Kor’Thank, word count:  11,232

Echo 4, word count:  240,208  (after my first pass, I cut out roughly 105,000 words.  Time for my second pass!)

Thanks to All Who Bought Echo!  And BIG THANKS to Melissa, Barbara, Ian, Lorna, [anonymous], Lisa, Meg, Matt, Bobby, F.T., Alice Smith, Leslie Coop, Richard, Shauna, Sydney, Pam, Jessica, Angela, Kiesa, Ross, Keith, Alice, Daina, Daniel, Yolanda, Trace, Books4me, Vince, Laurie, DAE, Jace, Matthew, and Siobhan for posting AMAZING reviews on Amazon!!!  Ashley too for the 5 star on Nook!  I’d like to reiterate that leaving a positive review for any author is the equivalent of leaving $100 tip at a restaurant (I know some authors who’d actually pay that much for a good review).  Although I sincerely appreciate any love you leave me on Amazon, please consider leaving a review for ANY author you know, simply as a random act of kindness…because it’ll mean the world to ’em!  (A good place to start are those I’ve listed—a few of them are authors.  Let me know if you want me to put you in touch with ’em and I’ll be more than happy to do so!  And no, you don’t need to have purchased their book to leave a review on Amazon; you simply needed to have used Amazon at one time or another to leave what’s called an “unverified purchase” review.  If you purchased their book at the store or on another eReader, you can still leave a review for them.)

News:  Still holding to my schedule of 250 words/day for Kor’Thank.  For those of you interested in my “process,” (yeah I know it’s a douchey word, but it conveys meaning, so whatever), I’ve just completed my first editing pass at Echo 4, reducing it from roughly 355,000 words to 240,000 words, or from roughly 1100 pages to 800.  For my next passes, I’m still gonna focus on cutting it down, but my primary focus will now be on smoothing out the chapters.  What I do from this point on is after I read a chapter, I add a brief note about its status to the file name (readable, needs smoothing, still rough, etc.).  I’m gonna continue doing this until all chapters are smoothed over.  My rough goal is to have Echo 4 published by June of 2018, but we’ll see.

After much futzing with Ingram Spark I’ve decided to go paperback with Amazon Createspace.  If I used Ingram Spark, I would have had to price the paperback at like $12 just to cover costs, which in my mind is WAY too high to price an indie novel.  So currently, I’m working with my cover designer to upload a proper graphic to Amazon.  Those of you who’ve been through this know it’s a bit of a pain; your graphic has to be a landscape pic that encompasses the back, the spine, and then the front.  But whatever—I’m glad that things are moving along, and that I’ve got SOMETHING to work with.

That’s it for now.  If you’re a writer, I wish you inspired drafting and insightful editing!!!  🙂 🙂 😀