I make stuff up for fun and profit.
Rejection 101: A Writer’s Guide is now available on Scribd. If you’re a subscriber, it’s included in your membership. Click here.
Do you use your library’s OverDrive eBook lending service? Good news, you can now request Rejection 101: A Writer’s Guide and read it for free.
Illithea Dayasagar survives alone, on a distant continent. For her mission to succeed, she must remain hidden.
But the fireball that splits the sky and scorches the earth does not go unnoticed. Neither does the corpse she finds instead of the meteor.
Especially once he turns out to be very much alive. And very much a mystery.
Passion and betrayal collide in “Enemy Beloved,” a story of true love and sacrifice.
Now available in Venus, part of the Planetary Anthology Series.
Kobo was actually the easiest one to set up. Added bonus, they are part of OverDrive, a system that allows libraries to lend eBooks. So, if you’ve wondered how to get your work into libraries, this is one venue. I think it’s also available through other aggregators.
But why would I want to “give” my eBook to libraries? First, you’re not “giving” anything. Second, having your book in a library is advertising. Someone who enjoyed your work might just decide to check out and see what else you’ve written. Gasp! What a concept.
Rejection 101: A Writer’s Guide is now available on Kobo.
Didn’t need an ISBN for this either. Yes, this means they’ll have different ISBNs, but I don’t expect this to be something that needs tracking to justify the cost of an ISBN.
As I said before, the self-pub plunge is as much for the benefit of the experience as anything else. iTunes Connect was easy enough to navigate. iTunes Producer, like most Mac programs, a breeze.
Easy set up. One glitch because I didn’t have the latest version of Java installed.
Review was MUCH faster than Amazon.
And now I’m live on iBooks with Rejection 101: A Writer’s Guide.
One of the nice things I noticed about this is that it’s very easy to set up promo codes.
No, didn’t need an ISBN for this either.
Most of my author friends are self-published or hybrid writers. I often feel “out of the loop” when it comes to the details of the self-publishing process, so I decided it was time to take the plunge. At the behest one of them, I took the six blog posts about my workshop experience and why a rejection is an opinion (not a death sentence), and created a book: Rejection 101: A Writer’s Guide
Although it took all day, it took far less time than I thought it would.
I already had the KDP account set up, but I had never worked with the KDP system or Vellum (the layout software).
Here’s the run-down of what it took to go from a series of blog posts to a finished product.
I chose an image off DepositPhoto.com, and fired up Pages. This probably ate up most of my time. It had been awhile since I’d worked with Pages for anything other than writing, but it all came back to me. Create a black background. Add image on top. Check the reflection option. Add the fonts for the title and author. I spent more time playing around with fonts and colors, to be honest. Way too many choices, most of them bad. Saved it, changed the type of file, and done. Reopened it in Preview in order to adjust the ratio of image width to height, per Vellum’s suggestion. That took like another minute.
Next, Vellum. Great software, took about ten minutes and one very specific question posted to a group, and I had it figured out — the front and back matter, the chapters, the headers, dividers, everything–bam, bam, bam. It was amazing. By contrast, I was struggling with Jutoh for days before I threw my hands up in disgust and wished I’d never heard of it. With one press of a button, Vellum generated everything for all the platforms/venues/formats, all in one step: Generic ePUb, GooglePlay, iBooks, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Print (i.e. a PDF).
It took longer to actually proof the PDF, Kindle and iBooks files (by looking at every page inside the file) than it took to put the book together, and that includes futzing around with the fonts and colors. (BTW, leave the extra pages in the PDF alone. They’re there for a reason.)
Vellum is pricey, but worth it (works only on Mac). You can play with a full version for free, but you have to have a license to hit that magic button that spits out all the stuff you can then upload to the various venues. No, you don’t need Vellum if you’re doing KDP because you can upload a .docx or .PDF or .rtf file instead, but that doesn’t mean that all your versions will look the same if you wide (other platforms).
Uploading to KDP was simple enough. The one snag I hit was with the paperback version, which took two tries to get right, so maybe fifteen minutes to re-do.
Did learn that you don’t need an ISBN–Amazon will “give” you one.
There was a 24-hour turnaround on the approval process.
Voila. That’s it, in a nutshell. Even a rocket surgeon can do it.
Up next, publishing on iBooks, Kobo, and Nook. Also CreateSpace, D2D, all this stuff I’ve heard of but never had a reason to look into too deeply.
I would really, really, really, love it if people took to the habit of understanding the meaning of words before they used them. I know it’s a lot to ask, but bear with me anyway.
You want to get creative? That’s fine. Lots of ways to do that. Dialogue tags are, however, most definitely not the way to do it.
Who decided that “said” and “asked” and “whispered” and other clear, simple, useful tags needed to be replaced by “creative” tags like “moaned” and “laughed” and “smiled.”
Really? Who? Because we have to talk. We really do.
You’re setting a bad trend. And here’s why: Writers will go forth and use words that don’t mean what they’re trying to make them mean. Our language is already dying the death of a thousand cuts as certain factions contort words into near meaninglessness—it’s linguistic matricide (h/t Tom Kratman)—and while what I’m about to rant about doesn’t quite reach the level of insanity of making things mean whatever we want them to mean, each according to his or her own personal philosophy, well, folks, you’re not helping.
Why take speech tags that are almost invisible to readers (but still function as a valuable signpost for clarity), and turn them into blaring neon signs that take the focus off the dialogue, yank the reader out by the short hairs, and scream, “Look at me! I’m being so creative I’m ignoring what a word actually means! Love me, damn it!”Continue Reading
“Make your characters interesting.”
Don’t recall exactly where I got this little bit of writing advice, but I was thinking about it when a few someones came up to me and asked if I’d seen Lucifer
Fast-forward a couple of weeks and I’ve got the first disk of season one and I’m setting myself up for another Hollywood disappointment—my standards for anything coming out of Hollywood have fallen so much that I’d rather watch Korean dramas with subtitles (which I hate because they’re distracting).
Nevertheless, hat tip on Lucifer
Plus, I seem to have a soft-spot for anti-heroes.Continue Reading
For updates on my space opera and science fiction, follow me via @HouseDobromil.
The fifth story was an exploration of dragons.
The first thing the buying editor admitted to was the fact that she did not articulate what she wanted as well as she thought she had. Unfortunately, that wasn’t apparent until she got the stories and it was too late to do anything about it. This brought up another important point about things that influence editorial decision-making. When they get a lot of stories that aren’t quite right (for whatever reason) the pressure on their time increases. They need to keep an eye on these time pressures, so they are more likely to buy stories that don’t need work.
Read the rest here: Rejection 101: A Writer’s Guide
The theme for story four was “chances,” and although there were plenty of clues in the submission call that it was to be a romance anthology, it was never explicitly stated. Two people that take chances to be together didn’t say “romance” to everyone in the group, and I can see why that would be the case. If you don’t write romance, your version of “two people taking chances to be together” could manifest in other ways—a father and daughter trying to find each other when war comes to their world. Therefore several well-written pieces just didn’t make the cut because they were not, technically, romances.
Others had romantic elements, but the romance wasn’t the main focus, but a sub-plot.
But romances are right up my alley and since one of the examples in the call was “Anthony (conquerer) and Cleopatra (conquered)” that was the first plot bunny I chased down the wrong hole. For four days. Yep, I gave up on it some time late on Thursday and went to bed knowing I’d have Friday and the weekend to start fresh. Fun times. Fun times.
Read the rest here: Rejection 101: A Writer’s Guide
