In the Blogbook section of this site, I’ve likened blogging to having a shadow. Although at the time I thought about the popular 1927 song, “Me and My Shadow,” the lyrics don’t fit very well . . .
Me and my shadow/Strolling down the avenue
Me and my shadow/Not a soul to tell our troubles to . . .
And when it’s twelve o’clock/We climb the stair,
We never knock/For nobody’s there . . .
Just me and my shadow/All alone and feelin’ blue . . .
. . . and the reason is simple: the blogging shadow is like having a friend who lifts my spirits and makes me smile. I enjoy the shadow’s company and look forward to sitting down in my writing-desk chair for a conversation. I also feel a sense of obligation to the relationship. As with so many things in life, friendships seldom remain static. They either grow or wither on the vine. To prevent the latter result, I’ve been regularly nourishing the association with content. Until recently, that is, when something got in the way.
To borrow a couple of sports analogies, in basketball they call it a “full court press,” and in football it’s the “no huddle,” “two minute,” or “hurry up” offense, and it all began when I withdrew my novel from an agent’s consideration and began final preparations for indie publishing my novel.
I’ve been preparing for this day since early May when I decided to tackle the task (sorry, but I do like to watch football, and rhyming and alliteration aren’t always bad things) of teaching myself how to convert my manuscript to eBook format, design the interior layout for the print version and the covers for both. I’ve covered in this logbook some of the trials and tribulations of that effort over the past few months, and I intended to continue doing that. But as is so often the case, the last 5% of the work took far more time to accomplish than I ever would have imagined.
So, I have a lot of catching up to do on this blog, and it starts now with the announcement that as of this morning, Pilot Error went live on BooksOnBoard. Within the next few days, my novel will appear for sale as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the iBookstore, and Smashwords. The paperback version will also be available on Amazon.
The next task is to implement as many marketing strategies as I can to gain discoverability, gain exposure, and develop traction.
To publish my novel after all this time feels pretty good, even after going to the dentist this morning. And that’s saying something.
