July 24, 2023

Taking down story, while uploading to pre-order.

Daily Diary, Day 1058:

I am posting this earlier than usual because I want to remind everyone that the first draft of Dandy and the Dognappers, which I have been posting serially on substack, is complete and this is the last day you can read it in this form, because this evening I am going to take these chapters down. This means the only way you will be able to read the story in the future is to buy the edited and polished novella when I publish it as an ebook on multiple retailers.

The first step in this process was to edit the draft that I had put up on substack, which I finished doing yesterday, and the next step is to send this edited draft out to beta readers, which I have now done as well. After getting feedback from these readers, I will again edit and then send to the person who copy edits for me. After she gets her suggestions back to me, I will make, I hope at that point, only minor changes, and send on to my professional proof reader. When I have corrected the typos and comma errors she always finds, I will have the final version.

Meanwhile, I have decided to put this novella up as a pre-order, to go live August 25. This means I have spent time this morning formatting the current draft in Vellum, so I can upload upload it to the main retailers (Kindle, Kobo, GooglePlay, AppleBooks, and Barnes and Noble.)

The way this works is that I will replace this draft file with the final version when it is done, so what I am uploading today is a placeholder.

I am always ambivalent about doing pre-orders for my books, sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. On one hand, having a book up for pre-order, means that during that period I can encourage people to order, so readers will all get the book on the same day, which can produce a kind of excitement, encourage early reviews, etc.

The negative aspects of doing a pre-order are that when you set up a pre-order, you have to have the final version of the book completely done from between 4 to 10 days before the date it is to go live (depending on the retailer), and that generates a bit of anxiety in me.

My fear is that there will be some problem in the multiple steps between first draft and final draft. One way to handle that is to put the pre-order date way in the future, but once a book is done, I hate the idea of it sitting there for weeks and not getting it into readers hands right away! 

In any event, because this is a novella, and this means the process of getting feedback and editing doesn’t take as long, I decided to go for the pre-order. As the links for the pre-order go live, I will tell you here, as well as announce in my monthly newsletter, which I am sending out on Thursday.

As I’ve mentioned several times, this whole process of putting up a story as I write it, as a kind of serial, has been an experiment, and today I would like to take a preliminary poll to see how you all felt about the experiment.

But now I am going to leave you with one of the last rose blooms I have been able to find, now that the weather has turned so warm.

Hi, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series.

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