I am ridiculously excited about this one. I’m officially launching Insider Edition: Make It Look Like a Book as a series of short, focused publishing courses that will take you through the interior-production process one step at a time. Instead of one giant course that makes everyone want to lie down on the floor halfway through Module 4 😄, I’m breaking the process into separate courses so you can learn one stage, use it, and then move on. COURSE 1: Clean Up the Mess Before You Format It Before we get anywhere near fonts, margins, chapter openings, or page numbers, we need to make sure the manuscript itself is actually ready for production. This first course is all about preparing the file you already have. We’re going to cover things like: - when a manuscript is actually ready to enter layout - why formatting too early creates a ridiculous amount of extra work - how to separate editing decisions from production decisions - how to deal with chapter structure, images, captions, notes, and references before pagination starts - and then how to find and clean up all the invisible junk hiding inside your document Tabs. Spaces. Extra returns. Manual breaks. Section breaks. Mystery formatting left over from 2024. 😂 All of it. And Module 1 of Course 1 is available NOW: Formatting Starts Before Formatting This module is about one of the most important rules in book production: Don’t design a moving target. Before you start controlling the pages, you need to know that the words, structure, images, notes, and other content are substantially settled. Because when you change the words, you change the pages. And when you change the pages, that can eventually affect everything from chapter openings to page count to the width of your spine. This module includes the lesson and a workbook to help you figure out whether your manuscript is actually ready to enter production. I LOVE how this series is coming together. Insider Edition has officially begun. 🎉

I'm an artist and writer who has been trying, failing, giving up in despair-- on repeat-- for my entire adult life, to get my work out in the world, connected to readers/customers. I have a set of two novels and a long poem, each of which stands alone, but go together. A boxed set! It took me 15 years to write these. My first attempt at self publishing, over 10 years ago now, netted me $75. But I was only doing them as ebooks. I foolishly thought I needed the written praise of other people, preferably famous people, for the back cover. And so I put off print editions. Now, of course, I can see how ridiculous that was. I have two more books in the works. One is finished, in the handwritten phase, and I'm in the process of converting it into a doc, for editing. The other is still only an outline...but it's a good outline! It's for a graphic novel, serialized. The first body of work is literary fiction. Highly literary. Social criticism. Anarchical. Pro-Nature and Wildness. Anti-patriarchy. And honestly? A masterpiece. The second piece is a poetic stream of consciousness, The Universe giving humanity a piece of Her mind, telling us how absurd and insane we are, but always from a context of Unconditional Love. She loves us BECAUSE of our absurd insanity. It's based on the Tao Te Ching. The third, the graphic novel, is about 5 protagonists -- Emma Goldman, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Einstein, Hypatia and Baba Yaga fending off the abuses of 5 antagonists -- Aristotle, John D Rockefeller, Perseus, Zeus/Yahweh and The Inquisitor. It takes place in an old fashioned train car that is traveling on a beam of Light to the Blue Faced Scottish Drum Circle. Every bang of every drum is another Big Bang. Because Creation is infinitely more enormous than our paltry science can even imagine. The protagonists do defeat the villains in the end, but not in a typical, dichotomized (and VERY last century) battle of Good vs Evil. Because fighting these enemies only makes them stronger. They employ Operation Grey Rock, which is the only way to deal with narcissists. And when the villains implode on themselves it's obvious. They were just victims, themselves, of their times. They become tragic and pitiable, enabling humanity to accelerate in a good way, for a change.

I'm struggling with the structure of my first chapter. It is way too long (nearly 7000 words) in 9 closely interwoven scenes. It is comparable to a pilot episode for a TV series instead of a novel. It works as it is in terms of pacing, avoiding info dumps and the protagonist is clear. I intend to self-publish, so the industry standards are not really a problem, but I don't want to be "too far out there". So, here's my question: Would you read a really long first chapter or would this turn you away? The genre is sci-fi / horror.

I'm so excited to find this group after BINGING Lara on YouTube. I have traditionally published for years, but I have all my books back now and am going INDEPENDENT! ( I heard that discussion this morning--GO FOR IT!!) So far--it is AMAZING! I have much to learn. For example, I have always wondered where YouTubers get all the sales information, and I heard you mention PUBLISHER ROCKET today. Is that the best place to get sales info and such? I now have 10 books on KDP and have just started a new series. I'm excited to learn it all!