Sally Jenkins

Every writer’s journey is different. Author Steve Wand is my guest today and he shares his path from adversity to publication, including resources he found useful. In the last paragraph he offers sensible and motivating advice – take it and you’ll immediately appear more professional.
Over to Steve:

Robert Schuller once said ‘good things are often birthed from adversity’.
This was the case with me when recurrence of my old spectre epilepsy resulted in me losing my job and driving licence. The event placed me at one of life’s crossroads forcing me to re-evaluate my options. A love of writing led me to consider proofreading and, upon completion of nine-month’s professional training, I formed Steve Wand Editorial, allowing me to work from home, providing editorial services. I was also able to resurrect an unfinished fiction project and, in October last year, I set out to complete what I’d begun in 2004.
Along with self-doubt as a writer, one reason I’d consigned the completed first draft of my novel – a children’s fantasy adventure – to the drawer was my frustration with the story’s clumsy opening. I’d no idea how to remedy this and allowed myself to become disheartened. I now had opportunity to re-assess the work. My ‘eureka moment’ was when I chose to cull the first four chapters and start the tale at the point where things become interesting. But what of the missing backstory? How could I include this without relying on hefty paragraphs of narration? Using the ‘show rather than tell’ rule I selected elements crucial to the tale and worked them into dialogue. For example, two scrapped chapters illustrating the protagonist’s school bully problem were replaced by eight lines of verbal interaction.
Solving the tricky opening gave me confidence and motivated me to redraft The Door to Caellfyon with a view to self-publishing it on CreateSpace and Kindle.
At this point my editorial training became invaluable, I knew the role outstanding book covers play in achieving sales so I elected to proofread the final copy myself and use my limited funds to buy professional artwork. For this I had just the chap in mind.
I emailed the remit to local graphic designer Stu Smith, along with sample text from scenes I considered would make for good cover art. Given the tight budget I think Stu did a terrific job. I received his completed artwork on Christmas day, at which point I was free to upload my novel. This proved to be a greater challenge than I anticipated. Sally helped here with her book Kindle Direct Publishing for Absolute Beginners. Rick Smith’s Createspace and Kindle Self-Publishing Masterclass was also helpful.
Having allowed self-doubt to deny me my ambition for so long I’d like to end here with a closing statement from my own recent blog-post Owning and Blowing Your Trumpet:
“ … as I begin 2016 with a sense of achievement and a feeling of excitement for the coming year I urge every aspiring writer who reads this to revisit your social media profiles and remove any trace of the word ‘wannabee’ or ‘aspiring’ and simply declare yourselves as writers. Make no mistake, this simple yet certain acknowledgement will serve as a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy and, in recognising yourselves as writers, writers you will be.”

Many thanks, Steve, for sharing your experience with us. It’s worth having a ‘look inside’ The Door to Caellfyon on Amazon and Steve’s website can be found at www.stevewandeditorial.co.uk