And breathe…

Tags

cover, Design for Writers, editing, Faith Hope and Trickery, formatting, plotting, template

Just a quick update to let you know that I have heard from Roy the plot man, and the news is good.  He does have some (as always perceptive and excellent) comments, but his overall view is favourable: “I found this story most enjoyable… Also, I find that you have developed your factual storytelling to include more human emotion and this adds greatly to the overall readability.  In conclusion, a lovely book.  Possibly your best.”

I cannot tell you what a relief this is; when you’ve been writing a book in isolation for eighteen months, you definitely stop seeing it objectively.  For all I knew, it was complete self-indulgent drivel, and handing it over for the first time to someone else is terrifying.

The plan now is to spend the next few days incorporating Roy’s suggestions into “Faith, Hope and Trickery”.  I will then read it all again myself, then print it out for proofreading by my husband, who is a very slow and therefore observant reader.  Then it’s final checks before cutting and pasting the text into the interior template.  At this point I allow myself the fun task of choosing chapter names – at the moment, they’re just numbers and dates.  Then I will know the page count, which CreateSpace needs in order to generate the cover template for me to send to the cover designer.  Heavens, when I write it all down, there’s still plenty to do in just over a month – I’d better get on with it!

Name that book!

Tags

blogging, cover, Design for Writers, Plank 5, title

Just a quick reminder that today is your last chance to have a say on the title of “Plank 5”.  I will be closing the poll at the end of the day, and then sending the chosen title to the marvellous people who design the cover for the book.  They already have my ideas for the figure and the document that will go on the front, and I’m homing in on the back cover blurb, so the title is the last remaining element.

I’ve had a look at the title poll results so far, and with twenty-nine votes cast there is a clear front-runner, but – as they say in the world’s leading opera houses – it ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings.  And she’ll be tuning up in about fourteen hours’ time.

Caution: plot holes ahead!

Tags

cover, Design for Writers, Plank 5, plotting, proofreading, writing

I can see the finish line – “Plank 5” is almost there.  And as I wrestle with the final chapters, I have lined up my usual fabulous team to help me to publication: the cover designers at Design for Writers; my husband (for eagle-eyed proofreading – how he does love to catch me out in a spelling mistake); and Roy in Jersey.  Roy’s job, right from “Fatal Forgery”, has been to read the first proper draft for sense, looking for inconsistencies and what he has taken to calling “plot holes”.

Isn’t that a great phrase?  You can just imagine them, nasty great gaps in the story that sit there unseen.  Your reader is cruising along, enjoying the journey, when all of a sudden, crash!  They go into a plot hole and – metaphorically speaking – the wheel comes off and the journey is over.  I’ve spotted a couple of them myself (along the lines of “but how did he know that she would be there?”, or “what made her ask him that?”) but no doubt Roy will see a few more.  Sometimes the writer has her nose so close to the tarmac that she can’t see the plot holes herself…

Fits and starts

Tags

audiobook, blogging, Design for Writers, Discovering Diamonds, Guy Hanson, Hart's Books, Martha Plank, Samuel Plank, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, Worm in the Blossom, writing

I seem to do nothing on this blog at the moment but apologise – and here I am again.  I have been working on “Plank 5”, honestly, but my day job has been so busy recently that I haven’t had any extra capacity to write this blog as well.  Nonetheless, you might like to know what I have been up to with regard to Plank writing and promotion (other self-published authors will recognise the juggling act!):

• The audiobook “Worm in the Blossom” (the third Plank book) is currently being recorded by the wonderful Guy Hanson of Go4pro audio, who just is Sam – he’s up to chapter 21 (of 40). When he completes a chapter he sends me a link to the audio file, and I listen to it while reading along in the book, and send back any corrections that need to be made.  As you can imagine, I can’t do this on the same day as I am writing “Plank 5” – otherwise I would muddle the plots.
• I have booked time with the fabulous Design for Writers cover designers so that they can work on the “Plank 5” cover in February 2018.
• In idle moments, I have allowed myself to find some possible images for that cover, and I have also started to assemble a list of possible titles for the book…
• I have contacted another independent bookshop in a nearby town – Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden – to see whether they would like to stock Sam. I’ve had no response to my email, so I think I’ll have to call in in person – I should imagine they get hundreds of email approaches.
• I have been selected by the angelic Helen Hollick to be part of her seasonal promotion of “discovered diamonds” – independent and self-published authors of historical fiction. Her idea is to feature an excerpt from a different novel each day in December, from the 3^rd to the 23^rd, with the theme of “Diamond Tales”.  As those of you who have read “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” may remember, Sam decides to mark his silver wedding anniversary by buying Martha a ring…  His scene will appear on the “Discovering Diamonds” blog on 16^th December, but I urge you to look at all the others – who knows what gems you will unearth!  The diamond-themed excerpts will start on 3^rd December 2017, on this blog.  (You can also click on the “Diamond Tales” logo on the left.)  A wonderful Christmas present for this author.

I think that’s it for now.  Thankfully things are slowing down with work as people – oddly enough – don’t want to be reminded about financial criminals in the run-up to Christmas, so I am hoping to get some good stretches of writing time during December.  Martha would have no truck with this procrastination, would she?

Revealing the cover

Tags

Amazon, cover, Design for Writers, Facebook, Portraits of Pretence, self-publishing

It’s here – the cover of “Portraits of Pretence” has been finalised!

Like the other three Sam Plank books, it consists of several elements: the title, the background image and the foreground image.  The title was all your work, so thank you for that.  The background image was reasonably straightforward: I knew that I wanted an auction catalogue, so I found images of suitable ones and my fabulously talented cover designer created his own version, which looks very fine.  But the foreground image – readers, what a palaver we have had with this one.

To be fair, some of the fuss was of my own creation.  In my initial brief to the designer, I said that I wanted a miniature portrait of a little girl of about five.  But I wrote this brief before finishing the book, and the little girl portrait became less important to the plot in later drafts.  Plus, when I looked for suitable images, they were all a bit saccharine for my taste.  Moreover, when the poor designer did a mock-up of the cover with one of these images, it looked wrong because the three earlier Plank covers have full-length figures on them, not just head and shoulders.  Wording it as carefully as I could, I said that I didn’t like the girl, and moreover, I wanted an altogether less wholesome image to reflect the plot changes.  In short, I wanted a woman in the nude.

Now this is tricky when it comes to Amazon and Facebook, because they are rather puritanical in their tastes, so the search was on for a nude yet tasteful woman, in a line drawn format that could be adapted for foreground use.  (I’m not sure on the technicalities, but I know that colour images are harder to turn into lines, and some images are difficult to divorce from their backgrounds.)  My cover designer, trouper that he is, threw himself wholeheartedly into this new search.  And he came up with this young lady and – here’s the clever bit – found that the title could be positioned to obscure her derrière.  Thank goodness you were far-sighted enough to choose a title of the correct length – anything shorter might not have worked.

As far as the publishing process goes, I have now uploaded the interior and cover files to CreateSpace and am awaiting the result of their initial scan.  (Quietly confident, as I’ve done this before.)  Then I can order my author copy, which should be with me within the fortnight, and then – if all is well with that – I can order the copies that I will want to distribute on publication day, 21 October.

No longer the new kid

Tags

Amazon, Design for Writers, formatting, self-publishing

I am very proud of being a self-published author – or an “indie”, as we are often called.  I look at my books on the shelf – my own shelf, or, even better, the shelf of a bookshop – and marvel that I created them.  But I can’t rest on my laurels: recent statistics suggest that 30% of Amazon best-sellers are now self-published, so I can’t rely on being unusual or ground-breaking.

Being a business-savvy author requires you to keep up with trends that will influence how you publish (and, for some authors but not me, because I’m ornery and stubborn like that, also what you write).  And in the self-publishing world, the two big trends seem to be these:

• DIY is the name of the self-publishing game – those “assisted publishing” businesses that offer to do some of the legwork for you are losing ground.  I was never tempted by them, because I like feeling that I’ve done it all (apart from designing my covers, of course – left to my artistic abilities, we’d end up with something made out of macaroni and glitter).
• People are reading more and more on their phones.  Not me, as my aging eyesight needs print about the size of my thumb, but I do see all the youngsters on the tube reading on their teeny tiny screens.  This development favours the clearly formatted, shorter book – so Sam is ahead of the curve on this one.

The net result seems to be that readers – and to some extent, bookshops – are starting to care less about the publication route.  As long as the book looks good and is well-written, its self-published status is no longer an obstacle or even particularly noteworthy.

Off with her head!

Tags

cover, Design for Writers, Fatal Forgery, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, Worm in the Blossom

One of my favourite parts – for obvious reasons – of writing a new book is designing the cover.  Of course I don’t do the design myself; a quick glance at the magnificent covers of “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” tells you that there is a professional involved.  Two, in fact: husband and wife Andrew and Rebecca Brown at Design for Writers.  And they are terrific.

As nearly everyone agrees that – thanks to the Browns – the Plank covers are “strong”, I knew that the cover of “Worm in the Blossom” would need to follow the same pattern: vintage colour, foreground figure and background document.  And haven’t we had some fun with the figure.  It’s a female this time, and basically she’s a prostitute.  But a young one – a teenager.  And so Andrew, Rebecca and I have engaged in interesting email exchanges about this.  “I like her clothes, the way she’s a bit tarty, but she looks too old.”  “Her hair is good, like she’s had it done, but her neck is too long.”  “Her boobs are too big – she’s obviously a well-developed girl.  The Worm girls would be thinner and hungrier.”  And then we found our compromise: we liked the head in one image and the body in another, and it was a simple matter of some Frankensteinian work of decapitation and reassembly.  I’ll be able to show you the results soon – and I’ll be amazed if you can tell that she was originally two girls.

It seems a shame to waste such sterling effort on just one book cover, so I did suggest to the Browns that they might like to approach perhaps Cath Kidston or Liberty with a proposal for a new fabric pattern: Summer Strumpet.  I can see the tea-towels and umbrellas already.