Just make a mark...

One of my daughter's favorite books is "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds. My wife and I read this to her at least once a week and it’s usually upon her request. That is a pleasure to us both, because this book is so much more than a children’s story.

The book urges the reader to “make a mark and see where it takes you.” Maybe that message isn’t clear to a 2 year old, but it certainly resonated with me. As a child, I was a big-time day-dreamer. I wanted to be a guitar-playing baseball all-star who fought fires in outer space during the off-season (I didn’t grasp the implausibility of that until much later). When I was a little older, in high school, I wanted to be the President. Then in college, I was going to be screenwriter and maybe even an actor. With all of those dreams, I did little to turn them into a reality.

Most kids have lofty aspirations for their future, so it isn’t surprising that 10-year-old me didn’t begin NASA training. I also did nothing to improve my baseball skills other than attending the requisite little league practices and games. I had a pitch-back and family members that I could have asked for help with batting and fielding, but I didn’t employ them. I didn’t buy a guitar until I was 24.

High school me wanted to be President because I was on the Student Council and liked organizing community events and being part of the leadership team. Beyond that, I did little to expand my ability to debate, speak publicly or network with others. Those are all essential for a successful career in politics. I went to college with that dream, but other than taking a few poli-sci courses, I did nothing additional.

College and post-college me really wanted to work in TV. I even moved to California and had an internship at a talent management company. I read a ton of screenplays and even wrote one. But I never did the hard part and that was get the script out to people. I was in the nexus of Hollywood entertainment, yet I was too afraid to share my work.

In the years since, I have held onto that dream of being a writer – to craft a story and transport it from my mind onto paper. It’s not a coincidence that I started re-applying myself in early 2012, when we started regularly reading “The Dot” to my daughter. I decided to make another mark. I began outlining a story about a boy and his surreal existence. Every day I would make sure I did something to progress that mark a little further. Where did it take me? I handed over a finished draft of my first novel to an editor in December of 2012, which I later published in January. I illustrated two children’s books. Then I wrote two more shorter stories which are building up to a second novel. 

Every grand work of art, music or piece of writing has to begin somewhere. Don’t be afraid to make a mark and let it bring you places. If you do something every day to make your vision develop, imagine what it will look like in 365 days. 

Converting Word DOC or DOCX to Mobi

For as many writers that you have talked to, you have probably found the same number of unique opinions on what software to use for completing your work. I have been offered Scrivener, Writeroom, Darkroom, Open Office, Q10, classic pen an paper, Google docs etc. All of them have their advantages, but for me, they all have one huge disadvantage - unfamiliarity. I don't want to waste time trying something new. I have a perfectly good word processor on my computer that has been with me since I've been writing term papers in the 90s. Microsoft Word is not the best thing out there, but I know the ins and outs of the program better than anything else. So when it comes time to write, I don't want to have to think about where the paste special command is hiding.

If you are like me and make do with Microsoft Word, then you may have encountered issues with turning your .doc or .docx files into an HTML that works for Kindle. Hopefully, this checklist will guide you through the process.

Using A Seed File

I went crazy trying to fine-tune the formatting on Seefer Elliot's ebook. Writing it in Microsoft Word was convenient, but when it came time to publish it as an HTML file, the code was virtually unusable.  I had to copy and paste chunks of data from one file to a brand new template. If you would like to publish a clean mobi file on Amazon (that can easily be converted to epub afterwards), copy and paste your work into this template:

How Awesome Are You, Createspace?

Last June, I started writing the manuscript for Seefer Elliot after months of outlining. Finishing up in October, I spent the next two months editing and polishing the text to make it ready for publishing. Welp, that day has arrived. I am moments away from approving the proof I received from Createspace.

The book was completely formatted for print and approved by the reviewers at CS, but I didn't want to approve it without first seeing a physical copy first. I highly recommend this. It is both sensible and thrilling for an author to be the first to see his/her book. To hold nearly 8 months worth of work in your hand is empowering and rewarding.

I have yet to be disappointed by CS's services. I ordered copies of I'm One and Sleigh Me! upon their release and I was more than pleased by the quality of the illustrations printed on the cover and pages. The colors were vibrant. The lines were clean. And the font was crisp.

I had no doubt that Seefer's print would look anything but brilliant, but there is still something to be said about getting the dead tree in your hand. That shiny gloss cover. The 98% brightness white pages. The Futura Media chapter headings looking so snappy in black ink. The culmination was exhilarating.

For a service that prints on demand, the quality is quite amazing. No fees up front. Only about $4 a copy. It was economical, but not at the expense of quality. Consider it for the next project you work on.

In a short while, the digital and hard copies will be available for all. I'm glad I got the chance to enjoy before the masses. :)

What I’ve learned since the release of “I’m One”

I released I'm One! a few weeks ago and saw it soar up the rankings when I announced a free day promotion. Unfortunately, the surge only lasted that one day and I saw exactly one sale since. But I am also guilty of not following up the promotion with more promoting nor utilizing more free days.

One big problem that I think occurred is that I selected the wrong category. Amazon's category selection is not consistent with the way categories are treed on the main site. The first book would have been very deserving of the "Baby-3" sub-category in Children's eBooks, but that was not an option on the KDP dashboard. I am actually still trying to get Amazon to correct this problem and get that book into the right category, but since I published it and launched a free day promotion under different genres, it messed everything up.

Advice: find the categories you want to be in before publishing. Follow the instructions on the site for requesting specific categories. You have to select NON-CLASSIFIABLE and then contact Amazon to determine where you want to put it.

Back to editing

After a nice diversion (illustrating a children’s book), I jumped back into my review of the Seefer Elliot. It took me a few days to read it (what with all the red ink I was tattooing onto the page). I was glad to pick it up after such a long break. I was able to distance myself from the project a little. I came across sentences where I said to myself, “What the hell does that mean?” I’m sure I thought it sounded incredible when I wrote it, but it didn’t hold up well to my reader voice.

I picked up a tip somewhere that said to read out loud in a British accent when editing. I don’t know if the comment was a goof or a serious advice. Either way, I heeded it and read most of the book as if I were James Bond. I can't believe how well it worked! Wherever my horrible impression stumbled over a word, I knew that the sentence needed restructuring. Whether it was the accent or not, reading aloud is a definite advantage because it limits your ability to gloss over the words. You are responsible for every word on the page.

As I read over the manuscript, I noticed inconsistencies. In some places a character's thoughts were in italics. In others, they were in quotes. In some places, I abbreviated 7th, while in others I spelled it out as seventh. I had 93 uses for a semi-colon. Which was correct? I didn't know. I was referred to The Chicago Manual of Style for help. While verbose, this manual has just about everything you need to know about grammar, style and punctuation. It may not have been the best style-guide to use, but it a)kept me consistent, and b) was free (with a trial membership).

FYI, this blog post has a lot of good information on formatting your manuscript in preparation for a professional editor or publisher. It came in handy when setting up my Word doc's line spacing, margins, font sizes, etc.

Now I have to take the redlines and actually make the changes. Fun fun.

 

I'm Published!

I'm One, is now available on Amazon! It feels so rewarding to have something published and available for all to read. For the last few weeks, I have been relentlessly drawing the illustrations for this book. I wrapped up about a week ago and started assembling the layout of the book and the cover. In one very short month, a book came together and went public. How wonderful is self-publishing?

The marketing duties were placed in my hands, so I decided to give the book away for free for today. Through KDP Select, you can promote the book on five selected days to help get the word out. Well, that's what I did and if you are reading this, maybe you'll want to click on over and download a copy.

Because I found it difficult at times to find answers to questions about children's books, here is some info of my own I can pass along:

• Design your book with both print and digital formats in mind. I chose an 8.5" x 8.5" layout for the print book, but eReader screens are not square. I had to be cognizant of where content lied on the page. I kept margins of 6"x 8" overlayed on my workspace in order to remind me of how things will look when cropped on Kindle. I went through 10 pages of the book before realizing this, and reformatting for the 6:8 ratio was a pain.


• With a children's book, you will likely upload your book to Createspace as a PDF. Because of this, it is not recommended to allow CS to automatically generate your KDP version. It will royally F it up. Upload your own KDP-ready file.


• See this reddit thread about KDP image formatting. This was the simplest and most effective template I found. Other templates would produce strange characters throughout the book or space things out oddly. His template was clean and perfect. Also, the recommendation to have images at 600x800 pixels seems to work well with all of the devices I tested it on.


• Use KDP's mobi creator. Make a zip file containing the HTML and images, then upload it to KDP. It's free and easy. I found little need to buy a third party mobi creator.