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Assembling a Self-Published Book by Kitty Bucholtz

March 9, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, Scrivener, self-publishing, Smashwords Style Guide, Superhero in Disguise, Superhero in the Making, Unexpected Superhero

Over the next two months, I’ll be assembling my newest book, Superhero in the Making, book two in the Adventures of Lewis and Clarke series. (“Superhero Books for Her!”) This will be the fourth time I’ve put a book together to self-publish, so I’m finding patterns and creating checklists.

Where Will You Distribute?

I’ve found that one of the important things you need to know before you begin is which distributors you will use. For instance, while Scrivener (where I write my books) has the capability to create an EPUB file, Smashwords still required a Word document the last time I uploaded a book there in May 2013. Since I want my ebooks to be absolutely identical on any device, and because as of May 2013 all the distributors I used accepted Word files, I found it was easier to create just one file and then make the necessary changes on the copyright page. (As opposed to having a Scrivener EPUB file, a Word file, and an InDesign file and having to remember to make any little edits to all three files, at least this way I only had to remember to make the same edits in two files. We’ll see if I do it differently this time to take advantage of Scrivener creating the EPUB and mobi – for Kindle – files for me. When I created my ebook-only short story, “Superhero in Disguise,” Scrivener helped me format the files fast.)

One thing to love about the free Smashwords Style Guide is that if you are meticulous in following the instructions there, your completed Word file will upload to any of the other distributors as well on the first try. (As of May 2013, I uploaded to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, All Romance eBooks, and Smashwords – who distributed to “everyone else.” I had no problems with B&N’s original “PubIt!” program, but its new NOOK Press messes up my books now, every time. So I now let Smashwords distribute there for me. That will change when I decide to spend the money hiring out my formatting or figure out my NOOK Press problem.)

Incompatible Upgrades

Another thing to consider is whether one of the programs you use has been very recently upgraded and other programs will not work well with it until they upgrade as well. This happened to me in May 2013 with Unexpected Superhero. Between Scrivener, NOOK Press, and an EPUB validator I was using, the Scrivener EPUB file had errors I couldn’t fix when I tried to upload it to NOOK Press. It was frustrating and time-consuming tracking down the problem, trying potential solutions, and eventually having to abandon my upload and have Smashwords distribute it. But these things happen and you need to go with the flow. (Again, unless you hire a professional formatter.)

Since my husband used to be a graphic designer and owns several professional programs, and I’ve done some newsletters using Quark Xpress, I decided to go that route for my print books. My husband and I created a template in Quark for my first book, Little Miss Lovesick, and I uploaded the final file as a PDF to CreateSpace. Again, plan for the unexpected. I couldn’t get Quark to create the PDF even though it was an option for the software. Turns out a lot of people were having the same problem. I finally had to send the file out to have it converted. Of course, then I had a PDF that I couldn’t change. Why was that a problem if my book was already printed?

A Professional Print Version

Yup, found a few typos. When I created the ebook files, I corrected any little things I saw as they came up – without thinking about it. Meaning, I didn’t make identical changes to the Quark file, which is why I mentioned above, be aware of how many separate files you have to change if you find a typo. And now, because I couldn’t get Quark to create a PDF for me, I could make my edits but would have to send the file out to be converted to PDF every time, forever. My husband and I started talking about upgrades and – voila! I got an email from Adobe about their Creative Cloud suite. Instead of purchasing the software and upgrading every year or two, you could pay a monthly subscription fee and always have access to the latest version. Not only that, you have access to every piece of Adobe software (that I’m aware of). Because my husband and I both use more than one piece of Adobe software, the monthly Creative Cloud membership seemed perfect for us.

So for my second book, I used Adobe InDesign. LOVE. IT. I sent out my Little Miss Lovesick Quark file to Nick Davies at Tinstar Design and he quickly converted it to InDesign for me for a very reasonable price. I made my minor edits in the new file and it was ready to re-upload. I also took that Lovesick file and created a master template for my future books, which I then used for Unexpected Superhero. Now my print books all have the same look every time. Definitely the professional way to go.

Checklists Save Time

During the last 2 1/2 years, I’ve continued to make notes about what I do, how I do it, and what order to do it. For instance, in your print version, if you add the header in the master section so that it appears on every page, then manually delete the header from the first pages of chapters, then go through every line of the book taking out words that are split/hyphenated to the next line, it will change the way the text flows and…wait for it…your manually deleted headers will sometimes be on the wrong page. Sigh. Then you have to re-do the header.

Yes, I learned that by doing it. 😉

So now with Superhero in the Making, I’ll take my newest checklist and begin working down it in order. Any time I find something not working right, I’ll make a note of how to fix it and, if necessary, change the order of steps in my checklist. Until I decide to send out my book files to a professional formatter, this is an effective way to get my books printed so that they look absolutely professional, and I’m not re-inventing the process every time. I haven’t looked into the prices of professional formatters or know who’s the best at a reasonable price because I genuinely enjoy the book-building process. But someday I may have to let go of this part in order to get more writing done and more books out.

I hope this has been helpful to you. If so, let me know and I’ll try to post more on this topic in the future. I’ll be teaching a self-publishing how-to class online in September that you may find useful as well. I’ll let you know the details soon. Happy Self-Publishing!

Kitty Bucholtz decided to combine her undergraduate degree in business, her years of experience in accounting and finance, and her graduate degree in creative writing to become a writer-turned-independent-publisher. Her novels, Little Miss Lovesick and Unexpected Superhero, and the free short story “Superhero in Disguise,” are now available at most online retail sites. Superhero in the Making will be released at WonderCon in April.

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Michael Hauge Storytelling Mastery Workshop

March 3, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as Master Class, Michael Hauge, OCC Special, One-day Workshop, Special Workshop, Storytelling, Storytelling Mastery

March 29, 2014

One-day special workshop

with

Michael Hauge

â€œStorytelling Mastery for Romance Writersâ€

During this special, all-day seminar, Hollywood script and story consultant Micahel Hauge, best-selling author of Writing Screenplays that Sell and Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds: The Guaranteed Way to Get Your Screenplay or Novel Read, will present his unique approach to creating compelling fiction and to eliciting emotion in your readers. For more information and to reserve your spot, please click here.

If you attend the workshop on Saturday, you may also sign up for Michaelâ€™s Special Advanced Workshop on Sunday.

Both Saturday and Sunday take place at the Embassy Suites in Brea, CA. There is a special room rate at the hotel for Saturday night for those attendees who want to stay over. All information can be found at http://www.occrwa.org/michael-hauge-workshop-saturday.html

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Writing Holiday Themed Stories – OCCRWA’s March Online Class

February 27, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as Online Class

Beth Daniels, aka Beth Henderson chimes in on her upcoming OCCRWA class:

Sometimes the ideas rain down on you, right? And then there are other times when youâ€™re enduring a drought of them. Am I right?

Some ideas give you a nudge but then youâ€™ve got that middle part of the book to writeâ€¦that oh-so-long sometimes middle landâ€¦and the nudge has left the building.

Been there, lived that.

But there is a type of storyline that supplies a built in structureâ€¦and Iâ€™m not talking about historicals that follow a war or political engagement where what happened is the structure. Iâ€™m talking about the holidays!

Oddly enough, there are more holidays out there than a writer can shake a quill atâ€¦if we had quills. Okay, so we shake rollerballs and mechanical pencils and cell phones capable of recording voice messages to ourselves.

At any rate, if you were thinking Christmas, New Years, Valentineâ€™s Day and Halloween, youâ€™ve barely got your feet wet.

True, these are the themes that generate calls for anthologies, but if itâ€™s a story with a word count that takes you into the novel range, the competition might be tough. Doesnâ€™t mean you back off of the first holidays that come to mind, just expand out from there.

What is all of this leading up to? Well, a workshop, obviously!

WRITING HOLIDAY THEMED ROMANCE STORIES ALL YEAR ROUND kicks off on March 10^th and takes us past April Foolâ€™s Day but not quite to tax day, which only the government would term a holiday worth celebrating anyway.

I hope youâ€™ll join me for a yearâ€™s worth of considering the prospects of various holidays throughout the year when it comes to spinning romances.

Visit OCCRWA.org here for more information and to sign up.

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OCC RWA Proudly Presents Our March Online Class

February 26, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as Beth Daniels, holiday, OCC/RWA, OCCRWA Online Class, Online Class

March 10 â€“ April 6, 2014

WRITING HOLIDAY-THEMED ROMANCE STORIES YEAR ROUND

with Beth Daniels

About the Class:

They show up on the booksellerâ€™s lists, at the book section at the grocery store, the pharmacy, the BOOK store, and are featured in cases at the library and on end caps at various and sundry places. They even blanket the bestseller lists at those special times of year.

What are they? Well, the holiday themed novels, novellas, and short story collections, of course!

Holiday stories not only send regular readers staggering to the check out stand with armloads of titles, they snag the not so regular readers, the folks stuck looking for a Secret Santa gift, or a stocking stuffer or a â€œthinking of you at the holidaysâ€ token for the babysitter, the hairdresser, theâ€¦well, fill in your own blank!

December isnâ€™t the only month that has a holiday though! There are holidays every month of some sort, and they are worth gold when it comes to themes for stories.

During the four weeks of this workshop will deal with: all those THINGS that relate to the special event at the heart of your story.

Because it is the most â€œprofitableâ€ of the holiday season, weâ€™ll spend two weeks on the Winter solstice timed tales then move on through the calendar year seeing what other holidays could supply a tasty tale or two.

Weâ€™ll also talk about what might be the best time of year for a holiday themed manuscript to land on an editorâ€™s desk.

No ideas needed beforehand as weâ€™ll dream them up during the workshop â€“ perhaps even more than one!

About the Instructor:

When wearing her Beth Henderson hat, Beth Daniels has had a number of storylines that worked in the holiday extravaganzas of December: RING IN THE NEW (originally published as NEW YEARâ€™S EVE) and SEDUCING SANTA both reveled in the season while MR ANGEL finished off under a gaily decorated tree. While she hasnâ€™t considered Halloween personally, she is laying claim to guys in bunny suits for a Spring story, so hands off Pete Rabbit!

Enrollment & Payment Information

For more information on how to enroll and play please click here.

If you are interested in more online classes, the 2014 class schedule is here.

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The bigness of small talk

February 24, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives

OK, maybe not all small talk. But if you are having a business meeting with someone you haven’t met or don’t know well, it’s big.

The convention that the American businessperson (or whomever) who wants to cut to the chase and avoid the traditional chit-chatâ€”sometimes a trait associated with non-American cultures and can be seen as a ‘waste of time’â€”is surprisingly short sighted.

Here’s my example and my insight:

I recently overheard a half of a phone call between a manager and his freelance hire on a project. (Yes, the intimacy of cellphones in public spaces). They knew each other, but not well; it seemed early in the project. And they spent about 10 minutes of their opening conversation before “getting down to business,” going over the Superbowl, which had just occurred.

And I realized how illuminating these oblique conversations could be, how revealing, how much information was presented. You found out how each one presented their ideas, responded to the other’s comments, explored issues, shared information. You got a sense for how they spoke, how they listened, how they addressed problemsâ€”in conversation as well as the ones on the field.

It’s how you say what you say, how you respond. How you judge, work, thinkâ€”your ‘general cognitive ability,’ beautifully expressed in this article about what Google looks for in hiring. In the article, the head of hiring tries to articulate what’s important, noting that credentials, grades, honors are all trying to be markers for something within, not things in themselves. They aren’t the point, they’re the product, and are meaningless without the ‘beef.’

Within publishing, writers sometimes ask if awards help sell a book. Well, yes they canâ€”but I also want to say, “You have it backwards.”

Things (books, people, films, whatever) often get an award because they are exceptional. So an exceptional, fabulous story may get an award, but it doesn’t get bought because it got an award, it gets bought because it’s fabulous.

That’s also why some stories can get awards, but not get soldâ€”because the judges may have wanted to reward or acknowledge something exceptional, perhaps something groundbreaking, or courageous.

But by virtue of its very exceptionalness, it may not be very commercial.

So it can be worthwhile to listen between the lines.

Isabel Swift