Smashwords Gifts and Underground Railroad Stealth

Dear Reader,

I sit here at my desk eating a McDonald’s McGriddle and pondering the odd combination of a sandwich that uses pancakes for bread. The rain is pouring though it is the middle of January in Ohio. The world is an odd place.

Last night, I decided I would redesign the cover for my short story, Mad Maxine. The first cover was, admittedly, thrown together. I thought I needed a photo-realistic cover for whatever reason, and that it needed to match my historical fiction covers.

Fact is, Mad Maxine is a contemporary short story that is so different from my historical fiction, I’m certain I was confusing readers. Maxine is a smoker, she’s just lost her husband and the story location is at his grave site. The original cover showed none of that.

So on Sunday, I pulled out my sketchbook and began drawing.  I scanned it in, did some Photoshop magic, and uploaded it to Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com.

Should be live on all those sites and propagated across Kobo, Sony, etc, over the coming days.

Smashwords Gifts

While at Smashwords, I noticed they have a beta “gift a book” option. The way it works is when you purchase the book, you submit the recipient’s email and they get an automatic email with instruction to get their copy.

This is a great option not only for readers giving gifts to readers, but also for authors who are holding contests! I hate the fact that when I want to give a free book to a reader, I usually have to send them this email stating “here is a 100% coupon for you to download the book.” Now, it seems Smashwords takes care of it for me. Huzzah!

Underground Railroad Stealth

In terms of my research for The Rebel’s Touch, I hit a gold mine while reading John P. Parker’s autobiography. Parker was an escaped slave who became a very successful businessman in the Cincinnati and Ripley, OH areas. He also happened to be a primary operator for the Underground Railroad. First off, this book reads like you are sitting at an old southern man’s kitchen table, listening to him tell his story. It is FANTASTIC! I often find myself reading a passage out loud, slowing down my natural rhythm, trying to hear how he would have said that particular sentence.

Parker’s attention to detail and storytelling is the kind that gets passed down in storytelling families. I know, I’m in one of them. My father once told me a story about how a crocodile used to eat lying children that sounded so plausible, I really thought he lost a brother who lied to this super smart, Peter Pan-esque crocodile.

Anyway, I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to Ripley, OH during the Civil War years and those leading up to it. He gives names, describes where the houses were, and the terrain he had to cross when leading contraband (what the Union army called escaped slaves) across the Ohio River from Kentucky.

I have at least three more books I want to read about Ripley Ohio and John Parker. Because I live in Ohio, and Ripley is only a couple hours from me, I want to visit the town and get a feel for the landscape. Many of the original houses still stand, sentinels on the river. I need to write to the local historical society to get additional resources, and I plan to visit the Ohio Historical Society to see what else they can tell me.

I want to get The Rebel’s Touch out sooner rather than later. But I also want to do a good job of it; I commonly hear that Haunting Miss Trentwood felt a little rushed, and maybe it was.

So yes, with the new year comes lots of grand plans. I mean to enjoy this research process, though, and I hope to translate it into a great book.

Best,

Belinda

Going Like Gangbusters

Dear Reader,

This was a GOOD week for Round of Words. Not only did I copy over my entire plot for The Rebel’s Hero over from sticky notes into the computer (you can see it on my fan page), but I also wrote character bios for half of my characters, and wrote another 1667 words on top of that initial 750 words, thus completing the first drafts of chapters two and three!

And then yesterday, while working in a coffee shop, I realized something awful. The Rebel’s Hero continues to change and morph away from Catching the Rose. So much so that it feels weird using the same character names. So I changed all of the character names and have finally broken free from Catching the Rose. The Rebel’s Hero is still technically a rewrite, so there might be a similarity here and there, at least between character relationships… Anyway, I think this is for the best.

Oh. And I made the cover for The Rebel’s Hero and unveiled it Friday evening on my fan page. If you’re a subscriber to the newsletter, you got a larger version in your inbox. As a bit of housekeeping, from now on I will be releasing book information first to the newsletter subscribers, then to Facebook fans, and then on the blog. That makes sense, right?

I updated the website home page, so if you haven’t visited in a while because you have an RSS reader, hop on over, if you please.

Now as you might have guessed, I’m exhausted. Because on top of all that, I worked full-time last week where I wrote a 32-page report that had a ton of diagrams (ok I’m cheating, I took two weeks to write that). And last night, I was swing dancing until midnight.

Belinda iz ded nao.

I’ll check in next week with a brushed up excerpt from chapter two, I think. Or maybe not. Not sure. My brain hurts.

All the best,

Belinda

Worderella Re-releases an Old Book

Dear Reader,

You might wonder why I’m publishing a second edition of my first book while in the middle of writing my second book. You wouldn’t be alone in wondering this. My mother has asked why I bother in looking to the past when I’m also planning for the future.

It’s a good question, and one I thought I’d answer here at Worderella Writes. You see, Catching the Rose was my learning book. When I say that I mean this was the book I wrote in which I learned how to:

1. write a novel.
2. edit a novel.
3. ensure my book was the only one with that particular title.
4. look for a reputable vanity/subsidy publisher.
5. deal with a vanity publisher.
6. make a cover sketch so my cover designer would know what I’m looking for.
7. twiddle my thumbs while I waited for the proof to arrive.
8. scream with excitement as I held my book in my hands.
9. gain local buzz for writing a 384 page novel as a high school student.
10. set up a professional writing website.
11. set up a professional writing blog.
12. compare my cover to other covers in the genre.
13. recognize my back cover copy was sadly lacking.
14. recognize my marketing plan sucked, because I didn’t have one.
15. accept compliments and criticisms with the same smile.
16. swallow my pride.

I learned a great many more things, but there’s no need to list them all. The point is, I love Catching the Rose, and a great number of my readers do as well. Almost seven years later, I’m still hearing about how a friend of a friend of a friend of my mother picked up my book, and liked it so much that they asked my mother when my next one was coming out.

If you’ve ever had this happen to you, you know the quiet joy that spreads within your chest, blossoms in your heart, and makes your eyes shine.

So I’m releasing a second edition of this book, giving it a real chance this time because it deserves it. I know so much more now about the book industry, though I have a lot more to learn. I know how to do page layout and cover design; I did both for this second edition. I removed a number of my glaring rookie mistakes, such as

1. spelling out accents (“Why how dayah you, Mistah Williams, foah speakin’ to me in such a mannah!”)
2. allowing widows and orphans to mess up the visual harmony of the typographical page.
3. adverbs run rampant.

I didn’t catch everything, but like I said, I’m still learning. Catching the Rose is my baby. I spent six years writing it during the developmental stage of life. I poured in all of my teenage confusion and angst, edited out the worst of it, and made an entertaining and engaging read for women of all ages. And a few men, too.

Even as I was re-doing the page layout last night, I caught myself reading passages and chuckling at the characters, or wondering what was going to happen next. Isn’t that odd? I mean, I wrote the book. Shouldn’t I know what’s going to happen?

I do, because I did write the book. But for me, it’s always been about the journey. I’m that jerk who reads the end of the book before I read the entire thing, because I don’t want to read it if I won’t like the ending. That doesn’t mean I only like happy endings, because I don’t. I like well-written endings. And a well-written bittersweet ending is clutch.

So I’m re-releasing Catching the Rose because:

1. It was, and still is, my learning book.
2. As per #1, I’m learning how to truly self-publish so when I self-publish Haunting Miss Trentwood, I’ll have worked out the kinks.
3. I love this book.
4. I love the characters, and I love their issues.
5. My readers ask me, years after reading the book, what happened to Veronica and Brad.
6. While formatting the pages, I got lost in my own story.
7. I am a writer, and I must write.
8. I am a storyteller, and I must tell this story.

So what do you think? Am I being dumb? Am I being greedy? Or something else entirely?

Worderella Releases a Book Trailer

Dear Reader,

I’ve made a book trailer for Catching the Rose, and let me tell you, it’s exhausting. But oh so fun, if you know what you’re doing. I downloaded CamStudio to screen capture what I was doing, but for some reason, it didn’t take properly.

Which really annoys me, because I was looking forward to watching a time lapse of the three hours it took me to do the actual work, after hours of looking for the perfect images/music.

Anyway, I’m going to try to do it again. I’m going to replicate the process, and capture my actions on screen so you can see what goes into a book trailer. Or, at least a book trailer of my making.

In the meantime, enjoy my trailer, and let me know what you think about it. There are some sixty of you following this blog, and I’m getting a bit lonely!

Worderella Becomes Her Own Hero (i.e. Cover Designer)

So I’ve been meaning to release my first book, Catching the Rose, as in eBook format, but wasn’t sure where to begin. As always, I turned to my friend Zoe Winters to see what she’s done, because let’s face it, she has her hand in every pot when it comes to self-publishing.

Smashwords, it seemed, was my answer. Smashwords is an

ebook publishing and distribution platform for ebook authors, publishers and readers. We offer multi-format, DRM-free ebooks, ready for immediate sampling and purchase, and readable on any e-reading device.

The really cool thing about this is I can upload a Word document and they do all the formatting for me. My book is now, as far as I can tell, available to read in the following formats:

• HTML
• Javascript
• Kindle
• EPub
• PDF
• RTF
• Sony Reader
• Palm readers
• Plain text

How crazy is that?? I’m pretty excited, I’d like to see what sort of sales I get this way. But again, just because it’s out there doesn’t mean it will sell. I should market the new format, right? Well, I have been meaning to update the branding of the book, and since this version is owned completely by me I felt funny using the cover provided by Aventine Press, the subsidy that originally printed my work.

Turns out stock art is an amazing thing, if you find exactly what you want. I searched through istockphoto.com, gettyimages.com, and fotolia.com, and decided that Fotolia was giving me the results I wanted. The image below is the one I chose for Catching the Rose.

There is a masquerade ball during the book, so the masks are absolutely perfect. I wanted to step away from the ultra-pink of the original book, so the blue background really pulled me in. Veronica, the main character, has blond hair, and Brad, the interest, has brown hair. I looked for an entire week at stock photography and my jaw dropped when I found photos by Andrey Kiselev. Just perfect!

But of course, an image isn’t enough to make a book cover. I played around during my break at work today with Pixlr, a great online alternative to Photoshop just to see what I could do with the image (see below). After an hour, I had something I was in love with, and I couldn’t wait to get home so I could buy the image and make the cover for real in Photoshop.

You see, I’d like to do a reprint of Catching the Rose, give it an updated look. So I need a decent-sized file that will print well, as well as make a cover design that will scale to a thumbnail nicely. Smashwords requires that you upload an image that is at least 600 pixels in height. I’m not sure why, perhaps to fit all the different eReader formats. So the final version is below.

What do you think? I’d love to get some feedback. To thank you ahead of time, I’d like to give you a discount if you’re interested in supporting me in my first self-publishing venture. To receive a discount on Catching the Rose (Smashwords edition), type SWS25 into the promotional field at checkout.

Worderella Needs a Hero (aka Book Cover Designer)

Really, the two are interchangeable at this point. I need both a hero and a book cover designer. You see, I’m self-publishing my book and I’m doing as much of it myself as I can. Why? Well, because I just graduated from grad school and I have loans to take care of, thank you. I’m also a creative; I take pride in doing things and have an aptitude to learn new talents fairly quickly.

Book cover layout, however, continues to elude me, much to my frustration. The problem is that I want an industry-standard-style book, something along the lines of Silent in the Sanctuary, or The Slightest Provocation, or The Deception of the Emerald Ring. Those covers have stock imagery that I can’t afford. I suppose I could commission an artist to draw my character in a similar style, but how many artists these days like to be so… classical?

My process

I’ve been collecting my favorite covers as I see them on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com for the last, oh, I don’t know, three years. I have them separated by category: Fiction, Romance, and Teen, since those are my three main inspirational sources. I know the trends like the back of my hand, but the problem is my book, Haunting Miss Trentwood, doesn’t really fit in a “trend,” per se. How many of you know about a historical romance with paranormal inklings? I can think of one, Amanda Quick’s Arcane Society series. The one I read was Second Sight. But I’ve looked at those covers, and I don’t like them because they don’t get the mood I’m going for.

Anyway, I went to JoAnn Fabrics to buy a fat quarter and some scrapbook paper to, in essence, build my cover from scratch.

I had sketched out the general idea that I wanted, and since I’m crafty with the scissors, I went at it for three hours, running upstairs and down to the copy machine and back to my desk, grabbing my mothers calligraphy pens when I realized I didn’t have brown, and then taking photos of the final result.

Sadness abounds. I didn’t measure properly and my photos came out being the improper size for a trade paperback, which is 5.5″ by 8.5″.

So I went digital. I’d had fun working with real materials, but with that failed, I decided to replicate it digitally.

But then that felt a bit sterile, so I went to istockexchange.com and grabbed some comp photos that I liked and began to play around with layouts.

An improvement, I think, but still not what I want. Why is it so difficult to make a book cover for a book titled Haunting Miss Trentwood? I think because the book touches multiple genres lightly at once. It’s historical fiction because it’s the late Victorian era, specifically, the year of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. It’s a romance, albeit sweet. It’s a mystery because blackmail is involved. It’s a paranormal because a ghost is involved. With all these injected into one story, I’ve opted to keep the plot itself rather simple, allowing the characters to grow and mature, allowing the reader to enjoy the journey rather than roll their eyes at me for trying to cover too much in one story.

You’re not done writing, why care about the cover?

I’d like to have a cover so I can begin my marketing campaign. Marketing will be the toughest part of this self-publishing journey for me because I’m not a very good schmoozer. I love Twitter and will be utilizing that hardcore. I dislike Facebook, but it’s the lesser of two evils (not having online presence).

Additionally, having a visual of the book inspires me to keep going. I have every intention of completing this book and making it successful, i.e. break even at least. It’s so frustrating because I am a passable artist in my own right… but I’m also a perfectionist, and my artistic skill simply isn’t at the level I prefer for my novel.

Help me, oh mighty Internetz, you’re my only hope

If you’re self-publishing, know someone who is or has, etc, how did you/they find a book cover designer? How did you/they find a reputable artist? What am I doing wrong? Why has my usually stellar Google-fu failed me?

Self-Publishers Unite!

As a published author determined to self-publish all future works, I always find it fascinating to read about others’ adventures in the self-publishing world. More people are doing it these days with the help of digital processing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a new trend. Many “established” authors self-published, such as Virginia Woolf.

Where do I begin?

Jumping into the self-publishing realm is not for the faint of heart. In fact, I would do a subsidy/vanity publisher first, just to get your feet wet. Something like Lulu would be a nice start as well, because they walk you through the process.

Once you’re certain you want to self-publish, subscribe to Publetariat. This is a blog peopled by a collection of self-publishers who write about everything, from hand selling your work to finding a good copy editor. They discuss the highs and lows, and provide resources to learn more about self publishing.

Then I would hop over to Dan Poynter’s website, which is chock full of free online resources for publishers.

Start watching Self-Publishing Review to get an idea of the quality people are looking for in terms of good self-published fare.

Listen to The Creative Pen podcasts on “writing, publishing options, internet sales and promotion – for your book.”

Most importantly, keep writing! If you don’t have anything to sell, what’s the point?

How are your projects going?

Have you decided if you want to self-publish, subsidy publish, or go the traditional route? Now that I’ve returned to the blogosphere, what would you like to see me write about?

Indie-Publishing Extravaganza

I am a fan of the indie-publisher in the same way that I’m a fan of a lot of indie musicians. It’s a scary thing to put your work out there for others to judge. And as there will always be artists that maybe shouldn’t have released their work, there are authors that shouldn’t release theirs.

But that goes vice-versa, too. There are indie artists who are so good at what they do that they gain fans, word-of-mouth publicity, and possibly even a big label contract, which may or may not be their end goal. Lucky for us, the same thing goes for authors… except there is still a stigma behind “self-publishing.”

Today, I’m listing some useful websites that will help you decide if you want to take that leap into the unknown and become an independently published author.

Indie Publishing Revolution
Maintained by Zoe Winters, a frequent commenter and even a guest blogger here at Worderella Writes. She’s an intense supporter of independent publishing and is doing her best to make sure that you know what you’re getting into if you’re interested in doing the same.

Publetariat
Self-described as an “online community and news hub for the independent author.” The people behind it claim to be experts in editing, marketing, journalism, etc, and are determined to help you make the best product you can. It’s not that you’re “resorting” to independent publishing, it’s that you “choose” to independently publish.

Selling Novels on the Amazon Kindle
A first-hand account from an author who experimented with selling a draft version of his novel on the Amazon Kindle and in e-book format. Very interesting and useful; read the comments to gain more insight as to whether you want to follow a similar path.

CNet’s 25 Things You Should Know About Self-Publishing
An honest assessment of what you need to know about self-publishing from a man who had to struggle through it the hard way by himself. Read it, learn it, love it.

Book Cover Archive
Not actually a publishing website, but an excellent resource for those of you needing inspiration for your book covers.

Book: The Rules of Gentility

Title: The Rules of Gentility
Author: Janet Mullany
Genre: Regency Romance
Length: 268 pgs

Summary: Miss Philomena Wellesly-Clegg is a young woman who knows her mind and operates by lists: she has a list of bonnet supplies and a list of eligible bachelors to start her day, and neither list includes Inigo Linsley, the younger brother of her best-friend’s husband. But Inigo is handsome, scandalous, and for some reason, very willing to help her out of a sudden and unwanted proposal, so perhaps she ought to give him a chance?

Excerpts:
Couldn’t find any that I really liked/that stood out for me.

Why should you read this book?
This book is, as it says on the back cover, a funny combination of Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary… which is weird since the latter is merely a modern retelling/spin of the former. Told in first person from Philomena and Inigo’s perspectives, it is amusing and frothy; a great book to read on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It does not take itself seriously in the least. After all, the heroine is proposed to in the water closet. Twice. I’m not sure if writers would want to emulate this book, however, because it is so very frothy with almost nothing to make you want to read it again. From what I understand, however, this is a departure from Mullany’s typical writing style so perhaps I shouldn’t judge too fast. I do know that based on this sample, I’m not terribly inclined to read anything else by her, despite my enjoying it.

So, read this book to know what not to do: don’t make disposable characters, or an entirely goofy cast of characters, or a plot built on the assumption your audience read Pride and Prejudice. Do read this book for an example of comedic writing. For those of you thinking to self-publish your work, this is an excellent example of a well-thought cover, as it is the original reason why I picked up the book in the first place. Always remember, marketing is so important!

The First Thing a Reader Sees is the Cover

If you’re trying to make it big as a self-publisher, investing in your marketing is key. Don’t just slap a picture as your cover or use some template, hire a design team! Not only will they give you a great cover, they’ll also give you ideas about bookmarks and business cards (which you can leave in library books similar to your own book), posters, postcards, etc. Look at the following companies for a headstart to a great marketing plan.

Dunn+Associates Design: book cover design, speaker material. From start to finish, we design so that you SELL. You not only get a dynamic cover look, you walk away with a powerful set of marketing tools. It’s the way we design your cover and your self-publishing brand that gets readers, reviewers, distributors, bookstores, and more, to all say YES! You hit the streets running with proven tools for promoting your book straight to the top.

Hey, John Edwards went through them, why not you?

Book Cover Express: book cover designer, book cover artists. Book Cover Express offers a full range of services, including free Bookland EAN barcodes. We can create any size book cover and format it to your printer’s specifications. All this, with an author-friendly, work-for-hire contract.

Dan Poynter from ParaPublishing says this company should be “added to your production company,” and I must admit, the covers do look pretty nice.