“Unrelenting Strength” was the smoothest release out of all my books. I hope that doesn’t mean the next one will be chaos. I also wrote and edited this book the quickest. “Reawakened Flames” took about two years. “Visions and Illusions” took about one year. “A Stormy Path” took almost a year. “A Dark Horizon” took about ten months. “Unrelenting Strength” was completed in about six months. I’ve heard about other authors getting faster with each book to the point that they can publish multiple books a year. I can finally see how that’s possible.
The writing and editing were a bit rough, though. I couldn’t get Omen’s character or the depression subplot right at first. Otherwise, the story came together well. It helps to write in a world that’s already established and fleshed out.
The release was largely uneventful. With my last book, everything that could go wrong went wrong. This time, glitches were minimal (and my fault a few times). The only big thing that I messed up was the map. The new location was too small and blurry in the proofs. So, days before release, I had to have it fixed, and I somehow still managed to make my chosen day. The hardcover proof shipping was delayed, and it arrived 24 hours before release.
On the actual day, there were storms around, although none hit my house. The thunder gave me flashbacks to the wild Stormy Path release day. But there was just thunder when I started and thunder when I finished. The prices for the print books displayed on Amazon correctly, Kobo was error-free, and even Google Play uploaded the EPUB the quickest I’ve ever seen.
I now know ways to prepare for future releases that make the process much smoother, and I’m looking forward to more stress-free releases.
As an aside, there was one scary thing that happened while writing. I saw a post about testing AI detectors and how unreliable they are. So, I decided to do my own tests with a section from the prologue that had been edited once by me only. While not a first draft, it was still in a raw form.
The results from the AI detectors I tested ranged from 0% AI-generated to 78%. One of them highlighted sentences as AI, and they were all descriptive sentences that I was quite proud of. I am planning to do a series of posts that will go over my entire publishing process with screenshots because I don’t want to be a victim of the AI witch hunt that’s currently going on.
Part 9 Coming Soon!
