Category Archives: Indie writing

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.

Book review: No Irish Need Apply by Edward C. Patterson

30 Friday Jul 2010

Posted by in Indie writing, Reviews

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Sometimes I don’t get any time to read, other times I get carried away and don’t stop. This novel is by another author I came across through the Kindle Boards and is also available for free until tomorrow on Smashwords. And it’s another romance (I must be in that sort of mood at the moment).

I enjoyed it very much. It follows the growing relationship between two young men in the build-up to their High School Prom. After the story of the Mississippi prom which was cancelled earlier this year, the novel (which was published on Smashwords in 2008)  seems remarkably prescient and topical. I thought the love story was delicately handled and the responses of the boys’ mothers to the relationship were sensitively drawn.

The writing is clear and at times poetic, with excellent dialogue. The whole book is suffused with a quiet sense of humour which made for a pleasant reading experience. Even if you don’t think this is your cup of tea, I’d urge you to give it a try. I think it would appeal to a wide range of readers. Although probably not to those who really should read it!

Advantages of self-publishing: international audience

25 Sunday Jul 2010

Posted by in Indie writing

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The traditional publishing world is a bit of a closed book* to me, as I’ve freely admitted here before. One thing that I am vaguely aware of is that a book isn’t just published and made available immediately to the whole world. There’s the whole ‘territorial rights’ issue, meaning that the original publisher of a book written in English will sell the right to publish it to publishers in other English-language countries, where it will be printed and possibly marketed differently, depending on how those publishers think it will best sell in their particular countries.  For the publishers’ point of view on this, a blog post on the Digital Book World blog from February by Emily Williams explains their rationale. Here’s a sample:

Those readers are also better served, in the best of cases, by having a local publisher who knows where to find them, what cover will best signal to them the book’s appeal, which media can best match the book with its audience, and which retailers are most likely to reach them and at what price. Any big online retailer is good at giving you what you know you already want, but creating that desire in the first place – getting the word out about a great new title or author – still tends to be a local specialty, and one that doesn’t scale well on the global web.

One of my favorite examples of this is Jennifer Lee Carrell’s Interred With Their Bones, published in the US by Penguin as a literary thriller in hardcover and trade paperback while in the UK, Sphere put it straight into mass market as The Shakespeare Secret by J.L. Carrell. Who was right? Both editions did well, because they were geared to the realities of their local market.

My reaction to that particular example was to think that maybe it would have sold well in both countries anyway, regardless of the cover/title, simply because it was a good book. But then I did a bit more research and noticed that the average review rating on the UK Amazon site is only 2.5, while it is 3.5 on the US site. Seems a fair number of its readers didn’t like it too much, wherever it was published and however it was marketed.

But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, territorial rights. One of the things I love, love, love about having put my book on Smashwords and Feedbooks is that it can be downloaded anywhere in the world. I can’t tell where, with the Smashwords edition, but with Feedbooks there are some simple statistics available. Bear in mind that there have only been 300 downloads from that site, but here is the current breakdown by nation:

I find this sort of information fascinating. I can’t imagine a British publisher looking at my (really very English) book and deciding that it would be worth trying to sell the rights to an American publisher. But that’s where people are mostly downloading it from, with the UK a very poor second. Until this week, the UK was even further down the list. Of course, ereaders are probably much more popular in the US than they are anywhere else, which explains this phenomenon. But in Ghana? I am thrilled that six people in Ghana have downloaded it. There is no way of knowing if they’ve actually read it, of course, but who cares? The point is that they could if they wanted too. And that gives me enormous satisfaction.

*Sorry!

Book review: Little Miss Straight Lace by Maria Romana

24 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in Indie writing, Reviews, Writers

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In the spirit of supporting other indie authors, I thought I would follow the lead of Maria Romana, who has been putting book reviews on her blog, Contemporary Romance Books. My own reading tastes are fairly varied (although one of my big problems right now is finding time to read!), so there won’t be much of a theme to any reviews I post. The only thing I’m not wildly keen on are ‘chick-lit’ type books. You know, the type that mention about five brand-names in the first two pages and judge people by their clothes and possessions all the time. But I’m not averse to a love story if I’m in the right mood.

Maria’s own book is a mixture of romance and pharmaceutical statistics. Which may not sound like a divinely-arranged combination, but it works really well. The main thread of the plot concerns statistician Josie Natale and her relationship with Nic Remedian. Who is a gorgeous Latino man who drives an Aston Martin and wants to settle down and have babies. If you can get over the suspension of disbelief required to accept that combination of qualities in one human being, then you can settle down and enjoy the book. The romance gets caught up in mystery/thriller territory when a pharmaceutical agency starts interfering with drug trials to discredit their competitors and promote the development of their own products. Throw in a religious cult and the trauma of teenage rape and you’ve got all the ingredients for a story that’s hard to put down.

The book is well-written and rattles along at a good pace. It would make a great beach read (if you weren’t worried about getting sand in your ereader, that is). In some ways I’d class it as escapism (all the main characters are good-looking and rich, for example), but there is more to it than that: certainly enough of a mystery to keep me reading for the last two days.

Until the 31st July it is available for free on Smashwords. After that it will revert to its usual price of $4.77.

Smashwords

15 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by in epublishing, Indie writing, Websites

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I’ve mentioned the Smashwords site before, but thought it was time to write something a bit more in-depth about my experiences with the service. Frankly, it’s hard to do so without coming over as a gushing fangirl, but I will do my best.

The site is aimed at anyone who wants to get their work into the hands (onto the screens) of readers with the minimum of expenditure. You can put a set price on your book, permit readers to set their own price, or make it available for free. The first two options work best if you are based in the US or already have a relationship with the US tax system. If you don’t, then you will either lose 30% of your income to the Internal Revenue Service or you have to do a lot of form-filling in order to meet the IRS regulations. Even if you live in a country which has a 0% tax agreement with the US. Smashwords gives a lot of information about how to deal with the various forms. Other self-publishing websites (Amazon and Lulu, for example) are effectively closed to non-US writers at the moment. Apple recently announced that you can publish directly to the iBookstore. If you own an up-to-date Mac. Luckily, Smashwords already distributes to the iBookstore, so I don’t need to get as irritated by that stipulation as I could if I put my mind to it…

I’ve talked before about the requirements that Smashwords places on texts: they’re mainly concerned with technical formatting issues, rather than content. I have noticed over the nine months that I’ve had my book with them that the formatting requirements have gradually got tighter. Every time you upload a revised version of the book, it goes through an automatic and manual checking process. Twice now, a new version of The Roman and the Runaway has been rejected in the manual check for something that was considered fine in the previous version. I originally had the book in block paragraphs and had to change it to indents to satisfy one of these checks. Then, more recently, I had to go through and alter the spacing between paragraphs.

To make books acceptable to the various other distributors that Smashwords deals with, there are often other changes that need to be made: the size of the cover image and hyperlinked tables of contents, for example. These evolving requirements involve some time on the part of the author to make sure that their books comply. The most significant change was the requirement for an ISBN number (in order to ship books to Sony and Apple). Again, detailed instructions were given for this and Smashwords is able to assign free ISBNs. In Canada, our ISBNs are free anyway, but the process of dealing with the Canadian ISBN Service System (CISS) is fairly complex and time-consuming. I think it’s worth it to get your name as the publisher, rather than Smashwords’. I found Sarah Ettrich’s post very helpful in getting mine. Randolphe Lalonde has also recently posted on this subject.

There’s a huge amount of helpful information on the Smashwords site itself – the Smashwords Style Guide covers a lot of the formatting issues and the Smashwords Marketing Guide gives useful tips on how to promote your work (including some great general advice about using Twitter). Overall, the ethos of the site is one of support and empathy with writers. Books in the system get (or are going to get) distributed to Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple and Amazon. All for relatively little effort on the part of the writer.

There are some things I’d like to see on the site that aren’t there yet. Statistics on the download of different ebook formats would be interesting (though that’s a bit geeky, perhaps). I’d also be interested to know how people got to the download page and whereabouts in the world they came from (the Feedbooks site offers this functionality): some detailed referral stats would be great. It would also be good if the Site Updates page had an RSS feed so that I could monitor it in my feed reader.

Overall, if you’re a writer who’s wondering about the best way of getting your work out into the big wide world, then I can’t recommend Smashwords too highly.

Advantages of self-publishing: perpetual beta

02 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Editing, Indie writing, Writing

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Word count

I can’t tell how many revisions of TR&TR I’ve uploaded to Smashwords since last October, but the number is probably going to be similar to the number of revisions on Scribd, which stands at 37. This is one of the biggest advantages of solely publishing in electronic form: it is easy to amend the text. Usually the revisions are minor ones: correcting typos; sorting out the annoying mixture of straight quotes and smart quotes; adding navigation to meet Amazon’s requirements and so on. Other times, the revisions have involved adding new scenes to the story. There are around 2,500 more words in the book now than there were in September 2009 when I first thought I’d finished it!

I’m intermittently working on a sequel to TR&TR. Having the first book in a fluid form means that I can go back and ‘seed’ it with things that might turn out to be significant in the second. I haven’t done a lot of that yet, but it is great to have that option and not to have the first book frozen in time already.

The main disadvantage that I can see is the inability to ever completely ‘let go’. But as it took 24 years to finally get the story into this form, perhaps it isn’t surprising that I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to it yet.

The terror of sharing

31 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Feedback, Indie writing

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While I was writing The Roman and the Runaway I was very protective of the words on the screen. If anyone came into the room when I was typing, I’d close the word-processing program down so that they wouldn’t see what I’d been typing. I was surprised at how sensitive I was about it. Once it was finished and I was happy with it my attitude changed and I was able to contemplate showing it to other people.

The first person to read the book was my daughter, aged 11 at the time. Well she heard it, in fact, as I read it out to her. This proved to be a valuable activity in a number of ways. Most importantly, it was great to see and hear her reactions to the story. Here was someone at the younger end of my target audience; if she enjoyed it, then I hoped that other people her age and older would, too. The second benefit was in improving the writing. Words that look fine on the page don’t always sound felicitous when you read them out loud. It’s also easier to notice repeated words in this process. I did a lot of editing while I read the book to her.

After that first positive reaction to the story (and after all the editing), I was ready to share the book with my husband and then with his mother, who was staying with us at the time. I put it online and shyly started mentioning it to other family members and friends. It’s an interesting measure of love or friendship, I think: the reaction of someone to the news that you have written a book. There are those that immediately want to read it and those who don’t want to know. What if it’s terrible? (You can hear them thinking.) I’ll have to lie and say I thought it was good! Either reaction is fine by me: I wasn’t forcing anyone to read it, although I did hope that no-one would find it a hideously painful experience.

I’ve already talked about the strange set of reviews that the Authonomy website provides. Family and friends are similar, in some ways, Are they just trying to protect my feelings by saying positive things? I wondered. The other websites on which the electronic forms of the book repose have their own rating and/or review systems. Until yesterday, the book had not been reviewed but then I got an email saying that someone had reviewed it on Smashwords. This made me nervous. Here was my first ever unsolicited comment on the book from a total stranger. Unlike the Authonomites, this person had nothing to gain by being unduly generous with praise.

Clicking on the link to read the review, I felt almost as jumpy as I did when I was a teenager opening the envelopes containing the examination results which would determine my future.

The review was short (like the book, apparently!) but positive. Thank you Rebel: you made my day!

Advantages of self-editing: swearing

28 Friday May 2010

Posted by in Editing, Indie writing

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In my last post I was talking about how not all self-editing is bad. In this one, I’m considering the positive side of being an independent author who is free of the constraints of a publisher. My feeling is that once writers have a publisher, they are so thrilled to be being ‘properly’ published that they are likely to go along with anything their editors suggest. Certainly on their first books, anyway. I imagine it’s different once you’ve got some clout to your name.

As a self-published, independent author you don’t have that pressure to conform to the publisher’s point of view. Which could be a bad thing, of course. I prefer to think of it as liberating. So in my book, aimed at anyone over 11, there are swear words. In fact the very first sentence contains what I’d think of as moderate swearing (from a British point of view) and the first chapter holds one strong swear word. Not because I’m a big fan of swearing, but because they were important to the progress of the plot. I’m fairly sure that an editor would want to take the stronger word out, given that my book would be likely to be read by 11 year olds. I’d battle very hard against such a decision – although I suspect that I’d roll over and cave in, for the reason given above.

I have close personal experience of this particular age group and I know that the inclusion of these words wouldn’t be a problem for them at all (have you heard a conversation between 11 year-olds lately?). Of course, it might be a problem for their parents but in the context of this particular story there’s usually an unfortunate consequence to any act of swearing. I hope this would provide a hint that it’s not the best course of action.

For now, then, I’m revelling in the freedom to include words that a mainstream publisher might think are inappropriate for some of my target audience. A distinct advantage of being my own editor, I’d say.

On pricing of ebooks

27 Thursday May 2010

Posted by in epublishing, Indie writing, Websites

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I was thinking of doing a post about ebook pricing anyway, but the discovery of my own book under someone else’s name for the bargain-basement price of $41.70 precipitated it, somewhat. $41.70! Who on earth would pay that? I could understand someone ripping off my content and presenting it for $2.99. That way they might actually sell a few copies!

Michelle Haley's version of 'The Roman and the Runaway'

(Click on the image for a closer look)

I love the way she used my cover for the book, complete with my name, and then claims the copyright in hers. It’s quite funny, really. The book does carry a Creative Commons licence which permits sharing, so long as the book remains unchanged. So she followed those guidelines, but conveniently forgot to notice the ‘non-commercial’ element of the licence. For some reason she has categorised it under ‘Craft and Hobbies’. I suppose it was a hobby of mine while I was writing it, but it doesn’t really reflect the content that well…

Anyway, back to the pricing issue. I mentioned in another post that I’m reluctant to pay anything at all for ebooks. (Maybe that’s just because I’m mean.) I do most of my fiction reading through our excellent public library system or via freely-available online material. I do occasionally buy printed books, although I try to limit that spending, otherwise the house gets full up of books too quickly. It tends to be mainly non-fiction that I buy these days: cookery books, for example. This might change if I get some sort of ereader, but the price of those is too offputting for now, too.

I enjoyed an online lecture by James O’Donnell on the Kindle, where he described his own ebook pricing barrier: $9.99 in his case. I suspect that many people share his scruples. There’s something too insubstantial about an ebook to warrant paying more than that. Or more than $5 or $3, perhaps. $41.70 would definitely be pushing it, I feel.

I’ve reported Michelle’s pirated copy of the book to the Lulu powers-that-be and have uploaded a free version on Lulu for good measure. Be interesting to see if they take the pricey one down.