Writing My First Book. A Diary. Episode 16: The Book is Completed. Audio Book Next.

By Chris Harris

As promised, Louise completed the editing and proofreading by the 1st of March, and the book, Ordinary Lives and Extraordinary Messes is now finished. The next stage is trying to find readers, which I am actually looking forward to. I have always enjoyed a challenge.

Needless to say, writing a book turned out to be a lot harder than I had imagined, even though this one is a collection of short stories. That said, the actual writing of it was enormous fun. Creating a world of your own is a wonderful experience, and it is probably one of the most satisfying creative things I have ever done.

I have also been very lucky. A friend of mine, Louise, who does professional editing work for organisations such as The Economist and UNESCO, kindly agreed to help with the editing and proofreading. The most chaotic part of the process was probably the endless swapping of Google documents containing the nine separate stories. I suspect that particular confusion was largely my fault, although Louise was far too polite to say so directly. In the end, however, we got there.

What I had never really considered before was just how demanding editing and proofreading must be. During the final week Louise sent me a Google Docs suggestion pointing out that I had completely mixed up the difference between nationalisation and privatisation. I assumed at first that there must have been a mistake. Politics is something I follow closely, so surely I would not get something like that wrong.

But I had.

It would have been a terrible error to leave in the final text. The remarkable thing is that I must have read over that passage a dozen times and never noticed it. Louise spotted it. The level of concentration and attention to detail required for that kind of work is genuinely impressive.

We are meeting on Sunday to discuss the next stage of the project, which will almost certainly involve producing audio versions of the stories. Louise is able to narrate them herself, and she will also be creating the artwork. We have not fully decided on the format yet, but because all nine stories take place in the same fictional village, Louise is planning to draw a map of the setting. She is a very good artist, so I suspect it will look excellent.

From what I have read about audiobooks, having accompanying artwork can help attract attention, and it may also make the project more appealing to smaller independent publishers when I hawk the book around, before self-publishing, should I fail. A collection of short stories already presented as audio with its own artwork suggests a certain level of thought, independence, and organisation behind the project.

So that is where things stand. The first stage is complete.

In the meantime, I am already well into writing my first full novel, which centres around a fictional non league football team. I have stuck to 2-2,500 words a week for sixteen weeks now, and to be honest, as we have been bogged down into knocking Ordinary Lives….into shape it has been great having another project on the go to help maintain some sanity!

Stage two now begins.

#writing a book #content creation #writing blog #writing for dummies #first novel