Welcome to Part 4 of the ‘Dear Dory Creative Process’. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

Once I completed the first draft of Dear Dory (early December 2019), I switched Grammarly on and was rewarded with a list of over 5,000 errors and suggested improvements. Naturally, the next thing I did was shut my laptop and forget about it until after Christmas.

But come January, it was time to get to work.

I often hear writers say that the first draft is the hardest. Not for me. Not for my first book, at least. Drafts two and three were brutal. They each took me a month to complete and involved about four hours of deep work each day. That’s alongside looking after a newborn baby with my partner while also reading and learning as much as I could about the craft of writing and publishing.

Rewriting is like sculpting a block of stone. You circle your block ever so slowly, lightly tapping and chipping away at the rock ­– slowly shaping it into something that’s appealing to the eye, something that your audience will want to appreciate in its entirety.

I hired a structural editor and two fantastic copy editors. While helping me get the book to the proper professional standards, their combined support also taught me a lot about storytelling.

Next, I needed to test out the material with readers, preferably readers who were new(ish) parents able to relate to the story of pregnancy but who didn’t know me, so as to limit any unconscious bias. I messaged all my mates and asked them in turn to message all their friends who were parents and rustle up some test readers for me.

I was astonished by how valuable and insightful a fresh pair of eyes is. While I expected this with professional editors who work with authors and publishers for a living, I didn’t expect to receive so many valuable suggestions and improvements from other readers.

I learnt which jokes worked and which didn’t, which areas were boring, which chapters weren’t working and which areas were good but could be even better. And so the book became all the better because of the keen insights I received from others.

All in all, Dear Dory went through fourteen drafts.

I also designed a shockingly bad website (it has since been updated) to help with the launch.

I then began pitching to as many bloggers and parenthood networks as possible. Ninety-nine per cent of my emails were ignored. I had no social media presence, and Dear Dory wasn’t out yet, so I had no online proof that it was any good – no reviews, etc. But I wasn’t totally ignored. The parenting website My Baba were kind enough to feature Dear Dory in their Christmas recommendations guide. They also let me write an article for their website (Top 10 Tips For New Dads which you can read here).

I secured press coverage; a local paper wrote a piece. Bernie Keith from BBC Radio Northampton invited me on his show and said some wonderful things about the book.

On 30 October 2020, Dear Dory: Journal of a Soon-to-be Dad went on sale. I was now officially an author with my first title available for purchase.

The next thing to do was to sit back and wait to see what came next.