Start to Publish: Launching My First Novel (Part 1)

Hi

I am currently in the works for writing and and publishing my first novel. To be honest it'll be more of a novella. I'm shooting for 20-40,000 words.

This will be the second thing I've written of this length. However, this is my first attempt at self-publishing through Amazon and possibly other platforms.

The point of this post is

to share my journey and beneficial information. This is an ambitious endeavor, but I'm confident. This post is directed towards writers who are interested in self-publishing.

I'm going to discuss all the tools, books, and thinking behind what I've accomplished so far. Here we go...

At the start of January I decided I was going to try to make this my last year waiting tables(my day job that I've done for nearly 10 years). The gig does have the perks of often short shifts, and a flexible schedule to keep a side-hustle going.

To do this I decided that I would need hard written goals. I discovered @prowebwriter on Steemit and started following her and got in touch with her as well. She had some very good information and leads, but she also gave me what I needed most which was sincere encouragement. Thanks pro :)

One of the things she told me about was a method of goal setting called SMART. Which is an acronym that serves as a guide. The goals needs to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time sensitive.

It made sense so I decided it would due for now at least.

Next I wanted to revamp my "workspace." In other words, my laptop. I decided to remove all distraction from my laptop, and I downloaded rainmeter. It's got a learning curve, and there are other options, but for my current needs, it works.

Here's what my desktop currently looks like.

That's full screen. It's got a background image I like and you'll see some text on the side. "Bruja Livia" is the current working title of the novel. If I were to click that it would open a text document with my goals listed. That's rainmeter at work.

Here's what my goals currently read as

DAILY GOAL
Bruja Livia: Spend 1 hour each on setting and character descriptions

(January)WEEK 1 GOAL
Bruja Livia: Setting and character descriptions completed

(January)WEEK 2 GOAL
Bruja Livia: Arcs and synopses complete

(January)WEEK 3 GOAL
Bruja Livia: Chapter scene index cards completed

(January)MONTHLY GOAL
Bruja Livia: Finish all research and scrivener info for Bruja Livia

(February) WEEK 1
Bruja Livia: 20,000 words written and self-edited

(February) WEEK 2
Bruja Livia: 20,000 words written and self-edited

(February) WEEK 3
Have Bruja Livia professoinally edited or proofread
Cover Art for Bruja Livia

(February) WEEK 4
Finishing touches for Bruja Livia

(February)MONTHLY GOAL
Publish Bruja Livia on Draft2Digital and Amazon

"Week 1" of January actually started on the 14th. Which means that in my goals, "Week 3" is 4 days. I originally was working on and posted part of a short story called Bruja Livia. I decided to make that into my novella, so I removed it after about 3 days. Which is why on my blog you'll see this.

Back to my yeah-right goals. Some of them need refining. 20,000 words written and edited in a week, then again in another week. That's a goal. If reality is that the finished product is just under 20,000 words, that's OK. I'm shooting for around 100 pages, and less than 250. You might be wondering how I'm going to get something professionally edited and have cover art completed in one week. Well, I don't know yet either, but I know it can be done.

So, if you looked at my goals you'll notice that I started about halfway into January to START getting serious and plan to have a finished product at the end of February. Again, doing this for the first time. I don't really have money for cover artist, or editors, or a lot of things. I don't have a mailing list...I don't have a lot of stuff, and I don't even know all of what I'm going to need.

Probably seems ambitious bordering on idiotic...or just seems unrealistic and idiotic.

To that my response is that I set high goals for myself for a reason. It's better to achieve more than you would have by setting the bar high instead of completing everything as planned and wonder if you could have done more. Maybe that's just me.

There's a second part to this though. I believe I can do this. I also believe that novella will be one of, if not the best, thing I've ever written. No I didn't get struck in the middle of the night with the greatest idea of all time. I don't even have it completely fleshed out.

Through @prowebwriter I went to self-publishing with Dale From that site I learned about Chris Fox

This is where the journey and the boost of confidence really took off. Chris has his own Youtube channel which is directed almost exclusively at writers aiming to self-publish.

I have read three of his books now, which I am going to blatantly advertise for him here as well. I have also personally reached out for advice to him and he responded within 12 hours. I believe him to be an authentic, and sincere individual, who happens to love what he does and makes a lot of money at it.

Here are the books I've read, some of which are very controversial in the author world:
5,000 Words Per Hour
Write to Market
and
Launch to Market

These books contain exercises, some of which I'm still working on, but they are short fast reads.

If I were me 1 month ago reading this I would be extremely skeptical, and critical of what is written here. I still am, concerning his methods, but so far, I feel inclined to believe that he provides a way to write what you feel passionate about, to write better, to write faster, and to deliver something of value to people in a way that I can make a living off of. You be the judge, however, I'd tempt you to check out his books and practice his methods before knocking them. His ideology is not one that most people are familiar with. I've experienced some push-back from fellow writers on Steemit who have accused and criticized this methodology before really understanding it.

Moving on.

In one of his Youtubes he mentions Scrivener. Which is a tool for writers to organize and compose their works upon. I'm currently on my first 30 days of using the product(it's free for a month). So far I really enjoy it. This surprises me because for the past 10+years I've written everything on simple blank Notepad text documents. Never could get anything started on Google docs or, even worse, MS Word. I still used those programs, just not for the actual creation phase. I would always copy and past from Notepad onto a word processor. Scrivener, it should be mentioned, is not really a word processor. It's a program designed more as a medium for a first draft.

Through screenshots I'm going to share my tailored novel template with you(Scrivener offers one but I wanted to make my own as an exercise in getting to know the program, which, by the way, took me about 2 days to get through the tutorial)

I should mention that my day job is a full time position. I'm either at work, doing something with my wife, but mostly working on the novel. There's lots of hours-of-sleep math going on as of late. I believe this can be done. If you still don't think so, if you think I'm not being realistic, if you think "dude is working hard but it's not going to happen because it's not really possible," then I suggest you look into Chris Fox and his work. He started writing and published a novel in 21 days. Not only that but within the first week he was in the top #200 rank on Amazon. I wouldn't have understood the significance of that a week or two ago, but I do now. It's very very good. It means his book was massively successful. It means that if I wrote one book that did what his did, I'd be looking at the kind of money that would allow me to make a really fun phone call into work the next day.

In all seriousness, I'm not going to quit my day job at the first sign of success. However, my goal remains the same. The more time I get to spend doing what I love rather than what I have to do, the more I find meaning in my life. Let's take a look at my template.

This is not a comprehensive guide, at all, to Scrivener. Scrivener actually has one of those and I found it quite easy to follow.

On the left you'll see what is called the Binder. Draft, Part 1, 2, and 3, 3 Act Structure, Research, Templates, and Trash. Those open up to more Text documents. You'll also notice index cards. Those are basically synopses of each folder within the Draft. I'm not going to go into the details of each image because I think they are fairly self-explanatory. The index cards on the cork boards and to the right throughout the different screenshots give summaries of everything. The last two images are the two template sheets I've created. The first being Premise and the second one is Characters. These are sheets to be filled in.

This novel will follow the 3 Act Structure as well as Chris Fox's SALES method for building a novel. He has Youtubes on all of this if you're interested.

The SALES method builds your novel in the order of the letters of the acronym.
First you need a Setting
then Antagonist
Lead(protagonist)
Ending
Starting Point.

My template here is set up to give me all of that, a premise, characters, 3 act structure, plot and character arcs as well as storing all MDA(media, data, and articles) I find along the way. I've even included some music links in my scrivener document that I listen to for inspiration, or to help me get in the mood to do a writing sprint.

I am currently working on Setting and Characters. Setting was tougher than I thought. I had a good saved image that told me a lot, and I thought the characters would be tougher. Turns out Setting, more than anything, determines your genre. You can't know one without the other.

I've had to do extensive research(all done through Chris Fox's book exercises) to figure out which sub-genre to focus on.

This included first finding which genres I enjoy writing in the most and then finding similarities between them and Amazon's categories to ascertain which sub-genres readers were hungry for. This is all part of "writing to market."

I've nailed down my setting, for the most part, done some serious world building, geography, history, lore and religion, and I can feel the character sheets starting to fill themselves in in my head.

Any comments, questions, or advice is welcome. I hope you enjoyed this look into my current project. The point of all this is to record and share the process. If my book launches on time and successfully, I will be beyond happy, and you will have everything you need to know to do it yourself.