Timelines

So, early last week I revealed the official cover art for my debut novel, The Case Of The Cheap Suit Plot. The response has been overwhelmingly positive (huge sigh of relief). Now what?

I feel like in movies and TV shows, whenever an author is portrayed, they’re always shown furiously typing out a draft of a book on a typewriter (none of us own computers), they break through their writer’s block at the eleventh-hour (no deadlines when you’re self-publishing), and then once they’ve sent off the first draft of their book, it just kind of…gets published? Of course, it would be pretty boring to watch our hero implement beta-reader feedback in real time, but there are a lot more steps to publication in real life, even when you’re DIY-ing it.

So at this point, the text of the book is almost completely locked in. I am still making a few changes to the last couple of chapters, but once that’s done, the novel will be fully formatted. This means I use a program like Atticus or Vellum (Atticus for me since I’m not on a Mac) to get all the fonts, indentations, headers, etc. correct so the book looks professional when you open it or download it. Who wants to pay for a glorified Word doc?

After formatting is complete, I send the novel off to the proofreader in March, to make sure there are no lingering typos or formatting errors. Once that’s done, I can submit the book to Amazon and put it on pre-sale! Currently, I am hoping to have the pre-sale window open around the end of March, if all goes well. I still plan to have Cheap Suit Plot’s actual release date somewhere around the end of May/beginning of June. But I don’t want to give any official dates yet until everything is set and ready.

So that’s where we are. For sure this book is in the home stretch of the publishing process, but we’ve still got a few hurdles to jump over before we start celebrating. Publishing a book is a marathon, but I’m sticking with it. I’d be crazy to drop out on the last mile.