Cost of the Heart

Tag: Author process

  • Put it together!

    Put it together!

    As I had said in the last post it took about two weeks to do the edits from my editor. She pushed me which I truly appreciated. I felt like my manuscript was worth creating a book with. One reason it took so long was as I would reread my writing and push the scene a little more I would cry, not just tear up but tears streaming down my cheeks; not being able to see the screen crying. I would get up walk a bit around the house till my eyes and emotions cleared up then back at it. By now I had also started my author blog site, this one to be specific. I used the same schedule as I did to write.

    To take breaks between editing I would work on the graphics of my book and the order I wanted the pages to be in. Created my bio for the book as well as the dedications page. Please know I had hoped to have at least my ePub files created to share for reviews and rankings. We were in middle of June and I pushed my original release date from June 21st, my mother’s birthday to a month from that, then ended up pushing it to Aug 1st.

    With the document edited and ready for my typesetter we began to work on it. Again my time line expectations were not realistic. My typesetter even said we will be going back and forth a few times. I said ok and continued to lay out how I wanted the book to look on the interior, the size a 9″X6″ format on cream paper. Interior picture placement and style. I wanted a “Penny Dreadful” style to the art that I submitted to be used in the book. Only the image of Lilith is my original work. The other two image plates are graphically designed from my descriptions and a few rounds of corrections.

    While waiting for the first typeset copy to come back I started writing my blog story “Under a Dark Star” to keep in the practice of writing. It is very easy to get out of the habit of creating stories or posts such as this one. One of my cousins and I were talking and she purchased my book directly from me so she could have it signed. I thanked her and I cried. She aske why would I cry. I told here that it is very humbling to have someone purchase your work. I write and hope that people will like my work. I don’t know, I do test it with friends reading it and thinking about the story if it’s worth telling. There are a lot of stories that don’t even get past my thoughts. Some I really just don’t think are interesting or would be worth someone’s time to read.

    As I write I become invested in my characters and what I am going to do to them. I cry, laugh, and such as I write their tales. I know what I am going to do to them, my stories are not rainbows and unicorns, it is science fantasy but tragic and bittersweet. My stories generally center around love and the heart regardless if that was my intent at the start of the story creation process. My work is pulp fiction, speculative, science fantasy, not something that will change society or predicts any great future-scapes to come true. Just plain old sci-fi/f tragic love stories with a dark “Night Gallery” type of twist. I worked through this to help refine my target genre and marketing/ad copy with use of AI. A stack I had put together to help me with marketing and creating images for Under a Dark Star blog poems.

    My files came back. I went through them with a pdf reader then printed them out to see how it laid out. I noticed that most of my 3 line breaks to indicate time passage or point of view change were missing. This will break a short story especially mine that may move hours to years and sometimes eons in the story timeline. This took was unreal in the back and forth it took to get the files. The pdf files were finally set but the ePub files were still missing not just some but ALL the 3 line spaces throughout all three stories. It took a week to have a picture corrected. My Aug 1st release date was approaching and nothing was being corrected. I told my typesetter thankyou, you have been paid, I will take these files and work with them.

    I found another typesetter to get the files corrected with all my line edits from the author copy I had printed on Amazon KDP. That was all I needed but in my panic I was over sold on what I wanted in services and mislead on marketing services. It cost me another $800.00 to have the files I needed to go to print and Kindle. Looking back now and what I have built with my AI stack I will probably be able to do my own typesetting for my next book due out late Winter.

    At this point in the story I now have my files to submit to KDP, booksy.by, and Ingram/Spark for publishing.

    Next week I will talk about tools and being lost in where to go now.

    -d²

  • Writing a book for the first time

    Writing a book for the first time

    Writing a book and getting out to the public was quite an experience and learning opportunities abound. I have been asked a few times about how long it took to get the book written as well as what was my writing process and insperations.

    First thing in the process was ideas for stories, my book is a themed set of short stories. Then making the commitment to write. No matter what get up in the morning, do morning chores, get coffee and write. Now I may write in a note book, in my reMarkable, or on my PC. Write and write until you can’t. That is ok, get up and finish household chores, go shopping, read, anything to revive.

    I did this every morning, getting up at 7.30A. Doing my morning ritual and writing. My first story took two weeks doing this. I was happy with it, made some edits over the next week and had friends read it to give me feedback. I also will sometimes sketch drawings of main characters or locations. I include some of them in my books as the opening page for a short story.

    During the writings of the main part of the book I am also working on the opening poem. Once satisfied with “Demon Tears” I moved on to writing the next story. The next story “Statue of Love” only took three days to write the raw story. The first day was my usual get up and write. I wrote a bit then went out and ended up at my friends house for the evening. Coming back home I was inspired. I sat in front of the PC and started banging on the keyboard, I wrote and would cry. I would get up and pace the length of the house. Coming back to write more. I did this all night to the dawn of the new day. At that time I all I needed was to write the ending I had already seen. Exhausted I climbed into bed and slept most of the day. I got up and finished the story that evening and the following day.

    “Heart of the Dead” took much longer. The story took almost a month to write and have my friends read it. Once I had all three of the main stories written and edited by me; now I started putting the book together, writing the three 6 line stories to introduce the main set of stories. Once done, another week, I go through the set of stories, editing, and making sure that they hang together in this collection.

    At this point I needed to have the document gone through and professionally edited. I looked on line and found Readsy.com where I could find the professionals I needed. I went through the listed professional editors finding a group in my genre I sent out requests for bids with a sample and what I needed. I got back a few rejections and two bids. I hired one of them and plan to use her again on this current book I am putting together.

    Now while my manuscript is with my editor I begin to look for a typesetter and graphic designer for book cover. Once I found my designer we began to work together off of a brief I sent him. After a few rounds of examples and finetuning color pallets I have a draft to use on my website to start promotion. It took about a month to get the book cover finished and ready to use for production.

    Now with the cover finished I can move on to the typesetting and internal images to open each main story. Not having the edited copy back yet I focus on the three images for the book. This I work with my graphic designer to take my drawing and create the graphic plates for the book. This took a bit to do and some back and forth.

    During the back and forth of the image creation I received my edited copy back. Here I go through the edits that have been made and approve them or change the wording to what I want. Now also at this time I have blocks where my editor would tell me “show don’t tell.” She pushed me and my manuscript is better for it. With her guidance on this book, my next set of stories will be a bit longer and will have four stories in “Cost of the Heart; Vol II Ghosts from the Machine” This process I thought would be a few days turned into two weeks.

    I am roughly two months into the book now. I am ready to start the process of the book layout and typesetting.

    I will post about that process as it took the longest and was the most frustrating. It also ended up adding another $800.00 to my cost already of just under $3K, with my book awareness ad campaign this puts my cost now at a little over $4K. More on this next post. See you Thursday.