I've been struggling for months on the right title. After making some editorial changes and seeing Julia from the perspective of an objective 3rd party, the title just sort of jumped out at me.
Nerd Girl
Julia is sort of a nerd. Most women who work at MS, frankly, are nerdy... but in a lovable, endearing, good way. We love technology, we're smart, and structured. We need charts and graphs to demonstrate, manage, and track things. Frankly, the majority of women in this world, aren't like this. I sometimes forget, having been around MS for over 14 years now.
Anyways, when you read the book, you'll see why Nerd Girl is the perfect title for Julia's story :-)
Ok, so next steps in my indie publishing journey:
- Book cover design: Unfortunately, I have to wait until end of October for this. I chose a book cover design artist who is really making a name for herself. The downside however, is that she is making a name for herself and her waitlist is long. I'm on her schedule for October.
- Start trolling indie publishing blog sites and get people to read a free ARC (Advance Reader Copy) in exchange for an honest review.
- Create an author account on Goodreads.com
- Begin the process on CreateSpace.com (on demand book printing)
- Begin the process on all other e-book publishing sites (Amazon, B&N, Apple, etc...)
- Get ISBN number
- Create my author FB page
- Format the book for all these different delivery channels (I'm outsourcing this part)
- Launch party? :-)
I'm hoping for a Pre-Christmas release date. Cross your fingers.
I have an awesome Editor - Erin Roth.
Her feedback was brutally honest and snarky. Some of her comments felt like an arrow through my chest.
BUT.... Every author must learn to take criticism and her feedback was constructive and very true. Having incorporated her feedback, I ended up cutting out almost 75% of my first three chapters. It seriously hurt to do so, but my book is so much better for it. Erin really knows what she's doing.
When I originally starting writing the book, I was initially motivated by my Microsoft experiences and wanted to share them. However, in the process of doing so, I forgot that I was writing a romance. The book was having sort of a personality disorder. If you read it, you couldn't tell if it was a romance or if it was a memoir of Microsoft. As much as it killed me to do so, I cut out all the MS stuff. I focused on making my main character likable and revealing the Microsoft components through other less direct means. Erin had some fabulous suggestions, that in my opinion, completely changed the tone of the book.
I'm so pleased with the end result.
