The first draft is the most challenging and time-demanding phase of the process. Once I get the first draft completed, things start to speed up. Here are a few highlights from my experience writing the first draft:

During the first edit, I work with one to two edit partners who read the text and give me feedback. In this edit, I'm focused on story-level elements: continuity with the other books, important clues, and adding character emotion during dialogue. I love this stage, and it tends to go quickly.This is also where I often have to make the hard decision to cut certain scenes or shorten scenes.

UPDATE: 10/24/23 - Wow! This was a challenging first edit. Instead of cutting, I ended up adding material. I've also been reading the entire copy to my daughter, Zion. And my daughter, India, is working through a printed draft to help me identify what to cut and what to keep, parts that sag, and confusing segments. One of my edit partners, Avery, has worked through most of the book, and is helping me to identify similar segments. Now on to the second and third edits!

During this stage, it's important to read the text out loud. I learned this from editor and publish Sol Stein, and from author Cal Newport. Reading it aloud you catch things that you wouldn't while reading with your eyes only. I'll fix technical issues and run the manuscript through Grammarly to clean things up. It's important to know that Grammarly is really helpful to catch 80% of errors, but books will typically have 100+ errors before they go to proofreaders. Finally, I have a checklist for this series that I go through: reducing the number of instances of words like "said," "answered," "looked," "watched," etc.

This takes me most of a day. I use Vellum to format the interior and Photoshop to format the cover.

On November 8th, I sent the beta draft to the printers!
They are now printed and in transit ;)

This is incredibly fun and takes only a couple of days. I now have a thermal printer that can print and cut labels. Our family creates an assembly line and we package between 150 and 200 copies to send to our beta readers. Once in the mail, it takes about 2-5 days for the beta team to get their copies.

While waiting for the Beta Team to send me feedback, I'll be working on the 25-50 illustrations for the interior of the book.

During this phase, my beta reader team is sending me feedback via a google form. I'm looking for parts of the story that might be confusing, need an illustration, or might be slow. I actually learned about this process from a Pixar documentary on the making of Finding Nemo. Most of the beta feedback comes in within 2 weeks from the date I mail the packages.

During this phase, I'm also working on the 35 to 50 illustrations I draw with my Apple Pencil using Adobe Fresco.

I have a small team who I work with to proofread the books. This is not my beta reader team. In fact, I ask my beta readers to not do any proofreading (because I want to hear about their experience of the story). The proof team is sending me edits at the same time as the beta team.

When I get the beta feedback in from about 100 readers, then I have a good sense of the scope of the changes I need to make. If I need to make significant story-level edits, then this might push my publication date out a bit. But, once I have the beta edits done, I can order the presale copies and establish two dates: 1) The date I plan to begin mailing presale copies, and 2) The date I will publish to Amazon. These dates might shift, depending on shipping and printing times, so I try to build in a few days of margin.

This takes about a week. During this time, I'm getting a lot of packaging prepared so that we can send the presale copies out to all of you who helped us kickstart this project.

This should take our family a 2-3 days. After being mailed, you should recieve your copy in 2-5 days. If I have extra copies, you can continue to purchase them on the website.

UPDATE: Presale Copies will ship beginning Friday, December 1st through Monday, December 4th.

After all the presale copies are in the mail, I'll hit the publish button on Amazon. This can take their systems anywhere from 12-72 for the books to become available online.