March Update of all things Author

It’s a wet and windy day here in the UK so it’s the perfect time to snuggle under a blanket on the sofa and write my March update.

We are still in the midst of lockdown 3.0 but as more and more people get jabbed in their arms and the number of covid cases thankfully reduces, the closer we are to getting out. Lots of smiley daffodils are popping up everywhere, we've had a couple of early sunny days and the promise of Spring is in the air. We’re even musing over booking a trippette somewhere, feels very extravagant.

More Editing & Sending it to a Reader Friend

So book-wise, what have I been up to? Well, I went crazy and paid for the full edition of Pro Writing Aid (well just the monthly subscription, not the full, full one, I’m not made of money!). This means I can check full chapters at a time rather than copy and pasting 500 words at a time, which was a laborious task. It also means I can check my Overused Words and Sticky Sentences. The Overused Words tool is jolly handy, who knew I used the words ‘know’, ‘think’, ‘believe’, ‘just’ and ‘look’ quite so many times on a page? The Sticky Sentencesreport, I’m still getting to grips with.

So I whizzed the old manuscript through PWA for yet another round of editing (which actually took a lot longer than I’ve made it sound) and now I’ve passed it onto a friend to have a read through. She’s kindly offered several times so I’ve finally sent it to her, eeshk! It’s always a scary moment for me when I press send and release my book baby out into the wild. Although it is almost 20 years old so it’s probably time it left home and made its own way in the world.

Technical Bits

So while the book is out doing its thing, I’m concentrating on the technical stuff like formatting and marketing. To this end, I’ve set up a Mailchimp account for sending out newsletters to my plethora of fans. I now just need to work out how to use it - and to land myself a plethora of fans. If you would like to receive my rambling newsletters sign up on my website page and I’ll be in touch, just as soon as I’ve figured it out.

And lastly but not leastly, I’ve been working on my book cover! This is the most exciting bit. I say I’ve been working on it but technically it’s the old Hubster who’s been doing the work. Yes he develops websites, yes he has a marketing company and yes he has a background in graphic design. All 3 very handy things for a newbie author with very little start-up cash. The cover is looking pretty good, just needs a couple of tweaks and then I’ll send it out to the Facebook masses to ruminate over.

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