LUSITANIA GOLD LAUNCH PRE PREP STUFF

For those of you that have never published a book before, there’s a lot involved in gearing up for a book launch. You’d think just writing the thing is enough, but noooo! There’s a lot more to it.

Right now, I’m in the process of finishing up all the last minute details for my second published novel, and the first in my adventure/thriller Gold series, Lusitania Gold. First a little history.

Though my first published novel was the fantasy Treasure Of The Umbrunna, when I started writing twenty-one years ago, it was with much different genres in mind. My first attempt, just to see if I could complete a novel, was science fiction. That novel, The Cave, will never see the light of day! Then I went into icky bug (horror). It turned out pretty good and will one day be published, I hope! Then came my adventure/thriller novel Lusitania Gold, originally put down into the ether in 1995. I’m now finally seeing it coming to print. It was well worth the wait. There are five others in the series that I hope will follow.

Whether you traditionally or self-publish, there’s a lot more to launching a book than just printing it. I’m past the editing process, so what’s next?

PROOFING

The manuscript has already been edited, but now it’s been basically formatted and printed in the rough book form. After that, it’s sent to the proof reader who goes over it with a fine-toothed comb (cliché, but so what?) and looks with a third, fourth, fifth set of eyes. The proofer looks for not only any last-minute editing details, but things like spacing, indents, page numbering, chapter headers, fonts, contraction consistency as well as a host of other things. Even though it’s been edited countless times, that last set of eyes catches as much as possible to make the book as high a level of quality as humanly possible.

Does this eliminate every mistake? Maybe not, but it catches the majority of them and after all, when you have something that’s almost 100K words or more, the more eyes the better.

PUBLICITY PACKETS

Depending on your marketing department, if you even have one, they should have some format for creating publicity packets to pass out to reviewers and book buyers. This may include an author interview and bullet points about the book.

I just finished the author interview and hope to have the bullet points about the story ready before this article hits this Tuesday (I did finish them and get them off after finishing the draft of this article).

Both of these items are intended to sell the book. They entice reviewers and book sellers to want to get a copy, or at least read a copy of your book.

THE INTERVIEW

This is a question and answer sheet (one page, to keep it simple and quick) that’s designed to tell a little about yourself and to pitch the book at the same time. It should convey who you are and what the book’s about. It should also tell what audience you’re trying to reach, why you wrote the book and what inspired you to write it. Maybe what research you did to get there and who or what were your influences.

THE BULLET POINTS

This is by far, the hardest to handle because you have to compress your entire novel into a single page of bullets, one to two sentences each with all the key plot points. You have to tell the entire story, including the conclusion. I’ve done three incomplete versions because I’m still getting bogged down into too much detail and have over a page and a half in each version and still haven’t got halfway through the book! The first try, I made a bullet for each chapter. However, with seventy-plus chapters, I’m going to end up with six pages of bullets! That’s not going to work.

Each time I get it down a bit more but I have to sit back and summarize huge chunks into simple single sentences. Just the facts, ma’am.

THE COVER

If you self-publish you should have complete control over the cover. At least I assume so and have seen that many times. That means either paying an artist or trying to do it yourself. A poor cover can kill your book before it gets out the gate.

Since I’m traditionally published, I have only limited control over my cover. However, I’m able to give some feedback now, at least to tweak the design. I’ve seen the cover and am giving feedback. This is all part of the process. At the big houses, from what I understand, the authors have no say at all on the artwork. As soon as I have a final design, I can set up my Facebook page.

WEB SITES

Right now, I have a page on this web site for Detach And His Gold Adventures. It has some real photos of the Lusitania, but no book cover yet. That page is for the entire series, not just Lusitania Gold. That goes for Meleena and here adventures as well on the Meleena page.

SUMMARY

There’s still much to do, but this gives you an idea of what else’s involved in getting a book to print. I haven’t even delved into the business cards, bookmarks, publicity sheets and videos. Then there’s the marketing, submissions themselves and all the fun stuff that goes with it.

Happy writing!