A writer's life - re-edit, cover, Wattpad, starting a new book

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Some updates from the writer's life while Richard Ashcroft does his hymnic singing thing in the background. 

Re-Edit:  "Troubleseeker" arrived back from the editor. Back to the chain gang to embed the edits and do all the homework of rewriting as suggested. Man, I hate this part. It is so labor intensive! I did not dare to check out the Word change log to see how much I have in front of me. But it must be done! A lot of good music will be needed to get me through the nights on this one.

Cover: And then of course the cover. I had some other priorities during the last weeks, so I fell behind on the cover for "Troubleseeker". The draft is there, but not the artwork, and not the copy for the back cover. Another piece of homework for me and Mr. Photoshop.

Wattpad: I will be hitting the three-hundred mark of followers and the thirty-thousand mark of readers due to the success of "A Brilliant Plan". We are at Chapter 45, five more to go!

Starting a new book: I am still undecided which topic to tackle next. It will be a romantic comedy, that is for sure. One a little darker, and one a little lighter and geekier. My mind tells me to do the lighter one first (a sort of Sex-and-the-City meets Start-up meets Gentlemen-prefer-Blondes mashup), but my heart lies with the slightly darker story (boy and girl are in love, fall apart, live their lives and accidentally meet again). If I see my follower group on Wattpad I might also dust-off a Calendar Moonshine short story from the shelf to bring that on the market before Christmas.

 

I almost feel honored - when your own work shows up as "bootlegs"

My Google "Alex Ames" alert pinged me today with some obscure Russian website that promoted two of my works (Troubleshooter and Five for Forever). The whole site is about free eBooks (including fake comments that have no relevancy to my work, and are the same all over the place). The whole thing is completely set up as click-bait to lure greedy people in. 

So, don't go there, ignore the site, be assured, you will NOT receive one of my books for free on that site but will probably make the acquaintance of a virus or a trojan horse.

But I feel a little proud that two of my works can be found for click-bait. Does that mean my "name" baits? I did not make in in New York but in Nigeria or Russia, or China, or wherever?

"Just, just, just" — How many 'Justs' can you stand?

In the middle of doing what I call the "robo-editing" for my third full length "Troubleshooter" novel. This is neither creative writing nor content editing, this is pure rooting out of grammatical and stylistical evil. I have a list of about 100 entries that are considered bad use of English, collected from third party sources, my own experience, and the feedback I had received from my own editors over the last projects. I enter one of those 100 items into the global search of my writing program Scrivener, hit return, and a list of sections of hits turns up. And then I go through each and everyone of them and try to get rid of the bad language or bad use.

There are simple mechanical errors to get rid of: Search for two dots, is one of them. In many cases over the course of six writing months, some sentences end with two dots instead of one. Easy to remove, no brain needed. 

There are simple stylistic errors to get rid of: Search for the filler word "Just". A word not needed in 99% of all cases. However, each "just"-hit needs a lookover. Before: around 300 uses of "just" in my 80K word novel. After: around 10 uses left.  

And these are "just" 2 out of 100! It's a mechanical nightmare. Click on section, scroll through section, read the sentence, including the one before and the one after. Delete/rewrite so that it fits without the offending item. Reread the paragraph. Done. Scroll to next item. Repeat... Repeat... Repeat... 

This is mind numbing. And the worst is: it is all pre-editor. After my editor returns the book to me, it is all over again: read the remark, correct the remark, repeat... repeat... repeat...

I hate that part of the work and if there is one thing I will change in the workflow when I become rich and famous, it will be that piece: work with a steady trusted editor who will constantly on a daily basis edit my output to build a clean first version of the novel right from the start.

And back to the chain gang of robo-editing! 

Five for forever — my ride from obscurity to superstardom and back

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Amazon has this concept of author rank. According to Amazon definition it summarizes all your cross book sales and pitches you against the rest of the world. With Kindle Press-driven promotion for "Five", I had for the first time taken a systematic regular look at my own rank. Talking about modest, have a look at my ranking from the last half year. It reflects nicely my activities around the two books I published this year "Five for forever" and "Pieces of Trouble".

What do we see? February and March spikes are easy to explain. I had bought some gift copies   (10 each)of my books via Createspace, that probably was the large May peak that brought me into the 100.000 for the frist time. The other earlier peaks were the typical 1-2 copies per month per book. There appears to be an interesting calculation method in place that catapults you up at a purchase but then uses some moving average to the end, which explains the right-heaviness of the distribution of each peak. 

Then mid-June things became serious with Five for forever on Kindle Press and the parallel promotion on Amazon. Basically what they did is that they added my book to the various recommendation results that you typically see.

The peak was July 5th, seems there were a lot of bored people in the US Independence Day, and bought something good to read. I made it up to Author rank 27.503. This probably does not yet bring me up to ranks with Stephen King or Frederick Forsyth. But next book, next goal! Crack the four figures.

PS: Just a plug for Wattpad's "A Brilliant Plan" - the next chapters are online.