Birth of a Book Part 1: Story Selection and Editing

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Facepalm.  That's what I did when I was doing my recent review of "A Self-Publishers Companion" by Joel Friedlander.  In the process of researching the book and exploring Friedlander's website, I discovered that he blogged the process of creating his book.  I realized that I've been working furiously away for months on my e-book and had I written one blog post about it?  No.  Facepalm.  So here's the inside story, such as it is.

I always envisioned launching my literary career with the "Great American Novel."  Problem is, the only thing I have that resembles a novel is a dusty NaNoWriMo draft from 2009 and at the moment it's not even a novel, much less great.  I suppose it is American although the protagonist is born in Germany.  OK, never mind.

Anyway, so it all started in February, 2010 when I won the February Challenge at Write On! Online with my story "Waiting for Spring."  I won a free professional audiobook of up to 21,000 words from iScript.com.  I was excited about winning, of course, but nervous because I didn't feel I was ready for my fiction to be put into anything as final as an audiobook.  I felt – and still feel – that I am very much a work in progress.  So I contacted them and asked if there was an expiration date on the offer.  They very kindly said that there was no hurry.

I figured it didn't make sense to have an audiobook if there was no book, so I set about putting together a list of stories that I might include.  I also continued to write Friday Flash and Tuesday Serial as often as I could.

As some of the stories got to the point where they were as polished as I could make them, I hired a freelance editor.  She worked with me on each of the stories and several have gone through numerous rewrites.  With every pass through a story, I have learned more and more about writing.  Working with an editor has been the single most important thing that has improved my writing.

To-date, I have a total of 75 stories, 20 of which are serial installments.  I'm not sure whether I'll be editing the serials and including them in the ebook or whether they will be put out separately.  Of the 54 standalone stories, I had originally planned to include the majority of them – or new versions of them – in the e-book.  The more I learned, however, the more I realized that many of my early stories are beyond hope.  With every pass through the list, I eliminated more of the old stories.  So at the moment, 29 of the 54 standalone stories are in "retired" status.  They were interesting experiments for a new writer, but don't have enough of the important components for an engaging story.

So I've got 26 stories slated for inclusion in the e-book, 11 of which are "complete."  It's been a difficult process to learn that at some point, it's necessary to stop tinkering and re-imagining a story and just let it be.  However, it's incredibly freeing to be able to finally call a story "done."  Otherwise, it keeps swirling around in your mind begging to be rewritten or tweaked.

Another aspect of my work is to focus on submitting the stories that are polished.  Eleven of the stories that are slated for inclusion in the e-book have been published either in online journals or in print.  I feel pretty good about that number and I hope to increase that number before publishing my e-book.

So I'm currently working with two editors and hope to have all stories edited over the summer.  How will I end up publishing my e-book?  That, at this point, is anybody's guess.  If you're an agent or a publisher, let's talk