Ready to Publish?
If you haven’t read my blog before, I’ve just signed on with Imajin Books and intend to blog about my publishing adventure. I’ll share what I learn and hope it helps someone out there get their novel published. At the end of my last blog, Ready to Publish?, I gave myself two action items:
Step one : Re-launch website and give it a cleaner look.
Done: Or sort of done. I’ll keep working on this as I get feedback. What changes did I make to the site?
- I changed my home page to a static page instead of my blog. I did this so when I have book covers designed, I’ll have a landing page to post the covers.
- I chose a new format that I found pleasing to the eye and what I think is a more professional image.
- I updated the image at the top of the page to mountains to start branding my novels.
- I used a free template by WordPress. This comes with restrictions, but for now I can live with them. Until I start making some income with my books, I’ll be careful how I allocate funds.
Step two: Decide if working titles for DESCENT and BURNT are the final titles.
This is where branding comes in. That’s a big question when you’re about to publish one of your books. I write a mystery series, and so my branding has to consider the current and future books in the series. I want to engage and excite readers, and branding can help do this.
A Stone Mountain Mystery is the tag line for all the novels because the series takes place in a fictitious resort located in the depths of the Purcell Mountain range.
The first three working titles in the series are DESCENT, BURNT and AVALANCHE.
After collaborating with Imajin Books, we’ve decided to rename the second novel in the series.
BURNT will become BLAZE.
The thoughts behind the decision to change the name are:
- BLAZE has a sense of impending doom.
- All three titles are one-word action oriented nouns.
- BLAZE now links to the mountain theme of DESCENT and AVALANCHE as blaze is more reminiscent of a forest fire than BURNT.
- One can think of BLAZE as blazing the ski trail which again links the novels.
I’ve spend four years building my online platform and writing about my books. This one word change means I have to visit all of my sites and update the name accordingly. I’m pretty sure this is the first of many changes. But who said writing was easy?
Now I’m off to find all references to BURNT and change it to BLAZE..
Thanks for reading . . .
Creative Story Editors 
I like the idea of the home page as a static page and the blog as another page. I might do that myself.
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I’m just trying things to see what works. So far this week I’ve gained the same number of followers as I’ve lost. We’ll see how it goes. The learning process is great fun though.
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Reblogged this on baringmyheart and commented:
Your blog post was so helpful , Kristina. My four book mystery series might benefit from a review of the titles. I love the idea of one word titles. And I think Blaze is a much more exciting title than Burnt. Thanks for your help.
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Your blog post ideas were so helpful to me. My four book mystery series would look and sound much stronger with one word titles. I do like Blaze better than Burnt. It’s more vivid and active. Now to take a look at my Web page and book titles. Thank you, Kristina.
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Thank you for commenting and reblogging my post. I certainly appreciate it. There’s always work to do to make the books shine, but that’s part of the fun 🙂
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