As we near the new year, I find myself thinking more and more about what lies ahead in 2015. I wrote a previous post (here) about my resolutions and such for next year, but I feel like I left out some rather important details about what is coming up and where I am headed.
If you have visited my blog before, you may have noticed a rather big change. Randomly this week, I decided that I would like to make my website/blog look a bit more professional. I am the kind of person who carries a notebook covered in stickers or drawings to cover the dull solid color, and before, my blog looked the same way with a rather bright red Victorian wallpaper used as a background. By prowling around Goodreads and various blogs on WordPress, I realized that my blog did not look professional at all. It was overdone, over saturated with color, and not very good in terms of marketing. Using the blogs of “real” authors (aka they know what they’re doing) as a template, I set to work on the Writer’s Habitarium. As you can see, the menu tabs have been streamlined to only home, about, books, and buy links for my books and gone is the crazy wallpaper. While I would love to slather my pages in rainbows and stickers, I know that isn’t going to cut it in the real world if I want to be taken seriously.
With book two on its way in a few months, I feel that I no longer have the excuse that I have no idea what I’m doing. Since publishing The Earl of Brass in June, I have learned a lot, especially in terms of formatting for ebook and paperback as well as marketing and networking. Currently, I am trying to dissect the html coding and formatting in the ebook I had professionally done, so I can do it myself with The Winter Garden. Sometimes I wonder if I am insane for trying to be independent and do all of this stuff myself, but I gave myself a tight deadline and plan on sticking to it as closely as possible. When I published book one, I was able to get the paperback ready myself with few issues, so hopefully, with a bit of research, this will go smoothly as well.
Part of me is VERY pro-physical book and tends to neglect ebooks or other formats, but I’m quickly realizing how important other markets are. The Winter Garden will definitely be in ebook form (currently The Earl of Brass is only on Kindle and in paperback), but I am not sure whether I will release it for other ebook platforms apart from Kindle since I tend to do little business from Kobo, itunes, or Nook. What I am doing is creating an audiobook. In November, I joined ACX and got in touch with a voice actor. He has recorded the first fifteen minute sample of the book, and I absolutely love it. As this gets underway, I will post more about it, but the current schedule is that it will be out in late February to precede the launch of The Winter Garden.
Well, I think that is all for now. Hopefully the next time I post will be to say that The Winter Garden is finished, and I am moving onto the editing process. Anything you are looking forward to in 2015?
Kara Jorgensen 