Now that I’ve finished the rough draft of my new Sam and Meg Stone Mystery, I’ve taken a week off before I jump into revisions. During this time, I’ve been thinking about what comes next. There are lots of steps before it actually meets the public. Some of them are completely straightforward; others are as murky as the Okeefenokee in August.

The first thing that needs to happen is a thorough revision, which will include rewrites and proofreading. Once I’m through with that and another quick proofreading run, I’ll feel ready for an alpha reader or two. These people will, I hope, find any glaring errors, like plot holes and unresolved situations that need to be fixed. They will also give me a feeling for the viability of the story itself. Could they follow it? Was it plausible? Were they entertained? Is there anything objectionable in it? Based on their input, I may make further changes.

At this point, I believe I would be in search of ARC, or advanced reader copy, readers. These are folks who agree to read the book before it is published with the hope that they will also be willing to give a positive review when the book comes out. It would in no way be a requirement–just a hope.

That stuff is pretty comprehensible to me. The rest is, at this point anyway, an impenetrable fog. At some point, I need to put together something called a street team. This group would be comprised of ARC readers and other folks who are willing to hype my book in anticipation of its publication date. They would share my posts on social media as well as just talk about it with their book-loving friends.

The other part that I’m completely unclear on seems on the surface like it should be simple, and that is publication. Now that I’ve gone back to being settled on indie publication, that opens about a million possible venues. I could do it like I did before, which is to do print-on-demand and e-books with KDP. It’s still a viable option, but it’s definitely not the only one anymore. There are so many other options that it makes my head spin. Services like Draft2Digital and PublishDrive and BookBaby and Smashwords and IngramSpark are out there, offering different levels and types of publication. These would give me wider exposure in exchange for either a percentage of each sale or a flat monthly subscription fee. I’m reading and asking questions of fellow indies, but the more I learn, the more I feel like I don’t know. I’ll make a decision when I have to, I guess.

And the part that has me completely flummoxed is marketing. I have no idea how to do that. I do know that what I did the first time I published definitely didn’t work. But the big question for me is how much of that had to do with bad marketing and how much had to do with the real possibility that my first book was so bad that I cut myself off from future sales because people had been so turned off by the first that they didn’t want to take a chance on subsequent offerings. Which is why I’m planning to spend so much time trying to get this book polished and really marketable. I hope a truly good book first book will build an audience for the ones that come after it.

I think that’s it. Well, there’s also the writing of the other books, but I don’t even want to think about that yet. Not to mention there are probably about a bazillion things that I haven’t even thought about yet. I hope I think about them, or become aware of them, before I need to know them instead of just after.

So, if you’re interested in being an ARC reader and/or member of my street team, I’d love it if you’d let me know by replying to this message or getting in touch via one of my social media channels. I’m active on Threads and Facebook. If you haven’t already, you can join my mailing list, which is where you would hear about those things first. The link to do that is on my homepage. I really hope to hear from you.