Next Project

I have been considering what I should work on writing now that Infused has been published. Before I went to the seminars by local authors (and came away depressed as described in my earlier posting) I had started writing another book. This other book is a fantasy novel with a twist, and I had written the first seven chapters. It has also been suggested by a couple of people that I write a sequel to Infused.

I have the basic story line figured out for an Infused sequel, but I don't know if it would be better to work on that, or on the more mainstream type of fantasy story that I had started. I just can't decide if it would be better to work on extending Infused with a sequel (since it is an unusual type of story) or starting an entirely different series.

If I go with the new fantasy book, one thing that I would need to work on is battle strategies for a small group of people to be able to defeat a larger numbers of enemies (which I have no knowledge of) while taking into account the special abilities that the characters have. The Infused sequel would be about Geoff learning about relationships and growing into a more complete person on a different world (as he plays god).

After Infused was Published

Once Infused was available for sale, my tasks were to make sure that people knew it was available and to get as many reviews posted as I could. I posted information about my book and put links to it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble on Facebook to let my friends know about it. I also put up a post asking those friends that had read it to post reviews. I later followed up with an e-mail out to the friends that had read it asking them to put up a review.

Since the Amazon author page was setup to be able to read a feed from a blog, I started writing this blog hoping that it would provide some more insight into myself and the book for anyone that happened across the listing. I don’t know how many people have read the entries here, but it has at least provided me with a chance to get some thoughts and experiences documented.

After a couple of weeks, I only had one review that had been posted; it was from my best friend Monique. I then posted another request to my friends on Facebook – this time saying that they can just put a comment instead of a review if they like. After this request (and mentioning a couple of friends in my blog posts), I ended up with a couple more review postings. I was a bit surprised that it was so difficult to get people to post reviews, especially since a number of my friends are theatre people and are pretty outgoing and expressive.

With no advertising helping to get visibility for my book, it’s up to me and word of mouth for the most part. However, mentioning it to people at my day job and bringing it up in conversations at parties can only get me so far.

In an attempt to make more people aware of my book, I started a post on my high school’s FaceBook page asking for information about all the different books that had been written by alumni (I knew of a couple other than mine). Information was posted about several other alumni authors, and a representative from the school said that they were working on setting up an alumni author shelf in the school library; it would be cool to have my book available at my alma mater.

I’ve given a few paperback copies of my book to friends, and I’ve joked about leaving some copies at various places in hopes that people would pick them up and read them, but really, I’m just not sure how to get more people interested in reading Infused.

Self Publishing

About a year and a half after I finished writing Infused, I finally decided to self publish it. My earlier blog posts shed light on some of the reasons that I waited so long, but in the beginning, I hesitated because I had read that agents would not work with people that had self published (either because the writer had gone outside the system, or because they would have concerns about rights to characters and stories).

I finally got to the point where I just wanted to complete the process of producing a book. So, after I spent time finishing up going through the editing changes that Joyce had suggested, I looked into what I needed to do to be able to get a printed version of my book created.

My son had been told that Create Space was a good avenue to get a book published in his teen writing group, so I looked into that site. I assumed that it must be reasonably priced if teen writers were being guided to it. There didn’t appear to be much information on the site itself about the costs involved, but there was an ‘Explore paid services’ button on the front page. I knew that they would offer editing and design services to make extra money, but I was not planning on spending anything on those offerings. So I clicked on the ‘Start a title for free’ button to see what would be involved. I had to create an account and was then given options on the kind of paperback book that I wanted to produce. I was given options of different sizes, black and white or color, and type of paper. After that was decided, I was given the chance to download a template for the interior of the book.

I had thought about wanting to have the book published in a 5 inch by 8 inch format before I went to the site, so I had formatted a copy of the novel in a Word document to be that size. I had even made a guess at the margin settings that would be needed – the main ones pertaining to the gutter settings. The gutter is the part of the paper that is in the middle (where the left and right pages come together). In a newspaper, the gutter is fairly small, but in a bound book, there is a wide area of the paper that you cannot print on (because it will be in the binding). To have a book formatted correctly to avoid printing in this binding the pages have to be setup with larger margins on the left side on the odd pages, and a larger margin on the right side of the even pages. Once I had the template Word file from Create Space on my computer, I modified the copy of my novel in the 5x8 format so that it had the same margins. I didn’t want to go through the process of copying pieces out of my file into the template file, so the formatting of titles and page numbers are not what was provided in the template. I then uploaded the interior of the book and it was presented on the screen in a realistic view of how it would look in a printed book – the shading of the pages and the flipping of the pages caused excitement to build in me.

Next, was the cover design. The site offered a number of pre-defined templates where you can put in text and upload a few pictures, but they were very rigid and they did not offer one that could handle a cover made up of just an image (which was my plan since I had created a cover image including the title a while back). So I went for the other option which was to download a template graphic file would have an outline of the back, front and binding edge that was the correct size for the number of pages of the book (and the type of paper I had selected).

Once I had the cover template, I worked to fit my image to it. I found that the picture I had created was more square than was needed, and started to trim off the sides to fit, but then I realized that I had enough extra width to be able to also wrap around and cover the binding. I really liked the way that it came out. I then had to add the title and my name to the edge of the image so that they would appear on the binding. I didn’t get them perfectly lined up, but by this point I was raring to get it submitted and let it go without inspecting it carefully.

For the back of the book, they suggested that I put an overview of the story and a picture of myself and information about me as the author. I quickly typed up an overview and put that on the back, but I knew that this information would be a lot more important if the book would be available in retail stores (where people would pick it up and consider purchasing it) than when the book is only offered on-line, so I didn’t put a great deal of effort into it. Unfortunately there is a typo that I didn’t notice at the time that got through. I didn’t have a professionally looking photo of myself and I did not have any other writing credits, so I didn’t put any author information on the back.

Once I had the cover finished, I uploaded it. The next day I was sent an e-mail that the book was ready to be proofed. I had the option of checking it completely on line or having a copy sent to me. I chose to purchase a copy and have it sent to me. It arrived a couple of days later. It felt great to have a real book in my hands that I had created. The cover looked great and I felt a sense of accomplishment. I did however notice a few typos right away in the first chapter. When I had started verifying the editing changes many months earlier, my heart wasn’t in it (because of the depressing talks by local authors addressed in an earlier blog post), so I had not done a good job of checking the edits. I went back and fixed the issues in the first four chapters and then resubmitted the interior file.

I chose to proof these changes on-line (since the exterior was not changing) and (while I was on the phone chatting with my best friend Monique) I finished up the paperwork (such as setting prices) to have the book made available. To get to this point, the only money I had spent at Create Space was the cost to have the proof copy printed and shipped to me – I was surprised that there were no other costs. I then used a Kindle tool to make a version for that ebook reader from the ePub that I had created earlier (after copying over the editing changes) and signed up on Amazon directly to have that made available on Amazon. I later discovered that I should have setup the Kindle version through Create Space because otherwise the Amazon store doesn’t realize that the Kindle and print versions are the same story.  I also put the ePub up on Barnes and Noble’s site.

The next morning I found out that the Kindle version was available. Minutes later, Gary, who was managing a project that I was working on at my day job, bought a copy for his iPhone after I told him that it was available. The next day, when the printed version was made available, the first person to order it was Monique. It was wonderful to have friends support me in this endeavor. 

Final Book Cover

While I was putting off working on the final editing of Infused, I decided to give the cover design another go.

After looking around the web for space pictures, I quickly found that NASA provides many photos that can be used by the public and business sector without any fees. The only stipulation is that if the photos are used for commercial purposes, a disclaimer should be given stating that NASA does not endorse the product.

After looking around the NASA site for a while, I found a nice moonscape picture that didn’t look at blurry as those from the 1960’s, a star field shot, and a picture of Earth with a hurricane off the North Carolina coast. The Hurricane was a nice touch because in the story Geoff goes to the moon after seeing a satellite picture of a similar hurricane on the news.

I initially tried to make the cover picture more proportionally correct – I made the Earth fairly small. I started with the star field as a background and then placed the moonscape at the bottom (of course). Next I placed the smallish Earth near the top. I had not pursued getting a photo of anyone else, so I used the picture of myself that I had used in my earlier attempt, and placed it so that it looked like I was standing on the moon.  Next, I Put the title “Infused” in red letters in between the picture of me and the Earth.

Unfortunately there were a couple of issues with this attempt. My dark hair seemed to dissolve into the star field and several people that saw it thought that it wasn’t very menacing looking with the Earth being so small and far away. Also, I realized that I once again forgot to stretch out the picture of myself to match Geoff’s height.

For the next attempt, I backed up a few steps in putting the images together and moved the Earth into the center of the image and made it much larger. This made it so that my hair was clearly visible against the lighter colors of the Earth (after I stretched the picture of myself the correct amount to make me appear to be 6’ 3”). I then put the title above the Earth.

I felt that the resulting combination of the images turned out quite well, although there are a few issues. The light on the Earth and the Moon are coming from the right side, whereas the light on me was from the left – it’s not a big deal, but it is a bit off if you look at it too closely. The other issues are mainly with scale. I’m certain that the part of the moon in the picture is huge compared to the size of a human, and of course the Earth is way too large compared to the picture of me. But, overall I think it is a pleasing picture and I think that it ended up looking great on the printed version of Infused.

Final Editing

Joyce, a friend that went to my high school, edits documents at her work and offered to edit Infused. I gladly accepted her offer since I knew that I was not a master of punctuation – I like to use hyphens, parentheses and ellipsis quite a bit. After my experience with the writing seminars, I was not in a rush to do anything more with my book, but I certainly was not going to turn down an offer by someone to help.

Since it was a volunteer job, and Joyce had a lot of things going on in her life, it took her a number of months to edit the book. I think that it was a bigger project than she had expected (it is after all about 90,000 words long) – she had read the book beforehand, but since she was conforming to the formatting commonly used for sci-fi/fantasy, she ended up having to make a great deal of changes. Many of the changes were swapping  out my medium sized hyphens to larger hyphens and removing the spaces before and after them, and putting spaces between the periods in the ellipsis, but there were many more changes too of course.

After I received the results of the editing, I let them sit for a couple of more months because I was still very pessimistic from listening to other authors. Then I finally started to slowly work through the changes.

I had sent Joyce a Word document with the novel in it and she returned that file with all of the proposed changes marked in it. Word has a nice feature that lets me accept or reject each change. Most of the punctuation changes I accepted easily (although I left some of the parenthesis as I felt that they worked better than the alternative is several places).

There were also a number of places that she pointed out awkward phrasing and performed some word-smithing. These I didn’t accept en masse. I agreed with the fact that the original wording in most of these places could use improvement, but I very often did not agree with the suggested changes. A few times I felt that the proposed change did not sound like something that I would write, so I crafted my own replacement so that the change would not stick out because it didn’t flow with the rest of the writing. Other times, the suggested changes were actually changing what was being said. This surprised me a bit until I thought about the fact that she was editing sentence by sentence, she was not intimately familiar with the story. An example of this would be where I have a character use a word that does not exist, and then a couple of sentences later I make a remark about how he was able to get away with using the word without anyone noticing. However, since Joyce was only looking at the individual sentences, she simply replaced the made up word with a real word.

I was very glad that Joyce had identified the locations of the awkward sentences, but I felt the need to make the changes with my own style of writing. Editing never ends – I’ve been informed of a few errors since the book was published. Don’t blame Joyce for letting any slip by though – I made changes that she never saw, and it can sometimes be difficult to tell exactly what the corrected version of the text will be when viewing it in Word with changes marked. After this experience I won’t be as annoyed when I find a mistake in a book that I am reading.

I have heard tales of authors rearranging large portions of their books, or of them re-writing it over several times. I did not do this. My editing changes were either grammar related, or to add a little more detail. The story was told (for the most part) in a very logical flow and I can’t think of any re-arranging that I would be happy with making.

Going to Writing Seminars

After finishing my book and sending out a few letters to agents, I went to a few talks / seminars given by local writers to try and find out more about the business.

The first one that I went to was at a local book store and was about how to make money writing books. The author had a number of books and eBooks available, but he was basically telling us that he made almost all of his money by having Google ads on his web site about how to get published. The only pieces of useful information that I got from him concerning being an author was that to have people buy your book online, you needed around fifteen reviews, and that he found the best price to sell an eBook at was $3.99.

The next one that I went to was part of a writing series hosted at our library. We performed a couple of writing exercises, but there was very little instruction given and even less about what to make of what you had done. The author had been writing for years, but caught me completely by surprise when she told us that she had recently learned in a seminar that she had attended that antagonists in book often think that they are the good guys. I couldn’t believe that she could be a writer and had not realized that. The next piece of information that she provided was that she drove a broken down car and was not making much money as a writer.

At the third talk that I went to, the writing exercises were a little better, and the author told us that in addition to writing herself, she ran a number of writing workshops, but she even with those, was not making much money. She also talked about how difficult it was to get more than just a few people to buy your book, even if you have and agent and a publisher.

The last author that I heard speak was the most successful. He had an agent, had a publisher that produced his series of sci-fi books, and he sold thousands of copies of his books. But, writing was just a hobby (albeit a very large part of his life type of hobby). He made sure that we knew that only a few people actually make any real money as authors – he relied on his IT job to pay his bills. He told the crowd to write if it was a passion, if not, just give it up, because they were just going to get disappointment in return for their hard work. As a side note, when I talked to him after the session, he was surprised that I had finished writing my book – few of the people that attend his writing seminars actually get that far.

So, after listening to all of these authors, I was pretty disheartened. There was no chance of making any money, and there was very little chance that more than a few people would ever buy my book (and those probably limited to my friends). Realistically, I knew that very few people actually are successful in the entertainment industry, but it was depressing to hear it over and over again. So, I walked away from my finished novel for quite a while…

Test Reader’s Opinions of Infused

Over the span of a year, I gave about twenty-five people copies of Infused (either copies that I had printed at home, in a PDF, or in an ePub file) before it was published. Out of those people, fifteen of them read it and I received a very interesting range of feedback.

A few of the responses were not a great deal of help to me as they were basically just, “It was good.” But I did appreciate them reading it and liking it. I had one friend who was an English major that had started taking notes on my grammar issues (before the final editing was done), but started enjoying the story so much that he didn’t want to be distracted by the note taking, so he stopped – that was a nice compliment.

It was very interesting to hear the different opinions. Infused is not a normal hero story, I strove to make Geoff’s actions realistic, so there was no built in way that the reader was expected to feel. If a social outcast that felt powerless to react to the world was suddenly given immense power, I believe that he would most likely abuse that power in some ways. Luckily, Geoff is hopeful and really does want to do good in the world. But of course, not everyone’s idea of what is good is the same.

Some of the test reader’s opinions turned against Geoff early on, while some waited until later in the story, and others were still rooting for him through the end. However, everyone loved Kevin, well, almost everyone; one person didn’t like him.

Some of the other things that I heard was that it was “more of a story for guys”, that there was too much sex in the book, that the writing was very easy to read, that I should have used more elaborate wording, that the story really makes you think, that the ending is poignant, and that the ending is “like you got tired of writing”.

The interesting thing was that all of the criticisms that I heard were countered by other readers. This story really is a different experience for each person that reads it because of how they interpret it is based on their own beliefs and values.