Good morning!
I wanted to start today by thanking you for sticking with me on this journey of redefining my writing and creative content. I know it’s not easy to start following someone who talks about one thing and then shift to something else entirely.
However, my heart is still to serve the community I am connected with, though it will be a little more true to myself than before. All that to say, I think it’s time for an update on my next book.
In May, I felt like God gave me this deadline to complete the first draft of my book. And yet, here I am, two months later, still working on it. Though, this time, I have found a lot of clarification as to what I should write about.
Having that deadline and failing to meet it was 100% on me, but I see how God is using me trying to finish in May to force me to re-evaluate the message he wanted me to share.
Because now, I am off and running.
To date, I am just over halfway through the first draft. Thankfully, the message and the writing have started to flow out of me. That happens as a writer. Sometimes we struggle and struggle and struggle until something breaks loose.
And that is what happened here. I aim to finish the devotional first draft in the next two weeks. It’s very attainable, and I am very excited about how things are turning out as I progress further and further.
Once the first draft is done, I will spend a week in self-editing mode and then ship it off to my editor, where we will probably take a month or so to work through the book. I will get a cover design out during that time, which I will share here too.
After that, it will take a couple of weeks to format and prepare the setup of the book to publish on Amazon. When it is all said and done, I should be ready to publish the Gospel of Mark devotional by the end of September.
In the meantime, I have one other goal.
I am building an Advanced Reader Copy Team (ARC Team) and will send a copy of the book out before publishing it on Amazon. My hope for this team is to get individuals who will read it and then share reviews once the book is published.
My goal is to build up my team of people to at least 50 individuals. This way, when the book comes out and I do my 48-hour free promotion, you can order the book for free on Kindle and then leave a review immediately.
I hope to collect the reviews to share with my other resources for promotion in the future. These different resources will be social media, website, and any blog posts or online content I share about the book.
More on this in the weeks to come as I set up everything to be able to share the Advance Copies.
Alright, time to start the day.
I appreciate you taking the time to read my update. I will share more on the book over the next few weeks on my Instagram, so be sure to jump over there and follow along. Also, I am sharing exerts of the Gospel of Mark on Medium so that you can follow along there. Here is my Medium page.
Thank you for reading, and we will see you next week!
J.R. Heimbigner
I'd love to be one of your readers. :)
Glad to hear things are moving along. I have been somewhat working on a book in some ways. I just need a few pieces and I've been procrastinating to go there.