By
Jennifer Harlow
Work grounds me. It centers me, at least when
it's not the cause of all the hell in my life. This month said hell is at the
courtesy of moving so amid being on hold for over an hours (Really Comcast?!?),
packing, spending more on getting my shit down to ATL than my entire car is
worth, setting up utilities, researching new car and health insurance, and a
trillion other little things, I needed a day to find shelter from my
self-imposed shit storm.
So I taught myself how to make an e-book.
We're talking writing, editing, formatting,
converting, even the fraking cover. I went mental.
Ever since Justice I've been
haunting the Kindleboards forum to learn
the ins and outs of the e-book world. There people like Hugh Howey bestow their
considerable knowledge to us plebeians. Everything's there from the best
editors, writers helping others with blurbs, the best practices, all of it. I
cannot recommend this place more, even if you're a traditional author vs.
hybrid like me (a foot in both traditional and indie publishing as Kindleboards
told me). However, as much as I love it, the boards can be a bit soul crushing.
Not from the people, they're all lovely, but what some of them advise to make any
money. Namely if you want to become a full time writer you need a ton of luck,
only write romance/Erotica/New Adult, and publish a new book or novella once a
month. Yeah, you read that right. A NEW BOOK A MONTH. This year I'll have FOUR
full length books out, two traditional and two indie. I was so proud of myself.
No one besides those with ghostwriters (Patterson/Evanovitch) accomplish that
in the traditional world. But in the indie world, I'm a slacker. And if I
haven't disillusioned y'all enough, it cost about $1000 to get Justice made
and marketed. I've made about 20% of that back. The lovely,
successful indies mantra is "It's not a sprint, it's a
marathon." Fair, but what if your shoes are falling apart and you're out
of shape? What do you do then?
Anything you can.
On their advice, I'd been toying with releasing
a "short," meaning a short story just to keep up The Galilee Falls
visibility up because once a book has been released for 3 months, it falls off
a "cliff" where it is basically banished to Siberia to make way for
newer titles. And damned if when 3 months hit I went from about 60,000 (not
terrible but not great, if my superheroes were into BDSM it'd probably be at a
thousand, but there's always the next one) to currently 267,000 in the Kindle
store. (Cue crying jag). Okay, I'm back from the land of self-pity where I am
basically their queen. Anyway, I needed to produce new material and
apparently most of my FREAKS and Midnight Magic readers aren't into superheroes
as the release of Death Takes a Holiday last month did nothing to
raise sales. (Not a swipe at y'all, I swear. To each his own.) So something had
to be done and that couldn't cost a thousand dollars.
Enter the Kindleboards brigade, especially
Joe Konrath's 8-hour challenge. Joe Konrath, for those who don't know, used to
write the Jack Daniels mystery series, then went indie before it was
cool and made a million dollars self-publishing his own stuff. He's a member of
the "10 new things a year club" along with Lilianna Hart, Elle Casey,
and Bella Andre. One night when Joe was drunk he decided to try and get
something up on Amazon in under an hour. That included the content, formatting,
and cover. That magnificent bastard succeeded. And he was surprised to
find it sold a few copies in the first day even though he didn't publish it
under his own name. So on his BLOG (another indie
must read) he put out the challenge for us all to try it, but gave us 8 hours
to do it all. I was in the throws of house crap so I didn't hear about this
until after the contest was done (My timing always sucks!!!) but when I got
crazed and needed an escape I decided to give it a try anyway. I sort of had
the content in mind. A few blog posts I'd written for the blog tour, I could
include the playlists, the first chapter of the next Galilee book, and a short
story I'd written a million years ago then called "When Justin Met
Joanna" (now entitled "Origins.") So, on content I was good. It
was everything else where I was screwed.
But I had no fucking clue where to begin when it
came to formatting and covers. I'd hired someone for those with Justice but
couldn't in this case. So I had to learn these things, me who barely knows how
to turn on a computer. Once again, hurrah for Kindleboards. People there led me
to a program called Scrivener, which was not only a word processor a la Word
but would also convert your stuff into EPUB and MOBI. I bought the sucker. Then
spent my allotted eight hours screaming, crying, and smashing my
computer in frustration when the converted files looked a hot mess. Formatting
was either non-existent or cluttered. Whole portions were missing. But I am not
a quitter. I am stubborn to a fault, I admit it, but in this case it paid off.
I played around until finally it looked professional. Clean. I could now add
"Knows how to format an e-book" to my list of not-that-useful skills
for the real world. But I'd done it. And hopefully in the future I can repeat
the process and save $200. Well see when I get around to Galilee Rising.
So, content? Check. Manuscript? Check. Now came
the cover. Enter Photoshop. My mom wanted to make Memes last year so for
Christmas Dad bought her the program. She was kind enough to let me install it
on my computer and I began to learn it as well. Another 8 hours later (no this
wasn't the same day, it was between all the moving bullshit) I had a basic
understanding of filters, text, effects, etc. Then I started an account at
Shutterstock. This is a site where you can get photos/illustrations/vectors
(whatever those are) to use for your covers. There are literally millions to
chose from. I found mine after a few more hours of searching, Photoshopped the
hell out of it (another few hours) and added it to my MOBI file (another hour
of trial and error), and up it went.
Ta da! I give you...
So if you need a Galilee Falls fix,
this should keep you until December. Only $.99. But in the end, this experiment may save me hundreds. I still might pay for covers
but I can do the formatting myself. Now if I could only write ten books a
year...
Anyway back to moving. Hope this post was
helpful to all you newbies.
