I recently received the manuscript back from my editor for my new novel A Love Story for a Nation. 

Once that happens, the gears start turning and the planning begins.

The first step is to obviously fix the mistakes and issues brought up by my editor. This is what I can tedious editing – the minutia of grammar and syntax that is ever so boring but also extremely important. I find it especially tedious because there’s nothing creative about it – it’s simply find and fix with the occasional re-write and re-phrasing.

Once I finish my tedious editing, I do another complete read through. I read it out loud to get a feel for the language and flow. On this final read through I fix any other mistakes I encounter along the way – though at this point the manuscript is ready for publishing. Of course, I do find phrasing and words that I want to change. A writer can never be completely satisfied. There’s always a danger of making changes at this point because what if I make a silly mistake that I don’t catch? It’s been known to happen, but it doesn’t stop me.

Once my final read-through is complete, I will typically produce an ARC which I make available to bloggers and reviewers.

But I’m not doing that this time because I’ve decided to give Kindle Scout a try. Kindle Scout is Amazon’s reader-driven publishing program. Any new, previously unpublished manuscript can be added to the site for 30 days. The more traction the book gets with readers will help it to attract more attention to Kindle Scout editors who may offer to publish it on Kindle Press. What’s most attractive about this program is that an author will know for sure with forty-five days whether Kindle Press will be publishing your book or not. If it chooses not to, then all digital and audio rights go back to the author.

I was happy to see Fiction and Literature finally being added as a new genre for Kindle Scout. This helped me decide to give it a try.

My goal is to have my new novel live on Kindle Scout by the middle of April. That way, I’ll have a decision from them by around the first of June.

If they decide not to publish it, then I will self-publish in mid-July.

Please keep your eye out for more information about my book on Kindle Scout. Your nomination on the site could help me land a publishing deal. That’s pretty cool. Even if it doesn’t happen, I am curious to see how the program works, and I’ll report back on my experience.

I guess that also means I need to release my book cover. Soon!