Top 8 Cover Design Tips For Self-Publishers

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We’ve all seen them. The train wrecks. The art class projects. The cringe-inducing artwork. It’s the world of do-it-yourself book cover design.

 
Somewhere between the quirky “cover design generators” on author-service company websites, and the All-American view that everyone should get a ribbon because, after all, they participated, the cover design is suffering at the hands of self-publishers.
 
And no, I’m not saying that self-published books aren’t getting better—there are a lot of great-looking indie books out there. But I am saying that you don’t have to go far to find the ones that went wrong.
 
Book cover design, at its height, is an amazing commercial art. The best book designers continue to amaze and surprise us with their graphic design prowess.
 
But anyone who can write and publish a book ought to be able to avoid at least the worst mistakes in cover design.

So, here without further ado, are my

 
Top 8 Cover Design Tips for Self-Publishers
  1. Establish a principal focus for the cover—Nothing is more important. Your book is about something, and the cover ought to reflect that one idea clearly.
    One element that takes control, that commands the overwhelming majority of attention, of space, of emphasis on the cover. Don’t fall into the trap of loading up your cover with too many elements, 3 or 4 photos, illustrations, maps, “floating” ticket stubs.
    You could think of your book cover like a billboard, trying to catch the attention of browsers as they speed by. Billboards usually have 6 words or less. You have to “get it” at 60 miles per hour, in 3 to 5 seconds.
    A book cover ought to do the same thing. At a glance your prospect ought to know;
    • the genre of your book,
    • the general subject matter or focus, and
    • some idea of the tone or “ambiance” of the book.
    Is it a thriller? A software manual? A memoir of your time in Fiji? Your ideas on reform of the monetary system? Each of these books needs a cover that tells at a glance what the book is about.

     

  2. Make everything count—If you are going to introduce a graphic element, make sure it helps you communicate with the reader.
     
  3. Use the background—Avoid white backgrounds, which will disappear on retailer’s white screens. Use a color, a texture, or a background illustration instead.
     
  4. Make your title large—Reduce your cover design on screen to the size of a thumbnail on Amazon and see if you can read it. Can you make out what it’s about? If not, simplify.
     
  5. Use a font that’s easy to read—See above. There’s no sense using a font that’s unreadable when it’s radically reduced. Particularly watch out for script typefaces, the kind that look lacy and elegant at full size. They often disappear when small.
     
  6. Find images that clarify—Try not to be too literal. Look for something that expresses the mood, historical period, or overall tone of the book; provide a context.
     
  7. Stay with a few colors—If you don’t feel comfortable picking colors, look at some of the color palettes available online to get a selection of colors that will work well together.
     
  8. Look at lots of great book covers—You may not be able to mimic all their techniques, but the best book covers are tremendous sources of inspiration and fresh ideas.
Resources
  • You can always send your book over to the Self-Published Book Design group at Self-Publishing Review. Get a Design Review of your book, inside and out.
     
  • There is lots of stock photography online to explore, and ways to find images you can use for free
     
  • Sites with color palettes can be helpful and just plain fun. Make up your own color palettes too.
Takeaway: Taking a little care with a book cover you’re designing yourself can produce big results. Look at lots of book covers for inspiration.

 

This is a cross-posting from Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer.

LSI Expand Partnership With PediaPress

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Last month we took a look at the launch of the Wikipedia Create a Book service supported by software tools designed by Mainz-based PediaPress. The Create a Book service allows users to create their own styled book based on selected content from Wikipedia’s English language content. It was unclear if PediaPress were going to provide all aspects of the service or find a specialised partner. Well, they have, by making the decision to expand their existing partnership with Lightning Source (LSI 268.40). Lightning Source will provide the print manufacturing and distribution as part of the partnership deal.

From the Lightning Source/PediaPress press release:

 

"With our innovative Create a Book platform, we required a technologically advanced company that understood the web-to-print model, and could satisfy our requirements. We needed a professional and reliable organization with high quality one-off book manufacturing and a globally distributed print network, and we found that with Ingram’s Lightning Source."

Heiko Hees, Managing Director of PediaPress

The recent start-up of Create a Book on the English language site of Wikipedia follows the successful launch of identical applications on the German, French, Spanish and 14 additional Wikipedia sites. Since the inaugural launch of the first Wikipedia book application in February 2009, Lightning Source has printed Create a Book wikis in 17 languages and has delivered books to 33 countries.

PediaPress is based in Mainz, Germany, the small city in which Johannes Gutenberg changed the world forever by inventing modern printing with moveable type. Five hundred years later, our mission in Mainz is still the same – making printed knowledge available to all.
 

“The content-driven model from PediaPress and Wikipedia is part of the forward-thinking method of book supply we envision as the future of print-on-demand, and we are delighted to work with the PediaPress team on this innovative web-to-print model.”

David Prichard, President and CEO, Ingram Content Group Inc.

The Create a Book feature from Wikipedia enables a user to build a custom book from the articles chosen from their search on Wikipedia and other wiki sites that are supported by PediaPress’ book creator feature. Upon the completion of content collection, the user creates a book title, adds an editor name and selects a cover photo from a group of images and photos associated with the content selected. A 30-page preview is provided to the user for review. The user purchases the book online from the PediaPress web site, and book files are then uploaded to Lightning Source for manufacturing. Printed books are then shipped to their final destination from the closest of Lightning’s networked print facilities.
 

"[The aim of PediaPress is] to capitalize upon best-of-class technology to bring affordable books and textbooks to the corners of the world, where books and education in some geographic areas is still a luxury. PediaPress is based in Mainz, Germany, the small city in which Johannes Gutenberg changed the world forever by inventing modern printing with moveable type. Five hundred years later, our mission in Mainz is still the same – making printed knowledge available to all.”

Heiko Hees, Managing Director of PediaPress

 

ABOUT PEDIAPRESS
PediaPress brings wikis to print. The web-to-print service enables users of Wikipedia to create custom books based on their individual content selection from the free encyclopedia. Books can be created on the Wikipedia website with articles in 272 languages and are delivered to customers in more than 100 countries. The PediaPress web-to-print service works with most of the more than 100,000 wikis worldwide, which are frequently used to collaboratively create and share content on the web and within organizations. The company established a long term partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation which operates several wiki-projects, including Wikipedia with its more than 350 million unique users per month. PediaPress was founded in 2007 as a subsidiary of brainbot technologies AG and is located in Mainz, Germany.

To learn more about PediaPress visit www.pediapress.com

 

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney‘s POD, Self-Publishing and Independent Publishing.

Is The Agency Model A Clear Case of Price Fixing?

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We learned this week that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has begun a preliminary investigation into Apple’s agency model price-fixing deal with five of the Big Six publishers. While I am sure that some of those players hope that Abbott’s inquiry is a fishing expedition that will amount to nothing more than some irksome legal bills, there is a significant chance that it or another inquiry could lead to a major legal battle and, ultimately, the possibility of legal remedies that might cause publishers to wish that they had never heard of the agency model. Let’s take a closer look.

For the past few months, in the course of reporting on the agency model, I have suggested at several points that it seemed likely that some of the issues involved would end up in court. After all, regardless of what else you might think about the agency model, there can’t really be any argument about two of its fundamental features:
 

  1. it is a manufacturers’ price-fixing arrangement intended to dictate and maintain certain price minimums at the retail level; and
     
  2. it developed out of collusion, either through direct communications or through communications that were brokered by Apple, between what one would expect to be competing publishing companies. (Collusion, I understand, is not a neutral word; if you are more comfortable using some other word, that’s fine, but, well, it is what it is.)

I have been criticized in a few quarters for suggesting, in earlier posts, a "conspiracy theory" and collusive behavior by some combination of Apple and the five big agency model publishers in bringing about the fundamental restructuring of ebook prices and business relationships earlier this year.

Guilty as charged: I did refer in my post to Penguin’s "agency price-fixing model co-conspirators," and I am sure that if I took a few moments I would find other instances of, well, calling things as I see them. There have been times when I have crossed the labeling line, and for instance I apologized just yesterday to Publisher’s Marketplace editor Michael Cader for referring to him and Mike Shatzkin as "publishing industry mouthpieces;" it was unfair and unnecessary of me.

But my point is unchanged: in all likelihood, the mass structural transformation of the ebook business that occurred earlier this year could not have occurred without the collective development of a pricing strategy by some or all of the key players. To suggest otherwise would be to imagine a process, something like the final round of Jeopardy, where all the participants write down the same answer to the question: "What can we do about these $9.99 ebook prices?"
Are we to believe that all of the agency model publishers independently thought up, and used their light pens to write down "We’ll throw out decades of wholesaler relationships and ‘manufacturers’ suggested retail prices’ and dictate that customers must pay 30 to 50 percent more for ebooks, and we’ll call it the ‘agency model’"?

Pardon me, but I’m not buying that.

Does that make it a conspiracy? I suppose it depends on your point of view. But if the major players got together across company lines to restructure their industry and fix prices at higher levels, and the result was a violation of the law, you don’t have to be sporting tin-foil headwear to call that a conspiracy. "Conspiracy" would be the word that a prosecutor would use, or a grand jury, or a judge, or a trial jury. I suppose you could call it a garden party, but the legal terms are conspiracy and collusion.

What law would they have been conspiring to violate?

The Sherman Antitrust Act, for starters, but there is a long history and legal tradition against such price-fixing collusion at the federal level, at the individual state level, and in a number of other nations where these business matters will be played out. Although the U.S. Supreme Court acted three years ago to narrow the circumstances under which businesses could be found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, they left the teeth in the law for the courts to act when a manufacturer’s (the publishers) enforcement of minimum price maintenance on its distributors (Amazon and other ebook retailers) could be shown to have an "anticompetitive effect" that is "harmful to the consumer."

It is also worth keeping in mind that, although the agency model was initially rolled out in the U.S. ebook market, eventually these issues will be played out globally and may face even greater scrutiny in the U.K. or by the European Commission. In the U.K., the leading book trades observer, The Bookseller, has reported that some publishers have walked away from negotiations with Apple because "concerns over the legality of the agency model, first highlighted in The Bookseller, have still not been addressed for many."
I’ve been writing for the past few years in books and blogs and newsletters about the Kindle and various other ebook-related issues and news, and at times I have spoken out strongly with criticisms of Amazon, but one would not be wrong to say, as one would expect from its name, that Kindle Nation Daily is a pro-Kindle blog. Far more than it is pro-Kindle, however, Kindle Nation Daily advocates for the interests of Kindle owners, and it is clear from thousands of messages of feedback, emails, and comments that many Kindle owners see us as effective, informative, and reliable.

When the controversies of the agency model began to unfold, I even gave brief consideration to playing an organizing role in support of legal action against the ebook price-fixing collusion under the anti-trust act. While it seemed quite possible that a plaintiff class with legal standing could be organized and a serious and legally plausible action initiated, the resources necessary to pursue such a cause and do it justice seemed truly prohibitive for any volunteer effort.

While some speculated that legal action against agency model collusion might come from Amazon itself, or from the Department of Justice, or from other ebook owners, there are good reasons why such action hasn’t originated from these sources. Amazon, for one, is unlikely to pursue a strategy of litigation because such a strategy would be even more destructive to its business relationships with publishers, because it would require the company to make information public that it generally keeps very close to the vest, and because it could well be vulnerable to counterclaims about its own efforts to manage prices, regardless of whether such claims were considered legally actionable. I won’t be surprised if the Department of Justice becomes involved, but I’m also aware that it has plenty of more important issues on its plate.

Instead, we have heard this week, the Texas Attorney General’s office has begun an inquiry into the agency model that, according to DailyFinance.com publishing industry columnist Sarah Weinman  "appears to focus on pricing practices for e-books and Apple’s entrance into the [e-book] market in particular…. Though the investigation is still in preliminary stages, there’s a good case for legal action — and it’s all about the current state of antitrust legislation."

For those of us whose take on these issues lists toward a consumer’s point of view, such an investigation — and the possibility of antitrust litigation — has seemed inevitable. However, among publishing industry insiders, there seems to be genuine surprise, or at least puzzlement. Weinman herself questions why Texas would be interested, and suggests that the near-monopoly that Amazon held in the ebook content market prior to the launch of Apple’s iBooks store makes such scrutiny puzzling. (It is worth pointing out that a number of much smaller ebook retailers have also been disadvantaged by the agency model; some that tried to attract customers by offering coupons and special deals are no longer allowed to do so).

But Amazon was using its market power and deep pockets to lower prices, and while a strong argument can be made that the company’s goal was to use those lower prices to build and maintain dominant market share, there was no collusion or collective price-fixing involved. Supporters of the agency model may try to make the argument that Amazon’s strategy of aggressive price competition is itself anti-competitive in the long run, but such an argument would seem to conjure up a rather slippery slope of "small is beautiful" opposition to free market forces and competition. Many of Amazon’s other initiatives in support of independent publishing companies and authors over the past few months, as well as its significant history of "big tent" relationships with other retail partners large and small, may also help give the company cover against such charges.

Amazon relied on an individual corporate strategy to reduce and subsidize consumer prices, and went on paying publishers based on the retail list prices of their hardcover editions. Apple’s agency model play was demonstrably different: it relied on a collective price-fixing agreement among competitors, and the effect of that price-fixing, of course, was not to lower ebook prices but to raise them by 30 to 50 percent. The fact that Apple was a "fledgling" player in the ebook marketplace at the time of these actions would likely be offset both by the fact that it achieved more or less immediate success in brokering a collective price-fixing agreement with five of the six targeted players and by the size of its installed base of ebook-compatible devices: there are roughly 30 times as many iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches in the world as there are Kindles. And, of course, there is relevant history in the music industry’s experience with Apple and the iTunes store.

With all of this for state or federal attorneys general to chew upon, I’m frankly puzzled by the number of times in the past few days that I have read remarks by agency model supporters expressing puzzlement about the Texas investigation. Representative of many of these remarks was a post I read yesterday by publishing industry consultant Shatzkin, entitled "Agency seems (to me) to be working; I hope it’s legal." Shatzkin concludes the piece with a fair demonstration of just how colossally an industry insider can misjudge his own industry’s ultimate consumers — that’s you and me, the readers: "It would appear that the Agency model is good for just about everybody except the etailers that would use price to drive others out of the market," he says. (I’m sorry, Mr. Shatzkin, but if at this point you need someone to explain why that’s a colossal misjudgment, it may just be too late to make the effort.)

He then asks a question that baffles me just as much: "But will it ultimately be ruled legal? I don’t think we know yet."

Excuse me? Why does it sound like publishers are just considering this question for the first time? This is not the Wild West; it’s the once staid old New York publishing industry. Could they really have entered upon this total transformation of the way they are doing business without having it vetted not just by their corporate counsel but by the best antitrust lawyers available to them?

But maybe so. There have been signs, even in the last week, that the agency model publishers and Apple don’t seem to be acting as if they are getting regular and solid legal advice, including:
 

  • Instances such as the return of Penguin (or its new releases) to the Kindle store with a new wave of higher-than-ever prices, and several days during which Penguin’s bestselling titles were 30 to 40 percent cheaper in the iBooks store than other ebook stores.
  • The direct quotation in Shatzkin’s post of a publishing industry executive who rhapsodized about his ability, under the agency model, to "maximize revenue" with no mention of cost, appropriate margin, or "the value of the book."

Maybe I am overstating the importance of such words and deeds, but it just seems to me that any lawyer worth his billable hours would be telling publishers to behave very, very carefully just now.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. As I hinted at the outset, the remedies in a case like this might well amount to more than just doing away with the agency model.

I am sure that I will be criticized for this post, as I have been criticized for earlier posts, for not being "objective." But there has been a strange "opposite world" resonance to much of what publishing insiders have had to say about the agency model and ebook prices lately, and under such circumstances it is best to accept a little criticism if that is the cost of challenging notions like the idea that the agency model is working for consumers or that the publishers who brought us drugstore paperback spinners are now the champions of "the value of the book."

 

This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.

How To Increase the Pace of Your Novel

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Listen to a PODCAST of this article. 

Did you know CONFLICT is not the only tool you have to increase the pace of your writing? Of course, the more forceful the conflict, the faster the pace. However, there is another important concept available to help ramp up the pace of your writing. The second most important technique used to increase the pace of your writing is the rise and fall of tension.

Tension is different from conflict in so far as conflict is your character’s emotional reaction to the challenges he faces. In contrast, tension is the emotional strain placed upon your readers. It’s a bit of hostility you interject into their lives.

So, how does a writer place emotional pressure on a reader? Alfred Hitchcock presented this concept at it best when he said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”

In my own mind, I see this concept in a scene where two characters sit at a table. Unbeknownst to them, there is a ticking bomb strapped beneath it. The reader knows the bomb is there and when it’ll blow, but the characters do not.

Can you see how a ticking time bomb, real or metaphorical, can propel your tension? 

Okay, now for some tips on how to increase the pace of your writing.
 
1. Use sentences and scenes and chapters that leave them hanging.
2. Tension, like conflict, should ebb and flow through your novel. Think of a line chart that grows ever upward in consecutive peaks and valleys. Your tension should follow this same path. It should always build, then fall, then rise to the next higher level. After you slow the tension, make something happen, and soon, to regain your momentum.

3. DIALOGUE is a great tool to increase the tension of your writing.
Not only are you able to use your characters words but also how they say what they say.

 
4. Quick lines make for quick reading. Quick reading makes for a fast tempo and greater tension.
 
5. In those nail-biting situations you create, sentence fragments will increase the excitement. Always. Every time. As here. I urge caution, however, for overuse of fragments can get out of control.

6. Consider the amount of white space on the page. Imagine a sheet of paper filled with text, one line after the other without breaks, from top to bottom and side to side. You can visualize how this would overpower the reader. Think instead of a page loaded with choppy sentences. This creates a great deal of white space to the right and makes the page read faster. Your reader will feel the increased rhythm if for no reason other than the speed by which they flip the pages.

7. Shorter, simpler words increase the tempo and the tension of your story. Anything that slows your reader will slow the pace, and the tension, of your scene.

Number 8 is one of my favorite sayings. “Be cautious of argot your middling might not twig.” That is to say, don’t use terminology your average reader might not understand. When you force them to take their mind off the story and focus on individual words, their reading slows in dramatic fashion. So does the pace. That goes double for medical thrillers and the like where difficult words are normal.

9. Strong, specific verbs and nouns can also increase the tension. Consider someone who dreams in nightmares in contrast to someone who is haunted by nightmares. How about someone who “falls” as compared to someone who “collapses.” These examples show how a single word can increase the tension of your novel. Therefore, seek precision with your words.

10. Use active voice. “He was going to fight it out,” reads slower and with less strength than, “He determined to fight it out.” Read this ARTICLE to learn more about active voice.

 

Now, might you have any tips to share?
 
As always, know I wish for you only best-sellers.
 

This is a reprint from C. Patrick Shulze‘s Author of Born to Be Brothers blog.

If Only I Had More Time…

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"The time has gone, the song is over. Thought I’d something more to say." – Pink Floyd
 
I originally had planned on blogging the next installment on breaking the rules in writing. But the past couple weeks have seen the chronic problem of time management rear its ugly head. I’ve gotten relatively little writing and promotion done, and that looks to continue for a while.

 
The fact is that if you want something badly enough, you find a way to do it. Almost everyone can find an extra 30 or 60 minutes, and you can get a hell of a lot done in an hour a day. A lot of writers can write a thousand words (or more) in an hour – that’s 365,000 words a year in that extra hour. If it’s important, you’ll do it.
 
I don’t want to spend the post complaining about my specific problems. Whatever I could say is keeping me from working much on writing/promotion, someone could point out examples of people who worked through much worse. I’ve thought a lot about the details and the options and I have come to a conclusion: writing is not important enough to me.
 
Now don’t get me wrong, I love to write, and I have no intention of stopping. I’ll have more novels, more short stories, more podcasts, and more promotions. This is not a post about giving up or stopping. But writing isn’t the only thing I love to do. Nor is it the most important thing I do, either personally or generally. And the other things that are also important are preventing me putting in the time I need to keep my writing "moving forward" on the various necessary levels.
 
So that means I need to make some choices. A while back I wrote a post about writers not letting themselves off the hook. The gist was that it is critical not to let yourself say that because you can’t do something perfectly or completely, you won’t do it at all. In a lot of ways, what I’ve been struggling with over the past two weeks is how to remain true to that.
 
So I have come to a decision, one that I think will feel more definite if I put it in writing, in public. From now until the end of June, I am going to focus on completing a thriller novella that I am about 9000 words into. I may also do a few edits of a short story, and I may do a submission or two of existing work, but blogging, promotion, social networking and podcasting are all going to take a back seat. Those things are important, but at this point I need to generate some more content. Both for my own sanity and for the potential growth of my fan-base, this is what I must do.
 
I fully expect that sometime in the future, I will write a post saying something roughly the opposite of what I’m saying now: that I’ve written some things and now I need to buckle down and spread the word. Life is not static; things change. I have found that in order to continue making progress, I need to re-evaluate things on a regular basis. And that’s what I’ve done in recent weeks.
 
If you’ve gotten through this post, I’d ask two things of you. First, tell me in the comments how/if you deal with situations where something simply has to give.
 
Second, wish me luck. This new thriller? It’s gonna rock.
 

This is a cross-posting from the Edward G. Talbot site.

Find the Bullseye Before You Shoot (or: the 5 Commandments of Target Markets)

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 On our recent excursion to Disney World, we began our day of adventures in the Land of Mouse with a little friendly competition on the famed Buzz Lightyear ride. And when I say friendly competition, what I really mean is a cutthroat contest of wills with the most important prize of all on the line: pride.

 If you’ve never experienced the glory of Buzz, let me explain the concept: A line of two-person cars moves slowly through the blacklighted landscape of Emperor Zurg’s world while the car’s occupants use laser guns to shoot at thousands of targets placed throughout the ride. You can spin the car 360° but can’t change the speed of the ride or manipulate any of the targets (many of which are moving themselves). At the end of the ride, your score is displayed. High score wins. Low score is mocked for the rest of the day.

My strategy was simple: Pull the trigger as many times as possible while swirling the gun around for maximum coverage. Since there’s no penalty for misses, I figured a mass spray was the way to go. At the end of the ride, I proudly smiled at my score (49,980) and turned to Toni in the car behind me, ready to boast about my win.

She scored 130,457.

While I was randomly spraying the room with laser shots, Toni was specifically aiming for the moving targets around the room that were worth more points. She probably hit half the targets that I did, but hers counted for more.

Here’s what you should take away from this: In the marketing world, Toni’s targeted strategy is the one that will get your self-published book on best-seller lists, not mine.

I’ve marketed sports teams, small businesses and aspiring writers, and across all three mediums there is one thing that all three have in common: They don’t know who their target market is.  This is such a major issue that we’ve decided to devote a series of blog posts to finding your target market.

Today, we’re going to lay down the Five Commandments of Target Markets (so listen up!):

Five Commandments of Target Markets

#1: You will not target everyone.

No matter what genre or subject matter your book deals with,I can promise you that your target market is NOT everyone. It’s not everyone in America, everyone in Florida, or even everyone in the town in which you live. For pete’s sake, that’s not even Wal-Mart’s target market.

#2: You will know your target market BEFORE you begin writing.

Because your target market determines your price, cover design, writing style, working title and almost everything else related to your book, you have to know your target market before you get started. General Mills doesn’t create a cereal and then wonder who will want to buy it, they see a demand and make a cereal to satisfy it.

#3: You will target one group, but know that other people can still buy your book.

Just because you target a specific group of people with the majority of your marketing budget doesn’t mean that no one else will buy it. ESPN the Magazine’s target market is 18 – 30 year old men, a demographic that probably makes up 90% of their readership, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any females who buy the magazine.

#4: You will learn the best way to communicate with your target market.

The ultimate goal of your target market research is to learn how to communicate with your target market. If you’re targeting teenagers, Internet communication is critical. But if you’re targeting Baby Boomers, the Internet is not going to a primary communication tool in your marketing campaign.

#5: You will constantly refine your target market.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a process that you will likely get right on the first try. Even here at Duolit, Toni and I are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating our target market and the means we use to reach them. Without a high budget research process, there’s a certain amount of guesswork involved in determining who will buy your product. If you try one direction and fail, try again. There are thousands of niches out there, with a little hard work, you will find yours!

This was cross-posted from the Self-Publishing Team blog.

 

Postal Service Update AGAIN

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 I think I have the Postal Service Claims Center in St. Louis, Missouri figured out. When a insurance claim comes in for a package that is lost in the mail the Center ignores the claim. It’s my understanding since this is the only Claims Center in the United States, the Center is swamped with insurance claims. So why not see how many claims the staff can ignore to see if  people who file the claims will just forget about the whole thing. Perhaps in most cases that works.  

 
If a person finally runs out of patience and a year later writes a letter to find out what is taking so long to get a response of some kind from the Claim Center, the response letter is a denial to pay the claim.  The reasons are all the fault of the person who mailed the package for not having the right address or return address.  A simple way to put an end to the claim the Claim Center thinks. Perhaps in most case that denial letter is the end of the matter.
 
 
Except if that was the case when I filled out the two different forms to hunt for my two lost boxes of books complete with pictures, the Dead Mail Centers had a chance to find what was left of the boxes. The books weren’t sent back to me, but my return address and the addressee’s address were on pieces of the boxes. The Postal Service knew my address and where the boxes were to be sent.
 
I guess I messed up the Center’s system when I sent in a two page letter and seven pages of documentation on why their denial was wrong.  So next part of the Center’s strategy is give in to accepting responsibly for the loss and send a check. I got a check, but it was for a third of the amount. No letter of explanation for not sending the full amount was included. The person will accept any amount after so much time has past. Would this be the way I should think? After all, this has been on going since January 2009 when the first shipment of books was lost. In my latest letter to the Claims Center I wrote this has been a consuming effort on my part which has cost me in time, ink, paper, postage and mileage to the post office to mail my documentation.
 
Sending that check to me proved that the Postal Service now believes loosing my box of books was the Postal system’s fault and not mine. The receipt attached to the check says for payment of package not delivered. So here is what I did. I copied the letter from the Claim Center with the claim number on it and attached the check to it after I copied the check so I had proof for the next phase of this saga if there is one. I sent a two page letter explaining I clearly realize and so do they that I was not at fault. I refused the check and attached it to a copy of the insurance claim. I said I expected to be paid the full amount for the claim which I added up – books amount, postage and tracking fee, to save the person reading the letter the trouble. The next page was another copy of the pictures of my books with ISBN numbers under them and this time the price of each book to show my loss. Attached to this sheet was one of my business cards that shows the address of my online book store, plus I mentioned Amazon, ebay and buy sell community where they could look to find my books so the Claims Center can quit questioning that I am a business.
 
I’d like to thank MyEntre.net’s Rob Williams for giving me the next idea. I use the Postal Service to mail my books. I should be considered a valued customer by them. So I put in a customer site map for the U.S as proof.  An X on each city in the states marks my customers. I update this map often in my bookstore online. My letter states this map shows all the mailing I do and some of those X’s are for more than one customer and more than one order of books. I again detailed the facts for trying to mail a valued customer a shipment of books twice which didn’t make it to the addressee until 10 weeks later (and only after the third shipment was delivered by UPS in 24 hours).  This was bad for my business reputation. I was unhappy about the fact that since I haven’t heard from that customer since I fear I lost future sales because of this mess.
 
Finally, I stated I didn’t see why I should have to send anymore proof to support that I am a business that uses the Postal Service’s business. I thought I should be reimbursed without delay and sent some assurance that this wouldn’t happen to me again. I’d like to go back to insuring large shipments, but I won’t until I know I don’t have to go through this hassle again if they lose my shipment. 
 
At the beginning of this problem in 2009, I sent an email on the Postal Service website to complain. A dead mail center in Georgia sent me pieces of my box, with stamps and addresses, attached to them was a letter from a bookstore in Missouri. An expensive textbook had been lost on it’s way to Iowa City to the college. The book store wanted to find that book. One more unhappy customer to fuel my persistence.   My answer was an emailed form to fill out asking me what I thought happened to my boxes. Was there a problem at my local post office? Could it have been vandalism?  Certainly not I replied. This problem was happening in southern Missouri and I believed it to be employee carelessness. I felt the area should be investigated.
 
What that response got me was a call from my local post office. The worker said she was told to tell me she was sorry about this problem. If there was anything else she could do to help me I was to let her know. I felt sorry about that. In this small town, everyone knows almost everyone else. I know and like the people I deal with at the post office. No way did I want to get them in trouble, and that’s what it felt like to me. I explained to her I made it very clear that the postal employees on my end do a good job. Now I’m waiting for a call again from my post office assuring me that my packages can be mailed insured without a problem with the Claims Center. Does this mean that I won’t have a problem the next time the Postal Service loses my books?  Will I get a check for the full amount from the Claim Center?  To be continued. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Establishing A Brand

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I have been working my way through the Platform/Promo Lessons in Publetariat’s Vault University curriculum  by April Hamilton and Zoe Winters (I was fortunate enough to win access to Vault University as a winner of Publetariat’s First Anniversary Contest.) While I don’t plan on revealing any detail on the excellent material presented in this curriculum (if you are interested, the fee is just $5 a month for monthly lessons, and I would highly recommend signing up and/or purchasing a copy of April Hamilton’s Indie Author Guide), I am using the subject headings of the sixteen “lessons” in the curriculum to evaluate my own attempts at promotion of my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery. As someone who has been teaching (and therefore evaluating students) for 35 years I figure it will be a humbling experience to see how well I have learned my lessons!

 
Over five years ago, in one of my last attempts to get an earlier version of my book published through traditional means, I went to a local writers convention where numerous speakers talked about the need to establish a brand. At the time, I remember being discouraged by the news that marketing departments of traditional publishers seemed to have achieved the ascendency in publishing, and that only those authors who could demonstrate a sure-fire market for their “brand” had a hope of getting published.  Nevertheless, I had to admit as a reader I responded to the visual cues book covers and posters offered me when I browsed bookstores, looking for the latest work by a favorite author, or looking for new authors to try out. If this is what was meant by a “brand,” well, that I could understand!
 
Consequently, a year ago as I began to rewrite my manuscript, I also began to think about how I would establish those visual clues for my future readership. The most obvious information I needed to convey about my book was that it was an historical mystery set in the Victorian era. The book was also to be the first in a series of mysteries with the same protagonists, set in San Francisco, emphasizing different female occupations of the era. Ultimately the choices I would make for the title of the book, the name I used as author, and the cover of the book would all be part of providing the visual clues that would “establish my brand.”
 
Title:
I had already decided on Maids of Misfortune as my primary title, (it sounded dramatic, domestic servants play key roles in the mystery, and no other books by that title seemed to exist), but now I had to decide on the subtitle, which I would carry through the subsequent books in the series. I had done enough reading about the increasingly important role the internet plays in modern book marketing to know the title of the book could play a crucial role in determining whether or not a potential reader could find my book. Using “late Nineteenth Century” sounded too academic, and I eliminated the two most obvious alternative terms used for the late Victorian period, “Gaslight” and “Gilded Age” because a google search revealed too many other authors with multiple books had already expropriated those tag lines. So I decided simply to make my subtitle as descriptive as possible, referring to both the time period and the setting, and the sub-title A Victorian San Francisco Mystery has certainly done the trick.
 
If you do a search in Amazon books and use the term “historical mystery,” over 7000 titles pop up, but when you put in “victorian mystery,” the list narrows to 323. In addition, after being out for 6 months, Maids Of Misfortune is second on that list. If you put in another term that is popular for series with female protagonists “women sleuths” you get over 11,000 titles, but when you put in the term “San Francisco mystery” you get 589 titles (who knew there were so many mysteries set in San Francisco!) and I am pleased to say that currently Maids of Misfortune comes up first on that list. My intention is to use this subtitle on the rest of the books in the series, which should cement it as part of my “brand.”
 
Author’s Name:
My birth certificate says Mary Louisa Locke, but growing up I was always called Mary Lou, a hokey 1950s sort of name (for those of you out there of the baby boom generation-all I need to say is Ricky Nelson).  I never wanted to be called Mary (my grandmother’s and oldest Aunt’s names), and Mary Louisa sounded so old-fashioned-so Mary Lou it stayed. When I married in 1972 (not coincidentally the year Ms Magazine started) I decided to keep my own name, so I remained Mary Lou Locke. When I got my doctorate and started teaching, I shifted to Dr. Locke as the way I introduced myself because it was easier than correcting people when they called me either Mrs. or Miss, since nobody seemed willing to use Ms. Besides, as part of a small number of women with doctorates in history, I was proud of the honorific. Meanwhile, my husband and close friends got in the habit of calling me Lou.

 

So, what variation of my name should I use as an author? I find it amusing to realize I never spent any time as a girl wondering what my “married name” would be, but I have spent a good deal of time over the years wondering what my pen name would be. In part this was because when I started writing a novel, I was at the beginning of my academic career, had written several articles as Dr. Mary Lou Locke, and thought that it might be useful to keep my fiction and non-fiction personas separate. But fast forward thirty some years, and I was now at the end of my academic and teaching career, and this motivation was gone. I tried different iterations of my name (including adding my husband’s last name in the mix) but the one that sounded the most Victorian to me was M. Louisa Locke. In fact when I said it out loud, it always reminded me of the name “Louisa May Alcott,” and what could sound more Victorian to potential readers than that?  So M. Louisa Locke became my pen name, and not a few people have mentioned how very “nineteenth century” it sounds.
 
I also decided to use that name as my domain name for the website I established, for all social networks, and my email address. It was a name that didn’t show up when I first searched for it, so I knew that by using it consistently it would also start establishing a high web presence. Now when you google M. Louisa Locke it is the only link you find in the first page of listings.
 
Cover:
There are numerous articles on why the cover design is one of your most important marketing tools, and I decided that this was one area of self-publishing my book that I did not want to do myself. However, one of the benefits of publishing my own book was that I could have full control over the final design of the book cover. After doing some comparative shopping on the web, looking at book covers of historical mysteries, and asking everyone if they knew any professional designers, I came up with someone who met my needs perfectly. I wanted someone who was not only a professional designer, but someone who might actually read and enjoy the kind of light, romantic mystery I had written.
 
Michelle Huffaker, who designed the cover of Maids of Misfortune, was local, so I could actually talk face to face with her and lend her books I had accumulated on Victorian fashion, interior design, architecture; she was both an artist and a professional web-designer, so she knew how to present for the web and prepare images for electronic books and print on demand; and she was a reader of light fiction (and didn’t begin her design until she had read the completed manuscript.)
 
I knew what elements I wanted on the cover. I wanted the background of the cover to represent Victorian wallpaper, which was characterized by linear patterns and I wanted a deep red, which is a signature color of the Victorian period. In the center of the front cover I wanted an illustration of a mistress and servant I had found in a late Victorian magazine.
Michelle Huffaker gave me that and more (and at a very reasonable price).
 

 
If you look closely at the cover you will see that she manipulated the classic Victorian pattern she found for the cover so that the edges were darker than the center, and, as a result, it really looks like the kind of fading you would find in old wallpaper. She researched Victorian fonts, finding fonts that not only stand out, even in small thumbnails pictures, but also evoke the nineteenth century. And she placed the black and white illustration into an ornate frame, again very historically accurate, so that it looks like you are seeing a reflection in a mirror. I have gotten nothing but compliments on the cover, including how professional it looks (a real plus for an independently published book.)
 
I couldn’t be happier, and I feel that the cover design, along with the title, and my name, provide the strong visual clues I was looking for. I don’t think that anyone who sees the book would think they are looking at a contemporary mystery, or a hard-boiled detective novel, so I feel confident I am on my way to establishing my “brand” as the writer of cozy-style, historical mysteries that are set in Victorian San Francisco.
What do you think? Comments are welcome.

 

This is a cross-posting from M. Louisa Locke‘s The Front Parlor.

Ebook Formats and the Unnecessary Fuss

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There’s an awful lot of confusion and kerfuffle going on at the moment around ebooks. It’s not new, as the kerfuffle has been kerfuffling for a while now. And I’m sure it will continue. The primary concern seems to be people panicking about getting their books (be they author, indie author, publisher or whatever) out in as many selling venues as possible.

There’s the iPhone and the iPad, the Kindle and the Kobo, the Sony Reader and a million other options. Then there are all the various ebook formats.

ebook readers Ebook formats and the unnecessary fussWell, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a fuss about nothing. Supply and demand is a great leveller. People that produce a product, the successful people at least, are keen to remove customer confusion. Often they let the customers do it for themselves. That’s happening with the retailers.
At its most basic, an ebook is not very different to a print book. When you produce a dead tree book you have to get all your content correctly laid out in your chosen program.
 
The real pros use InDesign or something like that, but you honestly can produce professional looking books with MS Word and Adobe Acrobat these days. You make sure you set your styles right, you get your layout and font the way you want it, you add in your page numbers and headers by section and so on. I’m not here to explain all that stuff right now – it’s pretty easy to learn.
 
Once you’ve made yourself a text block for a print book, you’ve already got an ebook. You take your print edition text block and you remove all the page numbers, headers, sections and everything else. There are numerous other options open to you, like embedded images and videos, hyperlink references, a hyperlinked Table Of Contents and a variety of font styles, but essentially all you need is the print file with all the page-relevant data removed. Again, there are numerous “How To” files and sites out there to help you with that stuff. [Editor’s note: here’s Publetariat Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton’s free, downloadable pdf guide to DIY publishing for the Kindle] But that’s not really the primary cause of concern. It seems to me that a lot of people are stressed about getting their ebook available on all the popular devices and in all the popular formats.
 
Ladies and gents, don’t stress about it. All those product makers out there would have you believe you need to jump through hoops for them. Not true. Jump through a couple of well chosen hoops and all the rest will fall into place.
Let’s start with the big names and the current poster children: Amazon, Kindle, iPhone and iPad. Very easy.
 
Go to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform or DTP. Here it is. Sign up and follow the instructions to upload your text block. Wait for approval. Now your book is available directly from Amazon wirelessly to anyone with a Kindle reader. And an iPhone or iPad, because those people can get the Kindle app for their device. Bloody gold, these app developers. (If you think of something and the thought, “There should be an app for that!” goes through your head, then there almost certainly is one already. If not, you might have just had a million dollar idea.)
iphone ipad Ebook formats and the unnecessary fuss
 
So you don’t need to be a web developer to make an iPad app of your book. You don’t need to pay other people hundreds or thousands of dollars to do it for you. Sure, it would be great to have an iPad app built specifically for each of your books, but you don’t need them. People will still read your book if you make them aware of it, catch their interest and then direct them to a place to buy it from, be it a standalone app or a file for their Stanza or Kindle app.
 
You don’t want to use Amazon? No problem. I’ve extolled the virtues of Smashwords.com here before. They are a truly great ebook publisher and retailer. You can upload your book to them as a Word document (as long as you follow their Style Guide to the letter, which isn’t hard) and they’ll make your ebook for you in every format you’ll ever need. Including .mobi, which people with Kindles can read. And epub, for the iPhone and iPad. And they’ll distribute out to numerous well respected ebook retailers around the world. It’s bloody child’s play.
 
There are ways to make all kinds of versions for all kinds of readers and have a really swanky looking selection of ebooks. But people that are keen to read your book will read your book. If they have a certain reader and you direct them to the correct file type, that’s it. With Amazon and Smashwords, you’ve got all you need.
 
Of course, if you’re all protective and believe in DRM (Digital Rights Management) then you won’t want to use Smashwords, but you can enable DRM on the Amazon DTP and still have Kindle editions available to all Kindle owners and anyone else with a Kindle app. For nothing. In no time. And you can set your price and make a royalty.
 
See. It’s bloody easy. Chill out.

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

E-Book Formats

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I will be publishing my cold war espionage memior, ROOFMAN: Nail-Banger, Librarian & Spy, as an ebook. It contains graphics and mp3 files.

I am confused as to what formats to use. Is Adobe Acrobat readable across all devices? I don’t much like the idea of submitting my book to the Amazon store where they will format it to be readable on the Kindle, because they will take 65% of the list price ($7.95), plus they’ll have a emailing list of all my buyers.

Can anyone help me, please?

Thank you,

John Pansini

 

 

Bone Spitting: Just a Taste

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This review gave me wood!

convo.us/conversations/5088

"Wow. Reads like Raymond Chandler meets Hunter S. Thompson. Then there is the fundamental irony that the tough, gonzo writing is about…teaching English in a school in China… So of course I want to see what the experience is like. YOur style suggests it isn’t as tame as all that…"

-Douglas Gorney Convo.us

 

Writing Q&A: Finding Time, Finishing Work, Short Story Markets And What To Do After A First Draft

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Here are some questions that have been sent in by readers.

How does one find the time between work, family, and other commitments to write the book one wants to write?
This is one of the most common questions asked, and basically there is only one answer.

There is not enough time to do everything, so what are you going to give up in order to write your book?
I personally went down to working 4 days per week, plus gave up TV ( I do download shows from iTunes but it cuts out watching crap!). I also have very little social life, but am a happy hermit! Here are some more ideas for finding time. Here is a free audio on Beating Procrastination.
 
What is your inspiration that keeps you moving towards finishing your book? I’ve got lots of “chunks” of text that i need to assemble into a coherent title (or series of titles).
The only thing that can keep you moving is wanting to achieve the goal of writing your book. Much of the ‘assembly’ can be boring but you have to push through that. Persistence and discipline have to be the hallmarks of anyone successful at anything. Here is some more help:
I’ve almost finished my 1st draft, what do I do next?
“Writing a book is rewriting”, I think Michael Crichton said that, but many other writers will say the same thing. The first draft is just the very start, but at least it gives you the rough material to work with. From here, you need to think about the following:
  • Rewriting, editing, proof-reading and rewriting cycle – here is a great post on different types of editing from Self Publishing Review. Whether you are going to submit to an agent, or going down the self-publishing route, you need to go through editing and rewriting to make the book as good as it can be. Yes, you will be sick of it, but it will be a better product. I have hired editors before to get a professional viewpoint.
Short Story markets. For question #–I’m a short story writer and would be interested in doing an anthology.

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

9 Ways For Self-Publishers to Get Unstuck

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Publishing a book can take quite a bit of time. Sometimes you finish a manuscript after months or years of work, and you feel like you’re ready to go.

But then you realize you need to hire an editor, and it’s back to “hurry up and wait” while another editorial process takes place.
 
Or your book might be done, but you’re not sure what to do next, so you spend all your time researching. You’ve got 120 blogs on your feed reader, you know the names of all the print on demand companies, but you have no book.
And then sometimes you’ve already finished the manuscript, printed your book, and now you realize you need a plan—or something—to know what to do next.

 
Never fear, there are always a few ways to get off the dime and back on track.
 
So no matter where you are in the process, here are some ideas to help out.
 
 
9 Things You Can Do Right Now to Get Unstuck
  • If you haven’t finished your book
    1. Get some other opinions, circulate parts of the manuscript to friends or sympathetic readers. Whether you agree with their assessment or not, you’ll have a new perspective on your material.
       
    2. Think about hiring an editor to help put your manuscript in order. Editors can be incredibly skillful at helping authors shape their manuscripts. More experienced authors know this and use editors to help their process.
       
    3. Visit writer forums for referrals, advice, community of others in the same situation. Hey, you’re online anyway, join a couple of active writer’s forums and you’ll find a sympathetic community of other writers.
       
  • If your manuscript’s done, but you’re not sure what to do next
    1. Sit down and decide how to self-publish to meet your goals. Will it be private, just circulated to friends and family, or for a fundraiser? On sale? Or will you try to compete actively in the marketplace? Each path has its own requirements that will help orient you.
       
    2. Look into hiring a publishing consultant, a book shepherd or a book designer to help you establish schedules, budgets and priorities. Use their experience to move you to the next step.
       
    3. Go back and make sure you have the infrastructure in place to establish your publishing enterprise. Have you acquired your ISBNs? Filled out directory listings for your publishing company? These details can be overlooked in the beginning.
       
  • If your book’s been published, now what?
    1. If you haven’t done so, register the domain of your book’s name. Get a blog attached to the domain and start writing about the topic of your book. Don’t try to sell the book, just work on finding an audience with common interests.
       
    2. Go over and set up a Facebook Fan page for your book. It only takes a few minutes, and you can let all your friends and followers know about it right away.
       
    3. If you know other people with websites or blogs in your field, offer to write free articles for them. It will introduce you to groups of new readers every time.
There’s No Substitute for a Plan
All of these suggestions will get you moving again, and that’s a good thing. But what self-publishers really need in order to stay on track is a realistic and orderly plan. Your plan should include all three of these phases of publication, finishing your manuscript, planning for publication, and long-term marketing.
 
With a plan in hand, you know where you are, and you know where you have to go. Without a plan it’s just too easy to get bogged down in detail and lose sight of the larger picture.
 
Book publishing can require lots of decisions and lots of different actions over a period of months. Be a smart publisher: get your plan together first.
 
And did you notice what all these actions have in common?
 
Takeaway: When self-publishers plan their book, their publication and their marketing, they rarely get stuck. But when they do, here are some suggestions on how to get unstuck and back on track.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer.

Who do You think is Good?

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Hello, I am Sarie Mackay.  Coming out with my second self-published historical novel very soon.  First one:  Lodestar; new one:  Fair Game.  I’ve been invited by my alma mater to come back and speak on self-publishing.  I’m honored but I have to confess I have not read THAT MANY other self-published authors.  Can anyone out there tell me whom they believe to be some of the more talented self-published authors?   I certainly don’t want to go and blab only about myself.   I suspect whoever is reading this feels the same sense of cause celebre  that I do about working very hard on a creative task for a long time….and I would like to represent all of us. 

Check me out at sariemackay.com.  Thanks.

Writing Grief

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For the past year or two I have been living with two impending deaths. One was natural, merciful and literal. The other was unnatural, tortured and figurative. Both have both come to pass.

I have been alive long enough to know that there is no way to anticipate or speed the grieving process. There is no way to shed grief but to endure it and to respect the truth of it. I am also aware that the trend these days is to encourage people to move on with their lives, or to otherwise ignore or distract themselves from grief — advice that is often proffered by friends and family who do not want to embrace the totality of loss, or the inevitability of mortality, in their own lives.
 
As I have watched myself move through this process in two instances, I have noticed that as a writer I do not have the tools to accurately describe what I am thinking and feeling. Were I authoring these events I would struggle greatly to communicate the totality of what I feel as a character. 
 
The lesson here — the fiction writing lesson — is that this cannot be done. The craft of the writer is as much about reconnecting readers with vistas already observed as it is about describing vistas that have never been seen. (And in this is the difficulty of writing about life for young readers. Because they have so little of life’s experience to draw on, there is little that can be evoked.)
 
If there is a common core to every writer’s work, it is found in the intersection between what the author wants to express and what the author can evoke. This is true of love, of loss, of madness and of resolve. It can only truly be communicated if the reader already speaks the language.
 
I don’t know if I will ever write about my grief. I don’t know if I ever want to, or if in doing so I would have anything more to communicate than adding my voice to the human scream.
 
What I do know is that I know how. As I tread water and look for landmarks by which to orient myself, I find my craft sustaining me in ways I did not anticipate.
 
Writing is inextricably a part of who I am. It has always been my way of seeing and being.
And it is a constant reminder to go to the truth not simply in my work, but in my life. Even if that truth is grief.

 

This is a cross-posting from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.