On the Writers Hub this week, we have Author L.E Bendon, who discussed his PERSONAL steps before he published:
1. Complete first draft.
2. Leave it to rest so I can edit with fresh eyes.
3. A round of edits, running through chapter by chapter in order making any little fixes and changes that occur to me. I spot many many typos. At this point I have no idea how many more will be fixed throughout the rest of the process. I have barely scratched the surface but think I have caught 90% of them. The result is what I label as my second draft.
4. The next step is to get feedback from other people who don't know me and would judge only the writing, unbiased. I join a website called critiquematch and had a few people look at the first four chapters. During this time I also read and fed back on other writers' work.
5. From the feedback I got I realised my story started too early, the changes of character perspective were far too frequent, and there were far too many scenes whose events could be better covered in later dialogue. So I did a major rewrite, removing much of the first third of the book. This then created the necessity to add more material later on, with a few extra plot lines and helped make it much clearer what the story was really about from the beginning. This I labelled my third draft.
6. I then did another pass of little fixes to make my fourth draft. I looked at it and realised that although it was much improved, the book was still missing something, and I just didn't know how to improve it further, so I put it away. And the longer I left it the less excited about finishing it I was.
7. Eventually, about three years later I found the incentive to have another go, as I had someone keen to read it who had beta read for people in the past. Before sharing it I decided to have another stab at improving it. As three years had past I was able to find plenty of new ideas. I then sent this fifth it in its entirety for a beta read.
8. While waiting for feedback (rather anxiously as this was the first time anyone other than me had read the whole book), I went to work in it again, realising I could tie even more plot threads together with a few extra scenes. When I eventually got the feedback, I was able to take this sixth draft and turn it into a seventh, which I then sent back to the same reader. I used the feedback from that to edit once more into the 8th draft.
9. After this I was confident that I was ready to query. I gave it six months, after which I had heard back from all of the agents I had found who might have been a good fit. None of them felt able to sell the book, so I decided to take publication into my own hands. During this time I built a very close friendship with another author who had also read the eighth draft while I was querying it and I got a lot of encouragement and self-belief out of this friendship too.
10. For self-publishing the first thing I did was look for a professional editor to help polish the manuscript to the standard needed for publication. I found an excellent one on Reedsy. Incidentally Reedsy have really good customer services. Anything I have needed from them gets a human-written response very quickly!
11. The editor I ended up using did an excellent job and also recommended me a couple of suitable cover designers. The designer I booked charged more money than a lot of authors tend to quote as typical fees, but I have no complaints. I am very happy with the result.
12. Next I looked into ISBNs. I decided to buy my own and set up my own imprint. I chose a name and paid someone on fiver to create a logo for it. I bought a bundle of 10 ISBNs in my imprint name from Nielsen. That's enough for five books in paperback and eBook. I will have five books out by the end of next year probably. When I buy more I'll buy a hundred instead which only costs about twice as much as buying ten (which itself only costs twice as much as buying one).
13. I also bought the domain name for the imprint. I already had the domain name for my penname and a very basic placeholder site there. At this point I started making something more substantial for both publisher and author websites.
14. Next I took my polished manuscript and cover design and formatted them for paperback and eBook versions. I did this in word, and then used WordToEpub to convert to epub, and then calibre to clean up the epub file. I made an ARC version to send out to ARC readers over kindle email.
15. I created an arc signup form using google forms embedded in a page on my imprint website and shared that link around everywhere I could to recruit ARC reviewers, and then sent them each their copies over the kindle email system.
16. I registered the book on Nielsen's Title Editor database, and also applied to have a Goodreads listing created for the book. The latter took some time as it's done through forum posts and there are many many authors on there posting books to be added by the volunteer librarians on the site. Once the listing was created I was able to claim my author page, and now I can use that to add my subsequent books directly.
17. I uploaded the finished publication files to IngramSpark and eventually approved them for distribution. IngramSpark has this weird quirk where if you don't approve the pdf proof for your paperback version, it will then make you wait up to a week before you can submit your revised files. That was stressful to discover in real time.
18. Once all approved and ready to go I ordered myself a box of paperbacks. I also set up a PayPal form for people to purchase/pre-order signed copies directly from my imprint (i.e from me).
19. Near the publication date I sent email reminders to my ARC team that Amazon and other places will allow them to post their reviews there on the publication date. Goodreads will let you list reviews at any time.
20. I received paperbacks, checked them over, then posted out pre-order copies as well as the one mandatory copy to the British Library's Legal Deposit Office. I took a selfie proudly holding a paperback up to the camera and posted it online, and promptly left the country for a month, in which I wrote the entire first draft of the sequel.
Fantastic first twenty steps from this author, very interesting and insightful for those who are interested in how others are doing it. Thank you so much!
To follow the author:
L.E. Bendon - About
https://x.com/L_E_Bendon
To buy his books:
Purchase The Weapon and the Fruit
ARC sign up for Book 2 - ARC Signup - Any Body Can Murder
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