Double Distilled

Well, it's finished. I worked back through my first novel in its entirety, making liberal use of my deletion key and rewriting and expanding where it felt necessary. I applied the two years of experience I've earned since its completion. I took the end result yesterday and spent some time preparing it for the Kindle, this time I'm very happy with the formatting but need to review the book in its entirety before letting it rest.

It's quite a strange process, producing a book for the Kindle. In the end I exported my book as html and then applied some e-book specific mark-up for the page breaks. It's infinitely better than my previous attempt which in retrospect was absolutely awful. Thankfully the Kindle is very forgiving with formatting, you can put a plain text file on it and it will read fine even if it does look amateurish, which you would be right to be sore about if you happened to pay for it.

I upped the price very slightly, both to represent the additional work I've invested in it and to offer some reward to those who bought it in its less refined state. I also moved the prologue, which I always thought didn't really fit into the tone of the book into the product description page where I feel it fits better.

The lesson for me through this process has been that it's worth taking the extra time to polish what you've written and it can be fun in its own way to grab a coffee and refine your creation and then spend an hour or so tweaking the formatting into something presentable. More than that, something I can be proud of and would be happy to purchase myself.

The next step now is to start work on the sequel, I have two years of ideas for it welled up now but little has changed in how I see it working from when I finished the original. The originals spirit is still very much alive in me, though my voice has matured, evolved.

Let's see where it takes us.