I started revising a novel that I haven’t looked at in almost two years and picking it up has been like looking at photographs. I can recall so many conversations about the characters and the situation that I had with my son who was twenty-one at the time. He helped shaped the world, and the characters. It feels almost like we’re having one of those conversations again by tweaking with the words.
The novel is ‘Hierarchy’ and is about a world where everything has a sell-by date and the power structure is enforced by Guardians for the whims of the Elevated–basically celebrities in Entertainment and Sports. Since neither of us were/are sports fans, we left that aspect as fillers for the weekends and mainly showed the characters during the week. We’re not big celebrity fans, but it’s easier to poke fun at an actress being a judge than a basketball player.
After weeks of knowing that I should ‘do something’ with my website and blog, I revamped it last night. It’s not perfect, but I think it looks a bit more professional, and more engaging. Also, the novels I plan to publish this year will fit on the page more easily.
It’s difficult at times to figure out where to put my non-writing time. I can spend a lot of time tweaking things, or trying to make it marginally easier for people to buy my books, but duplicating information that can easily be found elsewhere is probably silly. I had given a summary of each novel, and included prices, but that information can be found at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
I’m still working on getting more reviews of my novels. Marketing advice says that it’s important to have reviews, so I’ve been trying to get beta readers to give feedback. I’m also thinking about offering the Kindle version of at least one of my books for free for a while. Not sure which one or when, or how to best market it. I probably should have a Facebook page and other marketing stuff in place first.
I read several articles about how self-publishers don’t have professional looking books because they either don’t right justify, or don’t hyphenate, as if the authors are too stupid to know how to hyphenate. I hate books that have hyphenation. I think it breaks the flow of a sentence and it’s rarely done well, even in publishing house books. And I think right justified looks stupid 80% of the time.
Not sure if it’s a fight worth fighting though. It’s not difficult to right justify, or hyphenate. I’m just not sure it’s the right thing to do. Maybe self-publishers aren’t stupid. Maybe they have a chance to do things right without blindly following a practice that doesn’t make sense any more.
After fighting with the options available for the covers, I knew it was time to figure out how to do one myself and upload the pdf file. I tried using Inkspace, even bought a book on Vector Graphing with Inkspace but I just don’t care about the trivial details enough. I was talking about it as I drove my daughter to school and she suggested Gimp.
So, I downloaded it, fiddled a bit, found some YouTube videos on how to do stuff, tried more, and finally got a cover. Along the way, I learned a few valuable tips.
GIMP Cover design, a few things I’ve learned:
1) Download the template from CreateSpace
https://www.createspace.com/Help/Book/Artwork.do
2) Open the template, open the picture (if you’re using one for the cover) and play.
3) Add everything in layers (Add Layer) —
happens automatically for text, but add lots of layers.
4) Have to click on ‘Move’ tool a lot.
5) Turn off guide (at the end) – by clicking on the eyeball on the base layer–
the one that had the pink boxes and the where stuff is layout.
6) For any question, you can probably find a how to guide on YouTube.
7) Flatten the layers (merge layer in the layer tool) all the way before exporting it to pdf.
I’m very tempted to write a ‘how-to’ guide like I used to do at work, but first I have to finish the edits for Making Family and get my copies to my beta readers.