Writing and Character Names

I am making headway on the sequel to Infused, I've written about 7,500 words now.

One of the things that authors have to deal with when writing any story is the character names.

When writing Infused, I only had a few of the names selected before I started writing, the rest I just came up with as they were needed. In the fantasy novel that I was writing last year (and is currently on hold), I researched medieval English names and created a list of names to use before I started writing. I also spent time coming up with appropriate town names in for that story.

In this story I had to make a different kind of decision about the names as I started writing. Although Geoff understands any language, the story itself is actually written in English, so, the question was what to do about proper names for people on another planet. I could have decided to "translate" the names to something that Geoff would have been used to, but it would have felt odd to introduce an alien named Betty or something similar. I instead decided to have the names (for the most part) be completely made up but without making them difficult to say.

I know that if I am reading a book and a character is given a unique, hard to pronounce name, I tend to make up a short substitute for it and automatically swap the name out as I read. This has caused some confusion when talking with someone else about a book because they would refer to one of the characters that has a twelve character long name by that name, and I would not have a clue who they were referring to (because I thought of that character as Matt).

So, you can expect my aliens' names to be short and pronounceable.

Writing Again

After I made the tweaks to the printed version of Infused recently I think that I finally felt that I was finished with that book. It's been quite a while since I have written anything, but in the last week I started working on the sequel to Infused. I've written a little over 3,000 words so far, and I feel that it is going pretty well. I have the basic story mapped out (which is quite a bit more than I had for the first book when I started writing it since I really only knew the beginning and the end). For comparison, Infused is about 90,000 words long.

Hopefully I will be able to maintain writing at a good pace. My plan is that if I get stuck or just feel that I need to think a section through more before continuing that I will switch to writing on a fantasy novel that I started before Infused was published. After all, I do have over 16,000 words already written on that one.

I don't tend to follow the method of "just getting it on paper". With that method, writers tend to just get the story written down without really paying close attention to grammar or sentence structure or paying attention to details in general. To me, that seems like writing a very detailed outline because you really have to go back and re-write the entire thing again at least once (and probably multiple times). I tend to try and get very close to the final product on the first pass. I will go back and fix grammar some (and punctuation quite a bit) and tweak sentences a bit (usually replacing words that have been used too often), but I don't go back and restructure or re-write sections. This of course means that I am not the fastest writer out there, but it also means that there should be less effort in the editing process later on.

Now that I have gone through the process to publish Infused in paperback and have made it available in the three major ebook markets, hopefully the post writing process in general will be much shorter the next time. That is if I can figure out what the cover art should be and I can figure out how to make that happen of course.

Print Version of Infused Updated

Since it was originally published, I have found (or been told about) a few typos and grammar errors in Infused. Recently, when I converted the novel over to iBooks on a Mac, the document editor on that system pointed out a few more issues to consider (although not all of the things that it pointed out were actually incorrect). So, with the accumulation of a number of minor tweaks, I decided that it would be a good time to update the print version of the book.

With CreateSpace, when you update a book, it becomes unavailable for purchase until the process has been completed and approved. So, the print version of Infused has been unavailable for the past few days. Luckily I live one state over from one of their printing shops, so the proof of the book only took a couple of days to get here. I found a minor formatting issue and resubmitted the change online, but it will not require me to have another proof shipped to me since it is in the interior of the book - those type of changes can be proofed very well online. I have approved the new changes and am now waiting for their systems to verify that everything is in order. So, it will hopefully be available for purchase again tomorrow at some point.

During my rush to finally get Infused published last year I found that I had not put any thought into the design of the back cover of the book. What I ended up doing was putting together a quick introduction to the story using a graphics program to produce the text. This meant that there was no spelling or grammar checker, so, right near the beginning of the text there was a typo. I really wanted to fix that with this edition, so since I was modifying the cover anyway, I decided to add a picture of the author to the back cover as well. Although I love the way that the front and spine of the book turned out, the back is still pretty bland - but at least people get to see my (somewhat) smiling face now.

Infused Available on iTunes

The iPad version of Infused is now available. I used the iBooks Author tool from Apple to create the iBook version of the novel. It took this long for me create this new version simply because I did not have access to a Mac. Last week I bought a Mac Mini to be able to format books and to play around with writing iOS applications.

The iBooks version of Infused has the added feature of titles for each chapter, a bit fancier page layout, and a few minor edits.

After getting the iBooks Author tool installed, it just took a few hours to import the text from the original Word document and then go through it with the built in proofreader and spell checker to look for things that should be touched up. Once I was ready to publish the book I found that I needed to register with iTunes. It took a few days for my account to be setup. Then after installing an additional piece of software (and having to guess how to fill out several pages of forms) I uploaded my book to Apple. Next came the review process by Apple. I checked several times the next day to see if it was available in iTunes, and it appeared about a day after I had uploaded it.

The iPad version of Infused can be found at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/infused/id593767688?ls=1

Advertising

Getting people to be aware of your book by word of mouth is a difficult task. Most of the people that have bought my book have been those that know me either though my day time job, through alumni gatherings, or through my work as a lighting designer with local plays.
To try and get the word out a little more, I have decided to try a little advertising. The current play that I am designing the lighting for is How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying being put on at the Cary Arts Center in Cary, NC by the Cary Players. I am basically giving them back some of the money that they are paying me for my services to have an advertisement for Infused included in their programs that are handed out to their patrons.
This will introduce my book to an expanded audience who will hopefully find it interesting enough to purchase. We'll see how this experiment goes.

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.