Yay and hooray, I've finally put the manuscript for my first commercial novel to bed. 63,397 words, 197 pages typed out, but more like 240 laid out in a book or epub format.
From first concept to last word, it took me 62 days, or about one day per 1,000 words. That compares really favorably to my first manuscript, which was 114,000 words in 364 days for about 314 words per day. But writing fast was part of the challenge I laid out for myself this year. I want to see how fast I can crank out novels. If I can publish four or five a year, that could mean some financial independence.
The next two goals I have for myself are to get this one laid out for pub; and to commission and purchase cover art. My goal is to have those two steps done by February 15. The layout is trivial. I could probably do it myself and I may very well do. But I have not got the chops to do art. Nope. No way. Nor would I want to lay out the cover.
To get the cover done, I looked at covers of popular authors who write in the thriller genre and picked out about eight covers I really like. I've analyzed what I like about them and I've been hunting for artists on Artstation and DeviantArt. It appears that they ones on Reedsy are just too expensive: like $600-$1000 for a nice cover. I'm in more of the $100-$400 range, and hopefully more like the former than the latter.
A friend of mine, one of my beta readers, Steven Youndt, made this mockup of my cover concept. The art style is all wrong but the layout looks about right. Of course if I work with an artist, I would defer to their concept to some degree as well.
It's been a blast so far working in a writing style and on subject matter so very different from the medieval historical fiction - epic poem combo of Lions Red and Gold. I look forward to tackling the next steps and to publish my very first novel sometime around April 30 of this wonderful new year of 2019.
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