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?