Last year I was invited to contribute to the series of blogs by participants in Nanowrimo 2013, which made me feel a little like a proper writer and was also quite useful in keeping me focused.
Nano is a lot of fun but I know from previous experience that keeping the motivation can be incredibly hard, particularly if you're behind on the word count towards the end. I completed the challenge last year, with twenty minutes to spare, but my bragging rights are beside the point.
As a thank you for taking part I was able to submit my novel for the first stage of Writers and Artists' analysis service and receive some feedback on the synopsis and the opening chapter. I'm not an obsessive perfectionist but I do try to take a little pride in the work I show to other people so before I sent anything in I tidied everything up and got it as close to professional as I could manage. At this point I need to acknowledge my Dad, who manages to be an enthusiastic but impartial beta-reader and also very good at spotting all the little mistakes that pass me by because I know what I meant to write.
I'm pleased to say that the feedback was generally positive - Maria is a rather dark story and there were some suggestions that at least a few hints of happiness might be welcome but nothing worse. The end result, however, was that I found myself with a book that was ready to go but nowhere for it to go. Which is when we started talking about e-publishing as a genuine possibility.
I had actually been thinking about testing the waters for a year or two, if only because it seemed like a fun thing to try. I'm not a very technical person though and, as easy as it is to do, I was aware that doing it well is a different beast altogether, so I didn't think I'd make the leap until my Dad volunteered to take on the formatting and file conversions. I know this smacks of laziness on my part but one of the most constant criticisms of self-publishing is the low quality of so much of the product. You might think that the actual writing is guilty of that but the presentation isn't.
Since this was our first foray into the arena we decided to just work with one publisher - Kindle Direct. I'm told that preparing the file was a relatively easy affair once the quirks and ticks were identified, although I think there were some head-scratching moments over getting the navigation to work correctly. It was left to me to deal with registering with KDP and uploading the final book, which took hardly any time and was very easy. I enrolled it in Kindle Direct, selected the 70% royalty option and, a few hours of verification later, the book was available. The only grumble I have is that the US government is taxing me, but I'll deal with that as soon as I get myself organised enough to re-new my passport and get the tax exemption number I need. Overall, the process was easy and enjoyable and I'm very proud of the end result - the cover by my friend Alison looks great on Amazon.
As a final point, I should probably explain why the book I've released is a collection of short stories and not Maria, last year's Nano effort that started the whole process.
I'm as pleased as ever with Maria as a book but it didn't seem like the right choice for a first release. Most of my writing is supernatural horror, full of monsters and buckets of blood, and Maria is far more grounded in reality. It's still essentially a horror story but of a different kind. After all the work we'd done getting the text ready, however, we wanted some kind of end product so Chaos Tales was born. I've been using it as a catch-all title for my short stories since I was fourteen, and at least three of the ones included are based on ideas of the same vintage, so it seemed like a good fall-back position.
It's been a good year on the writing front for me and putting something out there has been the cherry on top. I might not be setting the world on fire but I have got two good reviews on Amazon and that's good enough. I'd definitely advise others to give it a go as well - Nano and e-publishing - but you might want to get your technical advice from someone else.
Christopher Law lives in Kent and is the author of Chaos Tales, advised for readers with stronger stomachs. You can follow him on Facebook.
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