First Reader Update!
Good morning Everyone and welcome to a new week of my launch campaign for my debut novel, Fallen Ribbon! As of this week I have some new updates to share with everyone regarding the publishing progress. Going into the holiday weekend on July 4th, we saw the official cover art for the book, and I am absolutely in love with it. My cover artist, Stephanie, did a wonderful job and I couldn’t be happier! To begin the week, we read a little bit on the faeries and the way they operate, which I was especially excited to post because of my love of fairies in general. I managed to solidify the release date for everyone involved and we are looking at August 15th, 2024! For the final post last week we got some insight into who Sam Williams is for our final Character Introduction. That one was perfectly timed because as we led into that blog post, I received almost everyone’s feedback from the launch team and there were a lot of requests to see more of Sam and his relationship with Matt. So unexpectedly, I started putting in more content for Sam delving into his past and giving him a proper introduction earlier in the story. He is definitely a character that has been on my mind a lot lately.
As I finally announced the release date last week, not only does this give a concrete idea of when the book will be out, but it also helps keep me on track and organized to finishing those final edits. At some point, I had to cut off the time limit for the First Readers as I still had not received everyone’s on time due to personal conflicts and I worked with what I received, which was four people. I did have to drop some more people from the Launch Team due to either busy schedules or lack of communication or correspondence. So presently the team is significantly smaller than when it started out.
Of the feedback I did receive, all of it was fantastic. Not only did my readers provide feedback on their feelings about the story but also provided constructive criticism on it as well. There’s an editor on my team who did some very basic line edit suggestions and they marked all their notes with page numbers and quotes which was super helpful to have on hand. By the time I received their feedback, I had already gotten pretty deep into the final edits and adding more Sam content, so the page numbers were all skewed. I had to pull up the original pdf I sent the readers to search for the specific lines and then find them in the newest version of the document. I think that’s what slowed me down the most on finishing the edits, so having the page numbers and quotes was super duper helpful in the long run.
Another common suggestion I received was fleshing out the dynamic between Geordie and Matt. The readers had some opinions of how things progress for the two of them and what they had to say made sense so that has also been something I’ve been working on but the feedback was more pertaining to the beginning of the story which I had already moved past from by this point so I am going to go back once I finish the current edits I’m doing in the middle of the book. There were a couple plot holes inconsistencies pointed out to me and a couple I noticed on my own that I needed to go back and fix so I’ve been prioritizing that.
I’m hoping I will finish all of this up and finalize the last version of the manuscript by the end of next week so I can move on to the next steps of publication. I already bought my ISBN and have looked over the application for the copyrights, but I need to finish the manuscript first before I can submit Fallen Ribbon for identification and copyright. In the meantime, this week you can look forward to reading about the final species of the story, the Lygoids, and then I will be doing a deep dive into the music behind Fallen Ribbon and sharing a link to the playlist that’s been keeping me going!
Starting July 29th, I will be increasing my blog posts to six days a week! I’ll need a little bit of a break each week to play catch up so Sundays will be my day off from posting. You can look forward to two excerpts and more updates as we near the end of the launch campaign. Don’t forget, Fallen Ribbon launches exclusively on Amazon, Thursday August 15th, 2024!
