I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is about Dreams of Deucalion Book 1: Special Recon, whereas the bad news is about the entire The Sword of Sirius trilogy. Plus, I think I might have to make a new purchase, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Let’s take a look at the key performance indicators before getting into any details.
Last Week’s Progress By the Numbers
The numbers for the week are a little misleading.
The total word count and the number of chapters is a little misleading. Because of a revelation I had about one of the secondary characters, I had to move her chapter from Special Recon to Dreams of Deucalion Book 2: Bait and Bleed. The chapter count for Special Recon remained steady at 43 because of that, but the good news here is that I finished the first draft of Special Recon! It came in at 111,047 words, which is about 11,000 words longer than the longest book in The Sword of Sirius. That’s approximately where I wanted it to be.
That means the number representing the words written this week is actually lower than the reality, for two reasons. First, moving the chapter deferred around 2,000 words to the next book. Second, it’s because of what I found when I tried to execute another one of my goals for the week.
How Many Drafts is Enough?
I had hoped that reading each chapter aloud before writing, plus a ProWritingAid pass, plus an alpha read, plus a beta read, plus a proofreader would be enough editing. To test that, one of my goals this week was to read aloud the first six chapters of each book in The Sword of Sirius: Red Flag Warning, Collapse Zone, and Firebreak. I started, of course, with Red Flag Warning. I found an average of two typographical errors in each chapter, plus one or two passages that I thought could be improved. But worst of all, I caught two continuity errors: one major, one minor. Well, both were minor-ish, but they’re not acceptable.
Reluctantly, I concluded that I’m going to need to put all three manuscripts through one more draft. It’s impossible to prevent all typographical errors, of course, but two per chapter is too high. Plus, the continuity errors are just not acceptable. That’s going to push my hoped-for publication date back by at least two weeks — possibly more.
This week, I was able to finish the (I hope!) final draft for thirty-two of forty-five chapters in Red Flag Warning. This week had a holiday weekend, and I’m not sure I’ll have that kind of time next week. Well, that’s what vacation days are for, isn’t it?
New Tooling for Creating Ebooks and Paperbacks
I’ve been using Amazon’s Kindle Creator to create my ebooks and Amazon’s Word template to create my paperbacks. Both have worked okay. Just okay — a resounding okay. The ebooks look solidly average, just like the paperbacks.
I don’t necessarily want to stand out based on formatting. However, indie writers live and die by their reviews and newsletters. A key tool to encourage readers to leave reviews and join newsletters is the back matter. And I’m sorry to say that Kindle Create isn’t strong in this regard. Neither is the ebook generator in Draft2Digital.
This looks okay. It could look better.
I use a Mac (an M1-based MacBook Pro for writing and an M1 Max-based Mac Studio for everything else). I think it’s telling that Scrivener had been written first for Mac. Creative tools have a rich history on this platform. Checking around, I’ve found that the leading ebook/paperback formatting software is called Vellum. I want to up my back matter game, so I think I’m going to invest the time in seeing what Vellum can do for me.
It’s not a free tool. That’s not a deal-breaker; I’m not against paying for software. I still have a full-time, non-writing career, so that’s not the issue. The issue is that I recently totaled all of the advertising, promotions, covers, and editorial work I’ve paid for both Evolution’s Hand and The Sword of Sirius, and, damn. I’m still in the red. I’d like to show a profit at some point! Adding more tools isn’t helping that cause.
Honestly, that’s a contributing factor to me investing the time to put The Sword of Sirius through another draft. I really want those books to do well.
Progress against Last Week’s Goals
Here’s how I did against last week’s goals:
- Finish Porter’s Resolution: Done!
- Read the first six chapters of The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning aloud to confirm it’s ready: Done! But it uncovered the need to do this for all forty-five chapters. So, there’s that.
- Read the first six chapters of The Sword of Sirius Book 2: Collapse Zone aloud to confirm it’s ready: Not done! Will be replaced by a complete third draft.
- Read the first six chapters of The Sword of Sirius Book 3: Firebreak aloud to confirm it’s ready: Not done! Will be replaced by a complete third draft.
- Begin building the ebook and paperback versions of The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning (stretch objective): Not done! Will need to wait until after the third draft is complete.
Goals for the Week in Progress Report 2024 Week 36
Here’s what I hope to complete this week:
- Complete the final draft of The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning
- Start the final draft of The Sword of Sirius Book 2: Collapse Zone
- Prototype the ebook version of The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning in Vellum
- Establish the Scrivener project for Dreams of Deucalion Book 2: Bait and Bleed and begin sketching the character starting points
- Rebuild the Facebook ad for September and see if revitalized ad copy helps sales of Evolution’s Hand Book 1: Executive Action
What Do You Think?
How do you format your ebooks? Do you use free tools like Draft2Digital or Kindle Create? Or a paid tool like Vellum? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!
It’s been a while, but I use Word and convert to HTML before uploading to the various sites. I’m basically an MS Office Professional thanks to my day job, so it’s what I’m most comfortable with. I do have a copy of Calibre which is free and quite good at testing different formats. I have heard good things about Velum, but I’m Windows based at the moment so it’s not something I would consider.
It’s been a long time since I used Word for that (converting to HTML)! But it’s a solid word processor. I’ve never felt comfortable with it, though, which is probably because my favorite used to be WordPerfect. I’ve never had a word processor liked more than WordPrefect for DOS 4.2.
Well, from the perspective of nostalgia, anyway. I fired up a DOS box the other day, and I still have disk images of WordPerfect. It’s great to use, until I tried to save a file — and ran smack dab into the 8.3 limit.