Book Blurbs and First Chapters

The first quarter of this year has been packed with a significant number of stressful life events. These are rather like public transport; they leave you alone for some time and then all come along together, as if you’ve been having things too easy and it’s time to see if you crack under the strain.

Selling our home and moving was planned, but the other events obviously decided this was waaaay too easy and they’d come along for the ride - big sigh! However, back to the moving. One of the things I decided to do before the move was to significantly cull my books and get rid of some of the bookshelves.

When choosing a print book to read, I tend to look at the cover and then reread the back page blurb to remind myself of the story and why it interested me. After doing this a few times I settle on one to read.

When I first starting using my Kindle I had a relatively small number of books on the device, and most were books by favourite authors or classics I hadn’t yet read. In all cases I was aware of the book premise simply by looking at the title. Since then I’ve purchased many more books, and often they’re on my Kindle for some time before I read them.

An eReader is a little like Mary Poppins' carpetbag. You can fit in a large number of books without it looking any different, whereas when I tried to find room on the bookshelves for new purchases I was always aware of the number of books I hadn’t yet read, and I felt guilty for buying more.

When I’m selecting a book to read from the electronic list on my Kindle, I tend to be too lazy to look at the book blurb on Amazon, so all I have to go on is the book cover and title, and a tagline if there is one. This means I often have very little to go on as to the storyline or setting.

From a writer’s perspective this means we’ve really got to make that first chapter work hard, (not forgetting that all important first paragraph). Is there enough to draw the reader in and keep them reading and wanting to know more, without confusing them totally?

The opening chapter needs to introduce the protagonist, give the reader a feel for the genre or type of book (you should also get an idea of this from the title and cover), give a feel of the narrative voice (is it a warm confiding tone, ironic, amusing, frightening), and introduce the setting and time period. By the end of the chapter there should also be an indication this is going somewhere, that there is conflict, problems to be solved and stakes high enough to ensure action is taken. As readers we don’t want endless ramblings of the protagonist's everyday life or lots of backstory.

Opening chapters have always had to do that, but now they need to work even harder if the reader doesn’t have an indication of the storyline from the back cover blurb.

Some time ago I released a romantic suspense novella (Driftwood). In the reviews I’ve noticed a couple of comments along the lines of ‘it’s a quick read’. That’s true, it’s a novella, and comes in at around 46,000 words. The blurb on Amazon states it’s a novella, but of course, when you open it on your eReader you don’t have any idea whether it’s a doorstop of a book or a quick read. For these reasons I’ve decided that in future I’m going to add the short blurb to the front of my electronic books, so the reader is oriented as to the main outline or premise of the book before they begin. It doesn’t mean I can relax on that first paragraph and chapter, it still has to pull its weight, but at least the reader has the same information they would if they were reading a print version.

As readers or writers, what do you think?

Lies of the Dead - Cover

I'm really excited that my latest book Lies of the Dead is just about there and thrilled to unveil the cover created by the talented Andrew Brown of Design for Writers.

Unlike Driftwood and Lives Interrupted I had absolutely no ideas for the cover of Lies of the Dead, but working with Andrew makes the process incredibly easy. He asks a lot of questions about the plot and characters, important (poster) scenes, my own likes and dislikes, and then he goes away and works his magic.

Lies of the Dead is set predominantly in Cornwall which is an area I love. Writing those scenes has allowed me to wander through villages, along beautiful cliff walks and feel the sand under my feet on the glorious beaches. The setting of Poldrayth is fictitious but it is based on a real Cornish village to allow me to play around with the geography a little.

What would you risk to find the truth?

How well do we know those closest to us? When Liam kills himself, his older brother Tom needs to know why suicide was the only answer.

Tom's search leads him, and his sister Andi, to a criminal world where their ideas of right and wrong don’t exist, and where people aren’t who they claim to be.

Liam’s legacy of deceit is dangerous and when Tom and Andi and her twin daughters are threatened, Tom realises that truth may have too high a price. 

Thanks a million Andrew for a wonderful cover - drumroll

Cover Image Changes for Kindle and Smashwords

One of the reasons I started this blog was to share my experiences in writing and publishing.

After having a novel published, I decided to publish Lives Interrupted myself using KDP and Smashwords for the electronic version, and CreateSpace for a print version.  I documented the steps I took and what worked best, and earlier this year decided to pull those posts together in an electronic book Smart Formatting.

About a month ago some of the requirements for cover images changed and I've updated the dimensions and information in Smart Formatting.

Below is the new information.

In mid 2012 Smashwords changed the minimum image pixel dimensions, as Apple required higher pixel counts. They require all ebook cover images to be at least 1,400 pixels wide. If you are looking for a good height to width ratio, say 1:5, you could go for an image of 1,600 wide by 2,400 tall.

KDP has a minimum of 1,000 pixels for the height and state an ideal ratio of 1:6. They recommend that images be 2,500 pixels high. For this ratio you could create an image of 1,600 wide and 2,560 high. The image must be in RGB (Red, Green, Blue) colour mode. I uploaded my image as a .jpg file although KDP say they will also accept .tif files.

Normal service will be resumed in the next post, and I'll continue with positive and negative character traits. 

  

Quality Writing

As writers we often get so caught up discussing whether we should wait to get an agent and a publishing contract, or go it alone and self-publish, that we forget the really important thing.  Becoming a good writer.

Generally speaking people aren't interested in how a book has been published, or who published it.  What they want is a quality read.

We don't all like the same books; some enjoy Stephen King, others Jodie Picoult (or anyone else you care to name), while others prefer the classics.  But whatever genre you read, you want a good book.

Yes, there are errors in traditionally published books, and I've seen more than a few clichés, but if you're going to self-publish you can't use these as reasons for your work being less than the very best it can be.

Anthony Horowitz covers some of these points in this article.

Formatting eBooks

I'm thrilled to say that Smart Formatting: How to format and upload your novel to Kindle, Smashwords and CreateSpace is available from Amazon and Smashwords. It should also be available from other retailers shortly.

Smart Formatting covers the MS Word settings and formats you should use, and gives full instructions on these.  It looks at the elements you need to have ready, and the uploading process to KDP and Smashwords. 

Should you also want to produce a print book, I've included a section on formatting your manuscript to upload to CreateSpace.

I've used my experiences working in MS Word on a Windows PC system, so the book doesn't have any instructions for a Mac.

Here is the Table of Contents to give you a better idea of what is covered.

What Do We Mean by Formatting an eBook
The Elements You Need for Uploading Your Manuscript
   Book Cover Blurb
   Front Content
   End Content
   Book Cover
Sorting out MS Word
   Things You Shouldn't Do or Use
   Track Changes
   AutoCorrect
   Word Styles
   First Line Indents and Block Paragraphs
   Creating a Table of Contents using Hyperlinks and Bookmarks
Formatting for KDP and Smashwords
   Paragraph and Heading Styles
   Images
   Formats for Saving Your Files
Publishing with KDP and Smashwords
   Uploading Your Book
   What Happens Now?
   ISBN
   Checking Your Book Without an eReader
Troubleshooting Formatting Errors
Creating a Print Book
   Book Interior
   Formatting Your Manuscript
   Paragraph and Heading Styles
   Front Matter
   Checklist for Interior Formatting
   Uploading Your File
   Creating Your Cover
   What Happens Next?
Author Central

If you click the Smart Formatting image on my website homepage, there is a free PDF you can download of the MS Word section of the eBook.  It has the same instructions as the eBook, but a few more screenshots, and has the advantage of being in colour!

I think the book is good value for $0.99. 

The next post will be back on writing topics, I promise.       

Formatting eBooks for Kindle and Smashwords

On this blog I've posted about my experiences with formatting and uploading my novel and short stories to KDP and Smashwords, and also creating the print version of Lives Interrupted.  I've corresponded with quite a few people answering questions about the process, and so I decided to put the posts into a more helpful format.  I've worked on that for a while, and have been editing it over the past week or so, and hopefully Smart Formatting should be ready to go by next week.

Small is Beautiful

Before querying publishers and agents about Lives Interrupted, I spent a huge number of hours over numerous weeks (get the idea!) working on my covering letter and synopsis.  I read everything I could find on 'how to' and my initial draft was way too long.  Gradually I whittled it down to the appropriate length. 

Writing the synopsis was harder than writing the novel.

Deciding to publish Lives Interrupted myself had nothing to do with the difficulty of writing a synopsis, but I do admit to a brief, 'Yay that's one job I don't need to do now.'

BUT there's that back cover blurb.

Distilling all those amazing characters, exciting plot twists, and incredible final page twist down to approximately 200 words is hard.  I think I could fill up my hard drive with the versions I played around with - okay maybe a slight exaggeration.

Here is an interesting talk on the subject of summarising TED talks in 6 words.  I'm not sure I'm any closer to finding an easy way to write a killer synopsis or book blurb, but it's a great talk.  Maybe I could plug my novel into the software Sebastian Wernicke used and get a book burb out of that.  Though I guess nothing in life can be that easy.

Uploading to Kindle

I had been told, or read somewhere, to save my Word file as an .html to upload to KDP (Kindle), but when I read through their help files I saw they accepted .doc and .docx files, and so I uploaded my Word.doc file.  Not a good idea, at least for me.  For whatever reason all my paragraphs, formatted in a Word Style with a first line indent, appeared as block paragraphs. 

Fortunately the upload to Kindle is very quick, and so I tried again with the same result.  Yes I know the definition of insanity...  and in my defence I only repeated it once.

Anyway lesson learned I saved my manuscript as an .html file and uploaded it.  Perfect first line indents!

Kindle doesn’t do the free downloads that Smashwords does, but once you've uploaded your file successfully a button appears asking if you want to preview your book.  The correct answer is yes, you really do want to do this.  A virtual Kindle appears and you can click through your book checking it is as perfect as it should be.

I formatted Lives Interrupted for both Kindle and Smashwords over the same weekend, and opened both the accounts at that time.  As I've mentioned in a recent post I didn't find it that difficult, and a lot simpler than formatting the print version!

Smashwords, AutoVetter and the Premium Catalogue

Once you've written the very best book you can, edited and polished it until it shines and then had it professionally edited, and either created or had someone else create a cover, you're ready to start the process of publishing it.

After logging into your Smashwords Dashboard you click on the menu item Publish.   On this screen you need to insert the title of your book, and then a short description.  This is basically the blurb on your back cover, but you don't have a lot to play with, just 400 characters.  I had a fairly lean blurb but even so I needed to cut it back.  You then have an optional long blurb of up to 4,000 characters, and I put my slightly longer description in that area, though it was nowhere close to the 4,000 character limit.

On this screen you also select the price of your book, and whether you want to enable sampling.  I chose to do this as I feel it's the same as looking through a book in a bookstore, and if I can't look through some of an online book to get a feel for it, then I'm not going to buy it. 

Now you select a category for your book.  There isn't much choice, but in the next area you can add tags.  For these you need to consider the words or descriptions that people might type into a search engine to bring up your book.

The next option is the formats in which you'd like your book available, and there is a list of about seven different formats. 

Then we come to the upload stage.  Firstly your cover, and then your precious manuscript.

I must have uploaded it while the rest of the world slept as I was lucky 10 in the queue, and Lives Interrupted uploaded as I was watching, but depending on how busy it is you may need to wander away from your computer and find something else to do, and await an email confirming that the upload was successful. 

About 24 hrs later I had another email saying there weren't any AutoVetter errors, and the book was now in the queue to be checked by the vetting team for the Premium catalogue.  Having your book in the Premium catalogue means wider distribution channels which includes the Apple store, Barnes & Noble, Sony and Kobo.  It doesn't cost you anything other than making sure you've followed the Style Guide and produced the very best book you can, and why wouldn't you want to do that.

At this point, basking in the glow of no AutoVetter errors, being busy with work, and formatting and uploading to Amazon, I forgot to check my Smashwords Dashboard for a few days.  When I did remember to log onto the site to see if I had passed the review and was in the Premium Catalogue I saw that… oops it hadn't.  

I had downloaded a copy as soon as I could and checked to make sure the formatting was good, so what could be the problem.  The reason given was that my Table of Contents was incorrect, but I hadn't put a table of contents into the manuscript! 

I understand the point of a table of contents for non-fiction books in any format, and for print novels if the chapter headings are meaningful, but Lives Interrupted has short sections with headings that are the name of the POV character, so I didn't seen any reason for including a table of contents. 

But if a table of contents is required for the Premium Catalogue then they could have one.

I decided against creating one that included every section as there are about 90 (as I said most are very short) and decided to go for a link to the start of the book (bypassing the copyright stuff), one at the beginning of Part Two, another at the author's bio, and a final link for the sample short story.

Creating these links is simply putting a Word 'bookmark' at the exact points you wish each link to go to, and then typing up these headings at the beginning of the manuscript and hyperlinking them to your bookmarks.  The style guide explains each step, but if anyone would like a bit more info I'm happy to email them.

Then it was back to the upload screen.  Again I received the no errors AutoVetter email, but this time there was no basking in the glow.  I logged onto the Smashwords site most days until the 'Under Review' status changed to read 'Approved'.  Yay another milestone reached.

Pricing an e-Book

One of the decisions you have to make is how much you're going to charge for your book.  Like everything else I did some research on this - by looking at the prices of other books, and reading other people's thoughts on the subject.

I decided from the outset I wasn't going the 'free' route, which incidentally you can do on Smashwords, but not with Amazon.  The minimum price you can set with Amazon is $0.99. 

If you are selling the first book of a trilogy or series, I can see that hooking new readers by selecting 'free' has some advantages.  Lives Interrupted is a standalone book, and while letting it go for nothing might give me some readers for the future, I believe it is worth something.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence, and comments from other authors, on the best price to set.  Some say between $2.99 and $4.99, while others between $0.99 and $2.99.

I decided that $2.99 was a fair price for my work.  Not only did I put a lot of effort into writing Lives Interrupted, but also in making sure it was as perfect and error free as I could make it.

Time will tell whether that is a reasonable price.  Watch this space and I'll let you know.

More Exploits with ePublishing

I've read and listened to a few discussions about whether to format the manuscript yourself or pay someone else.  Ultimately we have to make the best decision for us, but it's not difficult.  I didn't time the process but it didn't take me more than two hours and some of that involved starting the accounts and filling in the information they required.

I used a designer to create the cover and consider that money well spent as I don't have those skills, and I also had the book copy edited.  I believe, as Joe Konrath also says, an important part of publishing a book yourself means it has to be the very best it can be. 

I've had feedback from the writing group and from beta readers which has strengthened the story, and I think it will emotionally engage readers.  So having the copy edit and the cover designed was part of the process of making it as good as I could. 

Now it was time to press the enter key on the Smashwords site.  I've read about the length of time it takes for the manuscript to upload.  What can I say?  After pressing enter on the Smashwords site I was 10th in the queue and it went through so fast I really didn't see the numbers clicking down.  That must be one bonus of living in the Southern Hemisphere and therefore uploading files when much of the world is asleep.  Within minutes I had an email back from Smashwords saying ' Congratulations! There were no AutoVetter errors! Your book is now in the queue for review by our vetting team."  Yay I was on my way.  One down and Kindle to go.

Formatting an eBook

When I started writing Lives Interrupted I had no thoughts of Kindles or other reading devices, and so I formatted it with publishers and agents in mind.  And to look good for me as I spend considerable amounts of time looking at it, not gazing adoringly you understand, but working.  So it was in a print ready state, rather than an 'e-ready' state.

If you are intending to publish for electronic readers, you will need little more than the following for your manuscript:

• A simple style for the major part of your content.  For example first line indent paragraph style in a 12pt standard font.
• A style for your chapter headings.

I used Garamond 12pt first line indent for my content, and Garamond 14pt bold for the section headings.

This post goes into more details on that.

If you have an electronic reader you will already know there is no such thing as a page in an ebook, as the person reading controls how large the font is, and therefore how much shows on the screen at any time.  The document is basically one continuous page.

Smashwords advises not to use page breaks, and no more than four paragraph returns together (pressing the Enter key), or you could end up with blank pages on small screens.

I used one paragraph return after section headings, and two paragraph returns at the end of sections.

This is one area where the Smashwords Style Guide and the information on the KDP (Kindle) site differ.  The KDP formatting guidelines say to use a page break between chapters.  I guess it might depend on the style of your book and chapters.  The sections in Lives Interrupted are quite short and I tried it with page breaks, but when I previewed it on the Kindle Previewer it had some blank pages so I took out the page breaks and went with the paragraph returns as I've mentioned above.

Now we come to the front material.

I created two new styles: one called Book Title which was the same as my section title except it was centred, and a style based on the content style but with no first line indent and which was centred.

At the beginning of the manuscript I typed the name of the book using Book Title style (obvious really I suppose!) and my name and the copyright notice using the centred style.

For the copyright notice I looked at a few books from my bookshelf and Kindle and wrote what I thought was needed, some seemed excessively long.  You also need to add 'Smashwords edition' if you are going to publish on their site.

It was at this point I made another copy and called it my Kindle file.

That's pretty much it for the required front information. 

When I come to the end of a book I've enjoyed it's sometimes hard to let it go.  The characters stay with me for some time and I'm often interested to know if there are more books with those characters, or what else the author has written, especially if it's someone I'm not familiar with.

As an author the end of the book is a great place to do a little subtle advertising rather than just writing 'The End'.

I wrote a thank you for buying and reading the book, and put my website and blog addresses for any comments, and a little plea for a review if they felt so inclined.  I added a bit of information about me, and the book of short stories I'm working on at the moment, and added one of the short stories.  Hopefully after reading Lives Interrupted, and one of the short stories people will feel inclined to buy the book.

Kindle and Smashwords

When I made the decision to publish my manuscript as an ebook I started to find out as much about the process as I could.  I would certainly suggest downloading the Smashwords style guide, as it goes into a lot of detail on how to format your manuscript to successfully turn it into an ebook.

How difficult the process is depends mainly on two things.  The (formatting) state of your manuscript, and your skill level in Word.  Personally I don't think you need extreme Word skill levels to get your manuscript ready to upload to Smashwords or Kindle.

At most it took me about two hours on my Smashwords version, and some of that time was spent messing around creating the additional material needed, such as copyright notice, author bio, and actually creating the account.

I would recommend creating your accounts in both Smashwords and Amazon before you actually want to format or upload your manuscript.

In the Smashwords style guide there is a 'nuclear' method and if you're worried about the formatting you may already have in your manuscript, then use this method.

Before doing anything else make a backup copy of your manuscript.

Hopefully you're already in the habit of making regular copies of your manuscript.  I do a 'Save As' on my manuscript most days when I begin work using the current date as the last part of the file name, so if my laptop decides to have a hissy fit and close down I haven't lost everything.

One part of my work as a technical writer is making things look good and having them print ready, so I found formatting for the e-book painful.  Not difficult, painful.  There is no point in making it look pretty.  In this case plain and simple is definitely best.  It doesn't really matter what font the author uses as the reader can choose the font type and size they want.

You may be wondering why I keep referring to Smashwords rather than Kindle.  It's for the simple reason that the Smashwords style guide is very detailed, and ultimately most of what you do is the same for Kindle.

Okay here we go - MAKE A BACKUP.

It helps to have a passing knowledge of Styles.  Word Styles as opposed to what's in fashion at the moment.  You don't need a huge amount of knowledge, but it helps to know how to apply a style to text, and how to modify a style.  If you're not sure about this there are plenty of helpful websites, here is a link to the Wordtips site, but you can find others by searching on 'Word Styles'.

There are just a few big no-no's in this formatting lark for ebooks, and one is tabs, as in don't use them.  Phew one thing I didn't have to worry about.  If you're now saying, 'What!  No tabs!  How does she start her paragraphs?'  The answer to that is first line indents.  If you're not sure about those you can find out using the link above to the Wordtips site.

My manuscript was relatively clean.  By this I mean I used first line indents rather than tabs, and Styles rather than direct formatting.  Direct formatting is selecting text and changing it by using the tools on the toolbar such as bold, italic, colour, font size and type etc.  But I had used a lot of styles while I was editing to colour different parts of the manuscript, and so I decided the quickest way was to use the nuclear method.

Basically (after making a backup copy of your file - have I mentioned this before!) you copy all your text and paste it into Windows Notepad.  This strips out all of your formatting.

Close and reopen Word so you have a fresh document.  Then copy the Notepad content and paste it back into Word.  I'll warn you now it doesn't look pretty.  The intention is not to make it look pretty, but to get it ready to upload.

Your entire manuscript should now be in Normal style. 

The Smashwords style guide says to choose either a block paragraph style for your ebook, or a first line indent for all your paragraphs.  If you look in a print novel you'll see that the first paragraph of a section is a block style and subsequent paragraphs are first line indents. 

The majority of books on my Kindle have first line indents on all their paragraphs, but there is one book that has the print layout using both paragraph types.  I tried, oh how I tried, but I couldn't figure out how they managed it.  So I gave up and used first line indents on all paragraphs.

Now we've formatted our paragraphs we can turn to headings.  A non-fiction book will usually have several levels of headings, but for a novel we can keep it fairly simple.

Lives Interrupted is split into sections.  I call them that rather than chapters as most are relatively short.  Each section has a heading, which happens to be the name of the POV character for that section.  So I had normal style for the paragraphs, and then created a section heading style.  They were the only two styles I used for the book content.

It's fairly pointless spending a lot of time selecting a font, as the reader can change it to whatever they like.  The Smashwords style guide recommends something like Times New Roman.  What is important is not to go too wild on the font sizes, or to be more specific the variance between the font size of your paragraphs and headings.  I used 12pt for my content and 14pt for the book title and headings.

The only other thing I did at this point was to go through my Smashwords and Kindle version files and apply italics to about five or six pieces of text that had previously been italicised and which had been stripped out during the nuclear method.

Yeeha the manuscript was done, but the book not quite finished.  Now it was time for the front and back content.

E-Publishing - The Beginning

About a year ago I attended a publishing workshop run by the New Zealand Society of Authors.  Up to that point I knew very little about ePublishing.

The first presenter was Mark Coker.  I had never heard of him or Smashwords.  I hang my head in shame!

From the question and answer session at the end of Mark's presentation, I realised that a significant number of the people there were already trying out this brave new world.

Driftwood had not long been published in UK, but I had already discovered some of the frustrations of the publishing and distribution system.

Going back yet another year, I had finished Lives Interrupted and sent it off to some publishers in London.  I waited.  And waited.  Then finally, oh joy, they wanted a full manuscript.

More waiting.  Ultimately they decided not to take it on, but the letters were personal and they gave me feedback, which I treasured because I knew it was rare.  The feedback was useful and I worked on it, and around this time started meeting with my present writing group.

At this point I attended the NZSA workshop, and left deciding this was the route I would take.  I also came away with details of websites for research.  One of these was Joe Konrath, and so I started reading his blog as well as others that had been suggested. 

One of the most important points that Joe Konrath makes on his blog is that to sell well, you have to have a good product.  He isn't the only author, editor or agent to say that.  People may buy one bad book from an author but they won't do it again, and with blogs, Twitter, and review sites, people find out about that.  We owe it to ourselves and readers to put out the best product we can.  Over the year I've been blogging I've written about my editing process and the feedback I've received, and they have made Lives Interrupted so much stronger.

Sometimes it felt as though the editing process would never end; that the book would never be finished, and I guess in some ways it isn't.  We grow and mature as people, as well as writers, and see things in a different light through various experiences.

Another of the things that Joe talked about was the importance of having a product that was as near perfect as possible, which, depending on your skills, may mean using an editor, someone to create a cover, or someone to format the manuscript for you.

Most of the training companies I've worked with have a process for developing training materials or technical manuals.  This process usually involves a final edit by a writer who hasn't been involved in the project.  The principle is a simple one, and I'm sure most writers are familiar with the scenario.  You are too close to the writing, and just don't see your own mistakes.  That is true whether it's grammar, typos, or plot holes.  In technical writing it might be adding material that isn't relevant, or glossing over (or even missing out) important steps in a process.  For that reason I had my manuscript edited.  Because of the editing and feedback process the manuscript had been through with the writing group, I was fairly confident I had the big picture, structure, plot etc. covered okay, and so I asked for a copy edit, covering typos and grammar, and only comments on structure if the editor noticed any major inconsistencies. 

I have absolutely no skills as a graphic designer/artist, and so I asked a fellow writer, Bev, who is also a photographer and has designed other book covers, to work on mine.

With a book cover, the manuscript edited and read (several times!), and feeling as confident as a perfectionist can ever feel that it is finished, I was ready to get to grips with turning it into an ebook.

E-Publishing

I'm thrilled to say that Lives Interrupted is finally finished and - big drum roll - is now on Amazon and Smashwords.

I'm working on a print version and that will be ready soon.

I started this blog wanting to talk about writing and publishing, and so over the next few posts I'll share my experiences with epublishing.