The Path to Building a Book.

Hannah is finally coming up on the home stretch. All I have left is cover art, and sending out a few ARC copies before I push the big red "Publish" button.

It's been a long time coming and a lot of work has gone into getting this far. So I figured this would be a good time to go back and review the journey. It helps that I've pretty much documented the trip as things happened, so that makes it pretty easy. Going to be quite a few links to click if you want to get caught up.

This book started as a NaNoWriMo project back in November of 2013, right on the heels of the release of Class 5.

This was the start of my "Building a Book" series, which has actually turned out to be pretty popular. The series largely follows the progress of Hannah, even though I don't talk about the book specifically very often.

The first four posts were about writing the first draft of a book, with tips on characters, plot, and story structure.

Building a Book
Building a Book: Part 2
Building a Book: Part 3
Building a Book: Part 4, The End

Now, I didn't finish the NaNoWriMo project on time. The goal of the project is to write an entire 50,000 word novel in just one month. Hannah took me about four months to finish the first draft. Some people like to take a break between drafts on a novel. I don't, so I almost immediately dove into re-reading, revising, and making changes.

Building a Book: Second Draft

Re-vising and editing takes a lot less time to do than writing, thankfully, and a month later I was ready for the next steps.

Building a Book: Beta Readers
Building a Book: Post Beta Reader Revisions

While all this work was going on, I was also trying to consider where I wanted to go with this book. There is an ongoing debate about which is better, Trade publishing or Self publishing. Both sides have pros and cons, and both sides have extremely passionate supporters and detractors. It's still worth considering what path you want though, and I took the time to address that.

Building a Book: Choosing How to Publish

I decided to try Trade publishing, with a few specific smaller presses. One of the main drawbacks of that being the time it takes to get a reply, and what that reply might be.

Building a Book: The Wait
Building a Book: The Rejection

After the rejections, I decided to head in a different direction. Self-publishing. Which means I have to figure out all the rest of the details, like cover art, distribution, etc. etc. This ended up being the most recent post for the series, discussing the art issues I had (have) looking for a good cover for Hannah.

Building a Book: Cover Issues

That'll pretty much do it for the Building a Book series. There will be one more post, probably, regarding the release when I get the last few puzzle pieces into place, but that'll be it for the time being.

In the meantime, I want to thank you all for accompanying me on this long and twisting journey, and I look forward to sharing with you all just how much of a success or a failure all this work turns out to be. Regardless of how this book ends, you can still look forward to more stories in the future.

~ Shaun