"Let's do this thing!!!!"

On June 13th, I emailed the lovely Crystal from Word Alive Press with the subject, Let's do this thing!!!! She and I had been emailing a fair bit while I asked numerous questions about the publishing process. She graciously provided answers to all my queries with reassurance that I really wasn't being a bother or too much.

Once I was signed on, suddenly I had many tasks. They gave me a "WAP Blueprint." There were numerous questions to answers, decisions to make, and tasks to complete. It was exciting to feel that the process was moving along, but with deadlines for the different aspects of the blueprint, I found myself dedicating much time to what was required.

The following is a breakdown of what I needed to do to satisfy the blueprint's requests:

• Indicate my request for the print date. I loved this question because it pointed to a finished product! I indicated that I'd like to see the books printed and ready for sale by Christmas of this year.
• Provide personal details such as name, birthdate, home church, and social media accounts I use.
• Announce the book title, subtitle, and the author name I'd like to use. When I completed the blueprint, I was keeping to the working title I'd come up with when I began writing, which was All in My Head?: My Beautiful Life with Invisible Illnesses. From the beginning, I've wanted my author name to be given as Robyn Derksen Olfert. Although I go by Robyn Olfert most of the time, I wanted to include my maiden name to be recognizable by people I knew primarily before Kevin and I were married.
• Choose a trim size. 6" x 9" was the recommended size for books over 75,000 words, and that described my manuscript at the time.
• Decide between matte and gloss lamination. I chose matte because that has been our preference for photographs. However, once the cover was designed, Crystal proposed I consider going with gloss as it would a add nice shine to the bright and hopeful feel of the cover. I agreed, and my preference was updated.
• I also provided my request for paper stock, interior ink colour, number of call out boxes I needed, and formatting of headers and footnotes.
• There was a place to give guidance on how the cover design would be handled. I wanted my face on the cover, and I wanted it to have an upbeat and positive feel.
• The most daunting tasks were all the write-ups I needed to complete. These included a description of how my book is unique from others with the same theme, description of my target audience, one sentence to explain what the book is about, promotional text for the back cover with a maximum word count of 200, an abbreviated 30-word version of the promotional text, a 30-word author bio for the back cover, and a 200-word bio for use in my media kits.
• Finally, the blueprint encouraged me to obtain endorsements for the book. But that will have to be the subject of another post.

This blueprint felt like a giant to-do list, and I was pressed for time partly due to deadlines from Word Alive Press but also because of the one imposed by the fact I was having oral surgery on July 3rd and would likely need recovery time away from my first-time-author life.

I went from Let's Do This Thing!!!! to Oh my goodness. There are so many things to do!