More progress made, but this week it’s mostly on the business and production side.
My wife Kim has almost finished crafting the eBook version of Angel. It already looks beautiful, illustrated, and professional. She has worked so hard on it, has learned tons, fought several setbacks over as many weeks, and is now deservedly proud.
She cried showing it to me. I cried.
My first published story, coded by the hands of the woman who has supported and believed in me above all others. And the first of many we’ll finish together. The end of my weekend was crowned by that lovely moment. :-)
Kate Whitmore came through with three interior illustrations of the main characters to grace the eBook and print versions at scene breaks and on the final page. Two of them could contain spoilers, but the excellent picture of Melissa below from early in the story doesn’t:
While Kim coded her weekend away— interspersed by shouts of jubilant discovery and screams of utter frustration— I shifted my attention to nuts and bolts publishing stuff, and the purely business side of being an indie author. Keywords. Categories. Metadata. Descriptions… a lot of this goes hand-in-hand with how Kim will code the eBook of Angel, so we’re working in close tandem. Moreover, we’re learning, making mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes to make an effective process for future releases.
It’s time consuming, but worthwhile and working. For example, when Kim discovered a problem in her code she couldn’t trace down, she recoded the whole eBook from scratch and by hand. The first attempt had taken her weeks, the second, only a few hours.
On my end, I had already done a lot investigation over the years into how metadata like keywords and categories are an important aspect of making your work discoverable by an audience. But now that I’ve got a specific story to market, it’s all far-more tangible and nitty-gritty. I’m hunting down threads and looking at where others succeed and fail. Then I’m putting my own ideas to the test, abandoning those that fall short while exploring those that seem to hit on something. Doing that was my job all Sunday, and again Monday night.
Kim is now focusing on getting the print version of Angel together, which is familiar ground for her given her background in hardcopy/graphic design and printing. She’s thinking it’ll be a one-weekend job. Meanwhile, I’m tackling the questions of how we want to shape the metadata of the eBook for maximum effect. It’s a lot of work, but the close teamwork is nice. We’re getting there. :-)
Have a great week everyone, and keep writing!
~Jason H. Abbott
Aethereal Engineer 
Congratulations. I’ve been fighting with my ebooks for over a year. The price you pay for wanting quality products.
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Thank you, Ben. You’re so right about putting in the time to make a quality product, and I have the advantage of someone who can code and has years of experience in graphic and web design. But I don’t want to fall into the trap so many other indie authors get into: releasing under-edited, under-polished and under-supported books.
As the old saying goes: “You can have it quick, you can have it cheap, or you can have good. Pick two.” ;-)
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