Category Archives: WRITING

by | September 19, 2017 · 9:05 am

We Want to Hear From You, Pt. 2

I don’t usually continue these sorts of posts but we had some good discussion going on Sunday and I’d like to see where it goes. I’ve started compiling the recommendations already made and, in one case, responded. I’ll expand on the response later in this post.

Most of the comments left Sunday had to do with the technical side of either preparing your book for publication or writing blurbs. So here’s the first question for you. Regarding the preparation of a manuscript for publication, do you want a checklist sort of post or do you want an actual series of posts with exercises, etc., that you can do and the rest of us can help you with? In other words, say we’re talking about setting up the first page of a chapter. You can follow our instructions and just do it or we could give you some general guidelines and you can fiddle around with them to see what you think looks best and then post a screenshot in comments and get feedback. Which would you prefer? the same questions apply to anything we do regarding cover design, so let us hear about that as well.

Something else to think about is if you want a post on different software titles that can help writers. Is that something you’d be interested in?

Someone else suggested a blurb clinic with a second commenter adding that they’d like a clinic or post on writing pitch/query to agents or editors.

There were suggestions about how to make this site easier to search, etc., and we appreciate the feedback. We’ll look into it and see what we can come up with.

Now, for those of you who aren’t writers or who don’t yet identify as writers (I know there are some of you who still think you can avoid the writing bug), what would you like to see more of from the bloggers here? Writers, as readers, what would like to see us cover more?

Finally, regarding putting together a book of posts, we could do it. The first problem, however, is that much of what we write about here has changed since we wrote about it. If you look at the various posts we’ve done about formatting, you’ll see that. While the basics remain the same, many of the limitations we had even a couple of years ago no longer apply. Conversely, others have been put in place (or look like they will be as demographics change). Markets have changed as well. So have some of the players when it comes to traditional publishing.

So any gathering of posts would have to include time to edit and bring them up-to-date. But that pales when looking at the sheer number of posts we’ve made here on MGC. As of this moment, we have just under 3,200 posts. Can you imagine having to mine those posts to find those for a book? Add to that the issue of whether we go with just posts or with comments made by our bloggers. We’d have to be careful not to include comments made by anyone else. Otherwise, we’d have to take time to check with them to get their permission to use their comments. We’d face the same issue when it comes to guest posts. To be honest, the time involved in planning out the book and its contents, then culling through posts to find those we wanted to include, plus editing and updating them could prove to be a herculean effort. It would take time away from writing for all of us, especially for whoever does the initial culling of posts. Even if we wanted to outsource the editing of it all, the original work would still fall on us. I can’t speak for the others, but that would cost me money because writing is how I make my living. I’m not saying we won’t do it. I am saying not to hold your breath because there are a lot of strings to pull and plans to make before something like that happens.

But getting back to the main gist of the post. What else would you like us to cover in a single post or a series of posts?

Until later!

41 Comments

Filed under AMANDA, WRITING

Tagged as ,

by | September 17, 2017 · 10:02 am

We want to hear from you!

It’s hard to believe, but Mad Genius Club has been around for 8 years, 11 months (assuming my math is right). That’s over 3,000 posts. In that time, we’ve done our best to keep you up-to-date with what’s been going on in the world of publishing.  Some things have changed a great deal in that time while others appear to remain written in stone,  on a cave wall deep in the past. We’ve given you a glimpse — and sometimes more — of our lives as writers and our process when it comes to writing. So, as we close in on that 9th anniversary, we want to hear from you.

When Sarah and Dave first started the blog and reached out to others to join them, the purpose was to give authors and those who want to be authors a place to come for information on the industry, for support and a place where they could ask questions without fear of reprisal. So, that’s what we are doing today. We want to hear from you. We want to know what issues or topics dealing with publishing you’d like us to cover.

In the comments, give us your suggestions and questions. Be specific whenever possible. While we don’t guarantee we will do a post, or series of posts, on every suggestion, we will address as many as we can. Now, go forth and tell us what you’d like us to cover over the next few months or year.

Later!

33 Comments

Filed under AMANDA, WRITING, WRITING: PUBLISHING

Tagged as ,

by | September 12, 2017 · 9:18 am

They keep trying and failing

I’ll admit it. My brain is filled with edits for the latest WIP (which means yet another rewrite of the opening chapters, but more on that later) as well as still mentally dancing with glee over the ease of conversions using Vellum. Because of that, I had a difficult time figuring out what to blog about today. Unable to figure anything out, I went to one of my favorite places to find ideas — The Passive Voice. It didn’t take long to find a post that had me wanting to beat my head against the desk. One of the stories TPV linked to shows just how far traditional publishing and its supporters will go to twist data and manipulate outcomes in an attempt to stay relevant.

Let’s start with the headline for the article, which TPV recreates for his readers:

Children turn their backs on e-books as ‘screen-fatigue’takes hold and sales of books for youngsters soar.

Now, journalistic training notwithstanding, that headline is wrong on so many different levels. It’s too long. If you go to the original article, you’ll see the headline takes several lines and is then followed by three bullet points. I guess the bullet points are to show how important the information in the headline happens to be. Except there is no real support in the article for anything except the drop in sales for children’s e-books (3%) while printed books increased (16%). Oh, wait, there is no support for those numbers. They cite the sales figures without citing the source, only a secondary source (the Observer) to back it up. It is the same with their contention that “screen-fatigue” is the cause for the change.

But let’s go back to the headline, which basically says everything that’s in the article and with the same amount of primary data. It claims children are turning their backs on e-books. Wow, how do they know? Are they going out and asking children which format they prefer and which ones they buy? No, they aren’t. For one thing, kids don’t take surveys and, for another, most kids aren’t buying their own books. Their parents are.

Then there is the point made in the body of the article that one of the main bookstores/chains in Great Britain is having to put aside more and more shelf space for children’s books. Well, duh. Publishers aren’t completely foolish. They see that children’s books are in demand (Especially when school starts). so they will start publishing more titles in the current “hot” genre. This is nothing new. Does anyone remember the number of Da Vinci Code knock-offs or how about all the Twilight or 50 Shades knockoffs. Heck, When 50 Shades of Grey hit it big, a certain major publisher pulled an entire line in order to “rebrand” the covers so all the books looked like 50 Shades. That went over so well — NOT — that some authors saw their sales tank and their options for other books weren’t picked up. Why? Because all the books looked the same and buyers thought they’d already read the books.

The real problem with articles like this is that they use data without giving the reader access to it. We don’t know where the data came from. We don’t know if they went off of sales figures only and, if so, where those figures came from. We don’t know if they included indie and small press titles in the data (and my bet is they did not). We don’t know if they then polled parents of young readers and, if they did, what questions were asked and what the possible answers to the questions were. Nor do we know who interpreted the data and what their qualifications might be — not to mention their biases regarding publishing.

The Daily Mail, in this instance, is acting as nothing more than a cheerleader for traditional publishing, pushing the trad’s agenda and assuming its readers aren’t smart enough to figure that out.

TPV nails the assertion that “screen-fatigue” is responsible for the quotes sales figures right between the eyes.

PG suggests that screen fatigue is the creation of a marketing manager somewhere, not a psychological or sociological phenomenon. PG doesn’t know if “children are reading more” is a fact, but suspects it may also be the creation of a marketing manager somewhere.

One thing PG does know is that marketing managers don’t really care if screen fatigue or reading children are genuine phenomena, so long as adults continue to purchase children’s books.

As for me, I don’t give a flying flip what format a child reads as long as that child is reading. Isn’t that what we should be worried about?

Now, at the beginning of this post, I noted that I’m about to tear apart the opening of the current WIP again. I’m one of those authors who find writing the opening chapter or two of a book the most difficult part of the process. In Light Magic, I know the basic plot. I know the characters. I’ve had to make a few minor adjustments to keep the book from being too close to something else I’ve written. What I haven’t quite gotten down is how to get the story rolling. Part of that is because my main character is a challenge. She wants to be a “wild child” (she objects to being called a “bad girl”) but she isn’t one, not really. So, in a very real way, she is fighting me. Once the story gets going, we are on the same page. But, day-um, she is giving me headaches on the opening chapters. At least i think I’ve finally figured it out. If not, this book may have to take a back burner for awhile until my subconscious figures it out.

In the meantime, I need to get the new cover for the expanded version of Vengeance from Ashes tweaked just a little and then it will be ready to be sent out to all the major e-book outlets. The print version, sans the cover flat, is ready to upload as well. By the time I finished the rewrite, I added close to 20k words to the original. I’m really happy with the finished product and the beta readers seem to be as well. fingers crossed everyone else is.

Now, because I figure we could all use a laugh, and with a spew warning because I can’t afford to buy everyone new keyboards, I’ll leave you with this:

32 Comments

Filed under AMANDA, WRITING, WRITING: PUBLISHING

Tagged as , , , , , ,

by | September 10, 2017 · 2:00 am

Mailing List Basics – And New Books!

Mailing list campaigns

I am a big proponent of having your own mailing list – it’s a direct link to people who like your books enough that they want you to tell them when a new one comes out. No worry about the middleman, no having the list be hostage to some company or platform that might go bankrupt or fold. Seriously, happy readers get new entertainment, and you get paid. What could possibly be better?

That said, there are a couple things to keep in mind. Peter uses Mailchimp, so all my examples are going to be drawn from there; Aweber and others may use slightly different terminology, so interpret as you go.

1. Quality over Quantity

Never forget your mailing list is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end goal is to sell more books. Getting 1,000 people to sign up for your mailing list means nothing if they don’t buy your next book. We’ve taken a really low-key approach to mailing list growth: it’s on Peter’s blog sidebar, and otherwise we haven’t pushed it.

Other authors have run rafflecopters for free books or run Facebook ads where the call to action is a mailing list signup – but while they’ve expanded the amount of signups dramatically, the amount of opens / clickthroughs has dropped correspondingly. Some have still come out way ahead, others came out with a larger headache, more expense, and further in the hole. Proceed with caution, do research.

As a result of our approach, we have a fairly small mailing list, but while industry average for promotional emails is 19.3% open rate, 2.7% click rate… Ours is, on average, 49.6% open, 10.7% click rate.

Given that many inboxes these days have a “promotional” tab that exile everything that makes it past the junk mail filter, 50% open is pretty darned awesome. As for that 10% open rate – that includes clicks to other authors on cover-reveal emails (usually 4-5% click rate), and the westerns (8% click rate, because a lot of the scifi readers don’t read westerns.)

2. Specific parts of the promotional email

Subject lines

I’ve found that if the headline is “(New Book Title) is out!”, the open rate drops dramatically. “September Newsletter”, on the other hand, works awesomely. Amusingly enough, there’s an upsurge of sales anyway with the former: a statistically significant number of people will read “(Book Title) is Out!” and then go to Amazon and buy the new book, without ever actually opening the email.

Overall, though, “August Newsletter” gets more sales over the next 48 hours than “King’s Champion is out!” So September is “September Newsletter”, and not “Forged in Blood is out!”

Preview (The line you see on some email systems after the subject line)

“You’re getting this email because you signed up to hear about news and new releases from Peter Grant – and we have news for you!”

Why? Because the average interested reader may or may not know what the new release is named, and on the first cup of coffee, “King’s Champion is out!” may hit the same mental spam filter as “Hot sexy Tasmanian Devils!” So I give ’em a reminder why they’re getting the email. You’re getting this because you asked for it! Don’t reflexively hit that “spam” button or the “unsubscribe” link!

Body – This thread needs pics!

Put in the book cover. Many people are visual, and so you want to give them the “this is what you want” in visual form. (I know, I’m talking to writers, who tend to think in words. When talking to artists, I have to remind them to add words to the email instead.)

Put in the blurb. Make sure you use line breaks, paragraph breaks, and don’t give ’em a wall of text. This email may be read on a cell phone – make sure everything’s readable in mobile format, not just on a browser set at your monitor’s size.

Call to action: Put in the link to buy it! Say something like “Buy this Here:” Really, it’s okay to ask for the sale when people have signed up to buy your stuff.

Country-specific sales: We’re exclusive on Amazon, so what I’ve done is I put in the top 5 countries’ sales links. You can break this out on your KDP (and other) dashboards. While you may not have many Canadian, German, UK, or Australian fans, the ones you do have will appreciate taking the time to put in a direct link to click and buy. They appreciate with money! (I actually have this set now to the top 5 countries that are clicked-through on the mailing list – making it easy for the people who see it to get the books.)

3. Avoiding Spam / Junk filters

First, the easy one: in the body of your email, do not provide link text that’s different from the link but can look like http text. What do I mean? I mean, “King’s Champion on Amazon” is far better than “Amazon.com” and “Amazon UK” is far better than “Amazon.co.uk”

Otherwise, some spam filters are going to detect the difference and flag it just like emails that ask you to update your bank info at “Wellsfargo.com” and the link sends you to “Phishingcentral.com”

Second, the harder one – DMARC means you want a custom domain name.

What is DMARC? Here, check this post from Mailchimp – the other major mail providers have since joined. https://blog.mailchimp.com/yahoo-changes-may-affect-your-deliverability/
Basically, you really want a custom domain and email, because if you’re sending from SomeAuthor@Gmail.com, but it’s coming out of mailchimp’s servers instead of gmail’s, it won’t get authenticated as sent from gmail – and thus it’ll get bounced to spam.

And last but not least,

4. Getting people to sign up – or buy the next book?

It’s a truism of marketing that you can only have one effective call to action at a time – so while you can ask people to buy the next book, or sign up for the mailing list, or leave a review, asking them to do multiple things will drastically reduce the number of people doing anything at all.

Do I believe the truism? It depends on placement. If you ask busy people to do one thing, they will – if they want to. But if they don’t want to, they skip right past and don’t do any of the other things you’d like, either. If you give people with time multiple options, they’ll choose what they want.

Mailing list emails are a great place for single call to action. People don’t tend to spend a lot of time on any single email, and you want to get them to do one thing before they delete the email and move on without looking back. So “The new book is out! Buy the new book!” is a pretty great message for an email.

“Buy the next book! Review the last one! Enter this raffle! Check out this book by someone else!” is asking too much, and the clicks go down dramatically.

(Random aside: I try to have something people can do for each email. So if I send out a cover reveal email, then I provide a link to another author who overlaps with the reader’s tastes under “check this out!” at the bottom. 1-2 authors good; 3 is really pushing it.)

The back of a book, being arrived at without the pressure to get through 35 emails and on with their day, is a great place to try multiple calls to action. Thus, it’s a great place to stick “Please leave a review”, and hotlinks to “other books by this author”, and, yes, a link to a mailing list signup.

Note that on the cell phone version of the kindle app, Amazon has a page that pops up before you get to the back matter with 1.) a link to next in series, titled “buy the next book” in bright yellow bar. 2.) a number of stars to tap for leaving a review. Amazon puts a lot of effort into selling books, and this tells you they’re trying to get you to dig in your virtual pocket for more change (or reviews) before you have a chance to put the book down, leave that headspace, and go back to other things.

(This also prevents most readers from seeing the back matter you put in. Eh, can’t have everything. Kindle device readers, on-computer readers, and crossloaded devices will still display it, so stick it in!)

Blogs are the inbetween ground – while a single call to action works best, you can stick in multiple calls to action and options, like “Here’s my latest book, which you want! Already got it? Sign up for my mailing list so you’re one of the first to know when the next one’s out!”

5. Emails as feedback / audience engagement

Obviously, when a new book is out, you want readers to go forth and enjoy the new book. But most of us aren’t releasing a book a month – so what do you do if you release two books a year or less?

You can keep fan engagement going with other announcements: sales, con appearances, interview links, previews of the upcoming covers, update on how the dogs are doing (Some authors’ pets have fans of their own), and questions you’d like fans to answer.

Some authors will test their covers in their mailing list “Here are two possibilities for next cover. Which do you like more?” Some will ask their fans to pick (from a small list) a name for a bit character, or who ends up with whom among the side characters, or what color the wedding theme should be, or if they want the next book to be in series X or Series Y.

Asking fans for their opinions is not only excellent market research / reader feedback, it makes the fan feel like they have an investment in the book, and they’re more likely to promote it via word of mouth when it comes out.

On the other hand, this can easily grow to be an enormous time suck. Don’t become someone who answers emails for a living, and writes as a hobby!

6. Calls to Action:

Would you like to motivate me to keep writing these columns? How about giving yourself a real treat while you’re at it? There’s an easy way to do both: my darling man has not just one but two new books out, that you can pick up and enjoy!

If you like sword and sorcery, justice and old men who apply experience and cunning to overcome evil and enthusiasm, then you want to give King’s Champion a try! It’s right here on Amazon!

But even better, if you’ve already read that, here’s the story of a sword from across space and time! Peter has a story in Michael Z Williamson’s new Freehold anthology, Forged In Blood! Follow the story of Kendra Pacelli’s sword from ancient Japan when a surly ronin is called upon to defend a village against a thieving tax collector who soon finds out it’s not wise to anger an old, tired man… to Peter’s own story set in the founding of the Freehold on the planet Grainne, to the far future!

Thank you!

17 Comments

Filed under FYNBOSSPRESS, MARKETING, PROMOTION, WRITING: PUBLISHING

by | September 5, 2017 · 9:15 am

Hero or Superhero

Usually by this time on Tuesdays, I have an idea about what I’m going to blog about. Heck, I usually have an idea when I get up. Sometimes I even have the post written the night before. But not today. I blame yesterday for it. Between painting and taking down cabinets and an emergency plumbing repair (nothing serious, just threw off my timing on the other projects), my brain wasn’t on writing or blogging. To be honest, I needed a day like that. But, it meant this morning, I was scrambling for a topic.

So I did what I sometimes do in that situation. I went to other blogs, social media feeds, etc., and looked to see what folks were talking about. I came across a couple of different threads on different sites about what readers look for in main characters, especially in genre fiction. The phrasing was different but it all came down to one main question: do readers want heroes or superheroes for their main characters? Or, to put it a little differently, do they want flawed characters who have issues to overcome and who might grow some during the course of the book or story arc or do they want that perfect character who, like Clark Kent, swoops in to save the day and rarely has a hangnail, much less anything seriously go wrong in their life?

In one of the discussions I looked at, someone commented that they didn’t think you needed a character to have flaws or to “grow”. They pointed out characters like James Bond and Indiana Jones and asked how they “grew”. I think those two stood out to me the most and for different reasons. Ian Fleming wrote Bond, at least in my eyes, as the “perfect” man. He could get and bed any woman he wanted. He was the perfect spy. He was the man most other men wanted to be. There’s no problem with that. For the time when the books were written and for the genre involved, that’s what readers and publishers wanted. Besides, for every James Bond, you had a George Smiley. John le Carré wrote Smiley as an older man, one who had fallen from grace in the intelligence community. He was not the perfect man and he had a past to overcome. In my mind, in many ways, he was much more interesting than Bond ever could be.

As for Indiana Jones, he was far from perfect. While those imperfections didn’t cripple him, they were there. He was impulsive. He didn’t always think through the consequences of his actions, even when those actions might put others in danger. He had daddy issues. We see some growth, especially with regard to the daddy issues in the third film. (We won’t mention the fourth film. Please don’t mention the fourth film.)

But, where my mind went first when I saw the original discussion was my own reading and David Webber’s Honor Harrington. One of the things I loved about Honor from the very beginning was that she wasn’t perfect. Sure, because of her genetic background, she was taller and stronger than some. She was also a brilliant Naval officer. But she had her own ghosts and insecurities. Those could come close to crippling her. She had a temper and a streak of vengeance a mile wide. Both of which cost her as well, at least early into the series.

I loved seeing her shine as a Naval officer and then seeing the insecurities as a “normal” person. I’ve known people like that. They excel in the office or boardroom, in the surgical suite or at the front of a classroom. But put them into a social setting and they suddenly think they are unworthy, ugly, insecure, whatever. That was Honor. Over the course of the first three or four books, we get to see her grow as a person. She was already a strong officer but as a “woman”, she had a long way to go.

That did not make her any less of a leading character or human. Far from it. By seeing her able to put those insecurities or, in some cases, prejudices behind her in order to do her duty was refreshing. those flaws kept her from being a Mary Sue (something she has come very close to being in the later books in the series, imo).

What I noticed on each of the sites where I saw this discussion happening was that they rarely seemed to mention female main characters, focusing instead on male leads. Maybe their responses stem from the belief that men shouldn’t show weakness, maybe it came from something else. I don’t know. But, I think it comes down to a matter of degrees.

I don’t know about you, but when I say I want a character with flaws, I don’t mean I want a character who has been broken by life. Oh, there are places for that, but not every leading character has to be broken. They can be bent — hey! Get your minds out of the gutter! — or they can simply be human. Growth doesn’t have to mean a major change to their behaviors and attitudes. It can be as simple as learning to admit that they don’t know everything or that they might not be the best at something. It can be learning to let someone else into their lives, be it on a romantic scale or with regard to business.

Sometimes, we need characters with some flaws to make them believable. What is appropriate to one story or genre might not be for another. So, here’s my question to you; what books do you think do the perfect (or superhero-esque) character well and which ones do you think do the flawed character well? (Yes, this is also my way of adding to my TBR stack.)

68 Comments

Filed under AMANDA, characterization, WRITING: CRAFT

Tagged as , , , ,

by | September 3, 2017 · 9:16 am

It’s not your ancestor’s Vellum

Brad asked me to fill in for him this morning, so I thought I’d continue the formatting and publishing series I started last month. In this post, I mentioned a Mac-only program a friend used that I’d downloaded and would review later. That program, Vellum, isn’t cheap. But, having played with it enough to be comfortable with it and having used it to convert the extended version of Vengeance from Ashes, I have to say, it is well worth the money.

For those of you with a Mac, you can download the entire program as a “trial” and use it. The only limitation on functionality is that you can’t actually export an e-book or print-ready PDF file. However, as I noted in the earlier post, the preview function of the program lets you see what you have without actually doing the export.

So, what is Vellum?

Vellum is a program designed to convert your word processing file into e-books and, in the last version or two, into a print-ready PDF file. There are two pricing levels for the program. As I said, it’s expensive. To get the e-book only version, you’ll pay $199 and for the e-book and print version, you’ll pay $249. Unlike earlier versions of the program where you could buy a license that would allow you to convert a single title or in increments of 10 (if I remember correctly), there is no limit on the number of titles now. And, to be honest, that is the only way I managed to convince myself it was worth the money.

Like many other conversion programs, you can write in Vellum but I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s not where its strength lies. However, that ability to write in it means you can edit in it which is a huge plus. That’s especially true because you don’t have to open a text editor and edit the underlying HTML of an e-book like you do with other conversion programs. It even has a spell-checker which can be nice or annoying, especially if you are writing science fiction and fantasy.

Once you install and open Vellum, you’ll see something like this. You’re given the option of viewing the tutorial or opening the Help Overview. Below that, you have the option of importing a Word file. I recommend you view the tutorial first. The program is really pretty simple but the tutorial will help. Also, there are some pretty good — and short — Youtube videos about the program as well. The one I watched was only about 10 minutes and it gave all the important information I needed to put together a project using the program.

Once you import your Word file, you’ll see something similar to this. As you fill in the blanks in the dialog box in the center of the screen, you will see the changes happening on the right side of the screen. That is your previewer pane and you can set it to show what your book will look like on the Kindle Fire, the Oasis, the iPad, etc. You can also set it to show what your print file will look like. Note the far left panel. That’s your table of contents that’s been generated by your use of Headings in Word (or similar program). You can change those, including their attributes.

While we’re on the TOC, at the bottom of that pane is an *. If you click it, a dialog box will open. One of the options is to add an element. This is a handy tool because it means you no longer have to type out your copyright page, etc. It has one on file and all you do is fill in the blanks. Choose where on your ToC you want it to appear, add the element and it is there, not only in the ToC but in your preview as well.

Once you’ve finished filling in the book details, click on the Ebook Cover tab and upload your cover. That will embed your cover with the book file. If you’re like me, this is great because it means you don’t have to worry about it later.

Now it’s time to move to what I see as the real strength of the program. One of the banes of the indie author has been making the text of our ebooks look like that of traditional publishers. Unless you had access to programs like InDesign, doing things like true drop caps and even something as simple as true small caps was beyond many of us. So we found workarounds that didn’t quite do the trick. With Vellum, you don’t have to do that. It has different options built in and all you have to do is choose which ones you want.

Here is a screenshot of what I did with Vengeance last night. This was one of, if I remember, six or eight options available. There are different elements you can add — if you want — after the chapter heading. Since this is a science fiction novel, I didn’t want anything too fancy. It also has the first letter looking like what we are used to with traditionally published books. I could have opted for a different font or small caps or no fancy effects. But this is what I thought looked best for the book and genre.

It also handles scene breaks if you want it to. By using the standard  asterisk to break your scenes, you indicate to Vellum that there is a scene break and you can then choose what you want to happen. As you can see here, I chose to use the same basic first line layout that I do for the beginning of a chapter. I chose a simple line between scenes, again because of the genre. I didn’t have to do anything except go to the styles tab on the far left contents section and tell Vellum what I wanted it to do. The nice thing is you can preview everything before you make your decision. Better yet, you don’t have to go through and insert these changes at ever scene break or new chapter. You set it once and it is done automatically.

Once you’ve checked your work and are happy with how it looks, you can then generate your ebooks. Before you do this, if you have a section at the back of the book (or at the front) where you want to link to your other titles and you sell them in the different stores, you can actually input those store links into a separate dialog box for each title. What happens is when you tell Vellum to generate your e-books, it will automatically assign the right links to the appropriate store. That’s because you can choose to generate a book per major outlet and Vellum then optimizes the books according to those store’s requirements.

As you can see from the image above, I chose to generate versions for all the major stores but did not generate the generic EPUB file. That took maybe a minute to do. Once the process is complete, you get a new dialog box up that not only recommends you check your files but it will link you to a page that tells you how to check your new files. I sent the Kindle file to my Oasis and, damn, it looks good. None of the issues I’ve had in the past trying to use any of the “fancier” effects showed up. So far, so good. But we still had the print version to look into.

I’ll admit, this is where I held my breath. I’ve gotten to where I can take my basic manuscript and turn it into a decent print ready PDF in an hour or so. But it meant doing things like changing the the page size, figuring out the margins, etc. And then there were the headers and footers — oh, those headers and footers. They can be the bane of any author’s existence. But the headers and footers, as well as all the other special effects, can be set for print just as they can be for e-books. I’m still playing with the final product for the print version but the image below gives you an idea of what can be done.

As for those concerns about converting to print, Vellum surprised me and in a good way. It took my basic manuscript, considered what I had typed into the original dialog box when I got started and then all I had to do was choose which form of header and footer I wanted to use. That’s it. You choose the page size when you get ready to export the file. My only complaint (am I’m sure it is something I can fix but haven’t figured out how yet) is that it has page numbers on the bottom of the first page of the chapter. I want to lose the header and footer on those pages. But, if that is all I dislike about the program, that’s pretty darned good. As with the e-book versions, it took less than a minute to generate the PDF file.

I need to play with the program some more but, to get multiple e-book versions and the print version done in less than an hour with a program I am still learning is pretty darned good. To get one that looks closer to a traditionally published book at minimal effort is a very good thing. The final judgment, for me at least, is that Vellum is well worth the money. While I hesitate to recommend anyone spend that much for a program, I will do this. If you have a Mac (sorry, iPad Pro and iPad users, they don’t have a version for iOS), try the program out. As I noted above, you won’t be able to export the files but you can see what the program is capable of doing.

For me, until I see something better out there that is also easier to use, Vellum is going to be my go-to when it comes to converting and exporting files for both e-book and print publication.

22 Comments

Filed under AMANDA, WRITING: PUBLISHING

Tagged as , , , ,

by | August 22, 2017 · 8:36 am

A Change in Plans

A quick note before I get into today’s post. The series on formatting will continue next week. I want a little more time working with some of the programs I’m going to discuss before blogging about them. Sorry for the delay but I wanted to be comfortable with the programs before not only reviewing them but, in at least one instance, recommending them.

As for today, well, the title says it all.

Last week, I released Nocturnal Rebellion. It is the fifth book in the Nocturnal Lives series and the sixth title overall. This was the first series I started and Nocturnal Origins was the second book I published. To say this series and its characters have held a special place in my writer’s heart is to put it mildly. Because of that, I expected a few days, maybe more, of mourning after Rebellion’s release. Why? Because Rebellion brings an end to the current story arc and I’m not sure where the story will go from there — or when the next installment will happen.

Okay, that’s not quite right. I have a glimmer of a spark of an idea about where to go next but that’s it. Knowing Mac and company won’t be part of my regular writing schedule for a while is, well, odd.

Normally, I take a week or so away from writing after a book release to do some promotion and to simply get my head cleared of that book and ready for the next project. That’s when I try to catch up on my reading, reorganize my office — okay, cleaning it and getting it ready for whatever I’m about to start writing — sleeping and gaming. It is also when I catch up on those projects around the house that I put on hold while I got the last book ready for press.

This time, however, it didn’t happen like that. I took a day. A single day. Then I dug into my office, clearing away all the notes and research used during Rebellion’s writing. Once that was accomplished, I sat down and over the course of the next two days, made notes on the projects that have been floating around in my mind, those I knew I needed to get done in the next six months or so as well as others that, it seemed, had been lurking just below the surface until I finished Rebellion.

By the time I was finished, I had notes on 12 separate titles. 12. What the bleep?!? Fortunately for my sanity, not all of them are novels. More fortunately, some were for titles I’d already planned and, in a couple of occasions, are projects I’ve already gotten very rough drafts completed for — the next in the Honor and Duty series as well as the next in the Sword of the Gods series. What I hadn’t expected doing this were the several standalone titles that cropped up or the additional titles I hadn’t planned in the Eerie Side of the Tracks, including a novel that hit me out of nowhere but that I’m very excited to write.

So what’s the change, you ask.

First, and least important, is the fact I sat down and actually made notes on more than the current work in progress. I very rarely do that. While I’m not a pantser, I most definitely am not a plotter either. I’ve always fallen somewhere in-between. Whether this indicates a change in my process or not, I don’t know. I’ll admit, the prospect of my process changing is a bit scary. But it’s happened before and I adapted. I’ll do so again.

The second change is in the publishing schedule. Again, it’s no biggie. That is the joy of being an indie. I can shuffle my schedule as needed. But, in this case, there is no shuffling needed. I simply added more titles to it. In a way, that’s reassuring. It is also daunting because it means I can’t goof off and say “I don’t know what to write”. And yes, there was a teen-like whine with that quote.

The change is the obvious one. For the first time in more than five years, I don’t have a story with Mac in the hopper. Part of me mourns that. But it was time for this particular story arc to come to an end. Yet, even as I write this post, I know Myrtle the Evil Muse is thinking about what to do with our band of heroes next. She’s already teased (okay, tormented) me with a scene with a panicked Mac discovering she’s pregnant and wondering the best way to potty train the baby of two people who shift into jaguars. Do you buy stock in diapers or kitty litter? Do you buy teething rings or scratching posts?

You see why I call my muse evil?

Crap!

Even as I sit here typing in this post, I hear Myrtle cackling madly. It’s not enough that she inflicted me with a book that wants to be written NOW! I feel a new series coming on. In case you’re wondering, it’s a bit like feeling a headache coming on. Why? Because Myrtle isn’t subtle. She comes racing in with her combat boots and bullhorn.

Seriously, the change I refer to in the title is more of a mental change than anything else. I noticed something as I wrote my last couple of books. I was allowing myself to be distracted by the internet, by gaming, etc. I know the reasons why but knowing them doesn’t always mean I do anything about them. So, I made the decision to change one very basic and yet important part of my writing. I have switched machines. My PC laptop no longer is my work machine. I’ll still use it for a couple of post-edit functions because it has a larger screen and some of the programs I use after I finish a manuscript. But the actual writing now happens on the MacBook Air. So far, it has been a very positive change. It is as though my subconscious understand that when I’m on the Mac, it is “work”. the PC is “play”. We’ll see how long that lasts.

I’m not recommending everyone go out and buy a laptop or desktop that is a totally different OS from what you have now. What I do recommend is that you review how you write and be honest with yourself about whether you are allowing yourself to become distracted too easily. I know authors who have machines without internet connectivity that they use to write on. Others don’t put games or social media apps on their work machines. I finally am starting to understand why.

The other thing I’ve done is blocked off several hours in the morning and then in the afternoon where I don’t go online. I don’t check email and I don’t go to Facebook or similar sites. This is “work” time. That has helped as well.

In other words, I am practicing what I preach — I am treating my writing like my business. I’m still looking at ways to get better, both with time management and with promotion. Boy do I need to get better at promotion. How about you? What can you do to improve your productivity? What techniques are you using that seem to help?

6 Comments

Filed under AMANDA, WRITING: CRAFT, WRITING: LIFE

Tagged as , ,