My Experience With Indie Publishing (Post 2)

If you missed my first post on indie publishing, you can find it here. This time around, I'll be talking about picking a cover, getting reviews, marketing, and writing the next book.

Initially I had grandiose ideas about creating my own cover. There are plenty of sites out there with stock photos, and people swear by Gimp for fiddling with images, font, etc. I know some people who have designed their own covers and do a fantastic job at it, Maya Lassiter being one. So I looked at stock images and started thinking about what I wanted the cover of The Graveyard Girl to look like. And I was overwhelmed with the choices. Choice paralysis is a real thing, and it was inhibiting my going forward with the cover.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not a self portrait.

I had already signed up with Smashwords, so I went to their list of cover designers and started looking through them. I had a few questions in mind as I searched. Who had made plenty of fantasy and/or young adult covers? Who fit into my budget? Who had a professional looking site? Did they have plenty of examples of covers so I could get a feel for what they were capable of? I settled onVila Design because (1) she'd done a lot of covers, (2), they looked good, (3) many were in the genre I wrote in, and (4) she fit my budget. She gave me about eight to ten images to consider, some of which were really good but I never would have thought to include in my search. She seemed like a mind reader when it came to presenting me with the final two cover choices (or maybe she's made a billion covers so she knows what to expect), and she was fast. My choice paralysis was gone, and I had a shiny new cover.

Reviews are important. They let people know that someone has read your book, and they give readers a better idea about whether or not they might enjoy a particular book. Honest reviews help make a book more noticeable. It's a good idea to ask people for honest reviews via social media, or by asking at the book's end, or by asking for reviews from those who do a bunch of them. There are plenty of people out there who love to read and want to be among the first to get their hands on a good book. One helpful site I found is The Indie Book Reviewers List. It can take a long time to wade through all of the reviewers out there, so it's something I end up doing in bits and pieces when I have time. Word of mouth is one of the most important ways of selling a book, and if you find some good folks willing to review yours and spread the news, then that will help your book start to build momentum.

Once you've got your book out and you've spread the word, the best thing you can do to market it is to write the next book. People enjoy binge watching TV, and they enjoy binge reading their favorite author and/or series. The more books you have out, the more you'll sell, and the happier you'll make your readers. When I decided to self-publish The Graveyard Girl, I waited until I had a rough draft of the second book in the series and had the third novel roughly outlined. Right now I'm working on edits for the second book and tentatively hope to have it out by September, and I hope to have the third one out about four to six months after that.

I'm constantly learning as I go along, and I'm constantly tweaking my plans. As I cross items off my to-do list, others sneak on. But for someone who is a control freak (like me), self-publishing is a great venue. I rely on others to help, but ultimately, I get to say when the book comes out, where, and what it looks like. I was scared when I began this process, but that quickly turned into absolute happiness as I realized just how much fun the process was.

FAE Anthology Cover Reveal!

My publisher, World Weaver Press, is putting out a beautiful anthology, Fae, on July 22nd. The cover art is stunning, and the list of contributors is filled with some great authors. The synopsis:

Meet Robin Goodfellow as you’ve never seen him before, watch damsels in distress rescue themselves, Fae is full of stories that honor that rich history while exploring new and interesting takes on the fair folk from castles to computer technologies and modern midwifing, the Old World to Indianapolis. Fae covers a vast swath of the fairy story spectrum, making the old new and exploring lush settings with beautiful prose and complex characters. Enjoy the familiar feeling of a good old-fashioned fairy tale alongside urban fantasy and horror with a fae twist.
get swept away with the selkies and enjoy tales of hobs, green men, pixies and phookas. One thing is for certain, these are not your grandmother’s fairy tales. Fairies have been both mischievous and malignant creatures throughout history. They’ve dwelt in forests, collected teeth or crafted shoes.

With an introduction by Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman, and new stories from Sidney Blaylock Jr., Amanda Block, Kari Castor, Beth Cato, Liz Colter, Rhonda Eikamp, Lor Graham, Alexis A. Hunter, L.S. Johnson, Jon Arthur Kitson, Adria Laycraft, Lauren Liebowitz, Christine Morgan, Shannon Phillips, Sara Puls, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, and Kristina Wojtaszek.

There's a giveaway on Goodreads with six copies available. Enter to win, or spread the word!

My Experience With Indie Publishing (Post 1)

I celebrated my book's appearance on Amazon in style.

Things are winding down after a frantic few weeks. On May 1st, I released the first book in a series. It was my first foray into indie publishing, and it was as exciting and terrifying as releasing a book through a publisher, perhaps even more so because ultimately, the buck stops here, so I thought I'd share my experience.

First of all, I had this idea that I would have a 'release day' in which the book went live across all electronic platforms. Excuse me while I go laugh hysterically in the corner for a second. Ahem. So. I'm sure it can be done, but I have no idea how. Amazon took a few hours to have the book ready to sell. Barnes and Noble and Kobo had it ready in about a day. The iTunes store required an act of Congress, a small blood sacrifice, and about two weeks of time to have the book ready. In the future, if I want a 'release day,' I'll simply plan on a day about a month after I start publishing the book. But since I'm fairly lazy, I'll probably just do it the same way I did it this time--one venue per day.

One of the first things I did when I decided to self publish was read a couple of books on indie publishing. I read Indie And Small Press Book Marketing by William Hertling. It includes a convenient checklist for the time leading up to publication, during, and after. I made my own checklist based off his, and it helped immensely. Instead of flailing and wondering what to do when, I could just make my way down the list, feeling self-satisfied as I checked things off. I also read Your First 1000 Copies by Tim Grahl. He focused most of his advice on making and using an email reader list, which is something I haven't gotten around to doing yet. And I read numerous blogs, trying to absorb every person's experience and decide what I wanted mine to be like, including Jeff Carlson's guest spot on SF Signal and these tips from M. Darusha Wehm.

I'm lazier than turtles sunning on a rock.

The next thing I did was make the book as polished as possible. After making changes based on reader feedback, I read it over. Then I let it rest and read it through again. Only when I was satisfied I'd done all I could on a macro and micro level did I bring in a professional freelance editor to look it over. I used E-Quality Press. Not only did they do a fantastic job, but the editor got what I was trying to do. He formatted the files for me in addition to editing (more on that in a bit), and when it came time to format the file for the print copy, he asked if I wanted the story to begin on page 13. I was amused that he had gotten to know me well enough in a short period of time (and through email, too) to even know to ask that.

A lot of authors format their files themselves. Initially I thought I'd go that direction, but when it came time, I simply had no desire to learn how to convert my Word document into the proper format (Do you see a pattern? Seriously, I'm the laziest person around. I'm worse than Garfield the cat). It was worth letting somebody else do that work while I panicked over other things, like the book's cover, which I will discuss in another post along with reviews and miscellaneous other items.

Until then, if you have any links or books or anything at all that you'd like to share when it comes to indie publishing, feel free to comment.

Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.

The tile of this blog post is the tagline used for the final season of Six Feet Under. Fair warning, spoilers for the show are about to happen, so if you haven't seen it and you want to, stop reading.

My HS economics teacher suggested I be a mortician. Seriously.

I've said it before, the finale for this series was the best finale to any show I've ever seen. Nothing has come close to topping it, not even my beloved Breaking Bad, good as that finale was. I've been trying to figure out why that last episode did so much for me, and I think I finally figured it out.

The show was about death. It was about funeral homes and how the little businesses stacked up against the big, corporate ones. It was about family. But mostly, it was about death. Every episode opened with somebody dying. There were old people dying of, well, old age, people dying in accidents, kids dying, spouses dying, parents dying. It was right there, in your face.

At some point in the last century or so, it became rather taboo to talk about death. I've seen people avoid the topic, or refuse to attend funerals. They might do the equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and saying, "Lalalalalala, can't hear you!" Not so long ago, people talked about death more openly. When somebody died, they were laid out in their home for the viewing. In Victorian times, people died young, and often. There was no avoiding the topic. But now we go to funeral homes to view the deceased. People live longer, and so they might put off thinking about the inevitable. It's a topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

Shows like Six Feet Under are bringing death to the forefront, though, and perhaps encouraging people to think a little more about their deaths. So what is it about that show's ending that made such an impression on me? Well, almost every other series finale ends with the main characters still going about their lives in some way. But in Six Feet Under, we get to see snippets of how the rest of their lives played out, and how they died. Every single character's death is shown, all while Sia's "Breathe Me" played in the background. Incidentally, if you haven't heard this song, it's great. But there was no question about what happened to any of the characters. We saw them all die. It was such an intimate moment, and moving, and terribly sad, and completely satisfying. Holy cow, I'm sort of tearing up writing this. Yes, the ending was that good.

I'm not saying that every show needs to do this. But for this series, it was perfect. Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ended.

It All Leads Up To This

An article came out recently about three books bound in human flesh at Harvard. Since then, it's been shown that one of them is actually made of sheepskin, but that still leaves a couple of books allegedly made out of people. (And now I have an image in my mind of Charlton Heston falling to his knees and saying, "It's people! The dictionary is made of people!") I got excited when this article came out, not because I'm hoping to bind a tome in human flesh, but because the book of magic in The Graveyard Girl is made of the flesh of Rose's necromantic ancestors.

So I got to thinking about the various options available to people--and their bodies--once they die. Most people opt for a burial or cremation, and most people who go the casket route end up embalmed. In the U.S., embalming wasn't a popular choice until the Civil War when soldiers had to be shipped a long way to return home after they died. A man named Thomas Holmes is credited for creating modern day embalming, and it became a booming business. Interestingly enough, before he died, Holmes requested that he not be embalmed.

A lot of people are choosing green burials as an alternative. Simply put, no embalming fluid is used, and the body is contained in something biodegradable. There are special cemeteries that allow green burials, and having seen a number of dead bodies preserved with formaldehyde, I'm inclined to prefer green burials myself. I rather like the thought of a tree or some flowers growing over me.

But if cemeteries and urns sound too mundane, you can always turn your ashes into a diamond. Shiny!

As for Rose, her words of wisdom and her blood will end up in the book of magic to be passed on to another generation of necromancers because that's the way it's done in her family.