How I Wrote and Published My First Novel On Amazon

(Part Two)

That was how I spent the pandemic. When I wasn’t homeschooling my kids, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the baby, masking up, or lysoling my groceries (only for a week before I realized how insane that was), I was writing.

I finished a draft of the manuscript at the end of 2020.

I had a kick-ass cover designed, which I was starting to tease out online as a promotion for the book, which I anticipated publishing by late 2020/early 2021.

I had an editor lined up for that December before the holidays, but he fell through due to Covid.

That was the first delay. For a while, I fretted over having announced the book and missed the date until I realized no one noticed, or if they did, they didn’t care a lick. So often, our insecurities get the better of us, and we think other people are far more concerned with what we’re doing than they actually are. It stops us from taking action.

By this point, I was editing the novel myself. That turned out to be a terrible idea. With a baby in the house and a pandemic raging, combing through a hundred fifty thousand word manuscript to find the “there” that should be “theirs” or “from” became “form,” is a recipe for insanity — and for never finishing the revisions or the novel.

I needed another way to go about this.

Fortunately, in March, my friend Ryan, an author, mentioned I should try Grammarly. I had never heard of Grammarly, so he explained what the program did and immediately downloaded it to my computer browser.

Get Grammarly Here

That was a game-changer. Suddenly, an inexperienced first-time author’s grammatical and spelling errors bound to be made could be caught and fixed. At least until I could find another professional editor. Which I soon did.

Hollywood in 2021 wasn’t faring much better. The industry was still in start-and-stop mode due to Covid outbreaks. Productions that were up and running resumed, and new productions began to mount. However, the Covid precautions on every production increased the cost of shows by roughly 20%. That varies from show to show, but I heard a number from several studio heads in early ‘21. That didn’t bode well. Even in a good year on a good day with a great project, Hollywood pitches are uncertain. They can take a long time and not result in a sale.

Meanwhile, the more I studied indie publishing, the more I realized Amazon had opened the door for storytellers. It was only a matter of writing your book (at least that’s what I naively thought when I first started. However, despite the other factors, the ability to write and publish your book on Amazon and elsewhere and make money doing so, so don’t take this as me complaining. Just pointing out there’s a bit more to it when you get into it.). So I opted not to take out Beatrice as a pitch again. Instead, I kept writing it as a novel.

In April, while reading the manuscript for a revision pass, something didn’t feel right about the story. I realized that the relationship between his sister and the detective needed to have a history. So I had to revise large portions of the book to incorporate this new element, resulting in a near rewrite. This was partially driven by an overhaul of past and present tenses, which I initially used to delineate flashbacks from the main storyline. However, it was pointed out that readers tended not to like that and would leave negative reviews. I didn’t have to change it, but I wanted to give the book as great a chance to find its audience as possible. This rewrite ended up taking the rest of spring and part of summer.

That summer, I took a pitch out to producers in Hollywood (a dystopian show that felt too soon for some given the still going pandemic, but is seriously kick ass, called “The Last War” more on that in some future posts. But check out the video pitch here:

THE LAST WAR Series Coming Soon...

So I decided to pause that until a better time to sell such an idea. However, those weeks gave me some time away from the novel.

By September, I was doing another editing pass. This took longer than expected primarily because of kids and life stuff, which given the restrictions here in California, kept screwing with our expectations (for instance, having our kids in school consistently).

In the end tho, I managed to finish the edit.

Finally, it was time to publish. I wanted the novel to drop on Amazon for Halloween 2021 (since the book opens on Halloween night).

I had heard about people doing presales. This was my first novel, and I had no audience, so this didn’t really make a difference for me. However, I thought it would be an excellent time to learn the process when I wasn’t relying on pre-sales. I would have nothing to lose and could understand the process/strategies I intended to employ down the road on future books.

I got everything set up on Amazon’s website, with the only thing left to do was upload the actual manuscript. Like most writers, there is always something to tinker with, and inexperience and nervousness had me doing that on the novel until the last minute. (This occurred when I transferred the word manuscript to vellum to “design” the layout of the book. This inevitably led to all sorts of that tinkering. But still, I was ready to go. The boom was done, tinkering aside, and I planned to upload the manuscript file the last day I had to do so (Amazon pre-sales require uploading a manuscript three days before the presale commences. If you don’t upload the manuscript and miss your pre-sale date, Amazon penalizes you by not allowing you to do another pre-sale for a year. This is a critical tool in an indie-published author’s arsenal, and it wasn’t one I wanted to lose, mainly as I had only set the presale as a way to learn the system when I thought I had nothing to lose. Well, on the day I was supposed to upload the manuscript— I had until midnight on that Wednesday to do so— I was talking to my friend Ryan, the author, called over a checklist manifesto of the things I need to do to publish and we need to do in the coming days to market the novel. We were talking until late at night, California time. But at 11:30, I said to him that I had to go and I was going to upload the management before the midnight deadline. However, when I signed into my account to upload the books, I saw a message from Amazon telling me I had missed my deadline.

I was stunned. I couldn’t figure out how that was possible. I knew that I had the right deadline day and time. I had taken a screenshot of it on my phone the day I said a pre-sale. I search my photo library and found the photo of the confirmation of my pre-sale. Sure enough, there it was midnight, Wednesday. So why the heck was Amazon saying I missed the deadline.? Then I looked at the screenshot photo more closely. The deadline was indeed Wednesday at midnight. But not Pacific Standard Time, but rather the deadline was for midnight, mountain time G.M.T. Which is two hours ahead. Or, to put it another way, I had missed my publication deadline by two hours.

I broke into a sweat. I told Ryan what had happened. He found this hilarious though he kindly offered some comfort by telling me about some of his own early day Screw-ups. I appreciate that, but still, I felt like a horse’s ass.

I called Amazon the next day and spoke to a very sweet customer service rep. I explained my screw-up. Fortunately, she was lovely and understanding. She told me I would not be banned from pre-sale and could republish my book.

I was relieved. Then nervous. Another screw-up. I thought I looked like a fool and wondered why anyone would read my book. I started to tinkerer with the book some more.

I forced myself to stop.

I didn’t have much choice. We were leaving the next day for a trip to Hawaii, our first vacation in two years, and the first time our son had been to the place where his mother is from. I needed to pack, so I hit save and promised myself that I would publish the book. I told myself I would publish the book while flying to Hawaii, which would make for a pretty good blog post about how to publish your book in the style.

Unfortunately, the airplane did not come equipped with Wi-Fi, and so I arrived in Hawaii with my book still as yet unpublished. It was now November, a few days away from Thanksgiving, and just over a month left until the end of the year.

I had thought I’d be ready to publish this book a year before. Now looking back, I see that I had made many necessary changes. I often wonder whether or not the mistakes I made were fortuitous because they gave me the extra time I told him we needed to revise the book.

The first time you’re writing a book, it’s a lot like going on a car trip to a destination you’ve never been to before. You’ve seen pictures of it, people who’ve been there have told you about it, so you know that it’s real. However, once the journey gets underway, you find yourself asking, “are we there yet? How much longer?” It’s an unfamiliar journey. The terrain is unknown. There are no landmarks that you recognize. So you start to doubt yourself. You wonder if maybe you took a wrong road somewhere. Perhaps you should’ve taken that left turn back in Albuquerque, as Bugs Bunny says.

The lesson is if you stay the course, follow the directions and stick to the road, you’re going to get to your destination. And when you do, you’ll look back on all the detours and second guesses and times you thought of turning back around, and you’ll realize that it was all part of what made the journey worth it and made the destination that you had arrived at that much sweeter. It also means that the next time you make this trip, you will recognize landmarks, and the road won’t be so familiar. And even if you take a slightly different route to get there the next time, you’ll know from having done it before that you will ultimately arrive if you just keep laying the rubber to the road and putting 1 foot in front of the other (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphors).

In the end, the courage of my convictions needed another few days to work itself back up to the level where I was finally ready to hit “publish.” So, just before it was time to start cooking Thanksgiving dinner, At about 11 AM on November 24, 2021, I hate I uploaded my finished manuscript for Beatrice clover to Amazon’s website and hit publish.

I have no expectations for the book other than that it was written and is out in the world for anyone who wants to enjoy it.

Now, it’s time to write the next one.