Defying expectations

15 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by wyndes in Cover design, Grace, Self-publishing

If you read my last two posts, you might reasonably expect today’s post to include the new cover for A Gift of Time. Alas, I don’t have it yet. I do, however, have the new cover for A Gift of Grace, which feels like an appropriate substitute.

I didn’t ask the designer to add freckles to Grace, but we did get all fancy with both models’ clothing. Any second now they’ll be running into a bear. And I really like their expressions.

Alas, responding to comments on the last post reminded me that the point of new covers was to expand my audience and appeal to the many, many, many book-buying romance readers in the world, and those expressions are probably all wrong for that audience. I should have made him half-naked and had both of them looking sultry. Covers like that might not have been to my personal taste (or yours!), but the point of a cover is to appeal to a specific audience and I’m not my own audience. Or at least I am my own audience, but I’m not the part of my audience that can buy enough books to let me go on eating and paying vet bills.

Oh, well. I still like their expressions.

I’ve been working on lots of marketing type things. Some of it is very fun. Much of it is not. But on the fun side has been trying out keywords to include on my book listings. “Ghost romance paranormal suspense mystery” should be a terrible set — according to Kindle Rocket, there are 6046 books found with that search. But, at least yesterday, A Gift of Ghosts was at the very top of that list, which means it’s a terrible set for some other 6000 books, but not a terrible set for my book. That was fun to discover.

Speaking of Amazon, today is Amazon Prime Day and I had $10 of Amazon money from spending $10 at Whole Foods, plus the $5 Prime Day deal on printed books, so I spent a very pleasant 45 minutes looking at all the items on my wish list and deciding what not to buy. But I finally went for Salt Fire Acid Heat, a cookbook I’ve been debating forever. I’m probably not going to carry it around in the van with me, but I’m at my brother’s so I can store it with my Christmas ornaments and scrapbooks when I drive away. And I’m excited to read it.

I’m suspecting that this week isn’t going to be a terribly productive week for me, though. I’m dog-sitting, so I’ll have three dogs to take care of, and the puppy is energetic and always trying to convince the two older dogs to play. This does not go over well with the two older dogs, so dog-sitting the puppy is a lot more like dog-sitting a toddler than it is house-sitting. But it should be fun, even if it means that I don’t finish all the many miscellaneous things that I’m working on.

To-do list

12 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by wyndes in Cover design, Self-publishing, Thought

≈ 11 Comments

I created a To-Do list this morning with well over 80 items on it. Not a single one of those items was “create a to-do list”.

Also, not a single one of those items was “spend twenty minutes browsing to-do list apps on the app store, hoping to find one that’s better than plain text before giving up in frustration.” If you’ve got a recommendation for a to-do list app, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Actually, my to-do list is kind of a work of art. But it does not include “write a blog post,” so I’m going to make this quick.

Pennsylvania continues to be lovely but I am spending far too much time sitting on the guest bed banging away on my computer. I’m taking advantage of the internet to try to get lots of internet-related business tasks done — updating my mailing list software, setting up an automation sequence, working on the websites, that kind of thing. I’d rather be outside playing with my niece and the dogs, but honestly, it’s about time I took the work side of life a little more seriously.

Speaking of which… a more serious cover.

book cover for A Gift of Thought — Guys in stock photos never shave.

Cover reveal for a familiar book

08 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by wyndes in Cover design, Ghosts, Self-publishing

≈ 9 Comments

As of today, I have written approximately 762,000 words of fiction. That sounds like a lot unless you know that my goal in October of 2011 — before I even finished writing A Gift of Ghosts — was to write a million words, then decide if I wanted to be a writer. Having written approximately 200,000 words of fanfiction in the preceding twelve months, it didn’t seem unrealistic.

Oh, well.

As I said several months ago, I don’t need to finish those words to know that I’m going to be a writer.

But I’m not just a writer: I’m also a publisher.

And one of the best parts of being a publisher is getting to look at the covers of your books and say, “Hmm, I think I’m ready for something new.” I tried updating the typography on the Tassamara series, thinking that would satisfy me, but it didn’t, so last month, I hired Kelley York of Sleepy Fox Studio and described my dream cover of A Gift of Ghosts to her.

Without further ado, my ‘something new’.

What do you think? Does it match your ideas of the characters? Would it be your dream cover? I haven’t updated the book yet, because I’m waiting until I have new covers for all the books in the series, but I couldn’t wait to share it!

Bad File Management & A Lonely Magic

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by wyndes in A Lonely Magic, A Precarious Magic, Cover design, Self-publishing, WIP

≈ 15 Comments

I started work on A Precarious Balance, sequel to A Lonely Magic, last week. I didn’t get very far, partially because I kept getting distracted by Grace, but also because I was flailing a bit. I’ve got lots of notes, and there were things I’d already written that I wanted to re-use, so I compiled everything into a Scrivener file and got started. But as I tried to write, I was having a tough time finding Fen’s voice.

I finally decided two days ago that I needed to re-read the book again and refresh my memory on all the details, not just the ones that I’d put into my notes.

I didn’t like it.

That was a weird experience. I don’t always like what I’ve written (understatement, yes), but I LOVED writing A Lonely Magic. It was so much fun and I liked being in Fen’s head so much, and her adventures were so surprising, and such a beautiful blend of things I enjoy, science and adventure and fantasy and romance. But four years later, I’m re-reading and I didn’t like her at all. She’s bland and a little whiny and annoying.

And then, at about the halfway mark, I read the line, “Her own reputation had been shot to hell even before she dropped out and she hadn’t given fuck one.” and the “fuck” was startlingly out-of-place. It wasn’t the first time she’d used the word, but it was pretty close. And I realized that the version I was reading — which was in Vellum, which is the software I use to create ebooks — was the version I had once-upon-a-time tried to delete all the swear words from.

I wrote about it at the time. I was tired of getting negative reviews about Fen’s swearing so I tried to edit it into a “clean” version, and I realized partway through that Fen’s cursing is part of her, that it didn’t work to clean up her language, and I stopped. It REALLY doesn’t work to clean up Fen’s language. She goes from a character who is internally tough, a fighter despite her relative level of helplessness, to a… well, leaf in the wind.

In the hotel room scene, Swearing-Fen is stuck because she’s considered her options and she can’t find a way out but you know that she’s still fighting, even if it’s only in her head. (She never swears aloud in that scene, it’s all in her inner dialogue.) In the same scene, Clean-Fen is stuck and she’s passive and helpless about it. She’s going along with what other people are deciding for her future because she’s got no choice. Losing her inner obscenities takes her from edgy and angry to blandly accepting. She is not an interesting character to me when she’s being bland.

Largely, I think, that’s a good realization to have. I can’t write a book with Clean Fen. She is not someone I want to spend the next six months with. But it was not at all a happy realization to discover that the version in Vellum was the bland version. That means that the one available online is also the bland version. I know that because I only have one Vellum file and it has the latest cover. But oh, what a screw-up. I suppose it doesn’t matter terribly if I publish another version online, but these were non-trivial edits. They changed the flavor of the story. I don’t even know how long that’s the version that’s been available. Sigh.

The good news, I guess, is that it doesn’t really sell much — 100 copies in the past 12 months — so not many readers are going to know or care. Yay for being an unsuccessful author, I guess?

It is interesting, though, as a writer, to discover how such a seemingly minor change can become so important. One of my favorite occupations is playing with ideas for book covers. I’ve got probably at least a dozen designs for A Lonely Magic that I’ve toyed with — it’s literally been published with at least five or six different covers, but I’ve got a bunch more that haven’t seen the light of day — but I’ve never been satisfied, because somehow I’ve never found one that conveys the feel of the book to me. Maybe that’s because I don’t really know how the book feels?

I do know that the last time I read the book, which was in a print edition just a few months ago, I laughed when I got to the ending. Despite all the reviews that criticized the cliffhanger ending, I never believed it ended in a cliffhanger, not once. Fen found family, she found magic, she’s in a safe place, she knows who wanted to kill her, she’s defeated the bad guy — what the hell is a cliffhanger about that? Except it’s totally a cliffhanger, because when I was reading it with the perspective of time, I ended it really, really wanting to know what happens next. Everything with Malik is interesting and even though he’s the bad guy, and his resolution technically doesn’t matter, I absolutely want Fen to figure out how he’s bound and how to get him unbound.

A few of the many covers for ALM that I’ve made and never used. Which one looks most like the story to you?

Sample cover for A Lonely Magic

another sample cover for A Lonely Magic

Miscellany

14 Monday May 2018

Posted by wyndes in Cover design, Grace, Personal, Zelda

≈ 12 Comments

R told me a very funny story about love bugs yesterday (while we were having a nice Mother’s Day brunch) and it almost made me feel kindly toward them. For a minute or two. It didn’t last.

For those not from Florida, the bugs colloquially called “love bugs” — I have no idea what their real name is — have a brief mating season in spring and in fall. Every few years, their mating season is insanely crazy and there are bugs everywhere. You can’t go outside without breathing them in, because there are so many of them. They will crawl on you, they will get in your hair, they will fly in your face, and they will cover your vehicle. Yesterday, during my drive to Sarasota, I probably killed hundreds of them, maybe thousands. It does not make for a cheerful drive. So, so, so gross.

Fortunately (?), it’s also really rainy. Enough so that I checked the weather this morning with a wary eye. I’m not leaving Florida until R graduates from college and there’s no way I’m missing his graduation, but we actually might be looking at the first named storm of the 2018 hurricane season. About three weeks too early, but Al Gore warned us a long time ago about changing weather systems. It’s not a surprise. And it is handy for rinsing off dead love bugs.

I’m waiting on test results for Z, but she is unchanged. Yesterday afternoon, she peed on both beds, so I spent the afternoon and early evening doing laundry. The campground (Oscar Scherer Stat Park) has a nice washer and dryer, so I managed to get clean sheets on the beds, but it cost me $7 total. That’s going to be an expensive daily habit.

Meanwhile, she rejected fresh Atlantic salmon and rice for breakfast. I ate some and it was quite delicious. But she seemed hungry before I gave her the pills she’s supposed to take and it finally occurred to me to wonder whether the medication — which is not doing anything for the peeing problem — is making her nauseous. Turns out the side effects are restlessness, irritability and loss of appetite. I’m thinking we are going to stop those pills. I’ll continue with the antibiotics, at least until we get the test results. Eventually I will become nonchalant about the peeing, I suppose, if the other options are starving dog and/or dying dog. Peeing dog is fine in comparison.

I actually really wanted to make some cute flow chart graphics for this post. The first would ask, “Has Zelda peed inside?” and the answers would be, “No,” leading to “Of course not, what a bizarre idea, why would she do that?” and “Yes,” leading to “Seriously? WTF?”. The second chart would ask, “Has Zelda peed inside?” and the “Yes” response would lead to a bunch of variants, like “Did she pee on me?” and “Did it wake me up?” and “Did she pee on so many things that I must immediately do multiple loads of laundry?” and so on, with answers that would include “Great!” and “No problem,” for the lesser pee issues. Honestly, pee on the floor only bothers me now if I step in it.

However, creating a flow chart turned out to be a lot more work than one would expect. I wound up having lots of fun playing with book cover designs instead. I’m a long way away from needing any new book covers, but it was fun to try out some variations. (I was using free templates from Canva and my own photographs.)

possible new covers for A Lonely Magic

Of course, the book I’m really working on is Grace, so I should get back to it. No progress this weekend, unsurprisingly, and this week — given the graduation and the distractions inherent in being in the same town as R — is probably not going to be my most productive, but I’m really pretty close to finishing a draft for the first time ever. And I have no current impulse to start over from the beginning, which is a good sign.

I’ve got one other distraction happening this week, though, which is pretty fun. When I was walking Z this morning, I was wondering why it felt sort of like Christmas Eve. You know the feeling, that slightly magical sense of anticipation? And then I remembered that it’s because The Penderwicks at Last releases tomorrow. Yes, it feels like Christmas Eve because of a book. But I love the Penderwicks and I’m so looking forward to getting lost in their world again for a few hours.

First, though, some Grace!

A Lonely Magic Cover

27 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by wyndes in A Lonely Magic, Cover design, Grace, NaNo, Self-publishing

≈ 2 Comments

Several days ago, I mentioned that I had — impulsively — commissioned a fifth cover for A Lonely Magic. Yes, insane impulse, I know. How many covers does one book really need? The short answer is five, because I am so absolutely pleased with this cover that I can’t imagine ever looking at it and not feeling a thrill of satisfaction.

Jake at jcalebdesign is phenomenal. He took the info I gave him and got creative, and then he took my absolute nitpicking insanity and managed five or six more rounds of design, changing and tweaking and never telling me that I was a pain and always trying to deliver what I was looking for. I am so pleased that at Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, I actually picked this cover as the thing I was thankful for — well, and then added my delightful son and darling dogs and lovely family and terrific guests. I’m not a total ingrate about all the blessings in my life. I’m just counting this cover as one of them right now, because it makes me happy to finally have my feelings about this book captured in an image.

And now I have to go reformat A Lonely Magic for print, because I want a paper copy of it with this cover.

Sometime today I’m also going to be trying to write like mad to catch up for my two NaNo days devoted to Thanksgiving dinner instead of word count, but I’m also feeling this great impatience to be done with Grace and Noah. I really, really want to get back to writing A Precarious Balance right now!

Motivation

22 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by wyndes in A Lonely Magic, Cover design, Food, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

Sometimes it’s so hard to open up the file and start typing. I wish I knew why. I read The War of Art recently, subtitled “Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Creative Battles” and about all I can remember from it is a sort of religious idea of creativity, with Resistance being the devil’s handiwork. More or less. Really, probably less, I’m totally reading into it. But I remember nothing that tells me why I experience such resistance or what to do about it. Except, of course, to just open the damn file and start typing.

A few weeks ago I was on reddit and a cover designer posted a $30 cover offer for NaNo. On a total impulse, I took him up on it. For, of all things, A Lonely Magic. This will be the… fifth cover. I had to count on my fingers. Ugh. I should stop blaming the cover for the book’s lack of success — I worked in the business long enough to know that some books just don’t sell. Wrong time, wrong book, wrong opening, wrong blurb — it’s impossible to know why. It’s just the nature of the business.

But my Law of Attraction friend told me that I needed to be positive about the cover, to send out vibes into the universe that said “sparkling and magical” and to have faith that the cover would be, finally, the cover of my dreams. It would help, I suppose, if I knew what my dreams were. Anyway, I got a first design yesterday, and then a second pass at that design in the evening, and I’m actually rather impatiently waiting for the third pass. It’s different. I have no idea whether it will sell any books. But I’m definitely pleased with my $30 investment. (I’ll post it, obviously, when I get a final version.)

And now I should stop letting my Resistance run away with me. Yesterday I didn’t write a single word on Grace and today I need to do better. As well as doing all those chores I didn’t get to yesterday, including getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, four days in advance! But I like to make it easy on myself by having almost everything prepped in advance. Last year, there were nine of us, and by the time people arrived, I had the kitchen close to clean, and by seven PM, it was back to normal. I aspire to do the same this year, with ten people, which means planning. But this year it ought to be really easy — I’ve got people bringing stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, rolls, and two kinds of dessert. I’m on turkey, cranberry sauce, and gravy, but will probably add brussel sprouts and maybe salad, just to give myself more to do. Hmm, maybe I’ll make an appetizer? But I already know that my guests are happy as long as the turkey, stuffing, and pie are there, so I don’t really have much to worry about.

Resistance is writing about Thanksgiving dinner when I should be writing Grace. But if you know of any interesting Thanksgiving appetizers, please share them with me!

Eenie-meenie-minie-mo

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by wyndes in A Lonely Magic, Cover design, Self-publishing

≈ 7 Comments

A Lonely Magic’s darker cover

A Lonely Magic’s lighter cover

Looking at them side-by-side definitely makes me think that I should keep trying to tweak that background wavy-box. I don’t really have any good design tools, which makes it hard to do anything clever and creative, but I could keep trying. I’m not sure it’s a worthwhile use of my time, though! Anyway, opinions welcome, please.

Also, the current blurb:

WTF? What did she ever do to him?

When a gorgeous guy gives her an unthinkable choice – death by drug overdose or gunshot – he plunges 21-year-old Fen into a sea of trouble. Although she’s rescued in the nick of time by a teenage boy, Luke, and his sexy older brother, Kaio, escaping from her would-be killer won’t be so easy. Her brush with death is only the beginning of her wild journey.

The brothers aren’t ordinary men, and Fen’s rescue and her supposedly safe retreat have unnerving layers. How did they find her? What do they want with her? Who can she trust? And why was she targeted for murder in the first place?

As Fen and Luke are forced to run for their lives, Luke spirits Fen away, into an enchanting underwater city. But every enchantment has its dark edges. Fen must face an otherworldly plot that threatens not only her life but those of millions of human beings…and she must look deep within herself to find the strength and courage she’ll need to get out of this strange new world alive.

Submerge yourself in the latest gripping novel from Sarah Wynde, author of the Tassamara series. You won’t want to come up for air before the final enthralling page of A Lonely Magic.

*****
I think I want a new headline, so I’m still working on that, but otherwise, for those of you who haven’t read it, does it sound interesting? And for those of you who have, does it sound right? Any suggestions for changes?

Thanks for your help!

Updated: tweaked blurb

Series Redesign

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by wyndes in Cover design, Self-publishing

≈ 7 Comments

a series re-design

So one of the things that I’ve been doing/worrying about/working on/driving myself insane over is the decision to take publishing more seriously.

Here’s the overall picture: I quit my job (editor) in 2011 to go to graduate school. I had everything carefully calculated. Enough savings to get my master’s degree and then spend several months job-searching while I made it to R’s high school graduation before I needed to find a job. After his high school graduation, I, of course, would be more or less free to move anywhere, so if counseling wasn’t working out, I could get myself a non-telecommuting job as an editor anywhere–maybe Berkeley, Indiana, New Jersey. Wherever the jobs were, there I could go. (As long as I could bring Zelda, of course.)

Doesn’t that sound well-planned? Self-publishing was irrelevant, just a fun little side deal. Unexpected, however, was that 2011-2012 would be the worst years of my life and I would drop out of graduate school and wallow in… nope, not being mean to myself. That I would drop out of graduate school and spend a rocky year struggling with bereavement-induced severe depression.

In June, R graduates high school. I will not have my master’s degree. Every sensible bone in my body tells me it’s time to start looking for a job as an editor and be ready to move where it takes me. All the less-sensible bones are stubbornly saying, no, no, no. Not going to do that. I like Florida. I like my house. I want to stay here. And I don’t want to edit anymore. I want to write.

So the completely crazy bones–they’re investing money that I don’t really have and time that I could be spending working on my resume into starting up a publishing business and thinking about actually marketing my books.

The first step was to hire a designer to make me the covers above.

Tell me you love them.

Tell me they’d make you more likely to buy my books (despite the fact that if you’re reading my blog, it’s kinda a sure thing that you already got at least one of them).

Tell that I haven’t wasted my money and that I don’t need to be spending my time polishing my resume instead of sending my cover designer emails that say, “okay, that’s nice but what if…”

Don’t tell me how you’d make them better, because that ship has sailed, these are the final designs. And yes, I could have done lots of rounds of looking for feedback and maybe I should have but when I’m in an insecure space, having lots of people tell me what I could be doing better is actually more likely to send me crawling under the covers for a day or two than be productive.

But if you have an editor job for me… well, we could talk.

Or if you want to say lovely things about those covers, well, that would work, too.

PS A Lonely Magic–still going well. I made myself cry today–always a good sign!