Retooling

I’ve been busy. Over the last two weeks, I have written what I typically write in two months. I lived the life of a full-time writer and wrote for ten hours straight last monday (MLK day). Some of this was working on Destiny of the Daystar, book 4 of my Absolution of the Morning Star series, but the majority was on Koen, my standalone prequel.

I thought I had finished Koen, but recently, I ran into a perfect storm of constructive feedback and realized I could do better. The book must be as close to perfect as I can get it. It’s estimated that Amazon published two million new books last year alone (and has about 32.8 million in total)! AI-written content is getting better and flooding the market, all while readership continues to drop. To snag attention, Koen can’t just be good. It needs to shine. So, I tore the book apart from beginning to end. I cut 20k words, added 20k words, and wrote an entirely new first chapter. I increased the action, cut up banter with active tags, solidified the intentions of my characters, bolstered their personalities, and cut excess lore information. I’m still not finished. I’m on chapter 15, which is precisely the book’s midway point, but I’m getting excited.

I received some encouragement that I’m moving in the right direction. Yesterday, I signed up for a subscription to Autocrit. For the uninitiated, Autocrit is a powerful novel editing tool. It’s one of the best on the market for us struggling authors who can’t afford (or currently justify) $5k for editing. As I mentioned, I haven’t finished with my edits, but I was like a kid with a new toy on Christmas and couldn’t wait to play with this bobble. I ran what I had through its fiction analyzer, which uses an algorithm to compare your book to thousands of published works by top sellers. It gave my book a score of 89.7 in the fantasy genre, which places it in the league of a potential “best seller.” I know it is not a perfect tool and can’t substitute for real readers, but it was a much-needed boost to my confidence.

The weekend clock is ticking, and I need to get back to my work. Once I finish my edits, I will run Koen through Autocrit again to see if my score improves. I will then use the program’s assortment of tools to polish the book even more. I would love to get Koen into the mid-90s, so I know I have potential gold. If I can’t get it published after all that, then at least I’ll know it is a product I can stand behind and something worthy of my small group of fans. After, I will take what I learned from Koen‘s rewrite and run all my books through Autocrit. It will be a lot of work, but this is the type of work I love. Wish me luck!

Cheers!