Lou Paduano | Urban Fantasy Novels | Sci-Fi Crime Series

The Need For Collaboration

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I almost feel like this is more of a reminder to myself than something to share here on the blog. Collaboration has never been one of my strong suits. It is something I’ve always WANTED. Just not something that has ever come together easily.

Even at a young age I cringed at group projects. To put your faith in someone else to do as good a job as you would if you had full control of the entire thing? Not so easy for me. It wasn’t a choice back then. It is now.

Collaboration is necessary.

It really is. I love to write. That is my thing, my talent, my contribution to the world (or at least to the hard drive of my computer until something gets finished). Writing is where my focus is and where it should be.

Unfortunately, writing is only a piece of the process to putting my work out into the world. There are dozens of other areas necessary to turn a written piece into a published work ready to be shot out into the world.

Can you do it all on your own? Sure. Yeah. You could spend your time on each individual component of the process. Should you? That’s your call as well.

Time is fleeting.

I work during naps and at night with some extra hours on the weekends thrown in so I can actually hit the deadlines I create for myself. When I sit down with a goal in mind, I have to justify the time involved. If I have marketing to do for Signs of Portents I have to weigh the time necessary to do it well versus getting a chapter written for my next project. If it turns out that my time is better put toward writing, then I need to think of a different way to market. Do I use a service like Leadpages or Cart of Books? Or do I ask a friend for an assist?

This website took a long time to build and organize. I put it off until I had certain things in place, including the final version of Signs of Portents. But I also knew I couldn’t do it alone. I had friends that helped guide me in order to leave me time to continue editing my next project. I never did get a chance to give them a shout out so a big round of applause to Paul Sardella and Kelsey Dewey for their help in building  and critiquing the site. And also to Sara Frandina for her pointers along the way.

Building a team.

There are a massive amount of moving parts involved in putting out a book. From editing to cover design to formatting. All need to be addressed and tweaked and double checked. Then checked again by someone with eyes that aren’t completely fried from staring at the screen all day. (Or shaking out of their skull from too many cups of coffee.)

There was a time I thought I could do it all on my own. Get a template. Learn PhotoShop. Design a cover. Write a book description. Edit (even without a strong grasp on that essential tool called GRAMMAR).

That was fear. Fear of putting my work into the world. Fear that someone else added to the mix wouldn’t bring the enthusiasm and the drive necessary to make the book succeed.

Idiot.

If anything every time I’ve shared with someone, received feedback from someone or had a promotional piece created by someone it has rejuvenated my desire to create. They push me to be better and stronger and faster. Relying on someone else, forsaking a small portion of control, enhances the final product and I will be eternally grateful to all those surrounding me in this endeavor.

Write. Write. And then write some more.

“You should be writing.” My wife tells me this all the time. It is what I tell myself when I come to an impasse on making a decision about my time. My goal should be writing. Graphic design is never going to be my passion or my strong suit. Should I learn something about it? Definitely. Should I spend ten hours learning how to crop an image on PhotoShop that will never be used? Probably not.

Take advantage of people a whole lot smarter than you for things that aren’t in your wheelhouse. Collaboration is the key. Without my editor and formatter, Kristen Hamilton at Kristen Corrects, and my cover designer Kit Foster at Kit Foster Design my book would not have left the basement. Without services like Fiverr and Canva I would still be spending days on PhotoShop instead of working on my third book this year.

Know your limitations. Know your goals. Then build the team you need to succeed.

Then get back to writing. I need a new book to read.

Thanks for reading.

Signs of Portents – The Long Road to Publication

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Signs of Portents took a terribly complex and irrational journey from pen to page and finally to publication. The initial concept came about in 2008. Yeah, I know. Ridiculous. Image Comics’ ShadowLine imprint was looking for a companion book to their Bomb Queen title and were looking for pitches.

Being an overly ambitious fellow, I sent eight. They were horrible. Piddly little paragraphs like an elevator pitch more than a full blown, professionally constructed pitch. I did no research into Bomb Queen or anything else ShadowLine was publishing. Not a single smart move taken. It amounted to bupkus. Shocker.

Greystone, however, was one of the them, but not the same as the book you now have adorning your shelves.

Take a look at the original pitch:

To the outside world Soriya Greystone appears to be the epitome of normality.  Married to a man bringing home a middle class income.  Two kids, the apple of her eye.  And a house in the suburbs.  The typical housewife.

Wrong.

In the city of Portents, darkness lurks around every corner.  Creatures, demons, and more, all wait their turn for a chance at breaking through to our reality.  All that stands in their way is the Greystone, occult detective.

Working with Detective Greg Loren and an unusual arsenal of occult artifacts, Greystone uses her peculiar talents to solve supernatural crimes and keep her family safe and unaware of the true dangers of the city.

Like I said, horrible. No surprise it went into the slush pile we call life. But I came back to it at the end of that year. I was trying to figure things out as a writer and my focus remained comics and script writing. So I pulled out my pitch and wrote a four issue mini-series. I even came up with a title – Signs of Portents. (Progress!) After writing it I searched high and low for an artist but the process quickly fell apart. That’s how my writing was at that point.

So I had a script but no way of producing it. Back to the slush pile.

Getting closer to publication… by inches.

Soriya and Loren refused to leave me alone. They plagued me for years to the point where I wrote the sequel to Signs of Portents just to get some release, some closure on their world. It served to do the opposite.

In 2013, having left the working world to take my role as All-Star Dad, I pulled out my old script and set to work. I wrote the first prose draft of Signs of Portents in six weeks. I was on fire. (Sometimes literally. Raising kids is tough.) Everything I had sat on and shoved away since 2008 came roaring to the surface and the book took over.

Then nothing. Again. (WHAT AN IDIOT.)

I didn’t have a next step. A plan. A goal other than to make it work. Traditional publishing was as much a mystery as taking it all on myself. So it sat. And I wrote other things. New worlds. But Portents called me back.

It always calls me back.

Making 2016 the year for publication.

Eleven Ten Publishing came about in January of this year and I wanted the perfect launch product for it. There was only one choice. So I edited the holy hell out of Signs of Portents. Then a real editor made it readable. Kit Foster Designs added the window dressing to perfection and here we are. Publication of Signs of Portents is only two weeks away.

Easy peasy.

Plans don’t always come together but some deserve the extra time and effort. Some sure as hell demand it. Signs of Portents is definitely one of them.

I hope you agree.

Thanks for reading.

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