Nick Bryan

lifeblogging

Hobson & Choi Self-Publishing Attempt – An Early Update

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Like most of my big announcements, this one was somewhat buried in various podcasts and the London Book Fair blog post a month ago, so here it is up top: I am planning Hobson & Choi self-published editions, collecting the series storyline-by-storyline, with proper covers, editing, extra material and general joy.

The first of these should be out in the summer, for both e-readers and paper-readers. The second… hopefully by the end of the year, but that could end up being optimistic.

So, as I embark on this adventure, I thought I’d blog about it a little. These will be on an irregular basis rather than every week, as there won’t always be anything to report. And yes, it is taking a fuckton of willpower to not call this Self-Pub Update #1 and start numbering them, but I’ve only just made myself stop doing that with the writing blogs. Must be strong.

Anyway. How’s it going with the self-publishing, Nick?

EDITS EDITS EDITS

I’ll spare you lengthy descriptions of my editing process, as that’s another thing you can get extensively in other posts. Suffice to say, the knowledge this will be going public in the near future does focus the mind. After I went to all those self-pub seminars at London Book Fair, it became clear that editing perhaps wasn’t something I should do all by myself.

After all, I wrote Hobson & Choi, edited it before publishing to Jukepop, yet again before recording the podcasts, did another pass recently to get it into a book-shape with longer, more substantial chapters. I’m fairly close to this material. I know it better than I know the back of my hands, because I stare straight pass my limbs to the monitor. See picture to left for an illustrated metaphor of how my hands are kept in darkness by the shining glory behind them.

So, as everyone advised in the seminars, I engaged the service of an actual editor. Sent the manuscript off to them a week or so back, and the moment I get it back and have to face their opinions is one thing I’ll definitely blog about here. I’m only a little scared.

But the story needs to be the best it can be, I gotta compete with not just other self-pubs but traditionally published authors who get editorial feedback from agents and/or publishers. Mustn’t do this half-arsed, no matter how much my bank account sometimes wants me to.

MORE MORE MORE

As mentioned up top, we have extra material, to entice fans of the original serial into picking up the book anyway. This takes the form of an extra short story, set in the Hobson & Choi universe (well, it’s mostly one city so far) and expanding on some minor characters. To be precise, it takes place behind the scenes in the criminal pub The Left Hand.

This story exists in second draft form and I’m pretty pleased with it. Hopefully I’ll become even happier as edits continue. And in terms of providing even more value to existing readers: it’s entirely possible these editors will tear my text apart so much, it’ll basically be a whole new story.

JUDGE A BOOK BY THIS

Lastly (for now), the other thing I decided I shouldn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t do myself: making a cover for the book. Not that the existing H&C cover (on the right there) hasn’t served me well, but I don’t know shit about graphic design.

So I commissioned the nice people at Design For Writers, and it looks like we’ve got something. They come highly recommended if you’re after a book cover. It was a tough process at times and I needed to make intimidating decisions, including a new title for the whole first storyline (eek), but I think we’re there.

Which means I get to pull off one of those cover reveals all the cool self-pub authors do. I’m going to put it off for a few weeks, because we’re still months out from actually publishing, but trust me, it’s worth it. Or get me a drink and I’ll probably show you on my phone.

Don’t have to wait for me to drink the drink, I’ll happily give it up just in exchange for a pint existing.

Signing Off…

So that’s where we are with the Hobson & Choi self-publishing project. More updates will follow when something else tangibly happens. Questions? Worries? Suggestions for my marketing strategy? Comment below!

I AM NOT A NUMBER (but my novel editing progress is and I can’t stop looking at it)

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This week, threatened as recently as last week, I launched into the third draft of my constantly-in-progress novel. This is the phase where I trawl through the entire text of the book, picking at individual words and trying to get it to the stage where I’m willing to share it with my elite team of beta readers.

ASIDE: If you want to join said elite team, email me and volunteer, or contact me using any other method available to you. All viable humans considered, especially those able to read a book in 1-2 months and provide feedback more detailed than “Yeah, it was okay.” Beta reading likely to commence in early-to-mid June.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I launched into the editing process, and quickly settled on a method. For more details on said method and its implications for my location, read on…

Editalactus – Mincer Of Words

In a bid to give the words a thorough beating, my “third pass” will actually consist of three passes – one in the cafe with music on, picking at the language and doing any final bits of continuity straightening necessary. After that, I read the whole thing out – yes, with my voice at full volume – which usually serves to find clunky phrasings and stupid repeated words.

Last of all, I run this version through the Hemingway web app, which I think I’ve mentioned here before. This provides one last suggestion of overlong clunky sentences, letting me snip a few more chunks away.

So, that’s what I’m doing. I have nearly a hundred thousand words to feed through this mincer, and in the last week, I’ve managed a third of the novel. Not bad. Probably helps that I’ve spent three whole days in that time doing almost nothing else.

With this in mind, I might be on track to finish by the end of the month, then I can get some opinions and work out how much more work is needed. Must admit, I’ve already found myself eyeing up some bigger changes to the first third, but I’m tempted to let a few other people read it first. Be good to finally get a wider view on this thing rather than keep picking and picking.

Sit still, you idiot.

The down-side of the above-described editing process: I can’t do all of it in the cafe. Specifically, the part where I read out the text to myself. Doesn’t really work in public, people give you odd looks.

For a year or so now, I’ve basically done all my writing in the same Walthamstow cafe. Working at home just hasn’t been productive for me, I’m too prone to wandering off and procrastinating. But I’ve had to force myself through it this time, and although there are still a few hours that got lost in the whirl of talking to myself, the job is getting done.

Maybe one day, I’ll be able to work at home when I don’t have to. Might save me a few quid on coffee, at least.

So yeah, it’s getting done. When I laid out the target of finishing this edit by the end of May, I thought I was being self-punishingly optimistic, but perhaps not? We’ll see if this progress continues in subsequent weeks, I suppose.

WRITEBLOG EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

You may note I’ve stopped numbering my blogs about writing, as there was more or less no point. Sorry to anyone upset by this. I’m a slave to public approval, so feel free to argue the case for numbering in the comments…

Is it me or is there a COMPLETED SECOND draft in here? (WriteBlog #24)

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Unfortunately, the pun in the title doesn’t really work, as that kind of draft is spelt draught. But enough self-sabotage.

This week, on Wednesday to be precise, I completed the second draft of the novel I’ve been blogging about for ages. So yeah, hit my self-imposed deadline of the end of April by about six hours, go team. Now, this doesn’t mean it’s time to show it to publishing professionals, or indeed other humans at all, but it is a major chunk of work finished, and I’m going to number it as second draft anyway, simply because it gives me a feeling of progress.

So what exactly do I mean by second draft? And what’s next if not showing it to others? Time now for a little pause-and-take-stock in the editing process.

“It’s like running a comb through the forest.”

The second draft, as I’m defining it, involves going through the entire first draft text and trying to turn it into a coherent item, which you could conceivably go through from beginning to end and understand. I’m not saying every detail will be correct or the writing will be beautiful – in fact, that definitely isn’t true – but I have a thing that resembles a story.

More excitingly, it more or less resembles the story I wanted to tell when I started this whole process.In practise, this involved re-ordering or re-writing a lot of scenes, jamming new segments into them, not to mention the heartbreaking deletion of bits which no longer work. My deleted offcuts folder for this project is a terrifying 43,924 words – a lot of work to accept that you may never use.

(Well, there’s one whole deleted chapter which may find a home in some future related project, as I still like it, but the story has shifted and left the poor thing homeless. But aside from that, yup, it’s all being launched into the void to die.)

But at least it sounds like I’ve done something. Plenty of new writing, interesting thoughts about old work, gratifying sense of creation. The best editing experience I’ve yet had. I won’t be showing the first or second drafts to anyone, but one definitely advances the other.So, what’s next?

“It’s like fighting off an ant invasion using a sledgehammer.”

Well, the detailed editing, which I call the third draft because, again, it’s nice to feel like you’re achieving something. The bit where I go through the text in a finer fashion, potentially more than once, trying to get all the sentences to look and sound nice, spot the details which contradict each other, ruthlessly eliminate words like actually and finally which I use every five minutes and are never fucking worth it.

In short, yes, this is the fiddly part many non-writers assume I’m doing when I first start editing. If only.It also includes the always-entertaining section where I read the whole thing out loud to myself, alone in my house, hoping to spot awkward sentence construction and over-used words. The current manuscript is only 94,000 words so hopefully that won’t take too many thousands of hours.

I still live in hope this won’t be a huge chore. The last editing section was surprisingly pleasant, as it was still writing basically, but this really is word-by-word text examination. I’m going to try and push through it relatively quickly to avoid that being too much of a problem – in my dreams, I’m finished by the end of May. In reality, the end of June might be more realistic.

And then. Well, then we really are ready for other people to read the thing. And I’m sure I’ll talk about that when the time comes.

Tune in next week to find out how much/little of a boring task this third drafting really is. And then come back the week after that to see me change my mind.

Fighting The Skeleton Army – Fleshing out NaNoWriMo writing (WriteBlog #23)

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This week, I came within 1.5 chapters of finishing the second draft of the novel! But this isn’t quite the victory lap blog post yet, I’ll get to that next week. This week, after editing 5.5 chapters worth of NaNoWriMo work (I wrote the last seven chapters during NaNo 2013), I finally worked out the real difference between this and better, more carefully written first draft material.

No, it wasn’t the terrible spelling and barely comprehensible sentences, those would’ve happened anyway.

“An interest work, yes, but I can’t help but feel it may have been written by a burning cat.”

As documented in past WriteBlogs (and even a video that one time), I was concerned that the stuff I wrote in NaNoWriMo would be wretched godawful swill, a confusion of mess that looked like a cat had leapt onto my keyboard, then been set on fire.

But I worked myself into such a mess of pessimism that it was never going to be as bad as I expected. Yes, I stumbled upon a few bits which just didn’t make sense – after a few re-readings, I was forced to jettison entire sentences because no amount of re-reading could let me in on what my past self had been thinking.

Still, that was rare. Mostly, the plot was there, even if it still needed tweaking, and there were moments of great dialogue where I found myself thinking: “You know what, Past Nick, even though you were clearly hammered when you wrote that other bit, this is masterful.”

The one recurring problem I have found: most of it it just a bit thin. Not very fleshed out.

Zombies can’t eat the flesh if it wasn’t there in the first place

This could be a common enough issue with everyone’s first draft, but even compared to my other early work, this lacked in shading. Quite a lot of scenes boiling down to “Man and woman were in the room, it was green, one said blah, another said blah blah,” and so on unto infinity.

Not that the dialogue was bad, in fact some of it was very good, but compared to other, better bits of first draft, it did read a little like I was hurrying to the finish. So, in short, my experience of editing NaNoWriMo writing: putting some meat onto the blasted white bones of description-free scenes.

This grew a repetitive when blasting through scene after scene doing the same thing every time, but it could be worse. At least I didn’t have to delete and rewrite everything. And hopefully next week, we move on to the next big step: finishing the second draft.So that’ll be exciting.

The Trouble With All That (WriteBlog #22)

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Since last week’s London Book Fair adventures, I’ve returned to my normal life and tried to live the lessons, y’know? I’ve emailed a couple of people, spoken about things, set wheels in motion, and then… well, at some point I had to sit down and do some writing again.

And honestly, it almost felt a bit dull compared to all the faffing around checking my book options and seeing pretty colours. Not to mention, there are so many things to be done on the vague self-pub checklist, there’s always some other task I could/should be doing.

In fairness, I’m pretty sure I’m not the first person to feel this way. In fact, the self-published authors who spoke last week often touched on the difficulties involved in both achieving the ten million sundry publishing tasks and getting the work done. Oh, and continuing a regular human life outside both those areas, if possible.I think there’s a lot of novelty value here too.

I’ve been writing in some form since I was about 18 and I’ve pushed a hard cranking schedule in the last year or so especially. At this point, I know pretty well what it feels like to sit at a desk and type. But all this cover-selecting strategy stuff, that’s new and interesting.

Still, I’ve done some research and at some point soon enough, I’m going to have to process my Scrivener files into a correctly formatted ebook. I don’t see any way that won’t be an enormous ballache, so I imagine that’s about the time I’ll fall back in love with writing.

So for now, things keep going as they have been. A few slow, steady moves towards that self-publishing thing, another 1.5 chapters edited in my novel. Imagine I’ll have settled happily back into my routine soon enough.

And happy Easter to anyone reading this. Hope you’re having a good one and not yet suffering from diabetes. A more substantial entry next week, perhaps. For now, stuff is happening, work continues.

London Book Fair 2014 – “Eventual self-published author Nick Bryan goes to seminars, eats crisps!”

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I normally have a writing update in this slot on the blog, but I haven’t done much work this week, as I went off to London Book Fair 2014 in Earl’s Court. So, I thought I’d write about the experience from my perspective as an internet-using nearly-maybe-self-published author, on the off-chance it helps someone else or satisfies some curiosity.

(Although for anyone who is here for the writing updates: I got another short comic story pitch accepted by the nice chaps at GrayHaven Comics, so things are progressing.)

Anyway, for one week only, let’s move the adventure outside my room. I went to London Book Fair and what did I learn?

Forging the Ultimate Edition

As plenty of people will tell you, London Book Fair is not really a place where writers go to talk/learn about writing – it is a publishing industry event where those in the business go to network and discover what is coming up in that world. Not many traditionally published authors seem to go, unless they are one of the few special guests or have a meeting lined up.

However, we are living in an exciting new age. Not only are some authors doing a lot of their own marketing via Twitter, but a fair few are their own publisher too. I haven’t yet self-published anything – although you can buy my stuff on Amazon in these anthologies if you want – but as avid H&C Podcast listeners will know, I’m slowly getting my shit together for some kind of Hobson & Choi Ultimate Edition via self-publishing.

With that in mind, I went to quite a few seminars about the whys and wherefores of self-publishing, and did end up reconsidering quite a few of the approaches I’d been going for before. Firstly: probably will do a print edition as well as digital, at least for my first volume. If it sells fuck-all, might not bother for Volume 2, but I’d been assuming I wouldn’t be doing any hard copies at all. But apparently print readers are still out there, according to a few of the Bestselling Indie Authors who spoke.

If nothing else, my Mum will be happy. And, in fairness, the first time I mentioned this plan to a friend, they immediately asked if there would be a print book – and they’re a Young Person with an iPad and everything.

Obvious Idiocy – the worst kind?

Also, I will likely hire a proper editor, for at least a copyedit to make sure it’s a competitive product. This is something I have been back and forth on, but it was the one lesson every single self-publishing seminar agreed on. And if this venture turns out to be a disaster, I’d rather it not be because I ignored the most obvious tip everyone gave.

I’m also hiring someone to do a decent-looking cover design, but I’d decided that already. My limited Photoshop skills are not up to the task, and I’m not really up for joining the terrible self-published covers club.

So, that was the fundamental returns of London Book Fair for me. I went to immerse myself in self-pub research and I succeeded. I have discovered things. Well done me. If you too are an author wanting to explore this area, it is probably a good exercise – but again, little discussion of the actual writing.

If you’re planning for the publishing end of your operation to be handled by your mum/a publisher, there may not be much to do. But hell, it’s a fairly cheap event, so if you can see any interesting seminars then why not? It’s sufficiently inexpensive that you probably won’t feel guilty if you pay and only go for a day.

Sundry Observations

Nick failed to take a photo at London Book Fair, what a moron

I spent a lot of time in self-publishing seminars (in fact, probably enough time – I was feeling ready to lie down by the end), and the above section does contain my substantial learnings of LBF. But there were other things, and here are the highlights:

  • The Negotiating Author Contracts panel on Wednesday with a group of literary agents was a pleasantly insightful, intelligent, enjoyable discussion. Nice mix of enthusiasm and insight. Worth a listen if it ever appears as a podcast or similar, I’ll tweet it if I see it.
  • I don’t even like crisps that much, but I swear the packet I ate Wednesday luchtime after not eating all day was one of the tastiest treats I’ve ever consumed.
  • Did The Power Of Series Fiction panel on Tuesday. Obviously, I love serialised fiction in all its forms, so good to hear people caring, even if this specific discussion was largely about child-targeted serial stories.
  • The packet of mini-Party Rings I ate later on almost surpassed the crisps. Almost.
  • Author HQ at LBF was sponsored by The Daily Mail, unsettlingly. Gotta get the money somewhere, I suppose. I wasn’t bored for long enough to read the free papers left everywhere.
  • Really should’ve taken a relevant picture to accompany this blog post, but no, the only photo I took during those two days was the one over there of a smashed up bathroom and toilet near my house. Let’s pretend it’s a metaphor or something, okay?

That’s it, I think. Thanks to fellow blogger/writer-type Julianne Benford for accompanying me to the event – read her more informative, less crisp-focused blog post about it here – and already-self-published author and fellow Big Green Bookshop writing group member Chele Cooke for sharing her personal experience between seminars. If nothing else, self-publishing almost feels like a real thing that real people do now, y’know?