Author Dana Lockhart

It's been a while! Hi! I've been busy with leading CampNaNoWriMo workshops and lots of book signings . But here I am today, ready to tell you a little more about my novel, The Un-Life of William Moore. I highly suggest reading the novel before reading these "fun facts," as there are spoilers ahead. You can purchase the book at most all places you buy books, including Amazon , Barnes & Noble , and your local book store. -Fun Facts About The Un-Life of William Moore - 1)   The novel is approximately 63k words.   When I first “finished” the story, it only had 35k. Being so short and condensed, the story's pace was way too fast.   The additional word count helped to slow things down, develop characters, and make it a more standard sized novel.   2)  My first working title was “Billy the Vampire.” This title made it too obvious what the story was about, even though it conveyed the corny tone I wanted at the time.   Later, I wanted to make it more subtle. ...

When I'm put in an unfavorable situation, I try to look on the bright side of things. More often than not, the bright side is always the same: a learning experience. Whether it's a bad breakup, a civil suit, or a risk like investing in my novel, there's always a learning experience. And I love learning. I identify as a scholar, as a student, no matter if I'm enrolled in study or not. And this entire book adventure has been one heck of a learning experience. I always thought I was good at manipulating Microsoft Word, but I discovered new options and standards than what I knew before. Not to mention all the learning of how to write better to even get the book finished. I received my first proof on April 16th for my novel The Un-Life of William Moore. Getting it proof-ready was a challenge in itself. I didn't embed fonts right the first time, had a bunch of hidden blank pages I had to deal with. But the first proof wasn't that bad. Needed some margin work, but oth...

After over a year since I started this journey, The Un-Life of William Moore will soon be available to put on your bookshelf. I already had an e-book cover, but to be able to hold this book in your hands I went back and got a spine and back added to it. A week of waiting was well worth it! Here is the official book cover for The Un-Life of William Moore : I am so ecstatic about this cover. Thank you, again, Zakaria Nada , for working with me on making this book come to life. I didn't have a single complaint on the background of the back cover and am still in awe of how amazing it looks. If you need a book cover done, I highly recommend Zak and her watercolor style book covers. She has great turn around time and great taste. She also designed the bookmark (coming soon) that will come with this book when you buy it at one of my book signings. -Book Signing Times and Locations- Speaking of signings, I already have three book signings on the schedule and a potential fourth in the works...

Life is crazy, but I've finally hit a little lull with The Un-Life of William Moore . She's in limbo as I wait for the cover to be done (it should be within a week!). So, now that I have some more free time, I've taken up a new writing challenge: PAD. PAD is Poetry-A-Day, or NaPoWriMo . It's the poetry equivalent of NaNoWriMo, only instead of a strict word count spread over a month, you write one poem every day for the month of April. So far I've been able to keep up, albeit posting my poems rather late in the day on Twitter. I will start posting them to Instagram, too, but haven't yet because my background images for IG disappeared and it took me a while to find them. I will post all of my poetry in a blog post at the end of the month to see if I managed to successfully write a poem every day. I prefer to write structured poetry, with beat, rhythm, and rhyme, but when put on the spot like I am with PAD it tends to be a little more free form. And more than a ...

I know, I know, I've dropped off the face of the earth. My articles on DVS dropped from four a week to maybe one if I'm lucky, and my blogging here has suffered, too. But I promise it's for a good reason. - The Un-Life Coming June 2019- The big reason that I've stopped my side-writing gigs is because I've gotten back my mini-edit of The Un-Life of William Moore . Applying the critiques is my number one priority right now. I'm in a rush to get everything done in time for Gateway Con to have my grand first book release there. And I'm a little behind schedule. I'm still on target for the June release, but I'm feeling the pressure. Big thank you to Ryan P. Freeman for providing way more feedback than I anticipated. I ordered story editing and he still pointed out several copy-editing suggestions he didn't need to do. On one hand I'm glad he did more than I was looking for, and on the other I'm exhausted at the thought of all these things I s...

I know it seems like I haven't been blogging much (because I haven't), but I am trying.  I have five post drafts in the works right now and I'm not happy with any of them.  And I don't want to just post re-hashed stuff I already posted on DVS Gaming like I did with my Lucifer article .  So, if I can't come up with something entertaining, at least maybe I can come up with a post that's informative. -It's Time to Bring The Un-Life to Life- I am currently in the beginning stages to self-publish The Un-Life of William Moore .  I discussed it with the agent I had been taking to, who gave me her blessing.  As I told her, The Un-Life just feels like an old chapter in my life.  I don't believe that I have the spark to force myself to edit it anymore.  One, because I feel like the story is done and complete as is, two, there's just so much more I want to be doing.  So instead of trying to change the story to what it isn't for the sake of being more main...

As I waited for Amazon to accept me or reject me, my mind was whirling with ups and downs of why I could succeed and why I could fail.  What would my future hold?  This giant corporation had the blossoming bud of my life’s dream in their hands and I was on the edge of my seat in anticipation to see what their verdict could mean for the rest of my career as an author.  Would they toss it aside, or help it grow? I don’t think I did a bad job at the campaign.  By my figures, I spent close to half my entire 30 day campaign hot and trending – the last week I was close to spending every day-all day hot.  I got almost 3.5k views.  Five out of the top ten Scouts in the leaderboard nominated my book, including the #1 Scout.  My marketing folks I hired to help me showered me in support and compliments (I like to hope it’s because they liked my story and not because they were trying to make a customer happy).  I managed to make a little noise and got some p...

Perhaps the worst part of being rejected by the Kindle Scout team was that they did it so politely, so encouragingly, so supportively. I almost wonder if it would have been easier to accept if they had told me they hated my novel. But for them to tell me they liked it, but didn’t want to publish it, threw me for a huge loop. How hard is this publishing thing really going to be if good works still get the axe? How good does “good” have to be? -It Hurts So Good- The editorial feedback is a special Kindle Scout is doing at this time, starting in November 2017 and ending at the end of February 2018. When you get the email, it starts with “general comments” about the novel and their opinion of it as a whole. Mine was as follows: “There is a lot that we like about this novel, and we’re impressed by the positive and pragmatic attitude you express on your blog about the business aspects of pursuing a long-term literary career. You’re definitely the kind of talented and business-conscious...

There's no way to sugar coat it.  If you nominated The Un-Life of William Moore , you probably already got the email by now.  It was not selected for publication. And there's a ton of things I could say about that and how that makes me feel, but I'm sure you can imagine it.  We've all fought hard for something before and ended up not being able to succeed.  It hurts like hell.  I've personally been trying to hold in the emotions because I don't have the time to process them right now.  I found out an hour before my second writers guild meeting and couldn't let some bad news ruin my makeup and what was going to be a fun night. I do plan on moving forward with getting The Un-Life published.  I did have a back-up plan, but had rather hoped I wouldn't have to use it.  Now that I'm in that situation, I want to make sure that Plan B is the right plan before going full steam ahead into it. Plan B is to self-publish via Kindle Direct and Createspace....

Dearest Amazon, If you do more than just look at the book, if you also look at the social presence of an author, if you are reading this now, let me tell you: when it comes to my Kindle Scout campaign, the only thing you’ve got to lose is a beautiful partnership with a loyal customer and determined businesswoman. I promise you there are only good things coming your way if you support me. If you take the chance to be the first one to jump start my writing career, you can bet that I’m going to come to you first with everything from here on out. When I’m treated right (and you’ve always treated me right for the past 10 years), I stick with you, and I really look forward to doing more business with you in the publishing world. I didn't go into Kindle Scout thinking it was a tool to use to get published - I went into it with starting a business in mind. I’m not going to be a one-shot wonder. I dream bigger than that. The Un-Life of William Moore is only the beginning. I’ve got bigger ...

-Between the Lines- I referenced in my blog post Let Me Explain that I don’t really like revealing every meaning behind a story. As a writer, I like to let the reader figure out what I’m trying to tell them hidden between the lines of a story. But there’s something that I do want to talk about in regards to what I wanted to convey with my novel, The Un-Life of William Moore . But I assure you, it isn’t the only meaning I had intended! Just perhaps the most obvious one. So don’t forget to keep looking for more meaning. I’d honestly rather my first novel be something more unique and game changing. Because I’m sure there’s going to be a multitude of people out there that are going to groan and go “Uggggh, another vampire book, just what the world needed.” And that’s the point. This novel is the response to reactions like that. -Depths in the Shallows- The biggest theme present in The Un-Life of William Moore is not to judge a book by its cover – to not stereotype – to realize the...

-My First Try- I actually tried querying The Un-Life of William Moore when I first finished it several years ago. I submitted my pitch to a dozen or so agents, and only got automated “Sorry, but no” emails in response (seriously, I think one even said “Dear [insert name]” on it and they didn’t bother to fill in the insert). And that was a time when anything with the word “vampire” seemed like it was getting sold. Remember “My Babysitter is a Vampire?” Shudder. I remember My Babysitter is a Vampire. It wasn’t exactly unexpected that I failed, but it was still disappointing. And at the time, my dreams of being a published author were a little dashed. I tried looking into self-publishing, but the only things I were finding were “vanity” publishers and hefty investments into printing and distributing your own book, which at the time was out of the realm of possibility for me. -A New Hope- But my hopes were reignited a couple years ago when I discovered how easy it was to self-pub...

Well, I don’t really know how Kindle Scout is going, honestly. Kindle Scout does give you some tools to work with in order to figure out which of your marketing strategies are working and which are failing. But they won’t flat up tell you how many nominations you or anyone else has. For example, they tell me how many people have used external links to view my book, and where it was they were directed from when they clicked on it. It’s neat to see the breakdown: how many came from facebook, how many came from my website (and which page of it), how many came from promotional websites, etc. This is a screenshot of my traffic stats as of Jan 8 at 4 AM But external links don’t really seem all that important, because Kindle Scout also shows you what percentage of page views are coming from browsing Kindle Scout and how many are coming from outside sources. Right now, my ratio is about 90% of my views are coming from Kindle Scout, and 10% are from elsewhere. The highest external sources...

It's official. About an hour ago I submitted my novel, The Un-Life of William Moore, to Kindle Scout . I'm ending 2017 on the hopes that just a few months into 2018 that I am going to be a published author. I'm not sure how long it's going to take before my novel is live and ready to be viewed and voted on, but I will certainly let everyone know! I'd hope it wouldn't be much longer than a week or so. If you haven't read my previous blog post about how to possibly get an early, free copy of my ebook , here's how it's going to work: Once my submission goes live on Kindle Scout, I have 30 days to receive nominations on my story. The more nominations I get, the more likely that my novel will be noticed by a Scout, who might offer me a publishing gig. Everyone that votes for my novel, The Un-Life of William Moore , gets an early, free copy if I succeed in getting published with Kindle Scout. All you need to vote is an Amazon account! For more information...

Multiple times this past month I’ve had to stop and smile because this is actually happening. I have put my foot down and determined that this time, this time , I was not stopping until I published a novel. Even when confronted with the costs of editing and cover design, I did not let myself stop. I had to get over my fear of failure and really, truly try. And here is my proof. Here is the official cover for The Un-Life of William Moore . This cover was designed by Zakaria Nada , who was very polite, prompt, and professional through the whole process from beginning to end, as well as extraordinarily patient with my indecision and bombardment of questions. I didn't really know what I wanted as far as an actual design and image; I only knew what I wanted the cover to convey, what I wanted the cover to make a viewer feel.  I only had some minor color, font, and an additional image request, and in two revisions we got it to it's final version, which I think coveys the feeling ...