Cover for Chameleon in a Mirror, and various other updates

Some time ago, I promised to post a revised version of the cover for Chameleon in a Mirror to my blog, and I’ve finally gotten around to it:

Please let me know what you think!

Since I got Island of Glass off to my niece, I’ve been working on A Wasted Land, the next novel in The Pendragon Chronicles, trying to sort through what I already have and figure out what is usable and what has to go to the trash bin. That means, I don’t have any word count to report, since I’ve been reading, analyzing, editing.

That’s ok. In the last year or so, I’ve been working on training myself to accept my writing progress, even if it doesn’t include words created.

Wishing everyone a great week!

Using Pinterest for research bookmarks, and an update

First off, I have to thank Emily Witt for a recent post of hers which I read. It was primarily about music for characters, but she also went into using Pinterest for images for book projects. I’ve been hearing for a long time about how Pinterest is yet another great social media site where authors can reach out to their readers. All I could think was, “Oh, no, another social media site where I’ll be expected to spend way too much time reaching out to my readers.” AKA, another time sink.

I’m pretty good these days about not wasting too much time with social media (maybe too good), but when I saw the images Emily had collected for her WIPs, a light went off in my head. I collect oodles and oodles of bookmarks for the research I do on my books and stories, which then get buried in oodles and oodles of other bookmarks in a big long list of URLs and page names. So for the sake of experiment, while I was working on the last revision pass for Island of Glass, every time there was something I wanted to look up on the internet, I would pin an image to my board for the project. I haven’t done much searching for images that fit my characters yet, like Emily suggested, but I can see where Pinterest would also be very good for that as well. Right now, I’m just thrilled with the visuals for my research links.

I finished another revision pass of Island of Glass yesterday and sent it off to my niece today. For my next project, I’m returning to Book III of The Pendragon Chronicles, A Wasted Land. After printing out the jumble of scenes and notes I wrote in March, I made a Pinterest Board for that project as well and started adding maps and images. I love having all those images in one place! If anyone had told me a week ago that I would become an enthusiastic Pinterest user, I would have thought they were crazy.

And the way I’m using it now, it isn’t really much of a time sink at all. If I’m researching something anyway, and the article I’m reading has a cool photo or map, I just add it to the appropriate board.

Besides returning to A Wasted Land, I will probably also soon be tackling another publication project of my collaborations with Jay Lake, if I could only decide which! I’m also considering taking an incident from Shadow of Stone, the story of Gawain and Ragnell, and publishing it as a short story, making it permanently free as a kind of advertisement for the novels of the Pendragon Chronicles. I’m a bit worried that it might piss off readers who don’t read the description (I certainly intend to make it very clear that this is NOT new material). But I originally wrote that episode thinking I could try to publish it as a short story in traditional markets to drum up interest for the books. What do you guys think? Would that be ok? Or should I just finally write another Arthurian short story for the same purpose?

Publishing to multiple stores through Draft2Digital: Almost All the Way Home From the Stars

A while back, I promised to blog about the process of formatting a book for all sales channels offered by Draft2Digital, including CreateSpace. Before I published this collection of stories I wrote with Jay Lake, Almost All the Way Home From the Stars, I only used D2D for B&N, Kobo, and the Apple bookstore. For that, I could upload the EPUB file that I compiled with Scrivener. For this collection, however, I also wanted hard copy, and in order to generate the PDF for CreateSpace, D2D requires a DOC file.

So I made a clean doc file of the book, (I talk more about that here), uploaded it to D2D, and waited to see what would happen.

I had a couple of problems with the upload that writers who use the service in the future will not have, at least according to a recent email I received listing some of the improvements they’ve made. I knew, for example, that the generation procedures used by Draft2Digital at the time of my upload stripped away all the scene break symbols, like “#” or “* * *”. On the Kindle Boards, I’d read the recommendation to use a graphic to indicate scene breaks in order to get around that “feature”. So I found a dingbat I thought fit in a science fiction book and replaced all the scene breaks with that.

Unfortunately, the D2D generators didn’t understand it, it defaulted to something else, and I ended up with a random letter between scenes.

Next try, I found a symbol native to Word in the hopes that it would stick, a simple diamond, and replaced all the scene breaks in my DOC file with that. That worked for the ebook venues, and I approved the ebook for publication.

Next step, CreateSpace. I wasn’t completely happy with the PDF that was to be the basis for the print copy, for several reason. The most important was that it didn’t have a Table of Contents. That’s perfectly fine for a novel, but a short story collection really needs a TOC. So the wonderful Draft2Digital folks decided to use our book to test a new and improved PDF generation.

Now, after a lot of PDFs sent by D2D support and suggestions for improvement made by me, not only does the print version of Almost All the Way Home have a TOC, it also has running headers. You can take a look at how it turned out here.

Once I approved the PDF, I had to make the wraparound cover for the paperback. This is what it looks like:

The disadvantage of publishing to CreateSpace through D2D, I discovered, is that I don’t get a discount as an author, boo hoo. But now that it’s live, I think I’ll manage to buy myself a copy anyway. (If you’re interested in other stores carrying the ebook, I listed them here.)

As to writing, rather than formatting and publishing, I finished the new version of Island of Glass last week. It is now 23,000 words, 7,000 words more than the last incarnation. Most of that is through adding Chiara’s step-sister Minerva as foil for the protagonist, as well as more detail where I had skipped it. Right now, I’m going through a printed copy before sending it to my niece, who will be my first reader.

Anyway, never a dull moment. And now, the winter that never wanted to end is finally showing signs of ending, and we have SO much to catch up on in the garden! That has taken a lot of my free time the last few days, I have to admit.

Wishing everyone a great week and much success with whatever you undertake!

The recent Amazon category revolution, and what it means for you

As many writers have noticed by now, this month Amazon has been playing merry with its browse categories, deleting a couple, and adding a whole lot more. In the long run, this might well be good for writers, giving us more chances for exposure, but what a lot of us saw was an immediate and dramatic decline in sales. I think this mostly applies to those who had books in categories that were deleted, or whose books were reassigned to new categories, not necessarily the best or most appropriate. For example, at least one of my novels was being listed for a while under the category nonfiction/history!

If this kind of mix-up has happened to you, you might want to try changing your categories.

The new categories that Amazon assigned to books seem to be based on the keywords you enter when you publish on KDP. India Drummond has already written an excellent article about how to get your categories reassigned by changing your keywords, which you can read here. Another possibility is to contact Amazon directly with the information on which new categories you would like your book to be listed in. I have a longer post about doing this here, but if all you want is the direct link, that’s here.

As I mentioned in the older post linked to above, if your books aren’t exactly in the dozen sales a day plus realm, it makes sense to get them into categories with less competition. Check out this recent screenshot with the new fantasy categories:

See how many books are in “Paranormal & Urban”? And how many are in “Dark Fantasy”? If you’re not one of those kinds of writers capable of getting on top 100 lists against tens of thousands of other books, you might want to try and get your books into some of those smaller categories — assuming they fit, of course. Despite the lack of competition, I don’t think the “TV, Movie, Video Game Adaptations” would prove very effective for my Pendragon Chronicles novels.

Recently, a number of writers who have used the direct approach to KDP support have had problems with responses insisting they should change their categories through their Bookshelf — even when the category they want to be included in isn’t available through the Bookshelf. So these days when I request a category change directly, I always include the following sentence:

“These categories are not categories I can choose through my KDP bookshelf.”

One more thing to note, however (learn from my mistakes): it is not wise to try to contact Amazon directly regarding category changes for a lot of books at once. A number of my books were affected by the recent category changes, and trying to be efficient, I sent four posts to Amazon in one day. (For all of the books, I wanted at least one category that couldn’t be chosen through the KDP Dashboard.)

While writing a blog post a few days later, I noticed that these were the categories for Yseult, a historical fantasy set in the fifth century and based on the legend of Tristan and Isolde:

#17 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Arthurian
#56 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Science Fiction > Space Exploration
#60 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Science Fiction > First Contact

Needless to say, I did not request to have Yseult changed to “First Contact” — that was for Looking Through Lace. But I sent the requests on the same day, and Amazon support lumped them all together under one author, and I ended up with two epic historical fantasies listed in SF categories. Sigh.

I have since tried to correct the situation, and while I did get Yseult and Shadow of Stone into more appropriate categories, they are also still being listed in the science fiction categories I intended for Looking Through Lace and Beyond the Waters of the World. Here’s the current ranking for Yseult, for example:

#2 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Arthurian
#15 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Fantasy > Arthurian
#31 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Science Fiction > First Contact

Yes, it is back in Arthurian now, but it is still listed under First Contact. While on one level that might fit thematically, since Yseult is forced to move to a completely foreign culture, the novel is still not exactly science fiction.

So if, like me, you write in multiple genres or even sub-genres, don’t try try to change too many books in different categories in one day by contacting KDP directly. That is apparently too taxing for the Amazon support folks.

I HAS HARD COPY! *g* Yseult published to CreateSpace

After weeks of work, and ten days waiting for the proof, Yseult arrived in Germany today — and it looks gorgeous! See for yourself:

Ok, that last is a bit dusty, I admit.

Right now, I’m happy I went ahead and took so much time to get this book right, and that I spent the money on one of Joel Friedlander’s templates for the interior. It was still a heck of a lot of work, but here’s what it looks like:

I’m ridiculously proud of myself. *g* So off I went to CreateSpace to approve the proof. Yseult should be available on Amazon in 5-7 days. (As I mentioned in a previous post, I opted out of Expanded Distribution because it would have put the minimum price of Yseult at over $20!)

Just for fun, I also took a pic of all the traditional publications of Yseult, the translations into German, Dutch and Italian. I really think the do-it-yourself version is quite decent in comparison!

Now that I know all the work paid off, I will post at length about the process, seeing as (as far as I’m concerned) it was a success. But since this is primarily an update post, I’ll leave it at the pretty pictures for now.

The beginning of this week, I got a really bad cold or really bad allergies (this time of year, I can’t always tell which), and that has slowed my progress on Island of Glass somewhat. I feel more like a person again today, but the creeping crud is still giving me some problems. I’m up to chapter six on the revisions now. Adding a foil for Chiara means a lot more new writing than just a read-through, so it’s taking longer than an editing pass would. But I think this will make the book a lot stronger.

And for those who don’t yet have it, Shadow of Stone is FREE through Friday, May 31. Enjoy!

Getting back to the writing: Revisions on Island of Glass

Not a lot of progress on Island of Glass to report for the week, since revisions are hard to quantify. What I can say is that I’m in the middle of chapter four now (of ten), and during this rewrite, I’ve added an additional character as a foil for Chiara. That has resulted in about another 2500 words to Island of Glass, which is now coming in at just under 20,000 words.

It might not be a lot of words for the week, but I don’t think it’s smart to count words while revising. I’m just mentioning them for the record. Sometimes, the best revision is measured in words cut. If memory serves, when I was working on the final draft of Shadow of Stone, I cut at least 10,000 words — but that, admittedly, from an initial manuscript of about 190,000 words. And the cuts happened over a revision lasting weeks. Which means my “progress” during the revision stage was about -2000 words a week. I dare someone to top that! *g*

Before I close, just another reminder to check out the Epic Fantasy Ebook Sale Party!

I wish everyone a wonderful week.

Epic Fantasy Ebook Sale Party!

Just yesterday, I found out about a group promo for epic fantasy, being organized by Vera Nazarian on the Kindle Boards. It started today, but Vera was still accepting participants, so I decided to jump right in. If Yseult and Shadow of Stone aren’t epic fantasy, both coming in at close to 200,000 words, I don’t know what is! I have a freebie scheduled this week for Shadow of Stone, so that wouldn’t qualify — the promo is for sale books between 99c and 2.99. So I reduced the price of Yseult to 2.99 for the rest of this week. Nice to get involved in a promo again where I don’t have to do the lion’s share of the work.

Anyway, here are some of the books on sale during the Epic Fantasy Party:

Vera Nazarian, Lords of Rainbow, on sale for 1.99

Elizabeth Baxter, Everwinter (The Wrath of the Northmen), on sale for 99c

Nicholas Andrews, The Adventure Tournament (The Adventurers), on sale for 2.99

Enjoy!