for those of you who don't really do YouTube shorts the plot of my life recently goeth
thusly back in June 2022 I had a funny idea for a YouTube short involving a writer auditioning
fantasy heroines for her new book which somehow turned into a 50-something episode YouTube short
serial about Caroline a romance author writing her first fantasy romance Rosamund her recalcitrant
and trope averse heroine and their enemies to besties relationship the thing was everyone
kept asking but what book is this because I want to read it! but there wasn't a book because it
was just a series that I'd made up in my head so when I finished writing and editing the shorts
which was November of last year and I'd set them all to scheduled upload or whatever I thought to
myself well I could try writing it into a book and if it sucks then no one ever has to know because
I've been very clear that the book doesn't exist there is there is no book. I should point out at
this juncture that if you're a writer you're going to hate me by the end of this video but
can't be helped I hope you enjoy the story anyway. turning the shorts into a book which required a
lot of expansion was actually fun so as you would expect also kind of hard work but some approaching
National Novel Writing Month speeds later by just after Christmas I had a zero draft of 55
000 words you couldn't call it a first draft because there's too much still missing but the
majority of the story was there so I release it to my patrons and said 'hey here is the thing that I
have so far what do you think?' and then I was ill for two solid months and that wasn't great
but I'm better now so yeah I spent the latter part of February and March trying to incorporate the
suggestions which my patrons had made into the manuscript and kind of adding more bits
in specifically more Caroline because it really didn't have a lot of Caroline and it needed more,
and by the end of March I had a first draft of 60 something thousand words hooray a first draft!
It still needs a bit more Caroline but that's not really the point and then I had another funny idea
for a video to promote the fact that you could go to my patreon and pay a couple of dollars and you
could read the first draft so I wrote a YouTube short pitching one crisis at a time to baen books
both because they're my favorite publisher and also because they have open submissions and also
because the joke was Baen like things which are a hundred thousand words ish and mine was only
60 something thousand words the other joke being that the novel isn't actually fantasy per se it's
just sort of fantasy flavoured but you get me. But fear not gentle viewer I said in my YouTube short
because you can come and read the first draft of one crisis at a time on my patreon for a couple of
dollars while I work out what we're gonna do with the alternative publishing plan. How do I put this
um I am not used to having what you might call clout. I mean it was only three years ago that
I had like 25 000 subscribers and no one really cared about my opinion anyway so I figured it
was probable that Baen were going to see it and I thought they might find it amusing and
maybe even drop me an email and that was in fact what happened very very rapidly. Like I expected
them to see the video I did not expect them to be like yeah sure send over your Crappy First Draft
and we'll have a look and see how we can help you! At some point I may ask the people involved
if they would be okay with me telling like the longer version of the story because everyone
was really nice to me but suffice it to say for the moment that it felt like wandering into an
art gallery with a crayon drawing and being like look I made one too what do you think?
[pained noise of extreme self-consciousness] that aside Baen were not the only Publishing
Company who got in touch so I spent the month of April talking to people and learning things
about traditional publishing and all of this kind of jazz as well as adding some more stuff to the
first draft and then I sat down and thought to myself: regardless of anything else what I really
need right now is a developmental editor because I have this first draft and I can tell that it has
structural problems, but it's like a rickety Jenga tower at the moment or maybe one of those like
spun sugar sculpture things. I don't know how to pull the bad blocks out of the Jenga tower
and put good blocks in the Jenga tower without the whole thing crashing down around my ears.
I don't think the structure is robust enough for this and I am not a good enough writer to do this
by myself. I mean I don't really consider myself a writer but I did write something
so I guess there's that? Anyway I thought to myself what I really need is a Henry the Hot
Editor but preferably someone who's a bit less blunt than Henry the Hot Editor because I am
a special snowflake with easily hurt fee-fees. Also I've never written anything longer than 30
000 words in my life and that was probably a decade ago and it was fan fiction so you know.
I'm pretty sure that the ability to easily take constructive criticism is something that comes
with time. When I did stage combat and I was at the standard kind of basic level everyone
was really encouraging all of the time because I wasn't really amazing at it but there were lots
of different things I needed to work on. But obviously as a teacher you can't tell people
all the things they have to work on because that would just overload their brains so you have to do
it one at a time gently. Now that I'm at advanced level the teachers are much more likely to be like
yeah you need to fix this this and this do it again better and you say 'yep seems fair let's
do it'. Maybe everyone else is really good at taking criticism I don't know maybe I'm just out
of practice. The long and the short of it is that I hired a developmental editor but developmental
editing takes time so that is what I'm currently waiting on. In the meantime I thought to myself:
given your options self-publishing traditional publishing given this book given all the things
that you know which is the better option for you at this time? This is the part where aspiring to
be traditionally published authors are going to scream because I looked at timelines and legality
and money and who does what when and all of that sort of stuff and I thought to myself:
yeah let's do self-publishing! Is this going to be pure unadulterated pain? Yes probably. Do I think
that it's the best option for this Novella at this time? Also yes as someone with a substantial reach
on YouTube and not a bad platform on TikTok either I figured the Daniel Greene route was probably the
one to go. Also One Crisis At A Time is a weird book. First of all it's basically a novella at
this point second it's not really fantasy it's sort of romance but it's definitely meta fiction
and meta fiction is kind of a hard thing to market which you can understand is not ideal
for a publisher but doesn't actually matter to me because the reason I wrote it is because a bunch
of you wanted to buy it. The thing is choosing self-publishing means foregoing all of the
advantages of traditional publishing i.e. having lots of editors and having someone to do your book
cover and talk to you about marketing and blurbs and all of that kind of stuff so I've got to find
my own. Developmental editor: check, but I will need copy editing, line editing, proofreading,
all of these things. I'm also going to need a cover artists specifically someone who specializes
in books and who knows things about genre because I don't know anything about genre and
I don't really look at book covers. I mean I've started to do so now because now I need to work
out what I want the book cover to look like but I have an aged Kobo all of my book covers are low
resolution grayscale blobs. Side note Baen sent me a couple of signed hardcovers because I said
I like the Liaden Universe (see I told you they were lovely) and I just stared at the cover like
"that's what Padi's supposed to look like! huh!" I mean I even have this as an ebook I've read it
before I just never bothered to look at the cover because it was just gray and blobby! as for One
Crisis At A Time there's obviously going to be an e-book and the ebook will be DRM free because
I hate DRM come on who likes DRM, we're probably going print on demand for the paperback version,
I don't think it makes sense for there to be a hardcover version given the length of it but I
will find out closer to the time and there will probably also be an audiobook but I'm not quite
sure on the time scale of that one whether it's going to come out at the same time. Thing is I
would like to read my own audiobook first because I do have the recording equipment right there in
my office and second about 90% of the people reading the book are going to hear my voice in
their head anyway for obvious reasons. It's not a coincidence that the characters are going to
sound like me in your head, just saying. That being said I really don't want to have to edit
an audiobook so if anyone knows of people who do audiobook editing for a reasonable price
and turnaround time let me know. Same for cover artists by the way. Self-publishing does seem to
be a hard road to hoe as the saying goes but the thing about it is I'm in control of the process if
we have to move deadlines reminder if things get pushed backwards or forwards or sideways
it doesn't particularly matter because all of my deadlines are self-imposed. I am looking forward
to sharing with you in the shortest time scale that is reasonable the best book that I can give
you at this point in time but that's going to take at least multiple months or maybe a year
or maybe even more but that's still probably quicker than even an optimistic traditional
publishing deadline. so We're Off to the Races and I will update you as we hit major Milestones like
when there's a blurb when there's cover art when you can pre-order all that sort of thing. That
being said you will probably see a bit less long form content from me in the next couple of months
because I am trying to get the writing part done as efficiently as possible. There may also be more
fantasy heroine shorts where Caroline complains about various aspects of the self-publishing
process because we are nothing if not meta. And for all that I'm telling you that I'm going to
try and get it to you as efficiently as possible it's going to take as long as it takes. I want us
to at least to have moved out of could be worse if we can elevate it above eh I will consider it
a job well done. So thank you for your patience and I will see you next week for an armor review.