The Redux of Inglorious Ink

Restarting my path as an author is like going back to the first level of a video game, now that I know what traps I face, what obstacles are in my way, and what puzzles I had to solve, I feel more prepared than I was before. But starting over at that level meant going back to the beginning and I was prepared to do that.

When I first released my book Inglorious Ink in February 2020, I'll admit I rushed the process altogether.

I didn’t do the best introduction to introduce myself to the world as an author. It was like I skipped forward in the movie and I didn’t get to see the introduction of the movie and go through the first part and get to the median and then I just went right to the climax of the movie. That’s where I was at when I became an author, I skipped all of the parts that were necessary between marketing myself and getting my audience prepared.

I published my book right before the pandemic hit in 2020. It was one of the best and worst times when the pandemic ended up hurting a business or businesses inadvertently created from the pandemic depending on the situation. I was one of those people that didn’t know what to do with my book when the pandemic began, I couldn’t do any book signings, because there was no crowd.

And on top of that, many program errors made my book bad to release to the public. There were thousands of mistakes I had to fix.

I was very lost as an author but the reality of what happened over the past two years is that I never really truly began to be an author, I did not learn the necessary steps.

Until I reconnected with a fellow Virginian author named Dylan colon. Dylan and I had talked about the progress of our books over the past couple of years. We didn’t officially begin our camaraderie of creativity until this year when I reached out to him to get some help from him.

We set up a day to begin my crash course in authorhood: formatting, advertising, perspective, and many other topics. We took it one step at a time.

The first step: fixing the book.

My heart was set on getting the sequel published this summer. That was the same goal I had last summer. This was my opportunity to fix my book and I knew the only place to start was at the beginning of Inglorious Ink.

It wouldn't look too good to have a polished, formatted book for the sequel, and the first book doesn't have that same treatment.

Not only that, but I never did ANY advertising before or after when I first premiered my book in 2020.

How would this book be advertised if it needed to be presentable when it wasn't in the first place? I love my book with all my heart, with all the love I have for it to be a book that many will love, I love it enough to go through this process.

For this to be a good book, not only did my author work need to be organized for me to work as an author, The book itself had to be organized and go through some major reconstruction from grammar, to two-page count.

When I first wrote Inglorious Ink, My mindset for my vision has always been that every chapter has to go until it stops, some chapters were extremely long, and I got messages from my friends about how they had to take breaks from my book because it was so dark but also so long. This should’ve been my first insight that I had to think of the audience's perspective in terms of what they can digest.

I love my book, I love my scrappy characters, but if anyone is going to take my story, it couldn't exist as one whole book. I have to do what Quentin Tarantino had to do with Kill Bill, split it up.

Splitting up the story.

In the two years that I wrote the book, I kept going until it stopped, every chapter had a beginning to an end to sum up the certain specific segment of the story. I didn’t think about how long it was going to be I just knew that it was going. By the time it was finished +10 more revisions of plot points. My first book got to be a very hefty story. It went up past 400 pages. I didn’t think anything of it at the time that An audience would have to digest this book and the amount of time. When I got together with my friend Dylan he had to give me a stern piece of advice that an audience is going to not invest their time into a book that’s 400 pages for someone’s first book. I took that idea into consideration and I’ve kept in mind during the redux process.

By the time I got to page 224, I pulled out Dylan’s book that ends on about 289 pages. To give you an idea about where in the world 224 pages is in the book with all of the new edits in the A5 format, that is only 30% of the story for the first book.

I swallowed my pride and knew that I had to make my first book into three parts which I was OK with I contacted Dylan one night and told him that I thought about what he said about making the book smaller. And I told him that I thought about what he said by cutting the book in half so an audience could be able to take in everything. Dylan was very relieved to hear that I decided to divide my book. I finally got that audience perspective that I liked for a long time because I thought that people would just willingly read a 400-page book only to find out that I was wrong, especially for a first-time author like me. It was creative criticism that I had to take. It’s a double edge sword when it comes to creativity where one side of the sword has the vision and has to be strong and sharp about making sure that no one takes the vision away but then the other side of the sort has to be considerate that people will eventually understand the vision but they can’t understand the vision that would be a really big investment and sacrifice on their part to go through with reading the story.

By the end of the stopping point, it changed again and the book would be split up into three. In my point of view, Inglorious Ink will always be one book, Just like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill is still regarded as one movie in his eyes.

It'll be an interesting process when the other two parts are published.

Undercover the Cover

With a book about scheming, scrappy, tattoo artists.

My original cover had Polaroids and I’ve expressed this in several articles talking about the fun experience I had bringing my hobby of photography to create my cover.

But unfortunately it just wasn’t picture perfect.

The cover I made just didn’t appeal to many readers and getting a professional take on it it wasn’t going to catch the eye of readers and I had to make the decision to go ahead and get a better stronger cover. One that would correctly convey what the idea of inglorious ink is while also keeping it vague. There had to be an air of mystery but there had to be clues.

I got in contact with an artist named Mitch Green. The process for Mitch his work is very interesting, you give him some pictures and a couple of keywords . Then he does a combination of both the original idea and mixing it with the other keywords to see what comes together and this is what came together

A Fresh Restart

I will forever cherish the moment that I got my first batch of books and even though the first experience I had as an author was with copies that were not fixed, it was still beautiful knowing all of my work was printed into a book, it was surreal and beautiful and then I got to experience that again but on a level knowing that there was more work put into it than the first time.

Now I get to start that whole new beginning for Inglorious Ink: American Dream Scheme Part one was released on July 8th.

After the release, I feel much better as an author now that I know what I’m doing. I still have a long way to go, but these characters are going to get their story out. I have a lot of goals for the story and I’d like it to go farther than just being a book, but until then I’m putting in the hard work, and getting it going and see where it takes me.

If you love music, movies, and mayhem, you'll want to check out this book.