Since launching Cairns Writes in September 2012, to date (June 2014) Mike has written over 20 full length novels, a whole load of short stories and a fair few blog posts. His average weekly word count is about 30,000 but last week he was pretty chuffed to do a stonking 50,000 words in a week!
Needless to say at the back end of things, getting completed works out to you, our lovely readers takes a bit of polishing and is a bit of a longer process than the initial first draft…
A few people have asked us what happens behind the scenes of self pub’ so I thought i’d jot down our ‘nifty’ process for turning the books around:
- Write first draft, this can take anything from a week to a month depending on how many projects are going on at once.
- Brief artist if incorporating original hand drawn art into cover
- Brief cover designer
- Wifey’s read through edit
- Re-write
- Confirm cover design
- Out to beta readers (for the full length novels)
- Re-write incorporating feedback
- Professional editorial review
- Re-write
- Copy edit and proof read by our trusty copy editor (aka Mike’s mum)
- Final corrections
- Format for Kindle and epub (this is the really fun part…)
- Load onto the various websites and distribution channels
- Bug our friends mercilessly to buy it 🙂
- Format for print
- Brief cover designer for print ready artwork
- The hard work of marketing really begins.
We are continually refining as we learn more about the crazy world of Indie publishing and with 4 or 5 projects on the go at once we don’t always stick religiously to the order of things, but it hopefully gives you some idea of why we have no social life to speak of 🙂