Post #261 June 21 2021 “The Plague is Coming!” In the last week, I finished the first draft of my sf novel The Farpool: Plague. It comes in at 225 pages and about 123,000 words. What’s next? The real work begins. I keep a file called Next Steps for every project I do. It tells me what I have done and what still needs to be done. Below, I’ve reproduced this file for the current project…. 1. Complete any needed expansion of Story Outline, and Sequence of Events. DONE 2. Re-read all titles in The Farpool Stories for continuity with new stories DONE 3. Complete List of Major Players DONE 4. Background and personality sketches on major characters DONE 5. Details on medical/biological effects of the Purple and medbot interventions DONE 6. Write Chapter and Scene Details (2195 CE) DONE 7. Started first draft: 5 April 2021 8. Finished first draft: 10 June 2021 9. Review and edit final 10. Spellcheck 11. Book descriptions 12. Tag lines 13. Word 97 version 14. Set all text to Normal and enforce my styles 15. Verify cover format USE JPEG! 16. Projected upload date: 2 July 2021 From this, you can see I’m proposing to have this work finished and ready to upload to Smashwords by 2 July. This list is to remind me of all the things, after writing, that need to be done to finish a project. I’m currently on #9. So, there is still a lot of work to be done. And the job is somewhat more difficult in that this book is #6 in the series The Farpool Stories and there are 2 more to come. Just preserving continuity with earlier works is a big job in itself. Once the book file and cover file are in good shape, the job turns to marketing efforts. Smashwords offers a lot of recommendations on how to market ebooks. I’ll cover a few here that I like to follow. First, consider including an excerpt from the next novel at the end of this one. This is a form of pre-selling, or maybe whetting a potential reader’s appetite. Of course, this also means you have to have written enough of the upcoming work to make an excerpt. That has not been done yet…one more thing to do. Another marketing idea from Smashwords is to do your upload at a strategic time, ideally just before a major holiday, or even just on a Thursday or a Friday. The idea behind this is that it is during these periods that prospective readers will have more time to browse and come across your work. In my experience, this works pretty well. A third recommendation is to do what I’m doing right here…pre-notifying all my blog readers that something is coming. Also, you should do some of this on your web site and also on Facebook if you have an account, which I don’t yet. All of these ideas are good ways to get the word out that you’ve got something new coming and there’s even more new stuff after this. Pretty much anything that gets your name into the minds of readers is a good thing (like a review in Goodreads). As mentioned, The Farpool: Plague is title #6 in my series The Farpool Stories. As of mid-April 2021, this series had garnered 6587 downloads. That means I potentially have a ready-made audience who might be interested in any new works in this series. Anything I can do to let them know of new titles coming is a good thing. So, here’s the moral of the story: Just finishing the first draft of a book is only the beginning. What follows is at least as important to your success as doing the storytelling in the first place. Don’t skimp on it. The next post to The Word Shed comes on June 28, 2021 See you then. Phil B.