Bethany Hagen's Blog

So lately it’s been a lot of waiting.  If you thought that the query stage was a trial of patience, brace yourself.  Publishing is all about waiting.  Waiting for an editorial letter, waiting for a marketing plan, waiting for a cover, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Right now, I’m in the waiting for a cover phase and it’s a fantastic mix of excitement and anticipation and genuine impatience.  A cover is something that everyone from the editor to the sales department weighs in on, and they take into account all sorts of practical variables that I would never think of, plus still find a way for it to be true to the book.  And I am super duper lucky that I’ve been invited to chime in with any thoughts or ideas I may have–not many authors can say that!  So, with so much expert input, these things can take time.

But, while I know all this with my brain, I am still impatient.  Waiting is hard.

I’m keeping myself busy, though.  Book Two is well underway–probably only 10,000 or 20,000 words away from being a real first draft that I can then rip apart and stitch back together (like Frankenstein’s monster.)  I won’t lie, Book Two is been a PITA, and this is only the drafting part–the easy part.  God help me when it comes to revision time.