Renaissance Woman

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.

Judging a Book

by G.M. Malliet

I was recently tapped to be one of the judges in a writing competition. What an honor. What a responsibility. What a real labor of love - emphasis on labor, emphasis on love.

Many submissions later, and more on the way...Since my own escape from the slush pile is not that far in the past, I’m excited by the quality of what I’m reading, and determined to give everyone a fair shot.

I am also starting to see what agents mean when they say "Don’t give me any excuse, however small."

They are swamped with good-quality manuscripts. I get it now. They are looking for reasons to toss your gorgeous book aside.

Don’t give them a reason.

That means this: No funny fonts. No colored fonts. No odd spacing. Nothing that makes you stand out, in fact (except your exceptional writing and storytelling skills, of course). Boring conformity is what the agent and editor want to see.

I repeat: Don't give them a reason. These people are more jaded than I am. They are more tired after years in the business. Their eyesight is probably bad, and they may be cranky, for any number of unknown reasons. They may not choose to ignore, as I steadfastly do, the things that make it harder to read your manuscript. After all, I'm in this for the short haul, so I can be more diligent, and "holier than them."

They will not be as patient. Trust me on this.

The things it is assumed "everyone" knows about submitting a manuscript - not everyone does. So I’ve recently been compiling my own list of the formatting rules I didn't always know:

* Doublespace the entire manuscript. There is no need to triple or quadruple space between paragraphs – just doublespace.

* Indent each paragraph five spaces. Fewer or more spaces can make it harder to read. Also, don’t use dashes at the beginning of each paragraph. (I don’t know where this formatting style started - is it a European thing?)

* Again, no fancy fonts. Plain old Times New Roman, 12 point, is just fine. By the way, I was taught that a sans serif font, like Arial (apparently the default font for this blog), is harder to read than a font with serifs – those little sticky-outy things (a technical term I learned from Hallie Ephron) like on the letters g and p and m. Supposedly, the eye can track words better when you use letters with sticky-outy things.

* Put your name, the title of your book, and the page number on every page. The exact way you do this probably doesn’t matter. I put, for example, Malliet/Death of a Cozy Writer at the top left of each page, and the page number at the top right of each page. Imagine if you will a busy agent, dealing with dozens of manuscripts on her/his desk. The casual swoop of an arm, and there go your manuscript pages, mixed up now with dozens of other manuscript pages. This is the reason why you should label every page.

* Despite the above, it is not necessary to bind your pages. I have heard that agents/editors prefer pages unbound, except for a rubber band around the middle. Has anyone else here heard the same? (I think a giant, removable clip at the top is fine, too, but that’s just me.)

* By the same token, elaborate packaging isn’t necessary. A manuscript-sized box, such as that provided by the postal service for priority mail, or one of those unrippable bags is fine. One agent (now I can’t remember who) has famously begged people not to pad their manuscript with that plastic popcorn stuff, which tends to explode into every corner of an office.

* Center your chapter headings so the break is obvious. I also bold my chapter headings. Some people (me) begin a new chapter at the center of the page itself. It doesn’t matter, I don’t think, and probably wastes paper.

* Despite what I just said, it is better/more usual not to print on both sides of the page. Yes, I know this is wasteful. You are trying to get published, so the recycling gods will probably forgive you.

* Scene shifts or breaks in a chapter: Everyone does this differently, but use something to clearly indicate this type of break - don’t just quadruple space. I center five asterisks on a line by themselves to indicate that I’m shifting gears slightly, but I’m still in the same chapter. (*****).

* I don’t think a separate title page is necessary, although I’m probably in the minority here. I just put my title, name, Chapter 1, and then I start the story, all on the first page. (I confess that I only started doing this because I couldn't get my word processor to start numbering from the number 1 on the second page of the document file. Bill Gates, are you listening?) However, if you want a separate title page, I would bet most agents would tell you not to bother using a graphic or background image. Personally, I like this look and think it is effective in setting the tone. But we’re talking boring industry standard and getting published - so play it safe.

What have I forgotten?

Typescript image taken from http://www.star-dot-star.co.uk/books/buttons/004946.jpg