My plan tonight was to talk about fear which would have gone hand in hand with yesterday’s topic, excitement. Plans. Pfft.

As it was, got up later than planned due to a headache brought on by the rain. Argh. Did the day job. Worked out in the afternoon. As I was cleaning up, I noticed the time. Hey! It was nearly 5pm on a Wednesday. This is when the writers group that I’m part of meets. It’s been quite some time and I decided it was time to join back in.

It’s a great group of writers, all of us amateurs and nearly all of us either with day jobs or students. I didn’t mean to, but I got us on the topic of self-promotion, platform building, and finding readers. Great conversations were had on that topic.

Then we got into publishing, book covers, and editing and the costs associated with each. This is were opinions differ. There’s the mind set that you MUST put money into editing and covers in order to have a great book, it’s all a matter of how much money.

There’s also the mindset of putting out the best book you can for what you can afford. There were opinions up and down the spectrum.

I’m not saying write, produce, move on. Heinlein’s Rule #3 is edit, but don’t edit to death. Yes, read through your work (or cycle and edit as you go) but put out a clean manuscript. There are grammar tools out there to help you. You can have word read your document to you which will help you identify rough spots. There’s a LOT of options that cost next to nothing if that’s your budget.

It’s about putting out the best work you can within your budget. Readers will be forgiving to a certain degree. If a work is littered with typos and grammatical errors, many will put it down and some will leave you bad reviews. It happens. The goal isn’t perfection, but the best book you can put out. Making sure a manuscript is clean.

Perhaps have a friend read it first to see if they can identify something. I know several writers that have a beta-reader team that will point out flaws and issues. That’s another route you can take.

All I’m saying, you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars per manuscript if that’s not in your budget. You can put out a book for next to nothing except your outlay of time. Put in the time, do the work.

That’s what I’m doing and I’ve got a LOT of work ahead of me over the next couple of months before I begin my rapid release launches. My goal isn’t perfection, it’s entertainment.

Until Next Time!

Stay Awesome!