January 2012 started off reasonably well with some nervous anticipation: My first book, ‘Path to Vengeance’, book 1 in my science fiction/fantasy series ‘The Guardians’ was ready for publishing. All I was waiting for was the cover, which was undergoing some final alterations.

The formatting process was not as difficult as it first appeared. I had seen comments telling of problems and difficulties with eBook formatting, so I was expecting a long and potentially difficult process. However, I downloaded the formatting guide from Smashwords, and viewed the information from Amazon. After comparing the two, I chose to follow the former, and began the process. The one element that took me longer to master was setting up the chapter hyperlinks.

Then around mid January, my cover was finished, and it was time to find out if the formatting of my book was up to scratch. The first stage passed without any auto-vetting errors, but there was still the premium catalogue review to go, which, thankfully, also passed with no issues.

With my first breakthrough achieved, it was time to work on ‘Sorcerer’s Duel’, book 2 in the series ‘The Guardians’. While rewriting and editing this book, I became aware that my first book was not up to scratch, despite the initial advice I was given. So after finishing book 2, which was published in July, I set about re-editing book 1, taking into consideration comments made by some reviewers. A month later, I had made substantial changes, including editing out 20,000 words. I think the process had the desired effect, which was confirmed by a great review by Thatfantasyblog. The re-edited book was formatted and published, and thankfully, without any formatting issues.

I had intended to publish book 3, ‘A Guardian Reborn’, in early December, but the revising and editing of this volume took much longer than expected, mainly because I took extra care and was more thorough with the editing. I believe it was effort worth taking. The book was finally published on March 1^st 2013.

2012 was a busy year overall. Being in full time employment limits the amount of time one can indulge in writing, and so juggling my spare time between family life and my various interests was not easy. Naturally, my reading took a back seat as I focussed on revising and editing books 2 and 3, and therefore read only a handful of books. My book collection was still growing faster than I was able to read them. However, the benefit was that my writing and editing skills improved considerably.

My plans for 2013.
The first achievement, as already mentioned in the previous paragraph, was completing and publishing my third book. My plan for the rest of 2013 is to work on books 4 and 5 of ‘The Guardians’ series, as well as revise book 1, and if time permitting, work on some short stories related to the series, and attempt to read a minimum of 26 books.