Monday, February 09, 2015

Introducing My Debut Novel, A Time Apart: Book One of the Macauley Series

Well, this happened today.

A_Time_Apart_Amazon

Right now the book is available exclusively through Amazon.com, but come summer it will also be available for Nook and iBooks. If you'd like to own your own copy of A Time Apart, please click here
Olivia Donnelly has spent her whole life thinking about death and obsessing over how her life will ultimately reach its end. When tragedy strikes her family, she’s forced to acknowledge her biggest fears and stand on her own for the very first time. Hoping that a move across the globe will help her come to terms with her loss - as well as breathe new vitality into her writing - she arrives in Ireland a broken down shell of a woman, but ready to embrace whatever the world throws her way. Almost immediately Olivia is drawn to places she knows that she's never been, and to a man she has no way of knowing.

When she meets the darkly handsome, enigmatic William Macauley, her life is thrown into turmoil unlike anything she has ever known before. The two couldn't be more different, but despite clashing with him from the get go, Olivia cannot get him out of her mind. While the attraction they feel for one another is undeniable, Olivia knows that not every love story has a happy ending. In order to move forward with her life, Olivia must come to terms with the overwhelming desire she has for William, and what those staggering feelings mean for her future.

Olivia's understanding of life – and death – takes on a whole new significance as she is forced to confront the realities of the person she once was, the woman she was born to be, and how William is the key to her past, present, and future.

For the past several weeks I had been going back and forth on whether or not I should publish my book as a series of shorter novels, or deliver it later this year as one giant tome. After doing some research (goodness, I wish I could find that article that talks about how putting out a series is now considered sexy) and having a number of conversations with fellow authors, my beta readers, and potential customers, I decided to break it up into a series of shorter books.

On that note, you notice that in the picture above Amazon seems to think my book is about 203 pages. I don't know what crack the algorithm was smoking, but I have had a ton of problems with getting the information displayed correctly since I first hit "save & publish." First it said the book was 240 pages, but the formatting was ATROCIOUS. I quickly took that first version down and reformatted an entire document from scratch so that there'd be no confusion about where I meant to have paragraphs start and end. When the fixed version was uploaded and processed the page count dropped dramatically despite the fact that the word count stayed the same.

And what is the word count, you ask?

70,647 words.


Based on industry standards, and guidelines for first-time authors, that's well within the novel range (fun fact: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was 76,000+ words). According to these same guidelines there are traditionally approximately 250 words per page, which puts me somewhere closer to the 280 range. It's always so hard with Kindles because of reading preferences, but I just wanted to make sure to note the page tally discrepancy since that is a significant differential.

Once I decided that I was going to break the story up into different books, a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. When I first conceived of this book back in 2008, I knew exactly how I wanted it to end. As I wrote more and more and expanded the story beyond my initial idea, that stopping point came and went and the story grew well beyond my initial idea. As I read through the manuscript this past week, I was so happy to see that my original ending worked out to be a great stopping point in developing an ongoing series featuring the same characters.

While a friend has already pointed out a rather embarrassing typo to me (stupid Word kept autocorrecting Aer Lingus to Air Lingus, and after changing it five times and adding Aer to the dictionary I thought I was fine ...), aside from that I am very proud of this story. It's one that I've been thinking about, and working at, and writing and re-writing since 2008. I'm excited to put Olivia and William out into the world.

9 comments:

  1. Congratulations!!!!! I will 100% need to read this! :)

    PS- my friend works in ebook publishing and she has told me how frustrating it can be to format correctly!

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  2. Congratulations! This is so neat!

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  3. Congratulations!! I will have to get the Kindle app so I can read it.

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  4. Awesome! Congratulations on your first novel!

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  5. Thanks for your support, Casey! Can't wait to hear how you like it.

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  6. I *finally* figured out the formatting tricks, but it took me hours of reading websites that contradicted one another.

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  7. Thanks so much Luci! And now it's time to get Book Two edited and read to go.

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