Hey there! Today is the official book birthday for Chrysalis of Change. I can’t believe it’s been a year now. The journey to release my first book was hectic and a little crazy! There were so many mistakes I made. You see, it all started with writing prompt #17 Wings. Do you remember when I first wrote that story in 2019?

Wings was by far my favorite. The characters stayed with me and demanded I continue the story. Seriously, I couldn’t get them out of my head. I remember posting the prompt right around Halloween in theme for the holiday. Once I decided to keep writing it, I thought Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) would be the perfect opportunity to get it going. One thing lead to another and I wrote over 50k words that year. I was so excited with the progress I made that I just kept going.

Not having any experience at all in writing a book, I let that first story become a beast topping out at 150k words and it wasn’t a stand alone book! I had plans for sequels. After considerable research, I concluded that perhaps it would be best to cut the story in half and release it into two books. Thus, Chrysalis of Change book 1 and Chrysalis of Hope book 2 were born. I decided it would be a trilogy called The Metamorphosis series. Then I got to work editing the first part of the series, which took a lot longer than I expected.

As a writer/creator, I loathe editing. I feel like it sucks the life out of me. It’s a necessary evil of course and after I thought I had it ready, I found myself a professional editor. She did a great job, but it took me another six months to get through her edits and make the story right. Then it was off to a few ARC readers. Once that was done, I had to worry about the cover. I thought I had this part in the bag.

Did you know my husband drew the original artwork for the cover? Yep! As talented as he is, he only did the illustration. I realized belatedly I had to find someone to digitally color it and turn it into a cover. (Insert face palm here) So, here I was scrambling at the last minute to find someone to do just that and having all kinds of problems. Finally, I found a gracious gentleman to do the painting and make it into a cover just in the nick of time. Literally two days before my scheduled release date. Which I needed to get Amazon’s approval, anyway. I think I grew about 20 gray hairs in that month!

So back to the cover, while I liked the initial book cover it wasn’t really what I wanted. About six months after I released Chrysalis of Change, I found another digital painter who redid the cover art and it came out exactly as I imagined it. Sent it off to professional book cover artists and they turned it into the cover you see today. It was a long process and I learned a lot, but I’m grateful to have been a part of it and can now share it with you.

So what do you think of my crazy book journey?

Published by jlsanchezauthor

J.L. Sanchez is a big lover of romance, paranormal romance and sci-fi genres. She has been a voracious reader since she was a child when she first fell in love with books. She’s a wife to her high school sweetheart and a supermom of four who spends her days trying to make her minions into decent little humans. She worked for over fifteen years in the office world until she had her first child. She lives in sunny South Florida and has a love/hate relationship with the unpredictable weather there, though it never fails to inspire her.

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