Completing a Novel

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What Used to be Texas Cover Reveal!

(by Wynter Designs)

Yesterday, I finished the manuscript of the first book for my new series! I was happy and excited—and eager to start book 2.

My husband celebrated with me by getting me dinner out. Every finished book gets its own little celebration. He makes sure of it. He’s a good guy.

This is my thirteenth book (8 under Maira Dawn, 4 under another pen name) and one might think that the excitement would wan. It kinda did at the end of the Sanctuary’s Aggression series. Though I love it, at the end I felt more relief that I’d finally finished it then actual excitement.

On reason, I think, is that I really had been ignorant of how much work went into creating even one novel, let alone a series. Originally, I’d thrown the series on Wattpad with little polish, as many stories are on that platform. Over time, though, I did go through and do some of my own editing to take off the rough edges.

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Once I made the decision to publish on Amazon, I began to see the real, intense work that goes into a novel you want to sell. I had a limited budget so I went over my manuscript again—the entire series— first with rewrites then with Grammerly and Prowriting aid. I recommend both as each seem to catch different things. I then also transferred it to Google Docs and made further changes on its recommendations.

This made it as clean as possible when going to an editor—which gave me a cheaper rate. In general, the editors I’ve worked with will offer a cheaper price for cleaner work. That’s why they want a sample to quote.

To this day, I do the same four-step editing process before sending it. A couple of times I've accidentally skipped a step and then I get an upcharge from the editor. I don’t blame her. I can see all the extra work she did on my behalf.

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After all the editing, there is the formatting (I do that myself with Vellum which I love, love, love), and the cover and blurb.

Last series, with my limited budget, I needed to do most of that myself. But for the What Used to be series, I got the wonderful lady at Wynter Designs to create the cover. How do you like it? I think its great!

I also had The Blurb Doctor helped with the all-important and difficult task of creating the blurb. I was also very happy with her work.

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And then there is marketing—but we won’t get into that today because it’s such a huge subject.

Today, I’ll just bask in the joy of a new book completed and let my head swirl with ideas for the second one.

Fortunately for me, I’ve had this book edited as I wrote because I’ve been uploading It chapter by chapter onto Kindle Vella. So if you can’t wait for the book release—which will still be a couple of months—you can start reading right now on that platform.

The ebook will go out to beta readers in a couple of months. After that, it will be time to publish! Months and months of work for 60,000 words of fiction—and worth every minute of it.

Happy Reading,
Maira :)