A Web of Images

One of my guilty pleasures is cover design. Although that’s not my official responsibility at Five Directions Press—I handle copy-editing, book design, and typesetting, whereas our covers are in the capable hands of Courtney J. Hall, who knows her way around Photoshop better than I ever will—I’ve come up with ideas for the covers of all my own novels except for the current version of The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel. That last is Courtney’s, and the moment I saw it I fell in love with it. She also produced those beautiful fonts for the Songs of Steppe & Forest series, and she’s the person I tap for suggestions, critiques, and the final go-ahead, since no cover goes onto a Five Directions Press book without her approval.

That said, in my spare time I love to explore images and their potential as book covers. I have covers for books I may not write for years, the stories of which are limited to a main character, a love interest (maybe), and a vague goal. The cover, like the title and the cork boards filled with character images that sit next to my manuscripts on screen, are essential writing tools. They spark thoughts and symbols, emotions and descriptions, themes and personalities. My primary approach to the world is visual: change a character’s picture, and I develop a new sense of that character’s essential self.

So where do I find the images for my covers? For sure, Shutterstock loves me, because I spend far too much of my not so generous royalties there. Pixabay, with its ever-growing store of royalty-free photographs, is fantastic as well. But for Songs, as you can see from the Song of the Siren cover to the right, I decided to go with public domain art from nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and Russia.

Public domain art has one big advantage: unless owned by a museum or library that chooses to assert its rights, it can often be used without copyright issues and free of charge. But it also has one huge disadvantage: many of the files available online are too small and too fuzzy for a book cover. By the time you blow the image up to the minimum needed for a trade paperback, what you have left is a collection of visible dots. E-books, being computer-based, have a greater tolerance for poor image quality, but even an e-book cover can look unacceptable if the original picture is too small.

As it happens, I got lucky with most of the Songs covers. The one for Song of the Siren comes from a large file readily available on Wikimedia Commons and via the National Museum of Warsaw. Most of the others come from Wikimedia Commons as well. And in the process of tracking them down, I learned quite a bit about Russian realist art and the group known as the Wanderers and a good deal more besides. That in itself has become a great source of pleasure.

Song of the Shaman gave me fits, though, not least because nineteenth-century Russian artists didn’t paint a lot of shamans. After weeks of searching, I found one painting by a Polish artist resident in the Russian Empire, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t track down a version of the file that was usable for a book cover. I even purchased a personal license from a stock photo site for a high-resolution image of the painting, wanting to check it out before I decided whether it would be worth the higher charge for publishing use, only to discover that the high-resolution version looked worse than the doctored (but too small) Wikimedia Commons file. Missing paint, dull covers, too little contrast between the frame and the art, you name it: the problems added up to a series of flaws that either lay beyond the bounds of even Photoshop’s magic or would take so much time to fix that the end product wouldn’t be worth the effort expended.

So with a sigh of regret I gave up that idea. And I’m glad I did, because not long afterward I remembered another painting from circa 1905, perhaps not so obviously a shaman but still appropriate to the book’s theme (and, not coincidentally, a perfect depiction of its heroine, Grusha). And when I searched Wikimedia Commons, after a couple of tries I discovered a version large enough that I could compress it into a nice, sharp image without Photoshop doing what it typically does during compression: adding fake dots of its own. I had to tweak the colors and position the painting just right and even airbrush out a hand, but the results are exactly what I hoped for.

And soon you’ll get to see it. But I’m not quite ready for a cover reveal yet. First I have to ensure that the novel itself is ready for prime time. Then I need to work with the other authors in Five Directions Press to figure out the best publication schedule. By September, though, I hope to have a complete text and a plan. Stay tuned!

Images purchased by subscription from iClipart.com.

Works in Progress

So, as I wrote last week, I’ve spent the last six days focusing on my own novels, mostly the Legends books as I spiff them up in preparation for the release of The Shattered Drum, the last one in the series. I’d hoped to start work on Song of the Shaman, the second installment in my spinoff series, also set in Russia but in the 1540s, an even more troubled time in that country’s history than the 1530s, and involving some of the same characters. But now that Friday has dawned, it’s pretty clear that’s not going to happen during this break. So what have I been doing?

Well, the second edition of The Golden Lynx has appeared on Amazon for print and Kindle, although we’re still working out the kinks when it comes to linking the files—both print and Kindle and first and second editions. You can get the new e-book no problem, but running a search stubbornly turns up the older print edition, no longer available for sale (the print link above will take you to the right place). It looks as if Amazon is correcting the print/Kindle links as we speak, though. And the customer service rep did a stellar job of cleaning up the e-book formatting, which had become inexplicably distorted in the “Look Inside This Book” feature despite being perfect in the e-book itself. If you happened to see it in its multi-size, multi-font, all centered glory, try again. I swear, I do know how books should look!

The new Golden Lynx is also uploaded to Ingram Spark, although not yet available because I want to check the physical proof before I approve it for distribution. It has an official publication date of July 30 and an on-sale date of August 15. That was another learning experience, although the print proof passed on the second try and the site seems in general easy to use, if more expensive than CreateSpace. Both have great help files and extraordinary customer service, so in general it’s been a positive experience. Useful, too, as some of my fellow Five Directions Press authors want to list with Ingram Spark as well, and now I have a better sense of how to prepare their files and what to warn them about.

In addition to that, I’ve revised The Vermilion Bird (insignificant changes such as adding the book link for The Shattered Drum and stripping out one ad for another) and The Winged Horse (small but significant changes to make Tulpar more consistent with his later self). The box set of Legends 1–3 will be ready as soon as I finish reading through The Swan Princess, which I’m doing now. The second box set will soon follow. The Shattered Drum is available for preorder on Kindle. The print edition has already been proofed twice and has only the teeniest adjustments still to include in the final PDF. That will probably go up next weekend, to give the computers time to link the two editions before the release date.

With all these changes to account for, I’ve updated the Five Directions Press site, the books and bio pages on this blog, and my own site. I’ve even discovered the magic button that relinks this blog to my author site. Any day now, I’ll have a moment to record an excerpt from The Shattered Drum and add that to the two sites—maybe on Thursday, when my next New Books in Historical Fiction is supposed to take place. The print excerpts must wait until the official release of the Kindle book on July 16.

I’ve had a couple of weird experiences during all this. CreateSpace has twice freaked out about whether I have the right to update my own novels—this after six years!—forcing me to hunt down and scan the official copyright registration forms that I fortunately signed up for. Meanwhile, the Electronic Copyright Office registration site has been down since Tuesday, so I can’t clear up the mystery of why my application for The Swan Princess remains open even though I mailed the deposit copies in April 2016 or verify that my registration of Shattered Drum “took.” Which could get exciting if CreateSpace starts questioning my right to produce those novels....

But otherwise, it’s been a very productive week. And now I have to run off and work on The Swan Princess corrections, because I have only three more days before work barrels back down the pike at full speed!

Finding That Perfect Read

One advantage of the current publishing climate is that a reader has no shortage of books from which to choose. Free and low-cost books are everywhere, including through subscription services like Amazon.com’s Kindle Unlimited. But finding a good book is not so easy. Reviews offer some insight, but many good books fail to attract reviews for various reasons. Book bloggers soon acquire more titles than they can ever have time to read, never mind write about. Readers, too, become overwhelmed by demands on their time. And not all reviews are what they seem: ethical writers, including myself, refuse to pay for book reviews, but some desperate souls give way to temptation. So what’s a reader to do?

One approach, adopted by more than a few GoodReads friends I know, is to limit oneself to commercially published books. There readers can trust that books have gone through editing, typesetting, and proofreading, received professional covers—and, yes, that any reviews they receive reflect the honest opinion of the reviewer. But trade books are expensive, at $9.99–$12.99 or more even for an e-book. For the average voracious reader, they represent at best a partial solution, although public libraries can help.

That approach also ignores the many good books published outside the commercial houses. And commercial publishing is just that: books have to sell millions of copies in today’s market to make a trade publisher’s investment worthwhile. If your taste runs to more unconventional fare, you’re out of luck.

That’s where small presses and coop publishers (a variant on small presses) come in. A coop like Triskele Books or my own Five Directions Press exerts the quality control of a traditional publishing house but can charge less, especially for e-books, because the coop authors can break even at a much lower number of copies sold. No one can guarantee that if you love one author’s gritty historical fantasy, you will love another’s sparkling contemporary romance, but you can count on each book having received extensive critique and suggestions for improvement followed by professional editing, typesetting, proofreading, e-book production, and cover design. We guarantee one another’s work.

We also cooperate to get the word out, which means that we publish newsletters featuring other authors and news about our forthcoming titles, regular lists of book recommendations—such as Triskele’s Book Muse and Five Directions Press’s monthly Books We Loved—and blog posts, many of which feature writers and/or their books. I host an interview channel, New Books in Historical Fiction, where I interview other authors and read excerpts from their books. Gabrielle Mathieu, another Five Directions Press author, does the same for fantasy and adventure novels.

So you see, there are tools out there to help you navigate the independent publishing ocean. Take a chance! You never know what magical island may be hiding right over that cloudy horizon.


An earlier version of this post appeared on the Triskele Books blog a few weeks ago. Many thanks to all the Triskele authors for the opportunity to share my thoughts with their readers!

Image: Clipart 109839003.

And Then There Were Four

If you follow me on social media or even read this blog regularly, you’ll know that as of this week The Vermilion Bird (Legends of the Five Directions 4: South) has seen the light of day. As of a few hours ago, Amazon.com had still not linked the print and e-book editions, but if they don’t do it on their own in the next twenty-four hours, I will send a message to the support services. They’ve always proven themselves prompt and efficient in the past, so I’m sure it will soon be taken care of.

The release of a new book is always exciting for an author. A published book has the heft of reality in a way that an electronic manuscript can’t match—even in the days of e-readers and tablets, which do let a writer read her own work in a format indistinguishable from e-books put out by a press. 

Writers hope that the release of a new novel in a series is equally exciting for our readers. I know it is for me: I love it when I discover that one of my favorite characters has a new adventure for me to share.

But before I get to excerpts and reactions from readers to the latest Legends novel, let me remind you that until Sunday, December 10, the e-version of The Swan Princess is on sale for $2.99. This will certainly be the last promotion I run for some time—and given the poor results so far, even with paid Facebook ads, perhaps the last for a long time.

Also, a quick word about the New Books Network (NBN), the parent organization that hosts my interviews on New Books in Historical Fiction. The nonprofit NBN runs entirely on volunteers who supply their own equipment and record on their own time, but the costs of managing the website and storing the 4,200 interviews that already exist—the NBN adds 100 a month and now serves 25,000 listeners a day—are considerable. On the plus side, the network is growing in popularity; on the minus side, the costs increase as more people listen in. To close the gap, the NBN is currently running a donations campaign through Amherst College. You can help by clicking this link and donating whatever amount you can afford. As with all donations to nonprofits, your contribution is tax-deductible. And you will earn the undying gratitude of every one of the 220 hosts. We all love what we do and want only to continue producing more interviews for you to hear.

And now, a short excerpt from The Vermilion Bird, followed by a couple of early responses (and don’t forget to check out those authors’ books, too!).

Moscow, February 1537

“It’s a scandal, I tell you. Fyodor has gone mad.” Over the plink-plink of psalteries, the chatter of fifty women, the murmurs of servants in corners, and the noise from the courtyard below, Aunt Theodosia’s voice soared like a song. “Marrying a hussy two years older than his own daughter? Then wedding his own girl to his new wife’s former lover? Abominable! Where is his honor?”

“Auntie! How can you?” Maria, tempted to shrink into herself like a tortoise into its shell, instead gripped the hand of the hated Roxelana, whose fingers returned the favor with equal strength. “Stop squeezing me,” she hissed at her stepmother, who narrowed her eyes and hissed wordlessly back.

But Roxelana, although a general irritant, bore no responsibility for Maria’s present agony. On the contrary, she shared it. Must Auntie announce their predicament to the world? Thanks to her, every woman here knew—now, if she hadn’t before—that Roxelana had lived for years with the man destined to become Maria’s husband tomorrow, only to abandon him for Maria’s father and the respectability he offered.

A hint of sandalwood and cinnamon released into the air as Roxelana shifted in her seat. Among the many perfumes wafting around the room, hers stood out: seductive, elusive, foreign.

Respectability? Roxelana? As if that’s not a contradiction in terms!
 
Aunt Theodosia was still talking—bellowing, rather, with the blissful unconcern of the hard of hearing. “Twenty-two years old, and him a ripe thirty-seven. What does he want with a lovely nincompoop to warm his bed? After wearing my dearest sister to the bone, bearing and raising his children. Thirteen she gave him. Thirteen. And seven who lived!”

“We know, Auntie. We can count.” This voice, young and sweet, belonged to Maria’s sister Varvara, second of the seven living offspring. She spoke in softer tones than Theodosia.

“Don’t mumble like that, girl,” Theodosia snapped. “Speak up.”

“Hush now.” Varvara raised her voice as commanded. “The whole room can hear you.” She gestured with her right hand. “Including our stepmother.”

“Don’t be absurd. I’m whispering, just as you are,” Theodosia said at top volume. “Stepmother, indeed. Harlot, more like.”

Roxelana hissed again, louder this time, and Varvara pressed her lips together, as if trying not to giggle. In response Theodosia fixed Roxelana with her basilisk glare. “Ridiculous. Just ridiculous.”

“You’re being rude, Auntie,” Maria said. Anything to deflect the discussion to another channel, although she agreed with Theodosia. Watching Papa glow like a schoolboy while her stepmother flirted and cooed left her two steps short of disgust. Parents were not supposed to act like that.

As for this new match with her stepmother’s discarded lover, Theodosia was right: Papa had lost his mind. A man nine years older than Maria, and a Tatar—what would they talk about?

 
“The Vermilion Bird vividly envisions the culture clash between Russians and Tatars in the sixteenth century. Fans of historical fiction will enjoy this glimpse into a seldom explored corner of history, while fans of romance will delight in the unlikely love that blooms between a bluff Tatar prince and his scheming Russian bride—who is also the stepdaughter of his former lover.”—Linnea Hartsuyker, author of The Half-Drowned King

“In sixteenth-century Moscow, only a hairsbreadth separates peace from rebellion. C. P. Lesley brings this remote time and place into our grasp in The Vermilion Bird. In a rich portrayal rooted in the strange truth of the world of Russians, Tatars, and the intrigues of court life, Lesley weaves together characters real and imagined against a backdrop of romance, fear, and lust for power that characterized court life in sixteenth-century Russia.”—Laura Morelli, author of The Gondola Maker and The Painter’s Apprentice

Interview with Liza Perrat

I have written before about the writers’ cooperative Triskele Books, whom we at Five Directions Press consider friends as well as respected fellow authors. So it’s a special pleasure today to interview Liza Perrat of Triskele about her new e-book box set, which combines her three historical fiction novels set in the French village of Lucie-sur-Vionne. These are lovely books, filled with drama and conflict, that trace the lives of three quite different women facing very different problems yet bound not only by a talisman passed down from mother to daughter over the centuries but also by their determination to find a satisfying place for themselves in a larger world.

In addition to the written Q&A here, don’t miss my podcast interview with Liza for New Books in Historical Fiction, where we talk about Blood Rose Angel and the series at greater length.

Your Bone Angel Trilogy explores the lives of three women in a single French village at different times. Tell us briefly about these time periods and what drew you to the idea of focusing on one village from the 14th to the 20th centuries.

I live in a rural French village and one Sunday walk along the riverbank I came across a small stone cross commemorating the drowning of two peasant children in the 18th century. I wanted to know more about them: to give them names, a family, a village, an identity. The children had died in the years leading up to the French Revolution, so that seemed the most obvious setting: the peasants versus the aristocracy—on the small scale of my story, paralleled with the larger, real-life scale. A dramatic backdrop for the dramatic event of their drowning. This was the inspiration for the first in the series, Spirit of Lost Angels.

Once this book was finished, I realized there were more stories to tell about the village of Lucie-sur-Vionne and the farmhouse (L’Auberge des Anges). Hence  two more books, set in different historical eras.

For the second in the series, Wolfsangel, a visit to the town of Oradour-sur-Glane and learning of the tragic WWII crime that occurred there inspired me to set that book during the Nazi occupation of WWII, featuring the descendants of the family in Spirit of Lost Angels.

By  the time I reached the third novel, I’d become intrigued with the medieval period. So the bubonic plague seemed a logical choice for the setting of Blood Rose Angel: one woman fighting against the village, symbolizing the people of the world battling against the greater enemy of the Black Death. I set this one in an earlier time period as I also wanted to explore the origins of the bone angel talisman that links the protagonists in each book.

Victoire, the heroine of Spirit of Lost Angels, lives during the French Revolution. Who is she, and what essential conflict does she face?

Victoire Charpentier is a poor village girl, and when her mother is executed for witchcraft and her father killed by a noble, she is forced to leave her village of Lucie-sur-Vionne to work as a domestic servant in Paris, where revolution is brewing. Despite suffering terrible abuse under the ancien régime, which incites her to join the revolutionary force gripping France, Victoire vows that one day she will rise above her peasant roots.

The second heroine, Céleste, lives during World War II, another very dramatic period in French history. What is the central story of her novel, Wolfsangel?

It is 1943, and German soldiers have occupied Lucie-sur-Vionne. As the villagers pursue treacherous schemes to swindle the enemy, Céleste embarks on her own perilous mission as her passion for a Reich officer flourishes. But when loved ones are deported to concentration camps, Céleste is drawn to the adventure and danger of the French Resistance. Eventually, she will be forced to choose: her love for the German officer or her fight for France.

The decision she makes will shadow the remainder of her days.

Last but not least, Héloïse, another strong woman, must cope with the arrival in Europe of bubonic plague—the disease we now call the Black Death. She is a healer, but the appearance of this previously unknown disease causes social problems as well as physical ones. What kinds of problems does Héloïse have to confront in addition to the plague itself?

When she became a healer-midwife, Héloïse swore to care for and heal the sick, whatever the conditions. However, it is the 14th century, and a wife must obey her husband. When Héloïse’s husband forbids her to treat plague victims, sparks ignite between them. Héloïse must also battle the villagers’ suspicions that she herself cursed Lucie-sur-Vionne with the Black Death, which is killing everyone. Héloïse’s healing gift has become her curse.

The three women are also bound by an amulet, the bone angel of the title. What inspired this element of the series?

I wanted to have a timeless, mystical, and mysterious  link between the women, down through the ages. And something distinctly feminine, not an object a man would wear or own. So these three stories feature the journeys of strong female protagonists, as well as the journey, and eventually the origin, of this bone-sculpted angel talisman. 

 
The Bone Angel Trilogy is available as a box set for Kindle, at an introductory price of $5.99, and in print as individual volumes. To find out more about Liza Perrat and her books, check her website, like her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter. You can also find her on GoodReads, Google Plus, and Pinterest through the links on her site.

Liza Perrat grew up in Australia, where she practiced as a general nurse and midwife. She has been living in France for over twenty years and works as a part-time medical translator and a novelist. She is the author of the The Bone Angel Trilogy, a historical series. Her latest book, The Silent Kookaburra, is a psychological suspense novel set in 1970s Australia.

Liza is a co-founder and member of the writers’ collective Triskele Books and reviews books for Book Muse.

Crime and Punishment

I like a good mystery as much as the next writer. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, P. D. James, Josephine Tey—but also contemporary writers like Deborah Crombie and Elizabeth George, Gillian Hamer and JJ Marsh—have enlivened many an evening as I puzzled my way through deliberately misleading clues. I tend to prefer cozy to hard-boiled, so when HarperCollins sent me not one but two recently translated mysteries by Antonio Manzini, I wasn’t sure they were going to be my cup of tea. But Black Run and its just-released sequel, Adam’s Rib, are rollicking good reads, with twisty plots and clever solutions and a quite unusual setting.  

Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone can’t get over his exile from Rome or the tragedy that has left him mourning the death of his wife. Hard-boiled, profane, and smitten with espresso, Camels, liquor, marijuana, and the urge to check out the pretty women who from time to time cross his path, Rocco regards both his current posting and its local police force with a perennially jaundiced eye. Sure, the town of Aosta is high in the Italian Alps, filled with touristy boutiques, ski runs, chalets, and restaurants, but Rocco has no use whatsoever for snow, scenery, or the unfamiliar culture of a small town where everyone he meets is related to everyone else. As for his subordinates, he castigates most of them as morons. Why, they can’t even remember his correct title. Instead, they insist on calling him by the outdated rank of Commissario. Don’t even get him started on their grasp of investigative procedure.

 

Yet somehow, despite the many obstacles that dot his path, when a lacerated corpse appears on a little-used ski run (Black Run) or a burglary turns out to be cover for a suicide—or is it murder?—(Adam’s Rib), Rocco finds ways to motivate his unsatisfactory officers into finding the information he needs to solve the crime. And each crime turns out to have hidden layers, through which Rocco steadily plods, swearing the whole way about what a pain this all is even as he’s enjoying himself hugely.

Special praise goes to the translator, Antony Shugaar, for a fluid, idiomatic rendition that reads more smoothly than some works written originally in English.

And right now, the e-book version of Black Run is selling for $2.99 (usual price closer to $12.99) on the Kindle and iTunes stores. Not sure how long the sale will last, so if you enjoy complex mysteries and grouchy but likable detectives, this is your chance to discover a new author.

Sleuthing among the Dusty Tomes

At heart, I will always be a historian first. Sure, I write novels—in part for fun and relaxation, in part to introduce a wider audience to this fascinating and little-known world that has preoccupied so much of my adult life. With help from my critique group and a small library of books, I have mastered the essentials of story structure, characterization, and the rest of the writing craft. I’m still learning, of course—who isn’t?—but I’ve reached the point where I can see trouble on the page, at least most of the time.

Yet I experience a special thrill when I start a new novel, because a new book means research. Research in printed archival sources; research in academic studies, some of them marvelously obscure; research in books written for children, whose authors don’t assume that the reader must know how sixteenth-century Russians constructed a fortress and don’t scruple to include full-color illustrations, each element marked. I look for photographs and films, run Internet searches in Russian, check government sites from Tatarstan to Tula and everywhere in between. And whatever I find goes into the Research folder in the Storyist folder assigned to that book. My memory, alas, isn’t what it used to be, so the contents of that folder sometimes take me by surprise. But so long as it’s written down, I’ll find it eventually.

Of course, research is not my only means of preparation. I change the desktop images on my computer and set up music playlists and photo collections for the new book, so that the sights and sounds of my imaginary world are constantly at my fingertips. I draw up goal, motivation, and conflict charts for all the major characters and jot down ideas for events that should take place. I write rough scenes, knowing they will not make it into the final book without massive revision—if they make it in at all. I write long notes to myself about what needs to go where. Having learned from Swan Princess, I probably won’t draw up a detailed outline for The Vermilion Bird. It’s a waste of time, when the outline invariably goes out the window within the first ten pages. Besides, I already know where this book needs to end up, and the history is dramatic enough to carry the rough outline of the plot. But I will work on the characters’ backstories and voices, their unique takes on each event as it occurs.

I love the whole process: the magic of watching the story unfold, the absorption in the lives of others (even if they are my own invention), the chance to bring a long-vanished world to life on the page. But most of all, I love the digging in my library, the revisiting with old acquaintances, the moments of realization that a much-needed detail lies right there, in a source previously ignored. By temperament, historians are detectives, ever pursuing nuggets of information through trails of documents that no one has examined in centuries. In this case, I am immersing myself in the politics of 1537, a year with enough going on to have left some traces in the record, but not so many that a novelist has nothing left to fill in.

So once again, as Sherlock Holmes would say, the game’s afoot. And the pathway to success lies through piles of dusty tomes. See you on the other side!

Quick note about my November 6 post

Some people read my statement that I was moving most of my books to Kindle Select as a decision to abandon print books altogether. Not so! I love print books and will produce my novels in print for as long as the technology remains available and affordable. The only change is that most of my novels are no longer listed as e-books on stores other than Amazon.com. That seems like the best decision under current circumstances, but technology changes constantly, so even that arrangement may not always stay the same. If you’d like to know more about my publishing plans, please send a message via my website. I’d love to hear from you.


Image: Clipart no. 23660559

Preliminary Results

This time last week, I was running a free promotion on my science fiction romance series, Desert Flower and Kingdom of the Shades, as reported in “Ballet Shoes (on Sale).”

As noted in various places, this was my first-ever free promotion. I ran a countdown deal in December 2014, also on these two books (the only ones enrolled in KDP Select, the exclusive-to-Amazon distribution program), with dismal results. And back in 2012, I ran a straight half-price reduction sale on my then two books, The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel and The Golden Lynx, with a slightly better outcome. But I had never tried free, in part because the deluge of free content available on the Internet worries me. Art of all sorts takes time and effort and training to produce, then edit into something worthwhile. Creators deserve recompense for that investment of passion and attention.

Still, I was curious what would happen, and a week later I can report three findings.

1. People still download free books. This point seems obvious, but I wasn’t sure it would pan out. First, modern users are saturated with free content. Second, these books have been free to Kindle users for a while, through the Prime and Unlimited subscriptions; they do get borrowed, but not so often that I felt certain that people would download them. But they did: 71 copies of Desert Flower and 67 of Kingdom of the Shades during the 48 hours of the sale. How many people will read the books, never mind pay for other books that are not free, remains unknown. Still, almost 70 people now have access to my books who did not before. That is good news. You could argue that I lost about $400 in royalties, but I suspect that’s not so. Most likely, these readers would not have paid the $3.99 that the books cost when not on sale, so in that sense I lost nothing that I ever really had. It was an experiment, so I’m fine with that.

2. Facebook ads work. Although Bookbub is the current go-to source for advertising e-book promotions, I decided not to apply there. Listings are expensive, starting at $150 for a free book, depending on the category. Instead, I paid Facebook $35 over two days to boost my post. At the end of the second day, almost 4,300 people had seen the ad, and 2% clicked through to find out more. That may not sound like much, but for advertising, it’s a typical response rate.

The one thing I would change (if I can figure out how it’s calculated) is my relevance score. At 4/10, each click cost me 76¢. When we boosted the announcement for Some Rise by Sin, the results were similar, but the clicks cost 22¢ apiece, because the Facebook computers considered the targeting “more relevant.” But what made those categories more relevant I have yet to discover.

3. It doesn’t take much to raise Amazon bestseller rankings significantly. At the height of the promotion near the end of the first day, with 55 downloads of Desert Flower and 53 of Kingdom of the Shades, the two books had risen from ranges of 12,400 and 18,600, respectively, to about 3,500 among all free books. Desert Flower hit no. 43 in Kindle eBooks > Romance > Science Fiction; Kingdom peaked at no. 49 on the same list. If I had managed to give away twice as many copies in the same time frame, I probably could have cracked the top ten, albeit in this relatively unpopulated list. Although I don’t control how many people download my books, it’s useful to have a better sense of what those rankings mean. A good advertising plan could raise the profile of my books significantly—at least until the algorithms change.

Any benefit is, however, brief. By the morning after the promotion ended, the sales ranks had plunged again, because the books were now competing with the much larger number of paid titles: both novels dropped below 1,000,000, although they remained much higher than they had been before the promotion began. Since then, I have sold no books at all, either print or Kindle. Even borrowings have flattened out.

Will I try it again? “Never say never,” as the adage goes. I would need a good reason to go against the grain a second time, and so far the results seem rather mixed. But then, that’s the point of an experiment.

Image: Clipart.com no. 20574032.

Ballet Shoes (on Sale)

When I was seven, my parents took me to see The Snow Maiden, as performed by the London Festival Ballet, now the English National Ballet. I fell in love with ballet, then and forever. In the years since, I have seen many great dancers: Maya Plisetkaya, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Altynai Assylmuratova, Julio Bocca, Nina Ananiashvili, Ethan Stiefel, Gillian Murphy, Peter Boals. And those are just a few of the live performances; on television and video I have watched an uncounted number of Giselles, Kitris, Juliets, Nikiyas, Medoras, and more. I took class as a child, then for twenty-five years as an adult of dubious competence but sincere dedication; I still dance in my office most days to offset the unhealthful effects of too many hours sitting at my computer. I love Balanchine and Ratmansky and Wheeldon, too, but when push comes to shove, it’s the old story ballets that tug at my heart strings. A couple of decades ago, I created my own ballerina, Alessandra Sinclair—informally known as Sasha—just to explore what meaning those old nineteenth-century classics might have for our modern world. And now I offer her two books, free of charge, for forty-eight hours—to celebrate the seventh anniversary this month of my invaluable writers’ group, the basis of Five Directions Press.

Desert Flower (based on Giselle) and Kingdom of the Shades (La Bayadère) will be available without charge for Kindle apps and devices from 12:01 AM on Friday, June 5, to 11:59 PM on Saturday, June 6 (Pacific Daylight Time). If you love ballet and romance (the science aspect is minimal) or just want to see whether you like my style enough to take a chance on my historical fiction, here’s your opportunity. Don’t miss it: this is my first free promotion in three years, and it may well be the last....

Descriptions, excerpts, and links follow.

Desert Flower

Love plays no part in marriage arrangements on the desert planet of Tarkei. So when Danion, junior priest of the sun goddess, finds himself drawn, in defiance of his oath of celibacy, to a human ballerina  encountered by chance, he does his best to resist. The ballerina, tormented by memories of violence that may be real or just the product of an unknown enemy's twisted mind, has no interest in him anyway—or so they think.

But Tarkei has an ancient tradition: that two unusually compatible people, whether they believe they belong together or not, can bond at first touch. Once formed, the link lasts until death. Legend calls it “the joining.” Danion calls it a myth. He and his ballerina will soon discover who’s right.

Excerpt

Fabric gleamed in the flickering candle flame. Shadows danced on the cave walls. Blush pink ribbons slid through her fingers—soft and smooth. Once, before her mother died, she had stroked a m’retta with fur like this.

“What are these?” Entranced, Choli held out her find to the man who sat cross-legged in the corner, who had watched without speaking while she rummaged through his few possessions. Tall and slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned, austere in his charcoal robe, he looked like the men of her world. But no man of her world would have tolerated her presence, never mind giving her free run of his home. This one sat, still as the rocks at his back, hands folded like a scholar or a priest. Or so they said, the people of the caves.

Choli wondered how they knew. Scholars were rare among the Kazrati. In her thirteen years, she had not met a single one. Priests were not so rare, but they were intimidating. Danion, of course, was not Kazrati, although he appeared to be.

His deep, cool voice answered the question she had almost forgotten asking. “They are shoes.”

Kingdom of the Shades

Sixty-three years have passed since the meeting of Danion and his ballerina in the desert, but the memory of her continues to haunt him. Until one day in a cafeteria barely worth the name, an exchange with a surly waitress ends with him staring at that beloved form. A holographic projection—or Sasha herself, inexplicably restored to life?

Tarkei do not believe in miracles, but the evidence points to Sasha’s return. At last, Danion and his wife can be together. Or could, if he had not taken responsibility for guiding a group of young rebels whom he cannot abandon—not once he recognizes the existence of a traitor in their midst.

Excerpt

Spirit voices surrounded her, speaking a language she did not understand but vaguely recognized as one she had heard before. White light hurt her eyes, brilliant light that shone through her closed lids, causing pain even though she could not open them. If she had the strength to move, she would have turned her head. Instead, she seemed to be floating in a sea of light, the spirit voices bearing her up.

Slowly, the images crystallized. She could not see, but she could hear. The words took shape in her head. She struggled to separate them, to wrest the meaning from them, but at the instant they became clear, sensation left her, and she sank back into darkness.

And so it went, for how long she did not know. Wherever she was, time did not exist. She floated from the tunnel of darkness to the sea of light and back, spirit voices rising and falling around her.

Sasha Sinclair lay between soft clean sheets, listening to words that she almost understood. Her head ached; her whole body ached, as if someone had taken a bat and broken every bone she had. Her skin felt scorched; the sheets weighed her down, sticking to the curled paper that had once been epidermis.


Image no. 20528287, purchased from Clipart.com.

Cover Craziness

As I’ve mentioned before, I can be a bit—well, let’s be kind and call it obsessive. I edit and typeset for a living: every comma counts, every font choice matters. And I blow off steam by attending classes in classical ballet, an art form dedicated to attaining perfection in every tiny detail of placement and line. So it’s no big surprise that when it comes to something like cover design, I tweak endlessly, moving elements up and down and side to side, switching out fonts, applying drop shadows and beveling and embossing and so on until I’ve driven either myself or everyone round me mad. At this point in my life, I probably can’t help myself. But in the last week or so, I have realized that sometimes I’m so busy pruning the branches that I forget to step back and look at the forest.

It all started innocently enough. As I mentioned in my last post, Five Directions Press has decided to reissue The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel in a new, smaller trim size. That gives us an opportunity to update the cover design for this, our first book, to match the evolving standard that we have developed as a cooperative. I had a couple of ThinkStock credits that were about to expire, so I used one of them to purchase a lovely picture of Widener Library (where the book opens) in winter. So far, so good. But the rapier on the front cover had never had a high-enough resolution for print, and it no longer showed up on the site where I had recorded downloading it, so I decided to use my one remaining credit to replace it.

I won’t drag you through the ins and outs of what happened next, except to say that I ended up with a different rapier with cleaner lines, purchased from Shutterstock. But it was only after I had expanded and reduced and feathered and rotated the image, then tested the double pimpernels representing Ian and Nina in every conceivable configuration, then uploaded it as final and posted it on this blog that I noticed that the sword had a spur jutting from its hilt that suggested an erotic component more suitable to Fifty Shades of Grey than to my romantic but far-from-explicit novel. Wrong message!

To ensure I wasn’t overreacting, I enlisted Sir Percy, my faithful spouse, as arbiter. He took one look at the cover and confirmed my worst fears. Oops. I went back into Photoshop and removed the offending spur, twisted the flowers to a new angle, and re-uploaded the file. Then I went and removed the earlier version from wherever I could (Facebook stuck to the darned thing like glue), including this blog, and replaced it with the new one.

Naturally, when I received the proof of the book (with the problematic cover), I found a bunch of other errors that needed fixing, including an unrounded apostrophe and missing book title on the back cover. So the saga continues, even though the front cover is now ready for prime time. And since we may as well update the covers on the e-books, too, we will correct any “fleas” that I find in the proof in those files as well (these are tiny corrections, an “into” that should be “in to,” for example—I told you I was obsessive).

But the moral of this story is clear: don’t become so focused on the branches that you forget to look at the trees. Even the most perfectly shaped leaves won’t do much good if a whacking great skyscraper is standing in the midst of the forest.

The Winnowing

In “Indie Publishing: Boom and Bust” the novelist Deb Vanasse, quoting fellow-writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, notes that “the gold rush is over.” Their point is that the days when a beginning author could throw up an e-book (well-written and well-edited or not), manipulate the Amazon.com algorithms by distributing thousands of copies for free, and still make money have ended. The big publishers are in the game now, and they too have learned the power of free and discounted e-books. In addition, because e-books never go out of print, the supply side of the market is expanding faster than the demand side, and we all know where that leads. What the future holds, no one can tell, but it seems fairly certain that a winnowing will take place: either unsuccessful authors will choose to leave the arena, or readers will push them out by favoring traditionally published books—or at least high-quality self-published and small-press books.

Now the winnowing among authors no doubt deserves a blog post (or ten) of its own. Today’s post is actually about something else, based on a comment that Alix Christie made during my interview with her last week for New Books in Historical Fiction. We were talking about the long-term effects of the shift from print to e-book publishing, and she asked me if I’d noticed that print books are becoming more beautiful. In a sense, of course, I had. I even wrote a post on “The Beauty of Books” in November 2012. But until Alix mentioned it, I hadn’t really thought about books becoming more beautiful.

As soon as she said it, though, I knew she was right. The 75-cent copies of Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland that I devoured in my misspent youth were not beautiful, although sometimes they had nice cover pictures. Their mass-market successors, although they cost ten times as much, are not beautiful either: cramped text on a page. It’s easier to read those books on a Kindle or an iPad, where at least you can adjust the font type and size and see clear dark type against a white screen.

No, the beautiful books are the hardcovers and trade paperbacks. The publishers are separating their products from generic, customizable e-books by showcasing the design capabilities of print—not so much winnowing the market as creating two distinct sectors within it.

Christie’s own debut novel, Gutenberg’s Apprentice, is a good example of this trend: the book is gorgeous, as befits a novel about the invention of the five-hundred-year-old technology that the authors and publishers of e-books are doing their best to supplant. The book has large initial capitals on the chapters that look like printed versions of a manuscript book, as well as the kind of heavy rough-edged paper that I used to find in nineteenth-century tomes on the dusty shelves of university libraries, their pages uncut until I came along with my metal-edged ruler and peered at text not seen since it left the letterpress 150 years earlier. The cover combines a portrait of the three main characters in the novel—Johann Gutenberg; his financier, Johann Fust; and Fust’s adopted son, Peter Schöffer—with a stylized color image of fifteenth-century Mainz. The cover shows to advantage on an e-reader, too, if it’s a color tablet, but the design of the text is lost except in PDF format, which is not an e-book so much as an electronic rendition of the print. If you’re trying to read fixed-page-layout PDFs on a tablet, you might as well indulge yourself with the pleasure of turning physical pages.

There are two directions in which this post can go. The first and most obvious is to underline the importance for indie (self-published, coop, and small-press) publishers to take the question of beauty seriously if they wish to see their stories in print. Indie writers rely on print-on-demand technology, which is not suitable for mass-market production, so their print books must compete with trade paperbacks. The alternative is to focus on e-books and forget print, but that means abandoning the hefty chunk of the market that still prefers books on paper. Some of these readers own e-devices but have returned to print because they find it a more satisfying experience. Writers who can’t balance these competing demands are likely to find themselves among the “winnowed.”

But Alix Christie makes another important point as well. Winnowing threatens not only writers but print books themselves. Gutenberg’s Bible was a manuscript produced by machine; fifty years passed before Aldus Manutius shrank books down to something that would fit in a pocket, turning them into everyday objects that many people could afford. At the moment, writers and publishers aim to turn e-books into computerized versions of their print counterparts. “Enhanced editions” with trails of hyperlinks leading to pictures and explanations and online videos offer one alternative, but the flitting hither and yon interferes with the sustained attention that draws a reader into a story world, disrupting the emotional attachment that is the reason most people read fiction in the first place. Something else is needed. I don’t what it is, but I agree that when we find it, print books will join manuscripts as rare and precious relics of a long-forgotten past.

I may not live to see that day. I’m not even sure that I want to. But it is going to be one interesting ride.

Image: Jean Grolier in the House of Aldus Manutius (1894), via Wikimedia Commons. This picture is in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

And in a sad farewell that is associated with the broader topic here of the upheaval in publishing, I found out this week that Folium Book Studio, which we have used to obtain ISBNs and work with the e-book versions of all the Five Directions Press books to date, is closing its doors as of March 2015. Not sure what happened: perhaps it was an idea ahead of its time, in that older e-readers often could not handle the fancy formatting. But it is a service that we will miss.

The Untold Story

There are many reasons for writing historical fiction, starting with a simple love of the past and extending to practicalities (so much easier to keep a mystery going in the absence of DNA evidence, cellphones, and even the presence of trained and dedicated professional investigators). Writers can give “voice to the voiceless,” as someone (alas, I don’t remember who) noted on Goodreads, referring to all the poor and downtrodden, many of them female, whose stories don’t make it into the official record. The majority of the population in any given century belongs to this group, so it’s a massive and worthwhile undertaking, although an absolute bear to research. But the information deficit is what makes these stories well suited to fiction; where data fail to materialize, the imagination takes over.

My Legends of the Five Directions novels also present an untold story, even though most of the characters are highborn. Due to frequent fires and wars, the lack of a developed educational system, and a general indifference to documentation until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—and then primarily for practical matters of governance such as taxes, land allocations, and military musters—few written sources have survived from Russia before the Time of Troubles (1598–1613). As a result, historians expend a good deal of effort on untangling which of the extant documents offer useful information and what we can reliably conclude from them. Historians enjoy this kind of exercise, which is essential, of course, but for the world as a whole it can make for dry reading. In Legends, I try to distill what is nonetheless a quite considerable body of information into a series of authentic but fictional portrayals of a lost world. Novels allow me to fill in the blanks; I strive to keep my inventions in line with the known facts (although occasionally I goof), but I don’t feel the need to suppress every tiny detail that I can’t verify from the sources. Whenever possible, my characters are my creation. But even those who bear the same names as people mentioned in the history books reflect my invention of everything from their thoughts and speech and personalities to their physical appearances: most of the portraits that have come down to us were painted much later and at times in distant lands.

Alix Christie, in her fascinating debut novel Gutenberg’s Apprentice—the subject of this month’s interview at New Books in Historical Fiction—tells yet another kind of untold story. Her characters once existed, although she has had to reconstruct their personalities as best she can, and some elements of their lives have been revealed by advances in what we might call the technology of history: the ability to identify different inks in printed quires of the Gutenberg Bible, for example. The long-held belief among scholars that Johann Gutenberg singlehandedly invented the printing press has begun to crumble in the light of new evidence. (For more on the story behind the novel, see Christie’s wonderfully informative website.) But in Germany, too, the ravages of war, fire, and time have wreaked havoc on the archival record. Although the technology raises questions, the documents that could provide the answers have disappeared. Again, the situation is perfect for fiction.

And the story itself is tailor-made for a novel: three men, each with his own goal—sometimes overlapping, sometimes in conflict—drawn together to serve a purpose the importance of which they cannot yet conceive, forced to depend on one another to complete their project, but often at odds as to the best method by which to achieve the end they all seek. The one thing we know for sure is that the joint enterprise ended badly, in a bitter court battle that shattered their partnership. Yet together they produced the printed book—a creation that reordered the world they knew to an extent unequaled until the computer arrived half a millennium later.

As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

From sixteenth-century Venice we move back a century and travel north to Mainz, Germany, where a “madman” named Johannes Gutenberg has invented a radical new method of making books. Like any technological genius, Gutenberg needs venture capitalists to finance his workshop and skilled craftsmen and designers to turn his ideas into reality. He finds a financier in Johann Fust, a wealthy merchant and seller of manuscript books. Indirectly, this relationship also brings in a new craftsman when Fust calls his adopted son, Peter Schöffer, back from Paris, where Peter is making his name as a scribe, and forces him to become Gutenberg’s apprentice.

Like many people in the early days of printing, Peter is initially repelled by the ugliness and the mechanical appearance of books produced using movable type, an invention that to him seems more satanic than divinely inspired. But Fust will not release Peter from his apprenticeship, and the young scribe is soon learning to man the press and cut type as Gutenberg embarks, in secret, on the creation of the massive Bible with which his name will henceforth be linked. As he works, Peter too comes to appreciate—and in time to enhance—the beauty of printed books. Publication, though, takes longer and proves more difficult than anyone has expected. As the process drags on, tempers fray and tension rises, quire by quire.

Alix Christie apprenticed twice as a letterpress printer, and her experience informs and enriches Gutenberg’s Apprentice (HarperCollins, 2014). In this interview, we also talk about the ongoing transition from print to electronic books, what will tip the balance, and how our understanding of the first great technological revolution in books may prepare us for the second.

Pre-Christmas Sale

So the early results of making two books available for Kindle Unlimited are in: more than twice as many borrows as e-book sales and three times as many e-book sales as print sales. So I’ve decided to experiment with a Kindle Countdown Deal to see what effect that has.

Remember: this is all research, as the two books in question—Desert Flower and Kingdom of the Shades—were a project that I had expected never to publish until I hunted down the books, revised them heavily, and decided to use them to test the results of going Kindle-only for e-books. I’m glad I revived them, because I had forgotten how much I loved their joint story—and I’m happy with how the revisions came out. But any amount I earn on them is more than I thought I’d make, which keeps my expectations suitably low. And if they attract new readers to my other novels, so much the better.

So here’s the deal. Beginning today and going through 8 AM PST on Monday, December 8, Desert Flower costs 99 cents. From Monday through 4 PM PST on December 12, the price rises to $1.99. After that, it returns to its regular price of $2.99. Kingdom of the Shades will cost 99 cents from 8 AM on Friday, December 12, through Monday, December 15, then go up to $1.99 until Friday, December 19. Then it too returns to $2.99. Closing times for the second promotion are the same as the first.
 
Apologies to my friends in the UK, the only other Amazon.com marketplace that currently allows Kindle Countdown Deals. Amazon declared the price of the books (set by itself to equal the US dollar price) to be too low by 16p to qualify for a countdown deal. I changed the price to the minimum allowed for such a deal, but then I couldn’t set it up for thirty days. So bear with me, and I will run a countdown deal for you in January. Post-Christmas instead of pre-Christmas, but hey, you need an outlet for all that lovely cash you’ll get for the holidays, right?

So stock up while the price is right. Gift your friends for the holidays. If I get a good response, I’ll try other promotions. And whether you buy these books or not, I do wish you a lovely time preparing for whichever winter celebrations you celebrate.

By the way, the print versions are prettier. They just aren’t on sale. But you can still find them on the Amazon.com sites.

The Technology of Writing

In honor of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which began last Saturday, I decided to chat about options for producing novels, short stories, and screenplays. The technical aspects, if you like, of writing in the Internet Age.

Some people write longhand, in pencil on legal pads. Some pound out their manuscripts on electric or manual typewriters. I prefer a computer—the bad typist’s best friend. Specifically, I use Storyist, as I mentioned when this blog was brand-new.

Let me say right up front that Storyist won’t work for everyone. It runs on the Mac and on iOS devices, syncing files between computer and iPad with minimal fuss. Windows users have Scrivener—and other programs about which I know less. But their features are similar, if not exactly the same. So the question remains: Why pay for—and learn—a dedicated novel-writing program? Why not stick with a word processor? This post explains why. 

First, let me show you a screen shot.

 

Here you see the opening paragraph of The Winged Horse, combined with a photo gallery of my characters (I’m an intensely visual writer, so I love to imagine my characters while I’m telling their stories). On the left, you can see the Project View, which lists the different kinds of information that Storyist can hold: plot points, character and setting descriptions, research, notes and writing exercises, synopses and more. Already we’re in territory a word processor can’t touch, where I can write in one window while displaying other useful information in various ways.

The second screen shot shows a different view of The Winged Horse. Here you can see the chapters of the novel listed on the left. The character images still appear on the right, but the center manuscript has become a set of index cards representing chapter 1, each containing notes about the individual scenes—their purpose in the story, what they need to convey. If I were to double-click on a card, I would enter its collage, where I could write comments or drag pictures of the characters and settings associated with that section.
 

The third screen shot comes from The Swan Princess, the book I started this summer. So far, I have only about ten pages of text, which is sure to change as I write, so instead I’m showing the individual character sheet for Nasan, the heroine. It includes fields that came with the program (age, gender, eye color, hair color, build), fields that I defined (patronymic, character type, emotional makeup), my image of the character, and moments in her development—her character arc—linked to scenes in the story where that development takes place. I can show and hide these fields as I like. On the right I’ve displayed the novel’s main settings in outline mode, the third available option (besides text and grid—that is, index cards or photographs). On the left sits the usual list of folders, expanded to show different sets of information. I can get rid of windows, stack them on top of each other instead of side by side, or go into full screen mode and show only the manuscript.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that multiple options have their downside. Learning a new program takes time you could have spent writing. It costs money (although less than some word processors). And just as it’s possible to workshop a novel to death, you can spend so much time plotting and constructing timelines, defining character traits, and collecting data that you forget to write the story. Everything in moderation, as they say.

But the upside is huge. When I can’t remember the color of a character’s eyes or how old that person is in this book, I click into the appropriate sheet, then back to my manuscript, without losing minutes or hours. I can search the entire project for facts, words, or phrases. (Did I overuse “gadget”? I can find out in a flash.) For calculating distances or sketching out a story, saving that great page I found on the Internet or reusing information from a previous book, Storyist is invaluable. When I get farther into the story and want to read it as a book, I can export an ePub or Kindle file; when I need to send chapters to my fellow writers, I save the manuscript as RTF; when I get that great idea right after I’ve shut down my computer, I type it into the iPad app and sync it back to Dropbox. If I need an overview of the story or a shorthand list of characters or settings, the outline view exists for that purpose—and I can export that, too, for distribution in Word. In all these ways, Storyist helps me make good use of my time.

I don’t bother with every bell and whistle. My character and setting sheets remain half-filled, I have yet to produce a complete set of plot points, and it’s a rare book that contains more than a few section sheets. My timeline is perennially out-of-date. Full screen mode leaves me cold, and I tend to forget the collages exist until I stumble over them. But the options I do use, I use every day, and I like knowing the others are there if I need them. When I’ve painted my protagonist into a corner, I set up index cards to walk her out. I add fields to track characters’ internal and external goals. If a chapter seems flat, sheets show where the conflict died. At the end of each book, I save a template to preserve all that work for the next one.

I stay in Storyist until the last minute, then export the RTF files to InDesign for final typesetting. Any revisions I make go back into the Storyist file, which in turn becomes the basis for the e-book versions. At the moment, I still do a bit of final formatting in Scrivener, which lets me remove first-line indents from chapter and section opening paragraphs. But otherwise I produce my novels entirely in Storyist.

If what I’ve said interests you, this is the perfect time to explore: NaNoWriMo participants can get a 25% discount in November. At any time, you can download a demo from the Storyist site. And if right now you need to focus on cranking out those 50,000 words, don’t forget that November 2015 will arrive before you know it. Plot out your next book and characters in Storyist, and you’ll be halfway to the finish line before NaNoWriMo even starts!

Disclaimer: I am not employed or otherwise financially compensated by Storyist Software, although I have voluntarily acted as a beta tester for the program since 2007.

Advice from the Field

Back in August 2013, I mentioned in passing a book called The Triskele Trail. At the time, I was initiating my “Hidden Gems” rubric (expect a new entry in that series soon) with a look at The Charter, by Triskele author Gillian Hamer. I planned to get back to The Triskele Trail, which I enjoyed, in a later post, but life got in the way and I forgot.

Just as well, as it turns out, because Triskele Books has just released a much expanded version of its “how we did it” guide, now called The Triskele Trail: 2014 Edition—A Pathway to Independent Publishing and endowed with a spiffy new cover (although the old cover was pretty good, too). Triskele is also hosting a giveaway of the book—for the link, see the bottom of this post.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must mention here that although Five Directions Press, the writers’ cooperative/indie press of which I am a part, had nothing to do with the Triskele Trail project, we are featured in “How a Collective Works #2,” an updated version of the interview exchange previously published here and on the Triskele Books blog. So my present post makes no claims to being a dispassionate review. My intent is to get the word out, because this is a genuinely helpful guide to the basics of self-publishing and the benefits of working with a supportive group of fellow-writers rather than going it alone.

Triskele Books itself began as a group of five authors—Gillian Hamer, JJ Marsh, Liza Perrat, JD Smith, and Catriona Troth. The collective has grown since then, but these five remain the heart of the enterprise. In this they resemble Five Directions Press, which has published books by five separate authors (and hopes to add more) but is managed by the writers’ group that first came up with the idea. The Triskele Trail starts by describing the founding of the group and its philosophy. Like the cooperative, the guide is a collective enterprise, with the various members contributing chapters on the areas where they feel most competent to comment.

The bulk of the book addresses basic questions that beginning authors need to know: Why publish independently? Whom to trust? How do other collectives operate? What do editors and proofreaders do, and how do you find one? What is an ISBN, and how do you get one? What do the various publishing acronyms—ARC, AI, barcode, blind folio, QRC, etc.—mean? When do you need an EIN (employee identification number), and for what purpose? How do you get anyone, anywhere, to notice and buy your book without driving your 300 Facebook friends stark, staring bonkers with your self-promotion? Good cover design and book formatting—what are the guiding principles, how do you implement them, and when should you hire a professional to do the job for you? Copyright: how do you assert your own and avoid infringing other people’s?

All important questions, and the answers are delivered in clear, easy-to-follow prose, punctuated by interviews with other collectives as well as (developmental and copy, not publishing-house) editors and lists of useful resources. The authors make it clear from the beginning that these are not rules to follow so much as suggestions based on their own experience, what worked for them and what didn’t. Much of the advice focuses on the UK market, but even so, I learned a lot from this book—and I’ve spent the last twenty years in academic publishing, not to mention the last two accumulating my own list of triumphs and mistakes as my fellow-authors and I struggle to get Five Directions Press off the ground.

Even if you decide not to self-publish, you will find much of value in The Triskele Trail. Today’s publishing environment assumes that authors will polish their manuscripts before submitting them to literary agents or publishers and will play a significant role in marketing and promoting their own work. And although in-house departments may handle editing, cover design, and sales, it never hurts to understand and appreciate what the professionals contribute.

So if you’re writing the Great American (Canadian, British) novel, take a look at The Triskele Trail. And if you’ve wondered about self-publishing but worry about the amount of work required, consider a cooperative. You may be surprised to discover how much support is out there, and how much you can learn from authors who have traveled a little farther along the path.

From Thursday, September 25, through Sunday, September 28, 2014, you can enter to win a free e-book copy of The Triskele Trail at the Triskele Books blog. You can enter through Facebook or by using your e-mail address.