by krj | Aug 26, 2011 | Projects
Omni is almost ready! (Yes, that’s the official title.) I can see the finish line, and I ought to cross it some time in the next couple of days, which puts me roughly on my planned timeline. Though I had originally hoped to publish it some time in the first part of August, and then revised it to September, I may still hit the end of August. How’s that for everything mostly working out? I’ve received the almost-finished piece for the cover and it’s awesome. I’m very pleased with the quality of work, and it’s going to stand out against other books in the genre, especially since it’s a bit of a genre blender. I’m still not entirely certain what to call it, but for lack of a better classification, it can be considered to be a thriller, only with some fantasy or sci-fi elements that really shakes things up and takes it out of the realm of the other thrillers. I’m actually finishing up last minute edits/changes following editor and beta reader feedback, so Omni ought to be available some time in the next few days. Omni is the story of Ryan Sutter, a regular guy thrown into an impossible situation. What should be a regular day at work becomes a struggle for survival as Ryan finds himself thrust into a dark government underworld where mystery and intrigue are the norm, and the rules of physics and reality don’t necessarily apply. So as soon as Omni goes up, that means it’s time to go back to work and begin revisions on my epic fantasy story. Being fantasy, it’s...
by krj | Aug 3, 2011 | Projects
Because I like to do things backwards, let’s start this two-topic post by covering the second topic first. Logical, right? I received the preliminary work from my cover artist yesterday, and even though it’s “just a few placeholders cobbled together,” I’m blown away. Part of that, of course, is just seeing cover art for your own story. That’s a feeling that’s difficult to describe, but I’ll try: it’s awesome. Oh, that wasn’t so difficult after all. I only had a couple of suggestions for him in regards to changes for the art, and I can’t wait to see how he incorporates those changes, and even more so, where it goes from there. Once he massages it all together, colors it, and puts the finishing touches on it, I think I’m going to have a piece that really stands out from some of the other books out there. Even though it’s only the first draft of the cover, he’s already managed to nail a few of the things I wanted. I’m not going to pretend that people buy books strictly based on the cover (I’m sure there’s some small percentage that does, but they’re just that: a small percentage), but the cover should tell the reader a few things about the story. It should give them an idea of what’s happening in the story, perhaps introduce them to the setting and some characters, and most importantly, impart a feel that the book strives for. It’s the latter that I think has really been nailed, even though it’s the first draft. That’s a great feeling to see that. Although I’m excited...
by krj | Jul 19, 2011 | Self-publishing
While Joe Konrath was busy poking the beehive with his post today, Be Deliberate, quite the discussion took place in the comments. One of the more interesting things to come of it was the suggestion that books priced higher have a higher average rating, to a limit, of course. Commenter S Alini said: There might be another reason people gave one star reviews to Serial, Joe. That is that people often assign value to something based on how much they’re asked to pay for it. So if you give it to them for free, some are likely to think it has zero value. I think there’s some merit to the idea, and so does Joe who later replied: Serial is free and has an average star rating of 3 stars. Serial Uncut (Serial plus some extra stuff) is $2.99 and has a 4 star average. Obviously it’s not an entirely fair comparison because the free version of his book, Serial, doesn’t have the same content as the paid version. However, Scott Nicholson, a little further into the conversation, agrees with the observation: My $2.99 books always have better star ratings than my 99 cent books. That tells me they are more likely to get to the people who want them, as opposed to people who just want a bargain. This is all empirical evidence and not based upon any sort of study, but it makes for an interesting dialogue, especially if you’re considering pricing your book at $.99. Pricing it higher isn’t going to guarantee you higher ratings come review time, but I think there’s a certain validity to...
by krj | Jul 17, 2011 | Self-publishing
I originally typed out a fairly long blog post before I decided it was overly preachy and should be trashed. Instead, I’m going to limit this to something I learned. If you don’t want the background, then skip ahead a few paragraphs. I’ve been writing for years, well over fifteen, and though I’ve seen limited success in terms of publication, I have had a couple of things put onto paper. It’s been a gratifying experience, and one that has served as reinforcement that I’m doing what I should be doing. However, aside from those couple of lucky breaks, I’ve done a lot of procrastinating as I’ve watched the publishing industry slowly eat itself. I’m sure I’m not alone in having been part of a large group of spectators who were unsure if they wanted to dip a toe into those waters because they weren’t sure they’d get it back. Publishing has changed a lot in the last decade, and even more so in the last couple of years (or months). This isn’t news to anyone. The ramifications of the most recent changes means that self-publishing is now a viable option and, potentially, a viable career path. Whereas it used to take a lot of money, and an almost insurmountable amount of work, to self-publish and then market the crap out of something, one can do so relatively easily now, and with far less investment. Ebooks have changed everything, and at least right now, it looks to be for the better. So as someone who wanted the validation of the hardcover book (and still does, to be completely honest), I’m...
by krj | Jul 8, 2011 | Projects
I finished my final draft of my manuscript and submitted it to my editor yesterday. Whew! I’m not sure I can even begin to describe how stressful the final haul was, and it was all entirely unnecessary. The reality is that I discovered a couple of things late into my editing process that, by the time I discovered them, my deadline was looming and that meant I had precious little time to get through those processes. One of them turned out to be a piece of software that I discovered thanks to Smart Self-Publishing by Zoe Winters. This may be getting a little too inside baseball for my purposes here of sharing what’s going on, but as it so happens, there are some pretty smart people who have whipped up software that makes me think of Word’s grammar checker, only on steroids. And meth. And cocaine. And any other stimulant you can think of. Maybe caffeine, for instance. Anyhow, Editor, as it is know, is a fairly simple program that, when used wisely, can greatly improve your work if you’ve been lazy or have picked up bad habits along the way. In my case, it’s probably a little of both. Regardless, the software, in a nutshell, basically analyzes your writing and makes a bunch of observations and suggestions and leaves the work to you. Because it analyzes so many different kinds of things, you can end up with an exhaustive list of items to check off. In my case, it turned out to be thousands of things that I decided to go through to polish up my work. Was...
by krj | Jun 30, 2011 | Projects
Today is going to be a grueling day for me, not because I’m doing roofing or tarring roads or digging ditches or anything physically intensive, but because I’m planning on spending the day in front of my computer to get as much editing done as possible. When I last posted and speculated that I had plenty of time to finish my revision process before submitting my manuscript to my editor, I think I was being delusional, but not entirely so. It’s amazing how one day a person can have so much free time, and then a week or so later, have almost none. It’s getting down to the final few days at this point, and what once looked like a manageable (though still difficult) road has turned into a crazy, dangerous road that only the insane would dare to follow. Hooray for insanity! It’s actually been somewhat unavoidable, as such things are, but not because of the usual “personal reasons” or “something just came up” or other such reasons. No, it’s because at the last moment I decided to try something brand new as far as editing and revision are to me, and frankly, I think it’s for the better. At the very least, I’ve cleaned up a lot of grammar issues that sticklers would gripe about and I’ve had a chance to approach things from a different angle which is usually greatly educational for me (and this definitely has been). Still, I have a lot left to do, including the addition of another technique that I may or may not have the time to get to, but one...
by krj | Jun 17, 2011 | Projects
The revision process is a lengthy one, and for perfectionists like myself, possibly infinite. It’s difficult to say for certain when your story is done because it’s easy to continually polish and revise. That’s what makes deadlines a great thing, even if they’re self-imposed. My to-be-named book has just entered the last stage of the revision process before it goes to editing. I actually finished going through it yesterday, but there’s still a few little things to do here and there, thus why I say I’m in the final stage. The revision process for me tends to be somewhat lengthy, but a good part of that is time that’s spent working on other projects because time (and distance) is a necessity where revision is concerned. In this case, I’m now at the point where the only time and distance I’m going to get from it is when it’s away being picked apart by my editor. Once I get it back from him it’ll be a hard crunch to get it tidied up as quickly as possible and then it’s time to publish. Because it’s so close to the end now, it’s also time to find an artist to do the cover. I think I have an idea for what I’d like the art to consist of. I’m picturing a scene from the first chapter that involves a building that’s just been bombed. I see this building in the foreground (or possibly the middle) with two of the main characters standing next to it immediately following the blast (how is that possible? You’ll have to read to find out) with...
by krj | Jun 12, 2011 | Projects
To this point I’ve done little other than wax philosophic on the blog, be it about publishing or writing, so I figure I should take a moment to mention something about what this is all actually about: my stories. Seems like a no-brainer, and yet it’s easy to get distracted by other things. At this point I’m unsure of the title, else I’d actually share it. I had a title for it when I originally wrote it, but the story ended up taking a turn because it’s a seat-of-my-pants story (see my post on the writing process and outlining if a little more explanation is necessary). Because of that change, and because I’m still not through my most recent (and second-to-final) revision, I haven’t yet settled on a title. I’m not worried about it, though. While titles don’t necessarily come to me, I’m feeling confident about one coming to me for this one, assuming I don’t go with my original one. Regardless, as I’ve danced about the subject matter a bit, here’s a little about the book itself. It’s something of a contemporary fantasy married to a thriller, but it’s very light on the fantasy elements because there’s no vampires or werewolves or anything like that, just some people who happen to have extraordinary abilities, albeit in somewhat limited fashion. There’s no crazy mutant powers here, just telekinetics, telepathy, and other similar things. You could almost use the old D&D term of psionics, but it’s not going that far. The story follows a couple of characters who, after an attack on a small town, are trying to find out...
by krj | Jun 9, 2011 | Writing
I may be alone in this, but as a writer, I’m endlessly fascinated by the myriad ways there are to write. To be more specific, I’m actually referring to novel writing because that’s where my interests lie, but I imagine it could likely be applied to other types just as easily. Regardless, there’s no one way to write, and I like to take the occasional look to see how others do it. You can sum up the process into roughly three stages: planning, writing, revising. I think most people can agree to that, whether their planning consists of, “Oh, I have a great idea!” or it’s months of outlining, those are the essential steps. But it’s how writers go through those steps that makes them different, and to me, interesting. The most likely differences you’ll find in comparing one writer to another is in how much planning goes into their work. Some people obsess over doing very detailed outlines, some to the point that every chapter or even every scene is determined before they sit down and write, while others do little to no outlining at all. The person who outlines may very well know exactly how the story is going to flow, all of the way to the end, while the one who opts to just dive right in might not know what the story is about, let alone how it’s going to end. Perhaps the most interesting thing about that to me is that people can follow either of those ways, or anything in between, and be successful (I’m defining success here as completion of a manuscript)....
by krj | Jun 6, 2011 | Self-publishing
For those of us who are geeks, especially those are Apple fanboys, and perhaps yet more for those are developers, Apple today kicked off World Wide Developers Conference 2011 — WWDC. For those who don’t know what this is, it’s essentially a week-long event hosted by Apple for the benefit of people who make software and hardware for their products. So if this is an event for developers, why am I writing about it on a publishing/writing/editing/etc. blog? Well, it’s all in the title: iBooks and iCloud. At WWDC today, Apple announced a boatload of new things, and one of those was a syncing feature for iBooks using their new service, iCloud. This isn’t active just yet (except for those doing testing), and I may be wrong about this, but I see this new feature as a Good Thing for writers. In a nutshell, iBooks syncing through iCloud will make it super simple for users to take anything they’ve purchased in the iBooks store and quickly and easily send it to their other iOS devices for consumption. Beyond that, it appears as though it’ll work like Amazon’s WhisperNet which automatically syncs your Kindle (and Kindle apps) with bookmarks, highlights, notes, last page read, etc, only this’ll be for iBooks. A big problem with iOS right now, and to a somewhat lesser degree other mobile platforms, is syncing. This is going to be a big step in the right direction for Apple once this goes live, and if there’s something that can be said of making things easier for consumers, it’s usually that it benefits everyone. Take the Kindle for...
