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. :)

Book Cover: Decided

The good people at Reddit helped me through the decision process of picking a cover for Seefer Elliot and the World Aside Ours. I gave five very different options in my last post and it was not surprising to hear very different opinions from the commenters. Over 125 people gave me their choice, but it was the constructive criticism that proved to be so valuable.

For example, while some people liked option 1, their reasons made me steer in another direction. They compared the cover to Animorphs or other book covers that came out in the 90's. While I don't disregard those types of books as bad in any way, I rather distance myself from a look that is over done.

Option 5 had some votes, but ultimately I decided that it is just too cartoony. One commenter said that 12 year olds want to think they are reading ahead of their age level. If there was a cartoon on the cover of this book, I'd be attracting the wrong audience. Seefer Elliot is not meant for 9 year olds.

Option 2 was never a serious option, but a foil for the other four. Option 4 had some merit, but ultimately, I felt it was too vague and "hey, look at here at this cool glowing kid."

Ultimately,  I went with my original favorite, #3. It is adult enough to attract young readers at the older end of the spectrum, but it keeps the whimsy that YA books need.

The original draft, as I posted it on Friday. Here is the final(ish) product:

Choosing a Book Cover

I need your help in deciding a book cover for Seefer Elliot. I have spent a few weeks putting together some very different looks. I am too close to the project to make a decision on what is the best cover for appealing to young readers. Just a quick summary so you know the context: Seefer battles other-worldly beings aided by the power of some really cool devises and a yet-to-be discovered ability of his own. My target audience is middle-schoolers interested in sci-fi and adventure novels.

#1

I took a picture of my son (who was thrilled to participate) and superimposed it in the reflection of an astronaut-looking bad guy. The quality isn't there, yes, but it can be improved. The question is, should it be improved? Is this style the best?

#2

Hey, I recognize that silhouette. I just took the same picture, drowned away the details with some color and stylized the cover in general.

#3

This is my favorite. There is a scene in the book that shakes down like the image on this cover. I love pictograms, but do they convey the right message for selling a sci-fi adventure to young adults?

#4

My son makes another appearance. This time he gets a pretty fierce glow and looks like he is ready to kick some butt. The only caveat to this (and to #2) is that Seefer is kind of a loser. I don't want to make him out to be too badass on the cover.

#5

This was my hand at illustrating. If this is the way to go, I need to know it now so I can finish the drawing. I quit this effort mid-way because I felt it was too cartoony. The drawing is of the same pivotal scene shown in pictogram form on cover #3. I have yet to illustrate the battle on the ground. But should I even bother? Aren't cartoon covers meant for 4th grade and below?



I appreciate your input and any comments you can make would be truly helpful in wrapping up this first book! Basically it comes down to: which of these 5 books would you buy if you saw them sitting on a shelf?

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.

Santa Is Coming

Pleased with the outcome of I’m One, Cecilia Potts sought out another project. She had been working on a Santa book that explores a child’s fear of the big guy in red. She brought me the idea for illustrating ideas and I said, “if you want a creepy Santa, I’m your man.” After a few test sketches, I think I came up with a perfect character design that makes Santa out to be the disturbing and miserable soul you be if you only got out one night every year...

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.