Category Archives: Self-publishing

Credit where due

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Cover design

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I just spent a frustrating hour searching for the image that I used on the Ghosts cover. I think I’ve basically decided that it is the real and final cover (maybe some tweaking), and so even though the image was public domain, I wanted to credit the photographer and the website on the copyright page. Argh. Of course, I bookmarked the site, but then I lost all my bookmarks.

For future and current reference: Lightning Strike by Adam Weeden is the original image.

The phoenix

01 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by in Self-publishing, Writing

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I just wrote this as a mile-long comment on Stellar Four, and I decided that I liked it so much that I wanted to post it here, too . . .(somewhat abbreviated).

I worked in publishing for more or less the past twenty years, book publishing for the last eleven. I’m cool with hating B&N: the rise of B&N meant the slow but steady demise of the independent bookstores and the proliferation of copycat books.
The book buyers for B&N had incredible, terrifying, horrifying power to determine what books people read. If the B&N buyer, God forbid, didn’t take a book of ours, then there was no point in publishing. We couldn’t sell enough copies of a book to make it worthwhile to print the book if it wasn’t going to get on the shelves of B&N. When I started in publishing, we had a sales force for the indies, people who spent their days  wandering from one independent bookstore to the next. Over the course of the last decade, those people all lost their jobs as the indies died. The only places that mattered were B&N and Borders and Amazon, and really, that meant B&N and Borders, because Amazon was happy to include any title.
At the same time, as a person earning a living from publishing, I had to be grateful to B&N. Printing books is such a ridiculous business from a financial sense. A few hugely successful titles support dozens of unprofitable titles. The idea that publishers would lose money on many of their titles was almost a given when I started in publishing. That was just how it worked. Over my decade, though, more books became at least break-even because B&N and Borders could place such large orders. So yay, B&N.
Except, back to being a reader again, it was killing publishing. Publishers had to print books that were being churned through a mass market system. You look at YA publishing right now — it’s the most innovative and interesting area of publishing and it’s because Harry Potter and Twilight made it possible for YA publishers to take risks. And that creates a supply and demand cycle. B&N gives the books more shelf space, more readers see the books, more people buy the books, B&N gives the books more shelf space, and suddenly YA has rows and other areas lose theirs. Other areas of publishing — well, it’s always possible to find some good books. But innovation and creativity and diversity and quirkiness were being largely stifled by the need for a book to get into the shelves of B&N for two months. Basically, what I’m saying is that B&N was saving *printing* but killing publishing.
E-readers change all that. E-readers mean that little presses can spring up out of nowhere to publish quirky little books that a mainstream publisher could never afford to print. Yes, a ton of dreck is going to get published and for a time, the market is going to look like one giant slush pile, but a decade from now, acquisition editors aren’t going to have to say, “I love it, but I don’t know how I’d sell it, so I can’t take the risk” because the risk is going to be so minimal in a primarily e-book world. (And yes, I said that exact line more than once in my career. If we couldn’t figure out what shelf B&N would put the book on, there was no point in publishing it. It would never make the money to support the paper costs.)
I love paper books, I do. I’m quite sure that there will never come a day when there aren’t some print books in my house. But e-readers are going to save publishing — not necessarily the big publishers — but the part of publishing that is about telling interesting stories and finding interesting voices and sharing interesting information. That part of publishing was dying in the paper world, because paper, printing, shipping, etc. were so expensive.
Watching the independent bookstores die was heartbreaking. Watching the independent e-publishers rise is like seeing the phoenix. E-readers are the fuel.

Cover 4 (sort of)

28 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by in Cover design, Writing

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Decisions, decisions.

I was looking at my Kindle books, trying to choose what to read, and started really noticing the covers. I realized that I could pick out most of the self-published books from the trade books by the size. Not that it was a glaring difference, but it was a difference. Even though this book will never be a trade paperback, It should probably use the trade paperback trim size, which meant changing the page format on Powerpoint from the standard to a 8 by 5.25 layout.

I also decided that the cover really didn’t pop enough. I love the gray and the subtlety, but subtlety is not necessarily the most compelling selling factor. So I spent a half hour or so tweaking. I’m not sure I feel like it’s an improvement though. It’s brighter, but less balanced. I think I might need to start playing with the typography again. I did change the colors and move my name down to the power-corner. But I think I’ll post it for a while and see how I feel about it after I’ve been looking at it for several days.

I posted the first chapter for critiques at Critique Circle and that’s been fascinating. It’s fun to find out what changes other people would make. I was an editor for long enough to know that there are always words that can be changed, sentences that can be improved and so on, and that no work is ever perfect, and a lot of that feedback is quite useful. If it wasn’t going to take months and months, it might be fun to go through this process on each and every chapter. But I think that’s the same level of obsessiveness that used to inspire me to spend days on a presentation that other people would pull together in a couple of hours, and I’m not sure it’s actually a sensible use of my time. Do I really want to spend years on one book when I could be writing story after story and getting better with each one instead? And phrased that way, the answer is really obvious. At least to me. So on to Sylvie! I love, love, love the scene I wrote last night.

Cover design number three

12 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by in Cover design, Writing

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Somehow, I’m going to have to figure out how to get other people’s opinions on my cover designs. I need to do a poll or something, in a place where I can get more than a response or two. I guess that probably means Facebook, but eh, that gets complicated, too.

This, however, is cover design number 3, and yes, I am starting to enjoy the cover creation process a little too much. I made it in Powerpoint, using a public domain photograph of lightning. I cropped and rotated the photo, so I could keep the palm trees and put the lightning on the left, and then tweaked. I think I enhanced the brightness by +20, and did something to the contrast, then nudged the color to the cooler side. I wanted to bring the green of the palm trees out and make the lightning look a little more magical than it did.

I then spent an endless time playing with the text and the fonts. Powerpoint does not exactly have the best font tools, and I didn’t go absolutely insane in the way I would have if I were a real designer. (To wit, the G in Ghosts is too far away from the H, in my opinion, but in Powerpoint, I would have needed to make them separate text blocks to nudge them together, and I was not quite willing to go that far. Six text blocks were quite enough.)

I took a quote from a review on fictionpress that was from someone who reviewed only at Chapter 33, figuring that review was for the whole thing, not just a piece of it. I didn’t want to be misleading by using a review that was just for a chapter. Maybe if and when I actually get ready to publish, I’ll ask a couple people for reviews that I could put on the front page. It’s not possible to read the quote on the thumbnail, I don’t think, which is a pity. But I suppose I can use a bigger image that then gets turned into a thumbnail? I’ll have to figure that one out.

I’m still trying to refrain from revising until December, but I have definite ideas about some big changes toward the ending. I think I’m going to try not to go crazy on most of it, though. These are just words 300,000-360,000, and if I get too obsessed with achieving perfection, it’ll join my first novel (oh, book of many names) in spending the next decade on my hard drive.

I really like this cover, though. I think for me, it’s definitely jumped ahead of both 1 and 2.

And a second draft, too

30 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Cover design, Writing

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And a second draft, too. The first one looks absolutely nothing like the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but there’s some book it resembles, I’m sure of it. I’ll find it someday and feel stupid for not remembering. But I realized while looking at it that it’s wrong, anyway — it’s too dark, too serious. So I tried making it more colorful and I kind of like this one. The blur makes me think of Akira talking about what the energy of the house looks like. I suppose it would be better if I found a house picture and blurred that. Hmm, maybe with some Spanish moss in the background? But using Powerpoint for design is not so easy. (Not to mention that I’m not a designer.) But this, or something close to it, might do. 
There’s a terrible catch-22 with cover design which is that if I want to sell the book, it makes sense to pay for a good designer, but obviously, I can’t do that while I’m an unemployed graduate student. Or shouldn’t, anyway. I need to remind myself that I’m not at a million words yet. Worrying about cover design is approximately 700,000 words in my future. Two days away from NaNoWriMo, and I should decide what to write! 

Cover design

30 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Cover design, Writing

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I made my first draft of a cover tonight, just for the fun of it. It is definitely not going to be the final cover because it reminds me much too much of some other book. Midnight in the Garden of something or other, maybe? Spanish moss might be too much of a cliche.

That said, trying to design a cover in Powerpoint is not exactly easy. Especially the Windows version of Powerpoint. (I was once quite adept at the Mac version, but of course they’re different and I can’t find the same tools.)

Also, I might need to change that title. I sort of know what it means or what it meant to me, but it’s probably pretty mystifying to anyone else. Still, it’s exciting to have finished writing. Woo-hoo, I wrote a whole book. Conclusion and everything. (Okay, pretty abrupt ending, might need to add to it. But still, a definitely possible ending.)