Monthly Archives: August 2010

Book review: Tamar Black – Djinnx’d by Nicola Rhodes

25 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by in Editing, Indie writing, Reviews

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The useful list of free Smashwords books that I linked to in my last book review has now gone, so I found my next free read by going to Smashwords itself and searching for free books from their home page. I went into the Sci-Fi and Fantasy section, which wouldn’t be my normal first choice, but thought I should mix up the genres I’m reviewing a bit. From the ‘most downloaded’ list I picked the first book that appealed, which was this one. Having just blogged about book covers, I should mention that I really try not to let them influence me. It’s the words that matter, as far as I’m concerned. The blurb for Tamar Black – Djinnx’d showed an author with a sense of humour, so I bit and downloaded the book.

And I’m really glad I did. It’s a twist on the classic genie-in-a-bottle story and is very Terry Pratchett-esque in its humour. From the cheeky foreword and the very first chapter, with its sly rewriting of the Book of Genesis as a computer programming job, I was sucked in. Funny and smart. What’s not to like?

Well, actually, there is something that not everyone will like, and that’s the standard of editing. Font size changes randomly in the .epub version of the file and the punctuation is decidedly hit-and-miss at times. But (and this follows on from observations I’ve made before) it really doesn’t matter that much. It’s slightly irritating and my inner copy editor was itching to take out a red pen, but after a while I gave up noting down the errors (yes, I really did start to write them all down – thinking that the author might like to know about them) and just sat down to enjoy the ride.

There are four other books in the series, which sell for between $2.50 and $2.99. Now, the question is, would I pay for them, knowing that they are probably as badly edited as this one? And you know what, I think I probably would. But not right now – I’d want to get an ereading device first and then curl up in front of the fire with them in the winter. Paying to read things on my computer screen still seems wrong.

So there’s the proof of what I’ve been arguing in this blog for a while. Quality matters, yes, but if there’s a good read in amongst the errors then this reader is willing to overlook them and potentially pay for the next book, regardless. It’s time to stop wringing our hands about the quality of editing in ebooks – let’s just enjoy a damn good story when it presents itself instead.

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Instant gratification and libraries

24 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by in Libraries, Writers

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I was delighted to find that one of the local libraries I use has at last got its catalogue on the Internet. (There’s a misplaced apostrophe in its banner but I’m hoping that is the responsibility of an IT person, rather than the library’s staff!) The library itself is small and serves an equally small town of around 2,000 people. The other library service I use is much bigger, with five branches and around 25,000 potential users. Their catalogue has been online for a number of years.

Both sets of libraries are excellent and I find their services invaluable. If I can’t find a particular book, then I can order it through inter-library loan and get it pretty quickly. Now that both catalogues are online I can easily check from home whether a particular book is in the library and physically on the shelf. Which is a fantastic thing to be able to do, don’t you think? A far cry from the old days of card-catalogues and having to visit the library to find out such things.

Today I made use of this new facility to check on the availability of two books: Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Both books have had a fair bit of hype about them recently and eventually the hype filters through to me. In the larger library service, there’s a 19-day wait for the Gilbert book and an even longer one for the Larsson one (44 days). In the small library both books are showing as ‘available’ and I’ll be there when it opens tomorrow to get my hands on them. Hooray for tiny library services!

I only really heard about Eat, Pray, Love today, when I arrived, through a winding and distraction-strewn route at Shannon Rigney Keane’s blog and her post Olé to You Nonetheless, which introduces Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creative genius. It’s a great talk and I’m really glad to have found out about it. What a wonderfully funny and intelligent woman Elizabeth Gilbert is. I wouldn’t normally have picked up a book with the word ‘pray’ in the title, but having heard Elizabeth’s talk, I figured that it wasn’t going to be the sort of book I assumed it would be. (Forget covers, there’s a whole lesson here about not judging a book by its title, too.)

Anyway, the point I think I’m trying to make here, very slowly, is that within a few short minutes I went from thinking ‘I might enjoy that book’ to finding out that the library had it on the shelf. Tomorrow (unless I’m very unlucky and someone checks it out in the next hour) I’ll have the book in my hand. That is very close to instant gratification, I would say. And yet one of the arguments that people seem to be making about public libraries is that we don’t need them because we can get everything instantly from the Internet. And sure enough, I could download a copy of the Larsson book from Kobobooks.com for $7.99 and the Gilbert one for $10.49.

$18.48 for two digital files (which will be read just once) RIGHT NOW. Or $0 for two solid volumes tomorrow morning (I will be in the town anyway, so there is no additional cost for fuel to get there). For me, it’s an easy choice. I am always happy to pay for a book that I know will be read more than once and which I can see on my shelf (cookery and gardening books fall into this category) but for everything else (all my ephemeral reading), the library (or a free ebook) will win nearly every time. And in the future, as more people get ereaders and libraries get access to ebooks for their patrons, it will be possible to get to that content even more quickly. Next time you want a book, investigate the library option as well as the online ordering one. You might be pleasantly surprised by how quickly (and reasonably) you can get what you’re looking for.

Libraries are a fabulous resource and are increasingly under threat of cuts or closure. Use them or lose them.

Cover story

22 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by in Artwork, Indie writing, Writers

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Book covers are important. This is a message that is drummed into indie authors a lot. It’s also, like editing, an area where getting someone else involved (somebody who can actually draw or design, for example) might make some sort of economic sense. If you are selling your book for actual cash, that is. If you’re not making money from selling the book, it becomes difficult to justify spending money on it. For me, it also goes against the self-sufficiency ethos I’ve been living by in relation to this book (and in many other areas of my life).

When I first made The Roman and the Runaway available I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the cover. I knew I wanted something that said ‘modern day’, because the title of the book suggests that it is set in the past and I needed to dispel that notion with one glance. The book is mostly set in the picturesque village of Aldbury in Hertfordshire, so I browsed images on the Flickr website and found an appealing one with a Creative Commons licence on it. The licence was ‘attribution required‘, which meant that I was free to re-use and re-mix the image however I wanted, so long as I acknowledged the original creator (whose Flickr name was Draco2008). I also dropped him a line to say what I was doing and he was happy with my use of his picture. I adapted it as the header for this blog, too. I love the whole idea behind Creative Commons.

So that was that and the book cover was fine: an attractive, contemporary photo.

Original cover

And yet…

The more I looked at other people’s book covers and back at mine, the more dissatisfied with it I became. It was too static and didn’t really reflect anything about the story (well, apart from the pub, which does feature in the book and which is pretty well reflected by the pond!). Last month I started to think about what might work better to draw people in, while still explaining that this was not a book set in Roman times. Creating a drawing is beyond my artistic skills, but I thought I might be able to create a photograph that would work.

I enlisted my twelve year-old daughter as a model and we went off into the woods together with a rucksack stuffed with towels and my camera. This was the first time I’d ever done a photo-shoot with a human being (most of my photography (excluding family snapshots) is of plants, insects and birds). It was an interesting experience and I took around 60 photos.

My aim was to show Pagan (the runaway of the book’s title) as she might appear when walking near her campsite. My daughter is a little young, as Pagan is fourteen in the book, but she is tall enough to carry it off. Her hair was a bit of a problem – it is quite dark and curly and I’d described Pagan’s as straight and blonde, although she dyes it a nondescript  brown in the book. It was the curliness that was going to be the issue. Before the shoot, we washed her hair and straightened it as much as possible without hair-straightening devices. Then we went off into the woods.

One of the photos in particular captured what I was looking for. My daughter’s shoulders were slightly hunched in this one, making her look somewhat dejected, as Pagan would have been, alone and far from home. I spent a day or two playing with this image – trying it monochrome, using different fonts and colours for the title.  I had to flip the image vertically, as originally the girl was walking towards the left, which didn’t work at all. The collage below shows some of the different ideas I was playing around with as I worked. There are many others which didn’t get saved, needless to say!

Discarded ideas

I was using Paint Shop Pro as my image software. I’m certainly not proficient with it and often find it completely unintuitive, particularly where adding text is concerned. And as for the number of different fonts, well – there are so many that you could easily spend a whole day just looking at each one!

In the end I found that blurring the image worked better than making it monochrome. It hides the determined curliness of my model’s hair and makes the text stand out more than it does on a crisp version of the photo.

Current cover

I’m very pleased with the end result. It’s still contemporary, but with a bit more action to it than the original, and perhaps a slightly more emotive image. I don’t think changing it has had a big impact on the number of downloads from Smashwords or Feedbooks, but I’m happier because it is home-made and home-designed. What do you think of the change? Better or worse?

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve updated the cover again, thanks to a kind suggestion from another indie writer, Joseph Mitchell, author of Shard Mountain. This time I’ve used a drop shadow effect, which really does make the text stand out better than it did before. Thanks Joseph! Here’s the ‘final’ cover:

Most recent version

Book review: The Demon Queen and the Locksmith by Spencer Baum

17 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by in Indie writing, Reviews

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A Young Adult book this time, discovered through the ‘Free Smashwords books‘ list on the Kindle Boards site.

Here’s the blurb from Smashwords:

In Turquoise, New Mexico, a small group of hippies believe that the mountain north of town emits a constant, resonant hum that is only audible to a chosen few. They call themselves the Hearers, and the fact that fourteen-year-old Kevin Browne has never trusted them makes it all the worse when his own ears begin to ring, and he comes to realize “The Turquoise Hum” may be much more than a sound.

It’s a fun read, involving mysterious powers delivered by magical sap, an army of evil fire ants, conspiracy theorists and coffee-machines with unexpected qualities. An added bonus for me was the role played in the story by Monarch butterflies, whose life-cycle I find fascinating. The writing is fluid and clear, with no typos that I could see. I enjoyed it as a book from my “i don’t eat sugar so i can read teenage books if i want to” list (as jenn from Toronto so aptly puts it) and it is ideal for its young adult target market.

Instant gratification and literacy

13 Friday Aug 2010

Posted by in Editing, epublishing

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I thoroughly enjoyed Kent Anderson’s blog post ‘It’s the End of the Book As We Know It – and I Feel Fine’ over at the Scholarly Kitchen blog. It sums up a lot of my own feelings about ebooks and literacy. These paragraphs, in particular, resonated with me:

But will book reading actually suffer? I doubt it. My kids would love to have Kindles so that they could read spontaneously. They get addicted to a series (don’t get me going about “Pretty Little Liars” right now), and once one book is polished off, they want to start the next one. But the scarcity model of book publishing means having to wait days between reading events if ordering a book from an online retailer; calling around town to find a book and often failing; or checking the library which often doesn’t have the latest materials. Does waiting, calling around, or getting frustrated help the reading experience? Not at all.

The new era of books may actually see more authors, more reading, and more books being bought and sold.

There is a lot of complaining about standards of content in ebooks (particularly from professional editors, I’ve noticed…). Not just in those that have been self-published, but in books purchased from mainstream publishers, too. Usually it is standards of literacy that are criticised in the former and formatting problems in the latter. I agree that it’s irritating if a book is badly put together. I also agree that it is difficult for highly literate people to read a book if they are spotting spelling or grammatical errors every five sentences. What I would argue here, though, is that this doesn’t matter for every reader.

To illustrate my point I’d like to introduce a twelve-year-old would-be-author. She is three chapters into her first book and is happy to admit that:

I might make a few mistakes in spelling and grammer.

She loves writing and is spending a fair part of her spare time working on her book. Yes, it’s littered with errors, but she’s learning her craft and is committed to improving. Would you sneer at her for her mistakes? I hope not (especially as she’s my daughter).

This trainee author loves to share her work and get feedback on it. I think that a lot of self-published authors have a lot in common with my twelve-year-old. They have given up on the old publishing model and are anxious to share their stories with the rest of the world. Since many ebook retailers offer the opportunity to download a sample of a book before purchase, it is easy for you, as a reader, to assess its quality before you make a purchase. If you’re bothered by bad grammar and spelling, you won’t buy a book that offends your sensibilities. If your literacy levels are low, you probably won’t notice and you might buy the book and enjoy it anyway.

So what? Surely it’s better for someone with low literacy levels to be reading something than reading nothing? If a story is very good but the spelling and grammar are bad, then it isn’t too late to do something about it, when the book is still only in electronic format. Self-published ebooks are quite often works in progress, in this respect, as I’ve argued before.

In lowering the barriers to book publishing we are also lowering the barriers to book purchasing and opening up the written word to people who might have been too intimidated to walk through the doors of a library or a bookshop. It’s never too late to discover a love of reading. I agree with Kent: the availability of books in electronic form can only be a good thing for readers and for authors of all calibres.