This week the first paperback copies of my debut novel, Chasing Money, arrived in my eager hands. I’m thrilled and I can’t wait to share it with all of you. After years of work my book is finally becoming real. It is so exciting to see what I’ve written in actual book form, with a cover and 272 pages of text.
The cover looks fantastic. Sarah Meiers designed it, and she nailed it. She gave us three concepts based on the book cover design brief we provided, and one of her ideas was exactly what we were looking for. Her initial design was right on the money, and with a few tweaks it was perfect. Up until this week though, I’d only seen electronic versions of the design. It looks even better on a real book.
The back cover still needs a little work. It was designed before all the early reviews were in, and we need to cut down on my bio so we can fit in all the advanced praise! That’s a great problem to have. My personal favorite is Warren Easley’s comment – “It’s like the DaVinci Code for grownups.” But I also got great comments from the Midwest Book Review, Kirkus Reviews, the BookLife Prize and other authors. Doug at Mission Point is helping to select exactly what to use where.
Fortunately, there is still time to make changes – these are advance review copies (ARCs) that are stamped on the front “Not for Resale.” The two copies I ordered are final proofs – they’re intended to give me one last opportunity to check for errors and mistakes. And boy did I find some! More than 100, in fact.
Most of the issues were really minor – things like a missing end quote, incorrect capitalization, spacing errors and punctuation mistakes. But there were a couple of spelling errors that were really bad – for example, I misspelled Habsburg as Hapsburg, and never caught it in all the previous rounds of proofing. And I said “Bo’s eyelids arched,” but, of course, it is eyebrows that arch, not eyelids.
I also used this opportunity to rewrite a few run-on sentences that reviewers had pointed out to me, and tighten up some wording that I wasn’t happy with. There is something about seeing the pages of your book in print that seems to make the issues more visible, so I’m thankful for this opportunity to make some final tweaks.
Everyone is asking me when the book will be available. The official launch date is September 12th. That’s the date that the press release goes out, and of my launch party, and it’s when the book will be available in bookstores. About a month before that IngramSpark will have it available for bookstores to order, Amazon will have the Kindle version around the same time.
So, if you’re as eager to read Chasing Money as I am to share it with you, then sign up on my website, and I’ll let you know as soon as the first copies are available.
Michael
