Thoughts on….launching my first book
Dear Discerning Reader,
I published my first novel on December 26th, or thereabouts, depending on your time zone. It was earlier than expected. I’d originally planned to have the book professionally formatted; a process that would have delayed the launch by three or four days. However, after waking up hungover on Christmas morning, I decided to crack on and do it myself. Just as a quick aside, I live on my own in Seoul and Christmas is a little low-key here. I don’t want you thinking I was sat in bed tinkering with HTML tags whilst the family endured (or enjoyed) Christmas preparations without me. Had I been at home in London, that’s what would have happened, but as I wasn’t, it did not. 
Formatting wasn’t as hard as I thought. There are a few ways to go about it and I decided to convert the word document to HTML and then convert that to .mobi. It all sounds rather intimidating, but with the help of Guido Henkel’s formatting guide (via David Gaughran) and mind-expandingly strong coffee, I set to work. I copied the manuscript into Textmate and made the required adjustments. I won’t bore you with the process and it’s all rather dry unless you’re applying it to your own work. If you are going to give it a go, I’d recommend Textmate as it has a few features that make your life much, much easier.
Writing the acknowledgments, contacts, copyright and dedication pages made me feel very professional. I’d written stories before, but they hadn’t had more than a couple of lines of bio attached. These were the bits you only find in real books. Yes, real books also have covers and words in, but I didn’t create the cover and I’d written fictional sentences before. Writing the acknowledgments reminded me about the importance of the people who helped me throughout the process. Independent publishing isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a truly solo venture. Ideas like ‘copyright’ were once distant concepts I didn’t to know about, and that first page of publishing details and edition numbers was something I flicked past to get to the story. Having written my own one and seeing ‘Copyright © 2014 Darryl Donaghue’ and I can really appreciate – who am I kidding? I’m still going to flick past them.
The launch itself was wholly underwhelming. No black tie event or fireworks, just me in my pj’s pressing a button or two and waiting for an email. I had a cup of tea and a biscuit to celebrate. Chocolate Hobnob, of course.
