of the things stem from the fact that I have more knowledge about self publishing using Amazon and Smashwords, and not a distributor for publishers.  🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am not certain how, but somehow I managed to write 50 pages this week. Which is impressive, since I had written 65 pages in total before September.  To be fair, August was busy with travelling, work and preparing Exile for publication.

Still, the first week have made me hope that I might finish the first draft before Oct 1st after all. But we will see.

Another thing we will see how Exile’s ranking is affected by the fact that it will be 0.99 soon ( probably next week) and that it will have another ISBN since I am a doofus, first at  Kobo and then at other places.   I am more than happy with its rank, especially with the fact that it has been climbing for the last 2-3 days.  To be fair, I am experimenting with marketing it online, mostly on twitter with various hashtags.

When the sales numbers trickles down to Publit, it will be really interesting to see how many sales the ranking represents.

Also, I am really happy with Publit’s customer service. They are swift and prompt, since I have had to contact them twice this week.

 

 

Yesterday on twitter, C. E. Murphy said she needed to write at least 50 000 words in September ( or was it 60 000? My mind was too busy boggling to pay close attention.)  Then Adrian Faulkner challenged her to the great September Wordwars. Which means the one that writes most, wins.

I just shook my head, and hadn’t planned to join them. But then Catie challenged me, Laura Anne and Kari.  And since I would love to finish the first draft of Frosthold  mid October, I accepted the challenge.  Do I think I will win?

Well, I’ll not have the most words written, but I’ll have a big chunk of the draft written. Which is good enough for me.

 

1.   Have a formatting checklist

That is the biggest mistake I did.  I didn’t write a formatting checklist that included things like add the cover design/ stockphoto credits. As a result, I had to reupload Exile 3 times.

2. Once you have hit published, you cannot fix things in the e-book.  Which means you’ll have to unpublish it and reupload a new version.  ( Can you pretty please change that Publit?)

3.  Kobo takes a long time with uploading things. ( At least 5 days)

4.  The Widgetshop is too complicated. I think a lot of people balked at giving their address and stuff for something that is free.

Speaking of free:  You can download Exile at Kobo for free right now.  Since I just reuploaded the 3rd version ( fixing the quote marks), I also changed the price to 0.99.   I have no idea how long it will cost 0.99. It depends on how big cut Kobo etc takes.