Lessons I Learned Through The Game

It feels crazy to think that roughly a year ago I declared the manuscript for The Game ready to move forward into pre-publishing work. The feeling of passing the manuscript off of the work table and, in that sense, away from a sense of semi-fluidity under my hands was sureal. It felt like the whole story was suddenly locked into place and real.

Over the next few weeks, I listened to my family’s commentary as they read through the manuscript and gave their commentary at the wit and humor. And I treasure the  memory of hearing my wife say that at times the action sequences got intense and exciting enough that she had to stop and remember that theses are just boys playing a game. (I told her that that was how those boys wanted it to read because that is how they viewed themselves in those moments—they were epic heroes and villians!)

By the time we rolled into November my wife had moved into formating the manuscript and adding in all of the beautiful artwork from my brother, Ben Peak. Then on to publishing by the end of the month and finally hitting the shelves by December.

It was exilliration to see the first physical copy in all of its glory.

Now, almost a year later, I think there are a few lessons I’ve learned from that process.

Like how my wife and I want to handle illustrations in the future. I love having illustrations in my books to help cement the world into existence (likely something that has stuck with me since I read The Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddle), but formating them into all three editions of The Game was surprisingly difficult. In the future, I’m thinking that I will release a paperback and ebook edition right away without illustrations and then later do a deluxe hardback with illustrations and maybe use a nicer custom printer. This will work nicely on two fronts. First, it will help us get the book on shelf a bit faster once the final edits are made. Secondly, it will allow sales of the first prints to generate the revenue for the illustrations, meaning that perhaps I can have a bit more robust budget for such things.

Another lesson I learned the hard way during the writing of The Game was that I needed a locally based writing software rather than one that was solely cloud based. The entirety of my manuscripts were on Google Drive at one point—emphasis on were. I was dismayed one fall day to note that all of my edited versions of the manuscript had suddenly dissapeared without a trace. Oddly enough I still had the unedited versions that I had sent out to a few beta readers and a I had a physical print out with all of my wifes editting notes on it. So, while it thankfully wasn’t a total loss, it was definetly a wake up call to change up my system. I still haven’t found my long term setup, in my opnion, but I have a system that allows me to jump between my chromebook and my phone as needed, which has been helpful. (For any author nerds out there wondering, I’m using an app called Writer Journal that stores the data in my local device and allows me to sync up between my chromebook and phone via bluetooth).

The third thing I learned from The Game is how I write. I found that I fall into the camp of bullet pointing out my outline and painting out snippets of scenes and emotions that I want to hit on, but then I let the story kind of flow downhill in whatever path it seems to want to go. It’s interesting, often whole characters will pop up out of nowhere and create themselves as necessary to the story dispite my never having even thought of them. This catches me off guard at times, but aside from the initial spontanuos generation of themselves, my characters typically don’t completely blindside me with their actions. I’m usally seeing where they are going at least a few paragraphs or more ahead of them. Outlining and writing Questline and Founder’s Legacy have been far smoother with knowing my style. I don’t think The Game suffered for being the first in line (aside from just the sheer time it took to get the thing done), and I am still quite pleased to have my name on it.

The next lesson I hope to learn from The Game is marketing and selling a book on Amazon. I’m not expecting to become a millionaire off of this thing, but I am eager to let the selling of this title create the systems I will use on future projects. Currently, I have been reaching out to people that I know have read the book and asking them if they would mind leaving a review for it on amazon to help boost the appeal of it and get me to a point where my upcoming ad campaigns will have a bit more traction. I’m very interested to see how the amazon ads will play out.

Another bit I am trying out, and still in the hopes of gaining more reviews, I am setting up a free ebook promotional to run from October 17th-19th. During this time The Game ebook will be available for free through amazon. I really enjoy this story and, frankly, am just eager to get it in peoples hands to hear what they think of it. I hope that you will be able to download a copy of it and, if you could, leave it a review to help others find it as well.