Category: publishing

Transformations (and Honesty)

Please don’t buy the first two “issues” of Blue Daunia if you haven’t done so already!

It’s an ongoing process, this “art” of writing.  Ongoing not only in the sense of the writing itself, but also in the sense of learning.

Two months ago, I thought I had wanted an ongoing monthly serial.  That’s what the Blue Daunia saga was meant, from the outset of inception, to be.  I regaled myself with the starry notion of reviving the old-school dime novel serials, or even of putting the comic book “continuum” thing into text form.

I did not find the schedule of such a task to be overly rigorous… it was, and is, quite possible to maintain and sustain a monthly serial.  So it’s not really the difficulty of the undertaking (as massive as it is) that has recently caused me to change my mind on the format.

And indeed, the format is changing.  I’ve come to realize how daunting a task the marketing of a monthly serial can be.  Here are a couple of the problems:

A)  The Time In-Between:  I mean this from the point of view of the reader, not the writer.  Where a series is concerned, the modern-day audience is trained to digest installments on a weekly basis, as per television… or by binge-digesting the “season”, as per Netflix or Hulu.  True, when I speak of Blue Daunia I am speaking of the written word rather than an audio-visual production, but the modern take on output and consumption has been formed nonetheless.  Furthering this analogy, as I am equating “issues” of a “serial” with “episodes” of a “series”, I would also equate “novels” of an ongoing “saga” with “sequels” of a “movie”: with a series of novels and movies alike, the reader/viewer is content to wait a year or more between larger, novel- or movie-sized chunks.  It is as expected as the weekly interval of episodes of a series.  (This having been said, I will not be making my potential readers wait even that long… I plan on publishing a Blue Daunia novel every 6 months or so, not every year or two).

B)  The Pricing:  I pose a question to those who may be reading this:  When you are seeking out new reading material, would you rather discover a series of novels that piques your interest and pay $4 (give or take) for a novel-sized volume and realize you only missed out on one or two others that  you would have to invest in…. OR… Would you rather discover a serial that piques your interest and realize that, while the current issue is only 99 cents, you’ve already missed 22 issues and would have to invest 22 bucks to catch yourself up, and then realize that it will have to wait a month between each portion?  Or, to put it another way:  if, three years from now, a friend of yours talked up an excellent serial they’ve been reading as something you should really check out, how would you feel when you discover that, having been three years, there are 36 one-dollar issues you would have to invest in just to have to read 720,000 words (roughly 3,600 pages) just to catch up to where your friend is?  The marketing and price-to-volume logistics are troublesome, to say the least.

So, as much as I would love for you to do so, I’m here and now asking you not to invest in the first two “issues” of the Blue Daunia saga available on the Kindle store.  As much as I would love your support and your dollars, I’m going to be honest… as soon as the third chunk of what has turned out to be a three-part story arc is complete (later this month, October 2017), I’m going to release all three parts as the proper First Novel of the Series of Novels it really should have been all along.  For the several dozens who have already invested in the first two issues, I am still going to publish the tail-end as “Issue #3”, as I feel it is only right to do so, rather than to make these loyalists essentially re-purchase the first two issues all over again, just for the sake of being able to read the conclusion of the first story-arc.  But for everyone else, you can (if I may so humbly request you do) pick up the first NOVEL of the Blue Daunia saga, which will be known as Volume One.

From that point on, the series will be handled in novel format, like Fleming’s James Bond or Rowling’s Harry Potter.  The reasons for doing so, much like Problems A and B above, are two-fold:

A)  I’ve jammed myself up with Issue #3 in terms of the length and pacing.  I’ve spent the first two issues building up slowly to the action, and both of the first issues were 20,000+ words.  But now that it’s all set up, the action of the 3rd issue, if so published, would be so lightning-fast compared to the first two as to seem alien to the reader, not only in terms of pacing but also in terms of page-count:  you see, I’ve not much more to say to finish the first tale other than another 10,000 words or less, half or less the length of the first two issues… and could therefore not justify charging the same price (which I will have to do anyway, sadly, as 99 cents is as cheap as Amazon will allow a Kindle book to be).

B)  I won’t feel so confined by a set monthly word-count, and can allow future novels in the series to breathe a bit more, develop at a more natural pace, than trying to time everything out in a monthly 20k-word allotment.  I can develop the characters more thoroughly… add subplots whereas the current telling of the tale focuses on following one specific set of people along one path towards a unified goal.  I can build the world more strongly, vibrantly and dynamically, adding politics and struggles and regimes and rises and falls.  I can even do spin-off novels of certain characters (Redwood and Morlana spring to mind).  And, most importantly to me personally (again being quite honest here), I can explore other much-dreamt-of writing projects in-between, not the least of which is this blog itself (which I have woefully neglected), as well as other non-fantasy novels which have long been brewing in my mind.

To current readers of the series, I apologize for any inconvenience all of this might cause.  As I’ve stated, the 3rd chunk will still be made available separately, so that you don’t have to re-purchase what you’ve already bought by buying the first novel.  But yes, from now on, Blue Daunia will be a series of novels rather than a monthly “comic book in text form”.

Anyways… Cheers!  And Happy Reading and Writing!

Blue Daunia Issue #2 Now in Paperback

Well, the paperback is now available.  This leg of the story, I guess you might say Act II of a three-act arc, was a labor of love, and while the old adage maintains that you’re not supposed to favor one of your own children over another, I must say, I absolutely adore this issue.  That’s a difficult thing for me to say, too, because despite marketing’s main goal and purpose being to play up the hype and appeal of your product, I’m a bit modest really when it comes to my own work.  But I will allow myself the indulgence of telling you this, with all sincerity:  If you pick up these first two issues (the first one currently being free for two more days on the Kindle store), you might find the first one slow-building, but I firmly believe you will not be disappointed by the end of the second issue.  I really do feel that strongly about it.  I’ve often heard and read the advice “write the book you would like to read”. . . well, Issue #2 is that book.  I’m serious when I say I don’t like to brag, but it’s just such a quick-moving, fun 122-page read!

Speaking of the FREE first issue, here’s the link to that. . . good through the 22nd.  And Here’s the link to the second issue in paperback, as well as the in the Kindle store.

And, just because I wanted a longer post, the following is the introduction from Blue Daunia Issue #2:  The Sinister Sleep of Shevara:

INTRODUCTION

For Christmas of 1992, I got my first word-processor.  I was 17 at the time, and had big plans for that thing, which is fitting, because it was a big thing, literally.  I want to say it was a Smith Corona, but whatever it was, the thing was the size of a small suitcase.  It had a built-in printer, a thin green monochrome calculator-style LCD screen, and a 3.5” floppy drive.  That last one really excited me, you see… because at last I could rack up volumes of my upcoming masterpieces and save them all on such tiny little storage media.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas that year, I could barely contain my excitement, because I already knew I would be getting this thing, and I had worlds to create!  I was very much a fan of comic books back then, and even moreso what they represented to me:  vast universes in which a creative, resourceful individual could create characters both mundane and mystical, and in which the stories of these characters and their interactions with each-other could be told in a continuous series.  (Incidentally, this is the same reason I love Dungeons & Dragons, but I digress).

More than anything else in the world, at that moment, I wanted my own comic book universe, which I could mold and shape and tinker with to my heart’s desire.  But here’s the thing… I cannot, CANNOT, draw.  My stick figures sometimes get mistaken for ampersands, if that tells you anything about my artistic abilities.  So what was I to do?  Well, I could write.  Everyone seemed to say so.  Sometimes, every now and then, they still do!  So that was my angle… I would do a comic book universe in text form, and store every story on those tiny little floppy disks, because surely, those would never, ever get lost or fall prey to the hands of time.

So Christmas rolled around, and I got the gigantic word processor, and I cannot for the life of me think of a single blasted thing I wrote on that thing, except maybe a school essay or book report or some-such.  Oh, and the screen could be tilted upward at different angles to better catch the light, because there was no contrast control… but whenever I would tilt the screen forward, it would ease itself on back down again.  So I did what I had to do:  I got the rifle-like weapon from JetFire of Transformers toy fame and wedged that behind the screen when I lifted it.  That sure learnt it!

So, what am I trying to get at, amidst all this rambling?  No, I’m actually asking you, because I honestly don’t remember.  There was a point at some… point, I’m sure of it.

Oh!  Manufactured universes.  Fast-forward 25 years, and I’ve finally made myself one!  And here it is!

Azaria
An exotic world not unlike our own, but entirely beholden to the mythology, legends, and pantheon forged by the almighty sea. With a myriad of cultures that run the gamut from backwater to highly advanced, Azaria is a world whose sole provider of technology is as secretive as it is powerful, at times competing with the oceanic pantheon itself for ideological supremacy. But there is something else beneath the shimmering surface, deep within the Hadopelagic Zone… waters so deep that all cultures unite in referring to them as “the Blue Hell”… something darkly intangible and unspoken. Could there be a third force, ancient beyond all recorded knowledge, vying for supremacy?

Daunia Bluehaven
In her ongoing quest to investigate the disappearance of the brother she barely knew, her adventures aboard her father’s final ship design would lead her crew all across the coastlands of the world of Azaria.

Set sail with the crew of the Blue Daunia on their harrowing oceanic journeys. The swashbuckling monthly serial continues here. Join Daunia and her crew as they traverse a world of towering cliffs and arctic tundras, dense tropical forests, sweeping mountainscapes, cavernous subterranean depths, marble palaces, gothic spires, dusty libraries and raucous drunken inns. In the life of a freelancer, you never know where your next job might take you, or what odds you might face to get it done.

In this second installment, the crew continue their stay in the port town of Illunstrahd, though far from the recreational stint they hoped it would be. Along the trail to solve a few grisly murders, death seems to haunt their every step. Exhausted and uncertain of their fate, they come at last to the ancient temple of the demi-goddess Shevara.

Stop Hitting That Tab Key. . . NOW!

So you’re writing and editing to digitally prepare and submit a manuscript for your first-ever book-baby.  Well, it might surprise you to know that there is one crucial thing you may very well be doing completely wrong!

If you’ve gotten in the habit, over the years, of hitting the tab key to indent your paragraphs, stop it, and stop it now!

As I’ve stated on my “Ahoy!” page, I’m here to report any mistakes I make in this ongoing learning process, as I make them.  And here I am. . . because for over twenty years, I’ve been hitting that trusty ol’ TAB key to indent my paragraphs.

So, why is this a mistake?  What’s wrong with it?  Aren’t most word-processors set up from the get-go for their tab-key results to indent paragraphs properly?

Well, in a word, no.

The tab key is set up for “tabulating” tables and columns.  From the Wikipedia:  “In word processing and text editing the Tab key will often move the insertion point to the next tab stop in a table, or may insert the ASCII tab character or many space characters.”

Sure, if you’re just printing out a chapter or three of your story, or looking at it on the screen, the indentations created by the tab key will look dead-on correct. . . all nice and professional-looking.

But the problem comes in when you submit a novel or novella that has been “tabbed” within an inch of its life.  Even if you submit a PDF to an online publisher (such as CreateSpace or SmashWords), they still have to do their own formatting, and tab indents can often choke their conversion programs.

Oh, it may still go through, but when you proof it, it will probably look like the first lines of your paragraphs start all the way an entire half of the page over!  It took me a bit of research and playing around with a few different word processors to figure out why my proofs were looking like this, and how to fix them (because I have been, for my entire life, a tab indenter).

So, as you’re blazing along through your first draft, pounding out paragraph after paragraph, get your fingers off of that tab key!  Try this instead:  Move your mouse cursor to the top of the screen, and, depending on the program you’re using, look for a tab called “format” or “formatting” or something along those lines, and in the menu for that tab, look for “paragraph” or “indentations.”  Set the field to read “0.5” (as in inches).  This should, theoretically, set things up to where you don’t have to do anything at all at the start of the new paragraph. . . just hit “enter” when you’re done with a paragraph and the next line should be automatically indented for you.

In Scrivener, if you’ve copied and pasted a body of text in which you have previously used tabs, you can select “Format > Convert > Strip Leading Tabs” to get rid of all of those unholy tabs at once, then press “command”+”a” to highlight the entire text, and go to “Format > Text > Tabs and Indents” to set all those now-missing tabs to 0.5″ indentations.  Voila!

The result of proper indentation will be a text that will compile correctly, convert to other word-processing programs correctly, and basically just save yourself time, effort and headaches on down the road.  Your PDFs and digi-publisher proofs will look, for the lack of a better word, “correct.”  You’ll smile, because you’ve made something that looks and “feels” professional. . . as opposed to lines that start somewhere off in the bedroom closet instead of roughly 5 characters over.

KDP Woes Lead to. . . CreateSpace! (Same Company, Different Name and Results)

“If self-publishing were a video game, I would have broken the controller.”

I tried a hopeful experiment today:  uploading a Scrivener-formatted PDF of Blue Daunia Issue #1 to Kindle Direct Publishing (henceforth referred to as KDP), for the purposes of creating a print-on-demand paperback.

Scrivener compiled the text beautifully, as I suspected it would.  The PDF looks quite professional, with every-other page of text shifted to the left of the page and every other page shifted to the right (as to create the “gutter” of the book).  The copyright page looks legitimate, as does the title page, acknowledgements, introduction, etc.

So I headed on over to the KDP website.  The metadata from the Kindle book was intact, and usable for the paperback as well (I really like this aspect of KDP), so the first step was to create a cover.  I’m pleased with the cover for the Kindle edition, but it just so happens that paperbacks also have a back cover as well as a spine!  No worries, though, since KDP has a CreateSpace cover designer for paperbacks as well as ebooks (CreateSpace itself an Amazon derivative).

I experimented with a few of the cover options, using the same awesome image from Donna Chiofolo Photography which the ebook cover incorporates.  I even managed to get the front cover looking fairly identical to the ebook cover.  The back cover was also a breeze to set up.

But the pleasantries end there, and the headaches begin.

Whenever I click on the “Preview” button after designing the cover, it sometimes loads.  It did so the first time.  But I wasn’t quite pleased with a few minor details (one just has to be a perfectionist when it comes to things like this), so I clicked the “X” or whatever they had, rather than hitting Chrome’s “page back” button.  I altered a few things, made some adjustments to the Title font and the font color of the back-cover blurbs, and hit “Preview” again.  I got the “loading” spinny-wheel for about three minutes.

I don’t have the patience for that sort of nonsense, but I didn’t want to mess anything up, so I waited.  Finally, after another three minutes (now a total of six), I got to see my preview.  I still wasn’t quite happy with a couple of minor quibbles.  So I Xed again, made the adjustments, hit “Preview” again. . . and an infinity of spinny-wheel ensued.  After a cup of coffee and a few YouTube videos, fifteen minutes had elapsed.  Spinny-wheel kept on spinning.  I felt I had no choice but to hit Chrome’s “back” arrow.

It went back to the cover editor fair enough, but damn if it didn’t take four or five tries to get a “Preview” back up on the screen again.  I know when it’s happening correctly because the correct procedure seems to only take roughly 15 seconds.

After the frustration of all of that, my cover was finally “Successfully Uploaded.”  Yay!  Next step, uploading the PDF file.  That was a breeze. . . sort-of.  Yes and no.  Ultimately no.  Let me explain.  No. . . no time to ‘splain.  Lemme sum up.

The uploading of the PDF file took all of 4 seconds, which seems about right.  Now, on the KDP website, once you’ve uploaded a file as the body of text for your paperback or your ebook, you get the same message below the “success” blurb:  “Formatting the File.  Your Preview Will Be Ready For Viewing Once We’ve Processed the File.”  Or something along those lines.  The idea being that the program they use gets everything converted and then you get to take a look and see what it will look like to your customers before you finally click that “submit” button.

For the Kindle ebook, this process of formatting took about a minute to a minute and a half.  Excellent. . . good on ya!  For a paperback, this takes understandably longer as you’re dealing with various selectable trim sizes which you must ensure match the trim size of the compiled PDF, and other technical things I as a writer don’t like to worry over as well.

But when you’re waiting for over an hour. . . and you spend that eternity googling whatever search terms you can think of to see if it should be taking this long, and you’re sifting through forums and you find one in a hundred where someone else has had the same problem. . . the blood tends to boil just a bit.

Now take that boiling blood frustration and add this little gem to the equation:  Finally, finally, the website says something different, other than the spinny-wheel of waiting.  And what does it say?  Why, “An Error Occurred During the Formatting Process, Please See Error Message For Details” of course!  Because why not?

And what exactly did the error message say?  Whatever it was, I could fix it.  I could go back into Scrivener and make any adjustments necessary, and have a new PDF within 5 to 10 minutes tops (5 seconds if you just count Scrivener churning out a compiled PDF. . . the added time is on me, as a user, making the adjustments).

This is what the error message said:  “Error.”  That’s it.  Just “Error.”  No buttons to click, no tiny little down-arrow to hover over. . . just “Error.”  What. . . the. . . .

Hey!  Ya know what, I’m a fairly upbeat guy when it comes to things like this (he lied).  And I’ve got nothing to do for the next few hours.  I’m gonna look over the PDF as well as all the Scrivener formatting tabs, compile a new PDF just for the halibut, and try this again.

Two. . . Hours. . . Later….

“Error.”

Okay.  It was a bad night to be a nearby blanket on the couch.  I picked that blanket up and stuffed it over my pie-hole and still screamed loud enough to get a few neighborhood dogs barking.  If self publishing were a video game, I would have broken the controller.

To be quite fair (and this is where I try to turn this post around, and hope that you as a reader will join me in not hating KDP), the “paperback” aspect of KDP. . . that whole side of it. . . is still in “beta” mode at the moment.  Granted, it has been there for nearly a year if not longer, but it is still openly a testing-stages thingamajig.

Amazon also owns CreateSpace, which, if you haven’t heard of, then you probably haven’t dreamed the airy dreams of self-publishing.  CreateSpace is known for it’s quality print-on-demand paperbacks.

I remembered this, suddenly, foolishly, dawningly (I just invented a word!), and I went there, to that mighty CreateSpace, and things seem to be going much better now.

It’s still a work-in-progress, because they have actual flesh and blood human-peoples looking over your PDF or whatnot, making sure everything is good to go, and tell you flat-out (or up-front, or other hyphenated words that sound immediate and open) that they will review your stuffs and respond to you within 24 hours during a business week.

Long story short (as if I haven’t surpassed that point in this post already), it looks like my dreams of holding a book I wrote in my hands. . . an actual paperback book with a barcode and a spine. . . might be coming true within a few days.

The moral of this lesson is as such:  If you have an ebook, and want a legitimate paperback copy of said ebook, go to CreateSpace, and not KDP (which is supposedly powered by. . . CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon, who owns KDP. . . or something).

Rookie Fears: Little Computer Details (pt 2)

“. . . from the research I was doing, it takes a modicum of technical knowledge- the tiniest bit of coding savvy- which, as a writer in the 21st century, I felt almost required to have, and which, as a writer overall who just wants to pound out stories and not worry about computer details, I don’t really possess in the least. . .”

A couple of nights ago, I hammered out the first part of this post, about my worries and doubts concerning the details of just how to get a book onto the Amazon Kindle Store.  As I allowed Mr. Cubbon to illustrate in his video, my fears turned out to be completely unfounded. . . almost comically so.

But, as I was writing the first draft of Blue Daunia Issue #1 back in early June, other fears as a first-time indie author began to creep in to take the place of those that had been placated.  And, as it turns out, there was a collective name for those fears:  “ebook formatting.”

Yes, I had done a modicum of research in the past, and what I knew off-hand from those past browsings amounted to this:  Uploading a Word document to Kindle is possible (and possibly tricky); Amazon uses the “mobi” format, preferably with a hyperlinked table of contents; PDFs are doable but extremely tricky when it comes to Amazon auto-converting to its native mobi; and then there’s epub, which is the easiest format for Amazon to auto-convert.

But, when the time came, how would I get my final draft into one of the better two formats: mobi and epub (I just didn’t want to take chances with the possible conversion errors of Word or PDF)?  And, almost more importantly (to perfectionist me anyway), how would I go about hyperlinking my table of contents, so that, when I finally see my book-baby on the kindle screen, I could tap on a chapter name and be instantly transported to that chapter?

Other authors dabbling in the ebook format had hyperlinked their TOCs… heck, almost all of them!  The small handful of books I had seen on my kindle which weren’t hyperlinked, looked extremely cheap in other ways as well, from typos to poor cover designs to outright public domain rehashes done with very little care.  In other words, early on in my readership of ebooks, I almost instantly began to equate non-hyperlinked TOCs with lousy, time-wasting quality.  Therefore, if my then-“future” self were ever to write and publish an ebook, it had to have a hyperlinked TOC. . . it just had to.  I considered it an absolute necessity!

Ah, hyperlinked Tables of Contents and ebook formatting. . . from the research I was doing, it takes a modicum of technical knowledge- the tiniest bit of coding savvy- which, as a writer in the 21st century, I felt almost required to have, and which, as a writer overall who just wants to pound out stories and not worry about computer details, I don’t really possess in the least.  I had seen programs and apps which would take flat text and convert it to mobi or epub, but the details I craved, like hyperlinking, still required other measures.  But I have a limited attention span when it comes to such things. . . more like an impatience. . . so what was I to do?  I considered it a hurdle I would have to cross.  Where to turn?  Was there to be no “magic bullet”?

Enter the Scrivener program, from Literature and Latte.  I found out about it during that worried fit of research, and I’m here to tell you, it was like a godsend.  One of the best parts was, for a good bit of time, it is actually free!  Here’s the blurb from their own website:

“The trial runs for 30 days of actual use: if you use it every day it lasts 30 days; if you use it only two days a week, it lasts fifteen weeks. Before the trial expires, you can export all of your work or buy a licence to continue using Scrivener.”

And here’s another cool thing about it: although there is a rough tonnage of things you can learn about the features of the program, there isn’t really all that much you really need to know in order to churn out a mobi or epub ebook, complete with my coveted hyperlinked TOC!

When you first open the program, and select the “Fiction” category followed by the “Novel” template, there will be a tab in the upper lefthand corner titled “Novel Format.”  Take the ten or so minutes to read and digest that, and you have basically everything you need (except for text and talent) to get yourself well underway.

At $45 US to own outright, it’s not the world’s cheapest bit of software, nor is it the world’s most expensive.  But, for what it does for you as a hopeful indie author and publisher. . . for all that it can do, this program is to ebook formatting what Mr. Cubbon’s video is to Kindle uploading.  It makes things just that drop-dead simple, and the results are spot-on.  There are things I am still learning (it’s nearly as limitless as the game of chess), but all you need to get yourself up and running are right there on that one screenful of primary instruction.

With the guidance of video content such as Rob Cubbon, and the ease, convenience and near-perfection of tools such as Scrivener, there is, in my inexperience and my humbled opinion, no better era in which to enter into the world of self-published ebooks.

More Scrivener goodness to follow. . . .