We've MOVED!

Howdy Endingers and reader friends!

The Ending Series blog has moved to our website. We have some AMAZING new projects we've been working on, including a Surviving The Ending Handbook, World Before, and more. You can find out more HERE: http://www.theendingseries.com/blog

Visit our new and improved blog!

June Giveaway!

Hey, Endingers!

The June giveaway is pretty cool!

Time is a-flyin' and summertime is definitely here. It's me, LP, and for this month's giveaway, we will be sending some Ending Series merchandise to a lucky participant. 

Do you have a special shelf dedicated to The Ending Series? A defaced hardcover you'd like to share? Or maybe you are re-reading After The Ending by the pool this summer. Each post counts as an entry and we'll choose a winner(s) at random at the end of the month and announce them on FB and in our newsletter. Ready, and GO! 

(this photo comes to us from a wayward traveler, always representing ♥)

Post your images here for a chance to win!

The Story Behind the Book - Publishing After The Ending

In our last post, After The Ending: The Story Behind Book One, we talked about how The Ending world came to be, what book one looked like in the beginning stages, and how much it has changed since. But there's another side to being an author that some of you may not think much about--the publishing part of being an indie author. We're going to share that piece with you today. 

Things are always changing in the indie pub world, so why did we want to go this route when we were so green? Why would we want to spend so much time on formatting and design and marketing when we initially knew so little about the process?

In part two of The Story Behind the Book, LF sheds light on why we wanted to put in all the work and publish independently vs. traditionally. 

The Story Behind the Book  

Getting Published by Lindsey Fairleigh

First off, I want to say that we published independently, meaning an outside party didn’t coordinate the actual publication process for After The Ending. We had our sticky little fingers in everything from the writing (one would hope) to the creation of the cover and the formatting of manuscripts. Unsurprisingly, the question many people ask us is, “Don’t you want a 'real' publisher?” We’ll be the first to admit that we’ve thought about it...a lot. We sat down one afternoon shortly after the first draft was completed and spent hours drafting a query letter to send to traditional publishers, and we later spent more hours revising said letter. But, we never sent it. As we wrote and worked with editors and created covers, we talked about sending it...and talked about it... and talked about it, but there was a point where the book was so close to being publishable that we thought, why not try doing it alone? We loved the book, loved the characters and how they handled everything that we threw at them, and simply loved the world we’d created together. It seemed a bit of a shame to hand our literary baby over to someone else’s care. 

I’m not going to go into the tedious details of publishing independently--and believe me, there are many details and most are tedious--but I have to say that a few services like Createspace, Kindle Direct Publishing, and Lightning Source are amazing for the new-to-publishing indie authors like us. Of course, there are countless, tireless blogger-authors who devote hours every day to helping their fellow authors achieve their publishing dreams--people like Joanna Penn, J.A. Konrath, and the trio of fellas behind the Self Publishing Podcast--without whom we’d probably still be bumbling along through the brambles of the publishing world.

It’s definitely been a lot scarier than I’d imagine the traditional publishing route to be, but also a lot faster. It’s also been a lot of work, far beyond the writing of the manuscript...which was a lot of work in and of itself. But in the end, it was worth it. 

 

With blood, sweat, tears, and tired fingers and eyes, we managed to navigate the choppy publishing waters independently, and we’ve never experienced anything more rewarding. I’m putting words in LP’s mouth, but I spend enough time with her to be certain she’d agree. After The Ending was the first book either of us published, and thinking about readers’ responses sometimes brings me to tears...happy tears. As we've gone on to publish more books in this way, we've been able to smooth out some of the bumps in the road, we have no problems staying on the independent route.

May Giveaway!!

Hey Endingers!

This month, we're offering up a complete set of audiobooks to one lucky Endinger!

All you need to do to enter is fill out this form.

We'll announce the winner in early June! 

Good Luck!

After The Ending -- The Story Behind Book One

As mentioned in our last post, this series of blog posts are about Team Lindsey's story and how The Ending Series came to be. Why are we spending time on this? The answer is simple. Most of our readers haven't been with us from the beginning and know little about us. Even those loyal readers who have been around over the past three plus years aren't aware of how The Ending world came to be.

So, here you go! This is our story of when it all began--when After The Ending wasn't even a book concept yet, when Dani and Zoe only communicated through one-dimensional emails, and the world was just starting to fall apart... THIS is how the world of The Ending came to be, how Dani and Zoe grew into complex, commanding characters who would traverse the world in order to find each other--in order to survive the Ending.

The Story Behind the Book  

 

The Inspiration by Lindsey Pogue

 

It all began with two women, a longish car ride, and a lot of passion and inspiration...

Well, that's only part of the beginning. To start off, Lindsey Fairleigh and I met working at a bookstore in 2010. LF had recently moved to the Napa Valley and LP had just returned home from traveling through Europe. At first, it was cool because we were both Lindseys, tall, awkward, quirky book addicts. But our similarities didn't stop there. For most of our lives, we’ve been conjuring up fantastical worlds, heroes, and leading ladies, but neither of us had the confidence to do much with our passion for writing.

Fast forward to October 2011...

We were on a several hour car ride back from an exhaustingly awesome NCIBA (Northern California Independent Booksellers Association) conference on behalf of Copperfield Books. LF, being the science fiction and fantasy connoisseur that she is, got to talking about an idea for a blog—a correspondence between two friends as they experience the end of the world. We started brainstorming, developing our characters, a name for the project, and so on. Apparently all we needed was a seed of mutual enthusiasm, a sprig of inspiration from all the authors we'd met at the conference, and a spark of intrigue as we browsed the endless tables of lavish book covers to get our creative juices flowing, and... dun dun dunnn... Team Lindsey was born! That car ride began the After The Ending journey that would inevitably change our lives.

 

As a result of our enthusiasm and collaboration over the next year or so (and an immense amount of revisions), After The Ending, book one in The Ending series, was born. And when I say born, I mean it morphed into a completely different project from the one we initially set out to create. While the concept and storyline essentially remained the same, the format went through multiple revisions, transforming from the original online blog version into the nearly 500-page book that was finally published in February 2013.

 

Because our initial idea was to start a blog where our two characters documented their apocalyptic survival experiences solely conveyed through emails, we started off writing in first person and only in the format of emails between Zoe and Dani. It didn’t take us too long to realize that we were severely limiting the story that Zoe and Dani had to tell. We realized we were unable to convey the depth, dynamics, and true nature of our characters because we only allowed the reader to see them through their silly, realistic, and sometimes melodramatic emails. We wanted more! We wanted to share our characters in a way the emails wouldn’t allow, so we did a complete overhaul of everything we’d written. Happily, this not only enabled us to learn more about our characters, but it allows our readers to see beyond their quirky emails—to see our leading ladies as they truly are, including their fears, passions, and even their secrets. 

 

Eventually, we realized we don’t have to limit ourselves to Zoe and Dani’s perspectives either. These two young women are only part of the world of The Ending so we spread the love, including other perspectives throughout the series. Since publishing book one, we haven't looked back!