The ReRisening: Rise of the Apostate Rises Again!

            Back in Lockdown 1.0, in a time that feels both remote and yet somehow hauntingly recent, the publisher of my first book, Double Dragon Publishing, like so many businesses, closed its doors for good. As such, for the entirety of the last year, Rise of the Apostate has been out of print. Mere weeks before this development, I had completed the somewhat daunting task of self-publishing the sequel, Dawn of Tyranny.

                Now when I say daunting, I don’t mean that the simple act of putting my work out there myself is an intimidating pursuit, nor do I mean to say that the logistics are fraught with pitfalls; quite the contrary, publishing your book through Amazon is for the most part incredibly streamlined. No, the daunting aspect of it all was that, like most things in life, I decided to tackle every aspect of the entire process by myself. Editing, proofreading, cover art and all!

                I’m no stranger to editing. If you can’t edit, you can’t write. I’m not one of those authors that writes by the seat of my pants, as it were. Yes, I have on occasion put down over eight thousand words in a day before, but generally speaking, each sentence and paragraph I put to paper is a rough form of the final product; I’m not one to splurge incomprehensible rubbish through my keyboard, only to delete great swathes of text in subsequent ruthless purges of my work, selecting only the occasional gem of prose to make the final cut. My point is, I edit as I go. I’m forever stopping mid-sentence to reword, reshuffle, and rewrite the current section of text I’m working on. (I’m literally doing it right this second as I write this post!)

                Generally, my writing takes the slow and steady approach, (although not too slow—I only have Fridays to dedicate to this trade!) When I am penning a new manuscript, my main goal is to produce the most polished first draft I possibly can. That was the state Dawn of Tyranny was in little over a year ago: a polished first draft. Now, there is only so polished a first draft can get; some would have you believe a first draft is always rubbish, but I disagree. If you are constantly editing your work as you go, your first draft is basically your second, meaning the overall edit that comes afterwards is not a massive rework of the novel, but rather a refinement of the text.

                So, all in all, the edit was not a big deal. Having not read Dawn of Tyranny for a good couple of years, I was for the most part pleasantly surprised with the book when I first went through it again. It needed a fair amount of work, but I got it done lickety-split. Next came the part I feared the most: the proofread!

                Many people reading this will probably wonder what on Earth I’m on about. If you’ve written a book, something that many people perceive to be a formidable task, surely reading a book and picking up on a few mistakes seems relatively simple by comparison. And, in principle it is. Provided you can spell, understand the ever-dwindling laws of punctuation, and have an eye for detail, you can proofread text. The issue is, it is basically impossible for you to proofread your own work! At some point, you will have written something, read it through half a dozen times, to the point where you were convinced that the text was one-hundred-percent error free, only to hand it to someone who picks up a mistake in the first line or so! The reason behind this is that we don’t read our own work as it is written, but instead, how we think we wrote it! Our eyes skip over our own mistakes because they are genuinely invisible to us.

                So, whilst it may be possible to produce an error-free cover letter or college essay with enough care and scrutiny, I think it is safe to say that ensuring the text of your entire novel (a whole one hundred and twenty thousand words) is in no way erroneous, is more or less impossible. Now, there are obviously professional proofers out there that you can send your work to, but that cost money… money I don’t have—I’m a struggling writer for heaven’s sake! So, my solution: sponge off my friends and family and get them to do the hard work for me!

                You’ll probably be unsurprised to hear this didn’t work out. Whilst I’m sure given enough time, this grand plan might have eventually come to fruition, it turns out that other people have lives and commitments of their own and don’t really have the time to do my proofreading for me free of charge—plus, if you ever write a book, you’ll discover just how hard it is to get anyone to read it at all (even friends and family! Seriously, people don’t read these days!) Now I have deadlines to hit, (admittedly, they are self-imposed, but they are deadlines none the less,) so it soon became clear this was not a viable option!

                Long story short, I actually discovered a way that lets me proofread my own work to a pretty decent standard, that if I’m honest, I think is quite ingenious. More on this method in future posts where I’ll give you a peak behind the curtain.

                So, here we are. It is March 2020. The world is going to hell, but at least I have a bit of time off from my day job to get some author stuff done. Editing, check! Proofreading, check! Cover art… hmmm. Well, the good news is, I bought a subscription to Adobe Photoshop a few months earlier and I had been teaching myself the basics for a short while. It was a steep learning curve, but eventually after a few days of piecing together a set of catacombs from photos of individual skulls, I managed to produce a book cover for Dawn of Tyranny, which, to this day, I’m still reasonably proud of.

                So, upload a few files, do a bit of tweaking, realise that I basically can’t price the paperback under £11 due to printing costs, get everything ready to go, and voila! One sequel published. I now have two books in print, and I’m beginning to look like a legit author who knows what he’s doing. Only… fast forward a few weeks and Rise of the Apostate is pulled from Amazon. Double Dragon is bust. I’m down to one book again, and annoyingly it’s the sequel to a book no one can actually buy…. Oh dear.

                Now, “But Dan!” I hear you cry, “You have the rights back! Just repeat the whole process again for Rise of the Apostate and you’ll be square!” Great advice. Advice I fully intended to follow, only… well, by this stage in the year, I was already knee-deep in writing my latest work: a Sci-fi Fantasy epic by the name of Conflux. I was faced with a choice: stop writing Conflux, lose all momentum and energy I had, and turn my attention back to Rise of the Apostate, a piece of work I felt like I’d signed off on two years prior, or I could plough on with Conflux and self-publish Rise of the Apostate once I’d finished.

                Well, here I am, a year later, with Rise of the Apostate ready to go. Take a guess which option I went for. Had I known at the time that Conflux would end up being my longest book ever, clocking in at a staggering one hundred and ninety thousand words, I might have gone for option number one, but, it’s done now. In the end, I think I made the right decision. I had my doubts the entire time I was writing Conflux, having finished, I can say it might just turn out to be my best work.

                So, to summarise, in a few weeks, Rise of the Apostate will hit the shelves (figuratively at least) for the second time. I’ll be the proud author of an ongoing series again, with the next entry on the horizon. Now, time to start the whole rigmarole again for the third book, Beyond the Brink!