Saturday snipping

I'm over at the Writing Wranglers and Warriors blog today talking about snipping and saving.
Here's a partial reblog of what my current writing demands are - since I don't have time to do anthing but edits today. :-)

First published earlier today at http://writingwranglersandwarriors.wordpress.com/

Snip, snip, snip…but don’t throw away!

It’s that kind of day today. Up nice and early, off to the hairdresser- her first customer of the day. I’m fairly pedestrian in that it’s generally a case of ‘take off an inch’ all over. I like a no fuss, no frills hairstyle of the ‘wash, blow and go’ variety. However, sometimes I surprise myself by agreeing to something a little bit different.

Go purple? Not again! Blonde? Don’t think so. Grey …sometime…soon maybe ( *wink, wink and a smiley face here.)

But sometimes a change is ideal when things need a bit of a shake up. This morning I got the top shorter and the sides a bit different. Was I delighted with my new hair? 

Cringe… I got exactly what I had asked the stylist to do but when I climbed into my car for the journey home the view in the interior mirror told me I wasn’t actually that sure about the wide sweep away from my cheeks. Hastily scrubbing the hair towards the front made some kind of compromise I could live with. 

ww.123rf.com

I’m doing a bit of snipping in my writing as well this weekend. Last week I had to make the huge decision of renewing my contracts with my first publisher (the contract duration had run its course), or calling it quits with them and doing a reversal of rights.

 My two contemporary romance novels with my first publisher were always in both ebook and print versions. The slight problem for me, as an ‘overseas’ author was that on Amazon.com my print books were set at around $12.99.  On Amazon UK, the price was just a change of sign to £12.99 and that was way too high priced for a paperback. It’s not surprising that they didn’t sell well in the UK since I wouldn’t pay for a paperback at that price.

Now what the heck do I do with the stories?

I pondered if I should approach another publisher and just try for an ebook version instead of print and ebook? Or…should I take the plunge and self- publish on Amazon?

The deciding didn’t actually take much time.

Those two stories are contemporary mystery romances and had to go through quite hefty edits before they were published. Originally not romancy enough, I had to add in a lot of new heavily sensual details to satisfy my editor. Now the situation is reversed. Since I need to publish a different version of the story, I went back to my original manuscript which is without most of the ‘heaving bosom’ details. I'm so glad I rarely throw anything away and that my original versions were archived. 

So does that mean I think it’s ready to self- publish? Not by a long chalk.

It’s amazing just how much I believe I’ve learned about writing over the last few ‘writerly’ years. I’ve started a nice snip, snip, snipping process and hope by tomorrow I’ll have the same basic story to self- publish but a very well manicured one. Not a number 2- gosh I’m now bald- haircut, but hopefully a compromise I can live with.

I guess I might need to have a new name for the story as well as a new cover design?

Does anyone reading this blog have any advice to give me in this new (ish) venture? I’d love to find out what other authors might have done. 

 Slainthe!