When I completed the first draft of Books of Loukas in the Spring of 2018, I naively thought that it would be a mere matter of months before I would have a final draft ready for professional editing, and I could move on to marketing stuff like covers and suchlike.
Hah. Yeah right.
The first epiphany was my understanding that the first draft, as Terry Pratchett observed, is merely you telling yourself the story. That is not the finished article. You have to then move to the mindset, illuminated by David Foster Wallace, and documented in the excellent interview book Quack This Way, and remember that the reader has no idea who you are or how you think, so you have to make sure that the book is going to engage them.
I found out quickly by sending copies of the draft to some perceptive friends that the draft had some major issues. The main issue, which I had already realized and tried to fix, but not successfully, was that the story took way too long to get going. I have a creative idea for fixing that, but that will actually result in a subsidiary e-book with background information. Whether that will work is something that I will need to try out on an audience that does know me.
In the meantime, I did get a lot of useful detail feedback, which I wrote into a Work List. I also added my own items, when I read the draft after taking a long timeout, and spotted some other issues.
Now I have 60 items that I am working through. Some of them are little tweaks, others are going to be more effort. The main challenge will be to avoid continuity glitches and disruptions to the flow of the story. One or two items I have already decided I will not be doing anything about, since they were observations from readers who did not understand the bigger picture about the book series. For example, one feedback item was that one of the characters was not fully integrated into Book 1. This is correct. That character is deliberately on the fringes in Book 1, and only materializes in Book 2. Deliberate design, sort of a tease.
I am going to work to assemble a Background e-book for information related to the series like locations. I have no idea if this is going to work, but I am going to try it anyway.