Recently I published a book that I have to admit took me 30 years to complete. Okay, I didn't actually spend 30 years working on it. I sort of worked on it off and on. This is what a whole lot of writers do because of all the everyday obstacles that we have to deal with in our lives. You know what I'm talking about: Work, School, Kids, Managing the Household, etc. This is why I always say that writing a book isn't easy. In fact, the reasons I stated above are some of the reasons that most people don't even finish their first book.
Anyway, I started working on this book back in my mid-twenties and I guess if you add 30 years to that you can kind of get an idea just how old I am today. Needless to say, I'm happy I finished it. When I look back on this book now I have to admit that it took on a strange journey to how it all ended up. You see the idea for this book came from a dream that I had. I get a lot of my story ideas this way. Many writers say the same thing. I remember in my dream I saw an image in front of me which told me to write this book. I also saw the book on a shelf in a library in this dream. The book was titled: "An Island to Forget" and it had my real name on it. As I told you in a previous blog entry that I had decided to forgo using my real name and to use a pen name instead when I write. You can read that article here where I explain more in detail why I chose to go this route. ("Pen Names: Are They a Good Idea to use?)
This was also the first book that I actually tried to get a literary agent for when I had a little over half of the book done. Of course, I never had any literary agents interested in the story. So I sort of dragged my feet in finishing it. It was funny when I had first discovered self-publishing eBooks and Amazon Kindle back in 2012. You would have thought that this book would have been the first book I would have wanted to publish, right? WRONG... In all honesty, I had sort of forgotten about this book. I had actually decided to publish something else instead. I guess this was because since no literary agents were interested in it some twenty+ years ago, I figured maybe no one else would be. I know how silly this must sound to some of you. Plus, since this book was started some 30 years ago, at that particular time I didn't have a computer and a lot of this book was handwritten on notebook paper. If I wanted to publish this I was going to have to type all of those pages, and I really wasn't prepared to do this back in 2012. Don't get me wrong, I am a pretty good typist. I can type between 55-60 wpm. It was just that this handwritten book at this time was over 500 pages long.
Fast forward today and my quest for finishing this book became a necessity. Why? Well, because I received some unsettling new about my health. I have been dealing with a heart issue for quite some time and now my cardiologist wants to do open heart surgery. I have to admit right here that I really don't want to do this. This is one surgery that scares the death out of me. (no pun intended). So with this in front of me, it makes a person look back at their life and all the things you didn't do, and this particular book was one of them.
Needless to say, I put my nose to the grindstone and started typing this book, (day and night; night and day, if you get what I mean).
When I had completed typing it and editing the manuscript, I had discovered that there were over one thousand pages in this book. I also discovered that some print-on-demand book publishers that self-published authors use have a page limit in their physical paperback books, and a thousand pages were definitely over the limit. Granted, it didn't matter in an eBook. You can have as many pages as you want in an eBook. I then noticed out on Amazon that it seemed as if the book series appeared to be popular with writers. Yes, some people who buy books don't particularly like them because they have to end up buying more than one book, but this seemed appealing to me and my book.
In the end, I decided to break the book down into (6) smaller books, and I decided to change the title. I can't really tell you why I decided to do this other than the words in the title are better keyword driven to the Amazon algorithm. The name of the book series ended up being called: "Stranded By Deception", which is what Book 1 is called. The other books in the series were given subtitles such as; Book 2: "The Island", Book 3: "Rescue", Book 4: "Civilization", Book 5: "Showdown", and Book 6: "Destiny".
So if you are a writer struggling to get your first book done, don't give up even if the pace seems slow. Just remember it is easier today with self-publishing to get your book published. Just don't stick it in a drawer somewhere and forget about it the way I did. Keep writing and persevering. Good Luck.
In my next blog entry, I'm going to talk about the writer's template and what you will want to include in your book at the front to keep everything on the up and up.
So stay tuned.
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