The Beta Reader, and the Indie learning curve

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Getting a whinge off my chest. Do you have a friend or relative who writes?

Nope, not bestsellers. Neither did I run the last company I worked for. Oh, you didn’t expect me to become MD of an international company – yet you do expect me to have a number one bestseller? You’re disappointed in me? Back OFF.

Family and friends are uncomfortable and embarrassed for our sake when they realize our books aren’t, and will never be, in the top 1%. Reality check. We KNOW that.

When I started work as an office junior my modest future plans included becoming competent, maybe a few promotions and Bob’s yer uncle, hasn’t she done well, she’s a manager now. Look around your family – of how many relatives can you say proudly, he/she is a billionaire running an international corporation? Logistically we can’t all be tycoons of commerce and we all know that.

And yet, somehow, with writing, that changes. Tell a relative or friend you’re writing a book, or your tenth book, or your twentieth, and they are very nearly resentful. What name do you write under? Have I heard of you? Why haven’t I heard of you? What sort of books do you write? Why do you bother if you’re not good enough at it to sell a million copies a day? Or that patronising give me a copy and I’ll see if I can find the time to read it. Gee, pass. You’ll either never read it, or you’ll say in surprise that it wasn’t that bad, or you’ll never, ever, mention the subject again. When you do, try to remember you just met your friend or relative’s (brain) child and you ignored it.  Got any kids yourself? That ever happened? Bet it felt great.

There are over 32 million books available in a market place like Amazon. Some are – well, there’s a review ascribed to Dorothy Parker. “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”  If you think that about your connection’s book, eek, dilemma. But if you are just disappointed that the book you’ve read isn’t the best you ever read – it would have been miraculous if it was. Your other relatives and friends probably aren’t the acknowledged leaders of their professions. Hell, they’re doing well if they’re middle management and turning in an acceptable performance. Will you attack them? What do you do? Are you the best in your company? Why bother doing it if you aren’t? Give me a freebie. And when you meet their children, be sure to check they are brilliant, accomplished and famous before you deign to acknowledge them.

Huh.

Chest whinge-free, feels great. Upward and onward to 2020.

 

 

 

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Payhip for dummies, writers and readers #iamwriting

Payhip for writers wanting to sell books is pretty simple.  I want to load my books on this website  (under the Shop tab) (haven’t done it yet, gies a break) so I could keep all that lovely filthy lucre to myself (apart from the chunk Paypal takes) but also to eventually have all sorts of other interesting options.

Payhip is linked to Paypal for sales of anything that can be downloaded. It records sales, keeps track of tax, and other useful things, and there are dozens of blogs and vlogs and experts out there to tell you in tortuous detail why you should use it and how to use it. The only thing you really need to remember is that your Paypal account shows your writing or publishing name, not your non-writer name. Link a business option to your existing account, if necessary, because you do want your writer name to show on the purchase.

That sorted, go into Payhip, and link your account to the writer version of your Paypal account. Follow screen directions. I have all my books in mobi format. Some enthusiasts are very thorough and load the books in mobi, epub, pdf, and who knows what all else. Many formats are accepted.

Load your first book and then you should probably buy it to check all is well. You’ll pay for it on your private Paypal, not the one you just linked to Payhip.

If all goes well, there will be a positive flurry of emails on your respectively linked email accounts congratulating you on both buying and selling a book. You can download the book from Payhip itself, or from the email confirming your purchase.

Payhip for readers who bought a book and want to read it on a Kindle. This is the entire reason for this blog, because I refuse to believe I am the only person left in the world who uses a desktop computer rather than a neat little device small enough to be tucked into an evening handbag. Unless you want to read on your computer, rather than tucked up comfortably somewhere in the best place to read a good book, you need to get it to your Kindle. Do you know your Kindle address? It is listed on the Kindle, under Settings, and will usually be your name @kindle.com.

Create a new email to send to your Kindle, go find your Payhip download (in Downloads) and attach it. Send. The book will download into your Kindle.

Promise.

 

 

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Most Indies shouldn’t ever publish. Well, most women shouldn’t have babies. #amwriting

That’s not a kneejerk yeah well you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny response.  Ask any writer, traditionally published or indie, our books are the children of our brains, and we’re protective of them.

A traditionally-published writer puts that baby into the hands of professionals who whisk it away, do cosmetic adjustments, dress it, raise it, choose its schools, and, sometimes, hand it back after a while saying hey, we’re as sorry as you are, but the kid ain’t gonna cut it. Of course quite often (not always) the kid does good and the publishers are yammering at the door – make more babies. Fast. One a year. Go go GO.

Traditionally-published book-parents are proud to the point of arrogant about their progeny being Chosen, and they are enraged when an indie book baby does better than their own Improved By Professionals offering because it just isn’t fair. The indie parent had all the fun of producing exactly what they wanted, AND success?

What generally happens is they write scathing blogs, as Laurie Gough did with ‘Self-publishing is an insult to the written word’.  No idea who peed in her cornflakes, but she’s cross.  She thinks indies bash out a book in 24 hours, read it through once and think ‘good enough’ and publish.

I’ll not lie to you, I sometimes wonder myself. Book parents do range from the over-processed squeeze-it-into-a-fashionable-mode through to those who pop out a book in a week and stick it out into the world in a dirty nappy, snot running down its virtual face.

But not all, Laurie Gough. Not all. Some work on their books as hard as you do. They write them, rest them, edit them, polish them, send them to beta readers,  edit and polish again, send them for professional editing, they find the money and they pour it in willingly and only then do they publish.  For an indie, that’s just the end of the beginning. There’s no handing over. There’s placing the book in the right places, trying to find the right readers.

There’s no easy publisher-provided dollop of paid reviews, no publisher-provided salesperson working the shops, nothing on tap.  Just a writer and a book, trying to make it in a largely indifferent world.

So when an indie does make it, when their readers loyally buy every book they put out, when they make a tiny niche for themselves in a giant market – suck it up, Laurie Gough. Don’t be ugly, because it makes you look ugly.

If no-one could ever sing unless they had a record contract, there’d be no live entertainment in pubs, no bands entertaining parties, no wedding singers.  Buskers, eek. You’d shoot them on sight.

If no-one ever offered their art without a professional contract with, random example, an advertising agency,  this would be a poorer world. The professional artists do a slick, pleasing, and efficient job, but the life and vitality poured straight from the artist’s eye into your brain, that’s the real deal. Love it or hate it, from piece to piece, you deserve the choice. Van Gogh wasn’t to public taste in his whole lifetime. Laurie Gough would completely approve of that. If he couldn’t find a dealer to handle his stuff, he was obviously useless. QED.

What if no-one ever had a baby unless it had been commissioned with high expectations and a mapped-out future?  Well, there’d not be 7 billion people on this planet, for sure. Yes indeed, we tend to be ruled by the elite who were propelled expertly through the system into the top jobs. And yes, some babies are a complete waste of space – for the most part, they live and die and their lives make very little impact. Sometimes, though, the elite fail horribly, and sometimes the great unwashed change our lives. Actually, very few inventions, very few of the things that change our world, ever came from the stuffed shirts taught how to think and behave from the start.

To be validated by a money-machine that sees potential for profit in you is wonderful, well done Laurie Gough.

To be validated by loyal readers is better. Had a look at your book sales. Hope they pick up soon, and soothe that anger of yours.

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Lol has officially become a word – it is in the Oxford dictionary

LOL

(also lol)

Pronunciation: /ɛləʊˈɛl//lɒl/

EXCLAMATION

informal

  • Used to draw attention to a joke or amusing statement, or to express amusement:

    ‘I love how you said ‘coffee is not my cup of tea’. LOL!’

Okay that’s probably not exactly breaking news, I’m usually behind the trend on that sort of thing, lol.

Yes I know it is an infuriating little word!  Those of us who date back to the 80s get quite het up about it. There was confusion anyway back then between Lots Of Love and Laugh Out Loud.  Love fell by the wayside, as it always does (sigh) and we watched with jaundiced eyes as lol bounced into social media. Laugh out loud? At that comment? Please. It wasn’t funny enough to rate more than a smile, tops.

Well, that’s the point. It doesn’t mean laugh out loud and hasn’t for ages. It really is a quick smile, the half-shrug, sometimes wry, “I thought he meant it, lol” or a quick defuse of a comment that might otherwise sound a bit critical, “I hope you’re not going to wear that blue jacket again, lol” and although I resisted it fiercely for a long time and will FOREVER resist lolololol (or at least until it finds its way into the Oxford dictionary) I am finally not only using it but finding it quite handy. At times. In more ways than included in the dictionary definition.

Which just proves that you can teach an old dog new tricks. (Rueful half-shrug and wry smile)

It hasn’t crept into my books yet, and I don’t think it will.  My editor probably wouldn’t allow it anyway. And it will never become punctuation, I’m simply not that much of a smiler and that’s all there is to it.  My hackles still go up lol when I see it used more than once lol in a sentence or paragraph lol because that is simply infuriating. Lol. See? See how silly that looked?

mumbling

(Oh, and by the by – look at those helpful hints on pronunciation. Are they kidding?)

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#clickbaitbooks – say what?

Clickbait? Clickbait? It seems to be the latest buzzword on Twitter (although I am probably, as usual, behind the trend) – anyway, I’ve caught up now. And laughed out loud at a website offering clickbait alternative titles for popular books. Got it. Like newspapers screaming shock headings which have not a huge amount to do with the articles.

Clickbait titles for my books, hmm. Whodunits aren’t really that dramatic, apart of course from murders and stuff. Still, I do love a challenge.

Murdered! And No-one Cared!  (That’s One Two) (Aw. True.)

Dog Bites Death! (Three Four) ( I LIKE this one. The dog did, too.)

Dying To Meet Mr Right! (Five Six) (actually, I used this. So I was a little ahead of the curve after all)

Dumped In A Pit Full Of Bodies! (Seven Eight)  (Fiona really was)

Chained And Loving It! (Nine Ten)  (not, I hasten to add, one of my guys. But yup, one character was a little weird. More than a little.)

Plunged Into A Coven! (Eleven Twelve). (Pretty much what one disgruntled reviewer—who did not read the blurb first—said)

Drugs And Death In Tenerife! (Thirteen Fourteen) This may need work. Segway Horror!  My Wife Must Die! Nah. Not getting the essence here yet. Read it and tell me your suggestion.

You can still get 13 14 on promo price, by the way, last few hours.  Click on the title in the margin and you will be Whisked To Your Local Amazon!

(If you read this straight away, while I am still loading 13 14 in the margin because I am not very organized, the link is in the previous blog as well.)

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I Do Not Want Your New Free Book

Yes indeed

jjmarsh

Herewith the oft-quoted and possibly apocryphal Picasso anecdote:

Picasso is sketching at a park. A woman walks by, recognizes him, and begs for her portrait. A few minutes later, he hands her the sketch. She is elated, excited about how wonderfully it captures the very essence of her character, what beautiful work it is, and asks how much she owes him. “5000 francs, madam,” says Picasso. The woman is outraged as it only took him five minutes. Picasso says: “No, madam, it took me my whole life.”

As an author, I’m anti-frees. I spent years honing each of my books, not to mention the years of craft and education it took me to get to publication stage. You want all that – gratis?

booksnake Book Snake by Alan Levine (Creative Commons)

Before I even pressed the publish button, I promised my novels two things: Never free, never exclusive. If I don’t…

View original post 396 more words

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QR Codes

So, because I will otherwise probably forget myself how to do it, a quick blog on QR codes because this is quite cool for writers, even in the very, very basic way I understand it. It seems if you want to put a smart phone link onto, say, a bookmark or your business card, or a poster advertising your books, you use a QR code. The smart phone can scan that, and being very smart, is whisked to your linked market.

So, example. Say like me you use Booklinker, which will link browsers to their version of Amazon (which is also quite handy) (and you can then keep track of how often the link is clicked, and from which countries, which can also be handy), you would go into a site like this http://goqr.me/#t=url and feed in your Booklinker link and get something that back in the sixties would probably have been called Op Art (and been thought pretty groovy, I suspect) and that is your QR code.

If you scroll down my sidebar to the very bottom you’ll see two examples because you can embed them as well as save the images.  (Using a text widget, but you knew that, right?)

And then anyone with a smartphone who sees your poster or your promotion material can scan it and Bob’s your uncle and at least in theory you have a sale. You have certainly found another way to introduce Potential Buyer to Book.

Heavens, I know this is insanely basic and there is tons more to the subject! I’m rubbish at this sort of stuff. You cleverer types go and create your own codes, here’s a potentially useful site for you. Enjoy. http://www.qrcode.com/en/about/

Thanks to fellow writer JJ Alleson on LI for this tip!

 

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So, the trial on Scrivener, part one

So many people were recommending Scrivener that I decided to do the thirty day free trial and see how I got on. One third of the way through, and a little bit of feedback:

The theory is evocative. Scrivener will create a project file where you keep your writing, your research, your concepts, your character notes, all in one place. It creates an automatic card for the corkboard for each section you open, and you can mark the status on each section as first draft, revised, complete, etc. Do a readthrough, then go to the status board and see which bits have been marked for major editing. A section can be blank (because you know something is needed there) or a sentence or a whole chapter.  Pull the cards around the corkboard and the sections will obediently drop into their new order.

All of those appealed.

My initial reactions:

  1. Wow, that’s a long tutorial. Bored now, and not halfway finished
  2. Let’s go live and pull in the book I’m currently editing, and learn as I go by looking things up
  3.  Okay THIS is clunky.

But, once the process of laboriously pulling in a fifty thousand word document was complete, I was quite enjoying spotting a bit that needed work, isolating it in a section of its own, and pulling a section I wasn’t sure about into delete. It isn’t actually deleted, it just waits. You can pull it back if and when.

Scrivener saves every few seconds. Nothing can get lost.

Still, I found it slowed me down as I bumped along;  I wasn’t that impressed, and I thought the Compile was rubbish, eeny weeny screen to see the overview. I still cannot find out how to set the project to UK English, which means lots of distracting spelling alerts because I use more u’s than Scrivener feels necessary.  I found out how to set an em-dash (easy enough, – – then space and it appears) but not how to set an ellipsis, and I’m far too prone to both. My word count is only by section and I had about twenty six sections.

As always when I am editing one book, ideas pop into view for the next.  Previously I would fix them on a document and file them into the next book’s folder. This time I opened a project and suddenly started getting keen.  That’s handy!

So my initial summary: I’ve still not read the whole tutorial. Scrivener, for editing an existing book, for me was a no-no. I’m about to pull the whole book back into Word where I can do a UK spellcheck, get a full overview and start checking my chapters and chapter breaks, and I don’t feel I got any real benefit from the detour.

However, as a drafting and creating tool, I think I may be in love. The new book project is fab. Ideas are jotted down in sections, whole chapters have grown and can be pulled into place as needed, my character notes and photos are right where I need them, and so are the websites that I will be checking again and again as I push through.

Twenty days to go on the trial.

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Baby steps into POD

Considering my blog is for me, the most newbie of newbies, it must seem hopelessly naïve to the more experienced of you and yet every now and then I get a tweet on the lines of ‘hey, I never knew that, thanks!’

Which is of course very encouraging.  Perhaps in time it will become sophisticated enough that people would be prepared to comment on the blog itself that they hadn’t known something. We all start out knowing nothing, and we all learn. Some (usually me) more slowly than others.

Anyway, my latest field of learning has been the first cautious steps into POD. There simply isn’t a print-on-demand option out there that is praised by everyone, so it has taken a year to get this far, bite the bullet, and give it a try, one baby step at a time. I went with CreateSpace, because the ISBNs were free and immediate, and because the general consensus, after all my research, was that it was fairly idiot-proof, and even its most vocal critics weren’t saying too many alarming things. One downside is that I won’t be able to use the ISBNs outside Amazon but I’m only selling on Amazon anyway.

So, idiot-proof? Actually, yes. They supply a template, and you copy and paste your manuscript into their format, and spend hours (and hours and hours) formatting and tweaking and uploading to their previewer, and blushing over oddities spotted in the process. Repeat.

The cover options were pretty simple too. Choose one of their covers from scratch, or choose one of the template covers that permits you to add your existing artwork to the front cover (with some limited positioning and colour options) or expand your existing artwork to create your own back cover. They then have templates that will format it and add the spine lettering for you. Obviously these are the free options, and as always with indie publishing, the more money you have to throw at the process, the better the results.  But you can put together a fully formatted book, and cover, having spent nothing but time. Lots of time.

One reminder to the ignorant such like what I am. CreateSpace threw me slightly by insisting my artwork had to be a minimum of 300 dpi, but this just means you have to resize your pixels. I eventually resized to 4000 x 3048 and that worked quite nicely.

CreateSpace (and no doubt the others) then provides a full digital proof to gloat over online. They do recommend you get a physical proof, and that was a tiny setback, because one by normal post was pencilled in for January delivery. I can’t wait until January, not after getting this far! So I went for the most expensive option (about four times the price of the book) and received it in two days.  Joy.

Being a newbie, I had of course made several mistakes, so the joy wasn’t unmixed with chagrin. My title, although it had looked perfect on the digital preview, was slightly too far over, so the B of Buckle was crowding the spine and looked ridiculous. I had chosen matt over glossy; but with a very dark cover, there were odd shiny patches, and fingerprints showed up hideously. I think I shall be going glossy instead. I hadn’t sized my cover properly, so there was a deep black frame top and bottom, a skinny black frame either side.  And it was so dark, it looked really dull and glum.

Any decisions you take can be changed at any time, as can any errors you suddenly pick up in the book. (Despite all those hours and hours you spent, above.)

I went for 11pt (11pt or 12pt are standard) type, and a 1.15 line spacing, because it is a novella, and would have been quite thin using normal line spacing. It makes it light and airy to read, which considering it is ideally a weekend / holiday book, I think is better.  For the same reason I went for a 5 inch by 8 inch size (the default offered  is 6 inch by 9 inch, but with many other options) and I’m pleased with the size.  The book’s price is calculated by the page (hence the popularity of 6 x 9, a 12pt prize size, and regular line spacing, for word-heavy books). My book is around 42 thousand words, the proof copy is half an inch (around a cm) thick, and would be priced at $7.53.  That was having chosen cream paper, which is more expensive. Because I chose a light font, and more because some of the CreateSpace critics said that some local (book depository) printers had printed on white anyway, I will be checking the price difference if I go with white instead.  $7.53 is too high a price.

I played with a few generic cover options, because my cover was so dark, but they’re obviously not designed to, well, put professional cover artists out of business.  I tried about eleven, and have a photo below of one option – the pre-formatted author name went in an odd little hoop across the pic, but removing it (and pasting the author name on the pic instead) meant no author name on the spine.

Createspace cover genericFor a POD sale, no problem, the buyer knew the name anyway. But if there was ever to be a chance of bookshop sales? 4000 x 3048 2ndridiculous.  I fiddled a bit more with my own cover, and managed to improve it slightly. Enough to give it a try, anyway. Put it this way, I can’t shake the feeling I will be the only person buying it, after all.

At the same time, the whole point of printing copies is to be able to send them out for review, and I don’t want the reviewer rejecting it on sight. Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, that has been the POD experience to date. And to tell you the truth—so thrilling. I’m a paperback writer! One paperback so far, granted, and my sales will never threaten the forests of the world but a book in the hand is about the most exciting thing that has happened in this whole year of very exciting things.

 

 

 

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Playing with punctuation; the hyphen, the n dash and the m dash

I’m really writing this just to get it straight in my own head, but perhaps others have puzzled over it as well. And maybe what I think I am now clarifying I have still got wrong, so please jump in if I have.

A hyphen is used in phrases like mother-in-law. There are no spaces.

The n dash is a hyphen (taking up the print space of an n), with spaces either side.  One – two – three – GO.

The m dash, as a punctuation tool, is virtually interchangeable with a semi colon – and oh dear WordPress is not allowing me to create it – and creates a sub-sentence.  It takes up the print space of an m, double the length of a hyphen.  In Word, you can specify an n dash using CTRL and the minus sign on your number keypad, and the m dash using CTRL, ALT and the minus sign. (Didn’t work in WordPress.) It should not have spaces, so in fact-ignoring what I wrote at the start of the paragraph-there should NOT be a space either side. When it is full length, it looks less cramped. My m dashes all need correcting, because I persist in inserting spaces and Word doubles or halves the dash sizes with gay abandon.

You may ask why this is suddenly of importance, and I’m glad you did; I am currently formatting the first of my books for CreateSpace, to try out POD. I want to get it right. Talk about sweating the small stuff. I may yet give up but so far so good.

As you were.