Ghost Writing
News from the coalface
I have been good and haven’t even touched The Gatekeeper’s House. I have plenty more to get on with however.
I only have one book actually published so far, Oliver’s Voice, and once most people publish a book, they pretty much forget about it. Those who have been following my ramblings for a while will know that isn’t my style.
I haven’t looked at Oliver for months, and deliberately so. If you want to be critical of your own writing, first you need to forget it enough so that when you read it again, you read the words on the page, instead of recalling the words in your head.
No matter how good your editing team is, the finished book is down to you, and so are any mistakes. Last night I finished reading The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, published more than two years ago, over 300,000 reviews on Goodreads, and I found a typo, a pretty glaring one too. This was published by Penguin, one of the biggest publishing houses on the planet, and my copy is a 6th reprint. If a typo can get through that scale of publishing machine, it can happen to anybody.
Some people simply don’t care, but I do, so before getting on with my stack of work to do, I thought it was about time I checked over Oliver. I found one typo (now instead of no) and a missing word. While I was at it, I also wrote an entirely new Chapter One.
Why?
Because I have a couple of writers who know what they are about, I trust their feedback implicitly, and one commented that although Chapter One was lovely and all that, it wasn’t actually introducing the reader to the story, and more importantly, to my main characters, in the way it should. I have stewed on that feedback for a month or more, rather than rushing in and making a mess of it, so I waited until the idiots in my head had stopped arguing over it and I was happy with what they had come up with, then I set to work.
While I was at it, I made a few tweaks here and there as I read through, because that is what we writers do, or at least I think that is what we should do, always try to improve. Never be complacent. I finished writing Oliver’s Voice fifteen years ago. I have learned a lot since then, and one thing I have learned is that when you finish writing a book, that is only the beginning. After that, the real work begins.
So Oliver is happy now, all tidied and I can leave him alone for a while, but I will check again, and I will keep checking, and if I get more feedback that makes me want to improve things, I will do so.
The next book in this series is Gate in the Shadows. I experimented with making this the first book in the series instead of the second, and actually published it that way last year, but I was never really happy with that, so I unpublished it and have been putting it back the way it should be, as the second. That is also going through the slow process of revising, leaving it alone for a couple of months, reading, revising, and so it goes on. I am now working my way through another revision, and because all the major changes are done, and I am just tweaking, I am loving it.
If this all sounds like a lot of work for somebody who has only sold a few books, it is. If I want to have a chance at being a writer of books, which I do, then no matter what marketing advice you may read, or how many 5 star reviews you get from friends, family, and paid reviewers, if your product isn’t up to scratch, you are going to get one hell of a kick in the teeth if you sell it to people and they don’t like it.
Step one of book marketing: make sure you have a good book. Even if you can afford an editor to steer you in the right direction, all they can do is advise. It is still up to you to make it right.
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