I have actually made a crazy ton of progress in the last week, going from just under 15k words to just barely—and I do mean barely—squeaking over 40k as of late last night. I'm excited about that and what that means for my end-of-October push to write as much as I can before November 1.
But let’s switch back to Say Your Line for a minute. A few weeks ago, I had finished my third round of personal edits on this book, and I sent it off to a couple of beta readers to look at. I chose to hire a few people from Upwork, and I have to say, I really liked it. I received over 70 bids for the job, but I found two really great betas that I plan to use again for future books. They sent me back some really nice feedback last week, and I’m working on incorporating some of their suggestions as well as some things I had already made notes about. I’m enjoying the way this book is turning out, and I can’t wait to share it with you!
The next step with the manuscript is to send it off to an editor for final polishing. I will be doing that here in the next week to ten days as I want to give the editor plenty of time to work through the manuscript and for me to go through their suggested changes before it’s time to get it all formatted for publication.
You might be wondering why I need to hire an editor. I used to do editing as my job. However, I learned from editing my first four books that I published all on my own that, sometimes, you need a second pair of eyes to go over everything, to make sure that you are not blind to some of the grammatical issues and other changes that need to be made in a story. I want Say Your Line to be as close to perfect as I can make it, so I’m eager to have someone else look at it with professional eyes.
I also, while all this editing and perfecting is going on behind the scenes, have a cover editor who is currently working on a beautiful cover for this story. I have seen several of the photos and other things as she’s including me in the steps along the way, and I’m thrilled! I can’t wait to see the finished product! (And if you want to see it prior to release week, you need to subscribe to my newsletter! That’s the kind of cool stuff that only my newsletter subscribers get to see early, and you don’t want to not be on that list! Go! Subscribe! Then come back.)
I think October has been a very successful writing month, and while it’s not quite over yet, I’m excited to see what November holds as I continue to work on my series and make progress with releasing my first novella!
Until next week, friends!