Self Publishing...Again!

Hello Everybody,

So, I bet you thought since I got picked up by a publisher that I was through with indie publishing.

Not so much.

I've always said that if I have a book that I really believe in that doesn't sell, I'm gonna put it out myself and, once again, let my audience decide if it's something that they think is a worthy read. I've had this book on submission for several months now. For the most part, all the editors said they loved the story and concept but they didn't think there was a market for another Pride and Prejudice telling. I felt different...and so do many others as I found out by happenstance today!! A teen blogger who I just LOVE put the word out there on Twitter and she got quite a response...from readers...and a couple of agents and editors who requested my information. We'll see if anything comes of it.

As for me, I'm pressing ahead until a deal is in hand. So, I'll be back on the indie boards promoting the new book and hustling with everybody else. Initially, I'm only putting on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and iPAD and we'll see what happens from there.

A few print copies will be printed for author review copies (ARCs) and maybe I'll sell a few at a festival or two.

With that said, here's my new baby.

Basketball phenom Liz Bennett just wants finish high school under the radar...and without constantly defending herself against false rumors about her sexuality. With two trouble magnet kid sisters and a mother obsessed with protecting her virginity, she’s already dealing with more drama than an Emmy-winning daytime soap opera. But when two popular new guys enter her life, she’s forced from the shadows and onto center stage.

Trent Whitman, Liz’s hot new admirer, pursues and woos her with his silver tongue and hazel eyes. When he turns on the charm, Liz turns off all common sense. Darcell Williams, on the other hand, is a star football player who sticks his cleats in his mouth every time they meet. As far as Liz is concerned, Trent is a dream and Darcell is a devil reincarnate.

During the Back-to-School dance, Darcell spews an oh-no-he-didn’t insult that cements Liz's contempt. Oh yes, their feud is on and poppin'!

Driven by spite and embarrassment, Liz instigates a series of misunderstandings that propel her into an inevitable confrontation with Darcell. But when a Bennett family crisis reveals Darcell’s and Trent’s true colors, will Liz’s pride prevent her from accepting each for who he really is?

WORST IMPRESSIONS is a humorous and uplifting coming-of-age tale about a girl who discovers that misjudgments are a two-way street best left untraveled. Loosely based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this novel brings a timeless story to contemporary multicultural teens.

With that said, I'll keep you posted on the happenings!

Until then...Keep it real...and keep it real cheap!

Neat & Cheap Tools of the Trade #1

Well, this is a new segment I'll do periodically to highlight some of the neat and cheap tools I've found that have helped me put out a better and higher quality product.

Design Wizard 2.o - Book Interior Design

I don't know how many of you have attempted to design your own book interior but it was one of the MOST frustrating things about putting my book out. My chapter titles kept shifting all over the place. Never quite got the headers or footers right. Couldn't decide what size I wanted to print my book in so everytime I changed the page size, i.e., from 6x9 to 5.5 x 8.5, all my formatting got completely jacked up. In short, the inside of my book looked like a HOT MESS!

I was determined to find some kind of software that would take the pain out of that task. And find that software I did.

With this unbelieveably inexpensive but incredibly useful software, all you need to know how to do to set up a perfect book interior is click a mouse, type a few words, and cut and paste. What took me nearly a month to do--and I still never got it right--Design Wizard helped me do in about 2 hours. This is the best $37 dollars you will ever spend if you plan to self publish more than once.

How does it work?

It integrates into your MS Word program. As I understand, it does not work on MAC (sorry). But it becomes an option in your toolbars. Once you install it and click the option in your tool bar, it literally prompts you through your entire design. It asks you what size you want your book to be, do you want headers, footers, page numbers, what font, etc. etc. Then you just cut and paste your chapters in. And that's it. The great thing is that you can change the size of your book, your margins, etc. and it will reformat the entire book with the click of a button. You can make changes, literally in minutes.

If you're not sold yet, you just aren't gonna be. lol Buy this YESTERDAY! It will take all the pain out of your book interior design.

Book Design Wizard

BOOK COVERS for the Broke Author!

Since I've had so many people ask me about getting inexpensive book covers, I queried a few of the forums I participate in to find folks who will do them at a bargain price.

NOW, first I have to give props to my cover designer, Dee D'amico. She's not necessarily cheap, but if you like cool illustrations, contact her and she'll work with you. And I can personally vouch for the quality and speed of her service. She took my stick drawing and made my awesome cover.

Dee D'Amico

http://dee131040.tripod.com/

These are other designers but I cannot...I repeat I cannot vouch for their services. However, they have said that they are willing to work with indie authors on price. Please do your research and ask to see their portfolios. This is only a public service announcement. :)

http://www.tarangozi.gutensite.com/Design-Portfolio

http://coroflot.com/1013studio

http://barbgallowaybydesign.web.officelive.com

http://www.direatrium.com/ Gallery: http://www.direatrium.com/Gallery.html#starved

http://www.vedicdesign.com (Author said she paid $199 and they gave her three design options)

hetmanpublishing@hotmail.co.uk (Hetman Publishing - $50 for Createspace members e-mail him for details)

http://www.12on14.com or e-mail walton@12on14.com

That's all for today.

Keep it real...and keep it real cheap!

Quality Book Covers for the Cheap, Frugal, and Broke

As I’ve mentioned before, a quality cover is your book’s single-most important marketing tool. You could’ve written the next great novel but if your cover looks cheesy and unprofessional, most people won’t find out. The LAST thing you want is for someone to pick up your book and say, “This looks self-published.” That’s the same as saying, “There is no way in HELL I’m paying my good money for this crap!”

I’m one of those people who will buy a book largely based on the cover and a quick glance over the back cover copy. I’m easy, I know. And I can’t tell you how many books sit unread on my bookshelf because of that. Oh yeah, I’d been snookered, bamboozled, led astray, cast aside…lol. But it didn’t matter because by the time I figured it out they already had my money.

A really good quality cover is sometimes all you need to entice buyers…but to keep those buyers coming back you better have a damn good story too. But your cover and editing should be your two biggest investments when designing and publishing your book—no ifs, ands, or buts about it!

So, you whine, “Kaaaaarla, I don’t have enough money to hire a designer. And I can’t even draw stick people.”

Well, I’m going to give you a couple of money-saving tips that might help.

Tip #1: Check Craig’s List and Writer’s Forums. There are tons of freelance designers, many of them fresh out of design school, who would love the opportunity to design your book cover. Most don’t charge that much and are only looking for a good reference, so they go above and beyond. Always be sure to ask to see their portfolio so that you can see their previous work and whether their style of design fits in with your ideas.

Tip #2: Barter. Exchange service for service (and I don’t mean sexual services so get your head out of the gutter!). I know one writer who got her a graphic artist to design her book cover and in exchange she helped edit his graphic novel. You’ll never know if you don’t ask.

Tip #3: Hire someone to design the front cover only…and you do the rest.

I actually designed my spine and rear cover right on Microsoft Word and paid an illustrator to do the front cover because I didn’t have the money to pay someone to do the whole thing. I’ll admit that my first try really sucked because I didn’t go to the stores to look at back cover designs. But my second version turned out pretty dang decent. Looks like a REAL book. Note: You must have the Adobe Acrobat PDF plug in or the full standard or professional version on your computer to do this.

Here’s how I did it.

1. I opened up a new document in Word and set up my page dimensions by going to “page size” under the page layout menu. My page size is the size of the front and back cover of my book + the spine (6x9*2 + spine thickness). Lightning source, one of my printers, has a free spine calculator. You tell it how many pages your book has and what size it is, and it tells you the spine thickness based on the types of paper they use. (Note: You will usually need to make your length and width dimension about .25 longer to account for what printers call “bleed” around the outside edges. I could go into a long explanation here, but I won’t. Just do it! i.e., each box for the front and back cover is 6.25 x 9.25 and for the spine you only add .25 to the length. .71 x 9.25)

2. I set up two boxes for the front and back cover and one separate box for the spine. So, it should be in three pieces. I simply inserted the illustration in the first 6x9 box, inserted text boxes in the back cover box, and inserted a text box in the spine. Word 2007 has some great pre-designed text boxes that are great for inserting reviews and quotes from readers and reviewers. All you have to do is enter the text.

3. I cut and pasted my barcode into the bottom of the back cover and ensured that I typed in the price. (One tip for inserting your barcode: Do NOT resize after you download it from Bowker. If you do, the picture will come out pixelated and the printer won't accept it. Ask me how I know!)

4. Next, I grouped all three boxes together by holding down the ctrl button and clicking on all three boxes, hitting the right click button, and clicking on the word "group." Voila! My cover was in one single box instead of three separate ones.

5. Then, I used my Adobe PDF plug-in to convert my Word file to pdf. Be sure to select “US Prepress” and “press quality” in the preference section of Adobe to ensure the colors convert to CMYK, which is what most printers use. And that was pretty much it.

It doesn’t have to cost a million bucks for your book to look like a million bucks!

Next, I will cover the all-important topic of editing!

Until then,

Keep it real—and keep it real cheap!

Much Ado About Book Covers

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Your book cover is the single-most important marketing tool that your book will ever have. Forget what you heard, EVERYONE judges books by their covers in some respects. Although a poorly-designed front cover may not stop everyone from checking out the back cover or the first page, those people are few and far between.

I do not profess to know all the elements of book design, but I do know a little bit about the book business now and if I indie publish my second novel, there are several things I’ll be taking into consideration that I did not during the first round. So, I've created "The Four Commandments of Cover Design for Indie Publishers and Authors" A few of these principals are particularly geared toward African-American authors because, like it or not, our books are not necessarily going to be marketed like those in the mainstream. It’s just a reality you’re going to have to learn how to deal with.

1. Know where thy book will be shelved in a bookstore.

When I created the book cover for The Bum Magnet, I designed it in a bubble. I didn’t go to the bookstore to look at other books. I had NO idea whatsoever about how books were shelved and marketed by retailers. In my poor naïve little mind, I wrote a “chick lit” book, you know, women’s fiction. So, I imagined my book shelved with the Sophie Kinsellas, Emily Giffins, Erica Kennedys.

Boy was I WRONG! As an African-American author with an African-American on the cover, your book gets shelved in the African American/Urban Lit section of the store. So, instead of my book sitting among the cute colorful illustrated covers, my book was placed on the Urban lit table right between the following books. Book 1 and Book 2.

Yep! Imagine my surprise.(LOL) It's funny now that I think back on it. I was like, “It’s not supposed to be here!” because, in my head, I had shelved the book in another place in the store. Knowing what I know now, I would probably go with a fun all-text cover, so that the book could reach more mainstream audiences without looking like “Which one of these is NOT like the others?” no matter where it sits in the store.

African-American authors in particular need to understand (if not accept) the fact that retailers lump all African-American books into one big pile, with the exception of the best of the Bestsellers. Terry McMillian and the like will always have a space with other mainstream writers. Most of us will not. So, you should not write a book about women living in the '60s and expect to get shelved next to Kathleen Stockett. It's probably not going to happen UNLESS you become a bestseller. Make sure your book will attract ALL audiences that it's marketed to!

2. Know how thy book will be tagged online.

Thankfully, the big cover debacle did not spill over into the Internet world. That’s the beautiful thing about tags, which are especially important on Amazon. What’s great about tags is that the customer, not the retailer, gets to decide where your book will be shelved. The most frequently used tag on my book is “chick lit” so readers see the book as I intended them to see it. If you pull up the Amazon website and type “chick lit” in the search box, my book will come up on the first or second page. My cover fits in among the chick lit titles...yet it still stands out. That's what you want.

As an aside, make sure that you encourage people to tag your book when it’s listed on Amazon. The more frequently your book is tagged in a particular category, the sooner your book will come up when someone searches by that term. For example, I have 50 tags in the chick lit category, so my book now comes up within the first two pages if someone searches for chick lit. I don’t know about you but I may look at the first 5 screens of books in a given category before I give up, so the earlier your book comes up on a search, the better chance you have to get a sale. Encourage folks to tag your book…and please tag mine if you’re in the neighborhood. :)

3. Design thy cover to look the same as others on “thy shelf” – but different.

You want the cover to stand out, but you don’t want it to stand out in a bad way. You want your cover to be unique and similar at the same time. Sounds oxy-moronic but it’s true to an extent.
As I watched book buyers come in and peruse the books on the Urban Lit table, my poor little book was mostly overlooked. I think because the cover said, “You are waaaay out of my genre.” Even if the story might’ve appealed to from a female perspective, the cover didn’t get them. So, I moved the book over to the mainstream table and covered up another author’s book so I could squeeze The Bum Magnet in between Emily Giffin’s “Love the one you’re with” and another title that had a very colorful “chick lit-ish” cover (can't remember the name). And guess what? It got picked up within ten minutes. I moved two more books to that same table (on top of the author's book--shame on me!) and the entire supply had sold out within two weeks and the store placed a second larger order the next go around. Why? Because the cover was at least “in the family” of the kind of book they were looking to buy.

4. Thy cover MUST reflect something in thy book.

You'd think this wouldn't need to be said, but I've seen a few indie published books, which shall remain nameless, in which I could not figure out what the cover had to do with what I was reading. If your book cover doesn't reflect something in the interior, then that's literary fraud as far as I'm concerned. It should also reflect the tone. If your book is funny, the cover should give that impression. If the book is full of drama but you have a clown on the front--that's not a good thing. If you have a sexy half naked woman on the cover but there's no sex in the book, somebody's probably gonna be looking for a refund.

Anyway, you live and you learn! As an African American chick lit writer, I have a good idea of what kind of cover it will take to sell my book to African-American and mainstream audiences—a catchy title and a cover that literally sits on the fence between the two segments.

So, do your market research and DO NOT design your book cover in the bubble that is your head—the way I did. Trust me, you want your book to find its audience as quickly as possible and a little research will go a long way in helping the two meet.

Until next time

Keep it real...and keep it real cheap!