Volume II March 2024
Hello, and welcome back to this second edition of Tight Beam, with the March update for the progress of The Descendant Saga. If you haven’t already subscribed after the first issue, you still can, if you’re catching this on the second issue, because there will be more in the future.
I have a few tidbits to give you this time. Firstly, I threw a spare chair into my recording studio aka the sound closet. I have now officially completed my recording studio. I am ready to record and edit the Audio book. I will be doing that myself, and it will be ready on launch day with the E-book and paper backs. I recorded an audio book version of the first edition, that never got approved or released by the publisher, so while I am sure it will take a minute to remember, I have done this before and hopefully it doesn’t take me too long to get back in the groove of it. I am using the same mic and software, but I have a much better set up now with sound deadening walls and such.
Secondly, I used the editing assistant Pro-Writing-Aid to do a quick pass through of the manuscript, cleaned it up a fair bit. Catching all the typing and new grammar errors in it for all the changes I have made for the second edition. A couple of the chronic issues I noticed were, I had a tendency to start multiple consecutive sentences with the same word. He this, He that, he again. I used it to correct a lot of extraneous commas too. I think most importantly, I discovered an error with my chapters not being in chronological order. So that was a big fix, and with all these minor errors corrected, it will make it that much faster, that much easier to get the manuscript edited by a freelancer. And especially for this first book, most importantly, cheaper too.
Speaking of freelance editors, my third tidbit is I have started exchanging emails with someone. I have sent them a sample portion of the manuscript. They’re going to edit it for me, and I can see what they can do as an editor, and what they think of my writing. Hopefully, we can come to an agreement and move on to the rest of the manuscript when that’s done.
Lastly, I have plans to make a book trailer. I have a guy working on some sound. He’s going to do a little guitar riff, and if it’s good, that’ll get used for the book trailer. Perhaps he’ll make the sound of The Descendant Saga. You know how everyone knows that you’re playing Halo as soon as the choir kicks in at the main menu? Or when the credits roll, the music hits and you know it’s Starwars? I hope we get a solid sound that will be that kind of recognition for the brand/franchise, you know what I mean. I have the lowest expectations, but the highest hopes for this bit of news. Not because I don’t like the guy or anything, but because I have ridden that rodeo before, and I’m not going to get my hopes up for it.
I know I mentioned it somewhere else before, but since I brought it up again here, so I’ll tell you the plan. I am doing a book trailer. A roughly sixty-second animated short with music. Like a movie trailer, but for the book. It’s going to be awesome, and hopefully I can peddle the heck out of that on the various platforms like IG and YouTube and use it for some solid marketing. At the very least we’ll have a sound, and I can use it for video intros on my regular YouTube vids. I hope that will be the cool thing that will tip me over the scales and go viral. After years of tweeting and posting to thousands of people with little results, I’m tired of what feels like screaming into the void. I hope this it the key to it finally. I’m going to need every bump in momentum I can get to get this call rolling before we get to the second book, while I wrestle with the sunk cost fallacy.
P.S. The join link to the Drop Pod discord Community is :https://discord.gg/NVuhgHUE9N
The Descendant Saga 