Where are the books?

OK, so I have an author website, an author Facebook page, and pictures and descriptions of my books. So where are the books?

Right now, here's where things are on my writing/production schedule:

Urdaisunia is the first book scheduled for release. Right now I'm typing in copyedits. When this is done (early next week), I'll let the manuscript rest for a few days while I work on the book extras--the Who's Who and the map. After that comes the final proofreading, and then the formatting and conversion into ebooks. There are a number of ways this can be done, from running a Word file through a converter (results not guaranteed to be of good quality) to paying a conversion service to convert your file (better results but costs money). Being an independent author with zero production budget (what budget I did have, I used to license that wonderful cover illustration from Dreamstime) and the desire to give my readers the best ebook possible, plus also being slightly out of my mind, my plan is to do the coding and conversion by hand, as per The eBook Design and Development Guide by Paul Salvette. The book's author provides copy-and-paste code on his website, which (hopefully) will make the process faster and easier. I'm planning a couple of days to get the whole thing done; it should go faster on subsequent books, once I know what I'm doing and have my boilerplate all set up.

Once the book is ready, I'll get my accounts set up at the various stores (if I haven't done so earlier), then hit the upload button. And, ta-da! Books for sale! Though it may take a few days for them to start to actually appear as buyable items on the sites.

So, all told, I'm looking at about mid-February for the release of Urdaisunia.

The next book up for release is Chosen of Azara. I had this posted on my old website for years, and I'm pretty happy with it. I'm still going to run it through Holly LIsle's How To Revise Your Novel process, just as a quality check, but it shouldn't need too much work. This will be followed by the copyedit, proofreading, getting the map ready, formatting, conversion, and upload. I'm hoping for a May release.

The third book in the lineup is The Lost Book of Anggird. I thought this one wouldn't need much work, because I've already revised it about elebenty-seven times, but I started taking it through one last revision, using the How To Revise Your Novel process, and found a number of serious problems. So it needs a lot of work, plus it's a much longer book than the others. I'm almost done with the major revision pass, then it'll go out to test readers for six weeks, then another revision pass based on the feedback from the test readers, followed by line editing, copy editing, proofreading, etc. I want to say about a September release, but that might be a bit optimistic.

I'd also love to get Sarya's Song out this year, but I'll have to see how it goes with these first three books. There's a big learning curve to this whole self-publishing thing, especially if you aim to put out the highest-quality product possible, and I'm learning as I go. Both my writing work schedule and my publishing work schedule are still in flux as I learn how to distribute my time and do all the different tasks involved. I don't want to over-promise and leave whatever readers I may have disappointed, but I also don't want to allow myself too much slack, or else I'll just lollygag along and never get anything done.

Once these four books are out, I'll focus on the Daughter of the Wildings series, which is a very cool project that I'm very excited about. And you should see my inventory list of finished drafts, partially-finished drafts, story fragments I want to write, and ideas, all lined up and waiting to be written and released into the world!