Sneak Peeks

On Tuesday, January 17, Five Directions Press will formally announce the release of my latest Songs of Steppe & Forest novel, Song of the Storyteller.  I’ll talk more about the book itself next Friday. This week, I’d like to focus instead on the always thorny (from my perspective) topic of promotion. Even in the days when all publishing was commercial, books could not just appear and make a splash. In the current climate, where publishers are huge conglomerates and indie publishing has exploded, even authors lucky enough to land a traditional contract with one of the Big Five have to put in a lot of sweat and toil on social media if their years’ long writing projects are not to sink like ten-ton rocks beneath the roiling waves of public attention.

And that’s too bad, because while I love diving into my story world and exploring its nooks and crannies, its heroes and villains, then letting the writing flow onto the page and even cleaning it up afterwards, I am not cut out for the job of touting my work to the world. I tolerate social media—some sites more than others, but none for long. I’m happy to hold in-person events, but Covid pretty much put a lid on those. Advertising has never paid for itself, nor have reduced sale prices, and although I certainly have a group of fans, as luck would have it, they don’t generally leave reviews. My most consistent ways of reaching out have been this blog and my interviews for the New Books Network.

But one way of promoting a new book that I do love is book teasers. These are one-liners added to vivid, compelling images that offer glimpses into the action and visuals of a particular novel. They are fun to create, and they get me thinking about what are the most dramatic lines of a given story. So I decided to share how I create them, since you might enjoy making your own.

First and foremost, it helps to have the right software. I used Adobe’s InDesign until this book. It’s a wonderful program, but available only for a hefty monthly fee, so unless you use it for work, as I do, a better alternative is Serif’s Affinity Publisher, which costs $50–60 for a lifetime license even when it’s not on sale, which it often is. If you have serious Word chops, you could probably use that or one of the free alternatives, but personally I wouldn’t. I like to be able to place things very precisely, and the publishing programs are designed to do that in a way that word processors are not.

Next you need a source of good images that are royalty free. There are paid sites like Shutterstock and iStock, but those costs add up fast if you make 15–20 teasers per book. Try Pixabay, Unsplash, and other free sites. (Affinity Publisher will connect to several of them directly from within your files.) A subscription service like Clipart.com or iClipart.com (run by the same company), which charges a set rate per year, can be a good investment—and there are often discount coupons available on the Internet, especially for first-time users. But make sure they have a wide-ranging selection of photographs, not just clip art, suitable for your particular novel.

And don’t forget public domain images, especially if you write historical fiction. Anything produced by the US government is public domain by requirement, since the public pays for the government through taxes. That includes most of the Digital Collections of the US Library of Congress, although you need to check to ensure that the donor has surrendered all rights. Meisterwerke der Malerei is a great source for European paintings, and the files are often very high quality. Other museum collections may or may not permit free use; it’s important to validate each museum’s policy. 

 

Wikimedia Commons is a fantastic storehouse of great art and, unlike images for print covers, book teasers don’t require high-resolution backgrounds because they are destined for the World Wide Web, where 72 dots per inch look just as good as the 300 needed for print. So you should be able to make use of all but the smallest images. Book teasers sized for the Web should be no larger than 800 x 600 pixels (900 x 1200 for TikTok; 900–1,200 square for Instagram). I make them proportionally larger in Affinity but shrink them on export, which tells me also how much space they will take up (under 1 megabyte is ideal).

The third essential is good dialogue or description—single sentences that capture essential elements of the story and make a reader want to know more. These should be intrinsic in the writing, but some authors are better at dramatic statements and cliffhanger endings than others. A story can have lots of action yet few single lines that convey a sense of threat or intrigue in a catchy and comprehensible way. It’s worth thinking about that—not while you’re writing but perhaps when you’re revising, after all the main plot points and characterizations are set.

Last, it’s helpful to echo the look of the published novel by replicating the fonts used in the book, which should themselves be matched in style to the novel and its contents. If you create your own covers and texts, you will know what those fonts are; if you hire a designer, ask. If the exact font is not available, there are lots of free alternatives designed for the Internet. Google Fonts is one place to look. Try to find something as close as possible in style to that used on the cover.

In illustration, I have scattered throughout this post a few teasers I’ve created for past novels, my own and other people’s. Each of them corresponds to the principles above, although they range from contemporary romance to historical drama.

Note that these images all have a central image but lots of relatively free space where you can put text without either element overwhelming the other. Think about that as you are selecting between two equally good representations of your prose.

In closing, I offer the first teaser for my new novel, taken from chapter 1. Follow me on Facebook (cplesley.authorpage), Twitter (cplesley), Pinterest (cplesley), Goodreads (C.P. Lesley), Instagram (authorcplesley), and TikTok (authorcplesley) for new hints of what’s to come over the next month or so, as well as general updates on books I’m reading, interviews, and life in general. And of course, buy the book! If you like historical fiction set in a place just a bit beyond the ordinary, with a bit of adventure and a dollop of sweet romance, I promise you will enjoy it.

So if the idea of creating book teasers appeals to you, give it a try. They don’t always sell books, but in my experience, few “sure-fire” techniques exist. Promotion is like exercise: you have to focus on a few activities that you enjoy, or you’ll spend all your time making excuses and see no progress at all.

Happy Birthday to Us

Ten years ago this month, Five Directions Press published my—and its—first novel, The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel. Two weeks later, ten years ago almost to the day, I started this blog. And that November, I conducted my first podcast interview for New Books in Historical Fiction. So this is a year of anniversaries, for me personally and for two entities (my writers’ coop and my podcast channel) that have come to mean a great deal to me—and not only in terms of bringing my work to the world.

According to the wisdom of the Internet, the metal associated with a tenth anniversary is tin or aluminum. Compared to silver, gold, or diamonds, this always appeared to me a ho-hum choice, about which not much could be said except that it was better than paper. But, again according to the Internet, tin or aluminum stand for strength and endurance. That sounds better, don’t you think? So let’s go with that interpretation. Keeping anything going for ten years, especially as we mark the halfway point of the third plagued by Covid, seems well worth a celebration.

Anniversaries also invite retrospectives. While checking on dates, I reread that first post and was amused to see how relevant the questions I asked then still are, despite the many changes that have affected publishing and marketing in the last ten years.

Now as then, my nonfiction book still sells more copies in a year than all my novels (now numbering twelve) combined, lagging only during the worst year of the pandemic, when most college classes moved to Zoom. Social media still dominate marketing, although Instagram and TikTok are rapidly displacing Facebook and Twitter. With only so many hours in the day, I rarely have time to visit GoodReads or even Pinterest.

At the same time, the market for books has become even more crowded, further restricting opportunities to break out. The sense that more people are talking than listening has only increased. My sales were higher in 2012–2014, when I had only three books, than now, when I have four times that many. I still have my fans, I “own” the Amazon listings for 16th-century Russian fiction, but sales spike when I release a new title, stay higher than normal for a month or two, then drop off once more.

One bright light has been the New Books Network, which got off to a slow start in 2007, was still little known when I joined in 2012, but since then has grown steadily. In September 2021, a combination of people being stuck at home eager to produce podcasts and people stuck at home eager to listen to folks chatting about books doubled the number of downloads in just thirty days. We are now big-time, with an average of three to five million episodes served each month. I’m glad to be a part of that, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the authors who’ve spoken with me about their work, all the publicists who helped set up interviews, and of course, the many, many people who tuned in to listen.

Another bright light is Five Directions Press. We began as a writers’ group of three who decided, because of our particular blend of skills, to take a chance on producing our own work as a coop rather than brave the choppy seas of traditional agented publishing. At one point, we had more than doubled our numbers; we still stand at five, all actively writing. And although no one has yet cracked the marketing code and put out a bestseller, we have learned a huge amount about how the process works, what does and doesn’t yield results. More important, we have supported one another through the ups and downs of writing, offering comments, contributing to the newsletter and social media accounts, supplying reassurance during the down times and congratulations when things go well, and talking up one another’s books whenever possible. As I say in every acknowledgments to one of my novels, I can’t imagine the last ten years without Ariadne Apostolou, Courtney J. Hall, Claudia H. Long, Gabrielle Mathieu, Joan Schweighart, and Denise Allan Steele.

Then there is, of course, this blog. If you’d asked me, back in 2011, whether I would ever start a blog, let alone post once a week—without fail—for ten years, I would have laughed in your face. But it’s been a wonderful learning experience, not just in patience and perseverance but also in achieving comfort with talking about my own writing and life as well as structuring conversations with other authors. For all the high-intensity appeal of social media, I much prefer the greater space offered by the blog format. Perhaps it’s a generational thing; perhaps it’s my natural affinity for the much longer novel format. But either way, I like the challenge of finding a topic, stripping it to its essence, and figuring out how to present the central issue in a way that readers need not be specialists to appreciate. It’s a bit like teaching, without the requirement of grading—something I never liked. It also lets me interact with far more of my fellow writers than I could fit into my schedule for the New Books Network.

Last big question: in the end, would I make the same choices again? Retrospectives are always deceiving, because we cannot return to the state of knowledge we did (or did not) possess at an earlier time, but on the whole, my answer would be yes. It would be lovely, of course, to have a contract with a Big Five publisher—especially if (a far from guaranteed result) it meant funding my retirement with royalties from my novels. But I don’t write to sell books; I write because I love to tell stories about this long-past society that is so unfamiliar to most Americans and even many Europeans, yet so full of dramatic possibility and tension. Having written the books for my own pleasure and worked on them with my friends at Five Directions Press, I see it as a simple decision to share them with those who enjoy them. I can do that because after almost thirty years in publishing, I know how a professionally produced book should look, and the coop makes skills like cover design affordable. It’s not a model that would work for everyone, but it works for me.

So let’s raise a glass to ten wonderful years, with hopes for many more to come!

 

Images © C. P. Lesley, Colleen Kelley (Five Directions Press logo), and the New Books Network (New Books in Historical Fiction logo).

Writing Like Crazy

With all the interviews I’ve conducted this year—both written and podcast—I don’t often have a chance to talk about my own writing. At this moment, though, I’m juggling no fewer than three novels in various stages of completion, with a couple more roughly plotted stories waiting in the wings.

Nuts, I know. Just keeping the different sets of characters straight is a challenge, never mind remembering the details of all those plots. And there’s a constant tendency to think What about this? and go haring off in a direction that might better be left unexplored for a while. But with a bit of self-discipline and switching from one intense focus to another, it can be done. So, in brief, where do things stand?

Closest to publication is Song of the Sinner (Songs of Steppe & Forest 4), which explores Solomonida Sheremeteva’s attempts to balance her own yearning for love against her daughter’s needs. Anfim, the man Solomonida loves, doesn’t equal her noble status—a gap that today would seem minor but that loomed large in 1540s Europe. Meanwhile, her cousin Igor—whom some readers will remember from the previous book, Song of the Sisters—has come up with yet another scheme to reclaim the Sheremetev estate, and when it fails, his animosity becomes personal.

I’m working on final revisions now and expect to have a finished product by sometime in November, but since Christmas supply chains are particularly tight this year, I don’t expect the book to release before January 2022.

Once I get through that, Song of the Storyteller (Songs of Steppe & Forest 5) will be right behind. I wrote a complete rough draft over the summer, although that means only that my story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Since I can’t outline worth a darn despite years of trying, the only way I can tell whether a book will work is to write it out before I even begin sharing with my writers’ group. I’ve started on that second stage, but at just about one-fifth of the way through I still haven’t had time to enter their comments or respond to their suggestions. I have three weeks of writing vacation coming up before the end of the year, though, so I hope to make significant progress then. 

It’s a fun book to write, because it’s centered around the first bride show held for Ivan the Terrible (in 1546–47), where both Lyuba and Anna are candidates who, each for her own reasons, desperately want not to be chosen. Becoming queen is, I know, the dream of many contemporary girls and young women, but really it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, especially if it meant marriage to Ivan the Terrible. He outdid even Henry VIII, wedding seven times—and although the first marriage lasted the longest (thirteen years) and is reputed to have been reasonably satisfying, his wife spent most of her time pregnant and may have died from sheer exhaustion as a result. Not a fate my heroines yearn for, especially when each of them has already lost her heart to a far more appealing young man. 

The Merchants’ Tale, the historical mystery I’m co-writing with P.K. Adams, is the third current project. In brief, it’s essentially finished, but having two authors creates certain financial complications that can best be resolved by finding an outside publisher. With that goal in mind, we’re querying agents while beginning to explore the advantages and disadvantages of individual small presses. But each of us has other writing projects underway, so we plan to make a final decision on Merchants’ Tale in the spring. Around then, too, we will start work on its  successor, The Privateers’ Tale.

The last of the lurking projects is Song of the Snow Maiden (Songs of Steppe & Forest 6), which ties off a long romantic thread begun in Song of the Sinner and opens the door to at least two more novels featuring even younger members of the cast. But all three of those are topics for another day.

Cover images © C. P. Lesley, based on paintings in the public domain; Ivan Aivazovsky, The Rainbow (1873), public domain via WikiArt.

Ushering In 2020

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions as a whole. The annual promises to lose weight, exercise more, master a foreign language or a new musical instrument, and read more books than there are weeks in the year tend to lose their charm—or at least their credibility—after several decades of repetition. That said, I do have goals that I hope to achieve as a writer in 2020. Even if there is no real penalty to not meeting the goals, having them keeps me on track.

Which I guess is also the reason for promising to lose weight, exercise more, and so on ...

Anyhow, here are the writing goals. Those others are between me and my waistline.

(1) Publish Song of the Shaman (Songs of Steppe & Forest 2), on schedule in mid-January. This novel follows the attempts of Grusha, another secondary character from the Legends series, to balance her Russian heritage with life in a steppe horde and her own needs against those of her six-year-old son, whose future presents an increasingly pressing problem as he approaches the age when his training for adulthood will begin.
This one is pretty much a done deal, because the print edition is already available and the Kindle edition up for preorder, with a delivery date of January 14. But I didn’t want to skip its place in the publication sequence, plus there is so much that goes into marketing a new book that its appearance becomes an ongoing project for several months.

(2) Produce a final manuscript of Song of the Sisters (Songs 3) and sketch out book 4, Song of the Sinner.
Songs 3 is actually in its third draft, resting except for collecting comments from my writers’ group before undergoing another round of revision for publication. So that should be doable by the end of the year. A full rough draft of Songs 4 is a longer shot, but I am starting to come up with ideas, so it’s worth including here.

(3) Complete my half of the rough draft of my first historical mystery novel, co-written with P. K. Adams and tentatively titled These Barbarous Coasts.

After a slow start over the summer, this one is roaring along. Patrycja and I have agreed on a full outline (although the plot is already twisting a bit, as my plots tend to do, and I’m struggling not to let it twist so much that I drive her crazy). She’s drafted the prologue and chapter 1, I’ve drafted chapter 2 and sketched the opener for chapter 5. And I have three more full writing days in my holiday leave before I have to go back to full-time work and writing weekends.

Will we make it? Who knows? But the chances are good, and the process is both entertaining and educational, since I’ve never collaborated with another novelist before.

(4) Conduct twelve New Books in Historical Fiction interviews. Also submit links to recent interviews every four weeks for featuring on the Literary Hub.

I have interviews scheduled through June, and the volunteers keep appearing in my mailbox, so I’m hopeful that I can meet—even exceed—this goal. I just sent in January’s interview for processing and interviewed Gabrielle Mathieu about her latest book—which is fantasy based on medieval Europe and can be cross-posted to both our channels—so I’m getting off to a good start.

As for submitting to LitHub, that’s a privilege, so barring memory lapse or computer disaster, I will certainly do my best to fulfill that goal—for my authors’ and the New Books Network’s sakes as much as my own.

(5) Typeset/proof, produce e-books, and in some cases edit Five Directions Press titles scheduled for 2019. The exact lineup is still in play, but in addition to Song of the Shaman (historical fiction/romance), I expect to work on Champion of the Earth—the second book in Gabrielle Mathieu’s YA fantasy series, Berona’s Quest—and River Aria, the third and last novel in Joan Schweighardt’s Rivers trilogy.
Not much to say here. If the books come in, I’ll find time to work on them.

(6) Stay current with online marketing efforts and outreach. This goal includes keeping up with my weekly blog posts, maintaining my website and the Five Directions Press website, and participating regularly in such group features as “Books We Loved” and “Five Directions Press Authors Dish”—as well as regular if not daily appearances on Facebook (as my author self and Five Directions Press), Twitter, and Goodreads.
This one is always a challenge, because there are so many other tasks to fill my days, and neither marketing nor social media are really part of my natural skill set. But we try.

And as always, I wish everyone a splendid new year, with love and success and happiness for you and those you love!


Image purchased by subscription from iClipart.com, no. c1869314.

Roundup for 2019

As always (at least since 2014, when I started this tradition), here in the final post of December I review my goals for 2019 and how well I met them, in preparation for setting new goals for 2020 next week.

On the whole, I met and in some cases exceeded this year’s targets. See below for details.

(1) Publish Song of the Siren (Songs of Steppe & Forest 1), on schedule in late February. 
Met. Song of the Siren launched on February 19 with a number of lovely endorsements from fellow writers and, although nowhere near bestseller status, has done well in comparison with my other novels. It has also spurred sales of my earlier books, especially The Golden Lynx and The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel.

(2) Produce a final manuscript of Song of the Shaman (Songs 2) and sketch out book 3, Song of the Sisters.  
Exceeded. Song of the Shaman is available for sale as of today and ready for its formal launch date on January 14, 2020, by which time I expect Amazon to have linked the print and paperback versions. Song of the Sisters is now on its second draft, and I have developed a complete outline for a historical murder mystery to be co-written with P. K. Adams and set in Muscovy in 1553. We hope to start the writing any day, with the idea of producing a full draft by next summer and, with luck, eventually a trilogy set in Poland-Lithuania as well as Russia.

(3) Conduct twelve New Books in Historical Fiction interviews.
Exceeded. Demand was heavy from January on, and at one point it looked as if I would have twenty by year’s end, but for various reasons I topped out at eighteen. I also hosted Q&As with authors on this blog about once a month in addition to the podcast interviews for the New Books Network, and I reviewed a number of other books either at length or as part of my quarterly Bookshelf rubric—most often both.

(4) Typeset/proof, produce e-books, and in some cases edit Five Directions Press titles scheduled for 2019.
Met. For a while, it looked as if Song of the Siren might be our only title this year, but in the end we had three. I edited Joan Schweighardt’s Gifts for the Dead (Rivers 2) while she edited Gabrielle Mathieu’s Girl of Fire (Berona’s Quest 1); then I typeset them both and produced the e-books after they finished proofing the typeset files.

(5) Stay current with online marketing efforts and outreach. At a minimum, I plan to keep up my weekly blog posts, maintain my website and the Five Directions Press website, and participate regularly if not every month in such group features as “Books We Loved” and “Five Directions Press Authors Dish.”  
Met. Although heavy work commitments meant that I was absent from social media more than is either desirable or wise for a small-press author, I did manage to keep up with my blog, maintain and update my website (hint: book links are now separated by series rather than all crammed into one page) and the Five Directions Press site. I submitted entries for “Books We Loved” in eleven out of twelve months and contributed at least three “Authors Dish” posts, as well as a Spotlight interview with P. K. Adams (conducted before we established the parameters of our joint project).

So not a bad show, all told. Check back next week to find out what I have planned for next year. In the meantime, my best wishes for a wonderful holiday season and a peaceful and productive 2020!

Image: Purchased by subscription from iClipart.com, #c1219315_b.jpg .

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.

Judging a Book by Its Cover

A short post this week, because I’ve been writing like mad on the first novel in my new series while juggling my regular job and a freelance project that, although no doubt worthy and often interesting, seldom rises to the level of scintillating writing. Don’t get me started on tax season, which I have spent the last few weeks denying, even though I know I need to buckle down to 1099s, W-2s, and all those work expenses that require categorization and totaling.

An article dropped into my in box today that gave me pause: an interview with three independent publicists, it included lots of information about rates (high) and dedication (also high) and numbers of clients served (surprisingly low), as well as some tips for those of us who can’t afford the high rates. 

All good, of course, but the article seems to take one crucial point for granted: before you hire a publicist, you need a professional product to sell.

Specifically, you need a great cover, a properly formatted text (print or e-book), and most of all, stellar prose. I can’t tell you how many pitches I get from publicists for New Books in Historical Fiction for books where the cover looks like something drawn by a middle-schooler, the fonts are small and bland, the book description goes on for pages without ever capturing the story, and the writing—assuming I get far enough to research the book online—is as flat as the proverbial pancake. It may sound mean, but these are not authors I want to interview. They shouldn’t sink their funds in publicity but use them to hire a writing coach and a competent book/cover designer.

Because this is a short post, I won’t go into the specifics of what makes a professional cover design. You can find out more, if you’re interested, in JD Smith’s The Importance of Book Cover Design and Formatting (you can also hire JD Smith herself, if she has the time, to produce a cover for you—check out her portfolio).

If she’s too busy or her work is not to your taste, there are many other gifted cover designers out there. You can team up with writers who have the design skills you lack: here at Five Directions Press we have our own cover designer, who is building her portfolio with the occasional freelance job, as well as professional editors, book designers, and typesetters. 

You can also work with a subsidy publisher: She Writes Press selects books for high-quality writing, then contracts for editorial services as well as cover design and typesetting, yielding appealing and well-written novels with minimal errors. Book production companies like Bookbaby include cover design in their packages.

Or you can hire a graphic designer who specializes in book covers. In addition to searching the Internet in the usual way or posting requests for recommendations on social media, one place to check is Reedsy.com, which vets editors and cover designers, with whom you can then contract on a one-on-one basis.  

In all these cases you should check the output online to be sure you like the style before you commit yourself to spending several hundred dollars. But unless you know what you’re doing, don’t use free software offered online, including the “cover creators” offered by the various online booksellers. Be wary of sites that advertise book covers on the cheap. Don’t use your own artwork. Don’t design your book or your cover in a word-processing program. And don’t assume your book will sell itself.

To stand out in a crowded market, you need a great cover, a great book description, and most of all, a great book. Even with those three things, your book sales will probably fall far below your hopes; it’s the nature of today’s market. But without those three things, there’s no point in spending a small fortune on a publicist, because the best publicist in the world can’t compensate for the fact that we all judge a book by its cover.

Images sprinkled throughout this post represent good cover design independent sources. No cover appeals to everyone, but each of these examples includes an image that captures the story and the genre of the novel, fonts used creatively and well, and respect for proportions and alignment.

Revisiting the Past

The title of this post may raise a few eyebrows. As a historian and historical novelist, you may ask, am I not constantly revisiting the past—both the past that we can study from documents and artifacts and the past that has retreated so far into time that we can only hope that, in striving to re-create it, we don’t give birth to a monster that neither did nor could exist?

But that’s not the kind of past I’m writing about this week. Instead, I have in mind the return to a piece of my own past, specifically books I have written and published, then set aside to move on to the next novel in the series. However rewarding it may be to press the buttons that take a book out into the world, there is also a moment of nostalgia, even regret, at saying goodbye to that particular setting, to those individual characters at that moment in their evolution. Although I have lived mentally in the Legends world since 2008—and expect to remain here, in various forms, for many more years—each combination of characters and incidents is unique. As I get ready to release Maria and Alexei and the rest of the Vermilion Bird cast, the need to get the word out also requires me to consider and promote the earlier books in the series. To revisit them, in a sense. Which brings me to the concept of story worlds.

In brief, a story world comprises the vast combination of characters and settings that surround a series or an individual novel. Much of the story world remains invisible to the reader, but it envelops the writer, who must immerse herself in imagining not only what her characters sense and feel and think and interact with but also what they do not see: the unwritten rules of the society that govern their responses in ways they don’t question or realize. Every human community has these rules, and for better or worse we all live by them. We absorb them before we reach the age of independence, and whether we accept or rebel in adulthood, we seldom truly separate ourselves from the world around us. The same applies to literary characters.

Story worlds are most obvious in science fiction and fantasy, where authors construct entire planets based on principles they perceive in our society or trends they can imagine or just wild ideas that came to them in the night. The rules governing those worlds and societies must achieve sufficient consistency that readers will suspend disbelief. In brief, if dragons can fly today, they must fly tomorrow, unless an explanatory (and explained) circumstance shows up to prevent them.

But historical worlds must also be fully explored and understood, as must the intellectual and emotional circumstances driving contemporary novels, if the reader is to believe a given set of characters’ behaviors and motivations.

Creating such a world and such characters takes time. In the midst of a novel—which often requires years to complete, especially at first—the story world becomes all-encompassing. It surrounds the author even when she isn’t writing. I lived in Kasimov and Moscow, then on the steppe, then amid Russia’s northern woods, then in Moscow again. Each journey was different, following a new set of characters or struggling to reconnect with the same ones at later stages in their lives, trying to understand how they might grow and change—and how they would never change, no matter how many conflicts and obstacles I threw at their heads. 

That’s why going back, picking up one of the books, and opening it is like taking a journey into my own history: a little strange, sometimes awkward, but often as pleasant as returning to a vacation house I once enjoyed but haven’t seen in years. Sometimes I surprise myself with research I’ve since forgotten or a section—even a turn of phrase—that strikes me as well done. Other sentences remind me that learning to write is a process, one that requires lots of practice, or as J. K. Rowling once put it, “You have to kill a lot of trees before you write anything good.” I could go back and revise, but I know I probably won’t, because other worlds and stories are beckoning. My old friends in their sepia photographs will understand, I think, why I want to move on—especially since I plan to take them with me.

So with all that in mind, I offer you, too, a chance to enter my Legends story world. As noted last week, I am celebrating the imminent release of The Vermilion Bird (Legends 4: South) by placing the Kindle versions of the previous books in the series on sale in the US and UK stores for $2.99. The Winged Horse (Legends 2: East) promotion is running now and will continue through Sunday, December 3, at midnight PST/GMT. The Swan Princess (Legends 3: North) goes on sale at 8 AM PST/GMT on December 4, through Sunday, December 10, at midnight PST/GMT. The Golden Lynx (Legends 1: West) is always priced at $2.99 and is available at Barnes and Noble, the iTunes Store, and certain libraries, as well as Amazon.com.

Images from Clipart, nos. 201458399, 21735960, and 2193507.

Anniversaries

Incredible as it may seem—it certainly seems so to me!—this month marks the fifth anniversary of this blog. If you had told me, in June 2012, that I would succeed in finding things to say every single week for five years, I would have wondered what mind-altering substance you had consumed. Yet here I am, five years on, occasionally frantic in my search for suitable topics for discussion but generally posting on time.

This month also marks the fifth anniversary of Five Directions Press. On June 3, 2012, we published the first version of The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel (since reissued in a smaller size with a much spiffier cover designed by Courtney J. Hall). At the time, we saw our coop press as something of an experiment—a lark, even, like those old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland films about putting on a show. We had only the vaguest idea of what we were doing, but the climate seemed right for a cooperative enterprise that lay somewhere between completely self-published and the commercial format monopolized by large corporate conglomerates. We gave it a try, not knowing what to expect, and it’s been great.

That first title has become twenty, out or due by early next year, as well as several more approaching completion but not yet ready to add to the website. (For those counting, Cover no. 20 is awaiting its big reveal next month before appearing on our Books page.) The latest went up on Amazon within the last twenty-four hours: stay tuned for that announcement next week. Our small group of three has tripled, and most of us have more than one book under our belts. Marketing is still a challenge, but we have learned lots about book production, publication, website design, newsletters and press releases, social media, even promotion. Two of us host podcasts on the New Books Network. And the topics of our books range from the dissolution of the Roman Empire to twenty-fourth-century ballet, with many highways and byways in between, and cover the globe from the secret Jewish communities of Inquisition-era Mexico to psychedelic experimentation in 1950s Switzerland.

 

Selected Five Directions Press Books

Image © 2017 Five Directions Press

Last but not least, June marks the ninth anniversary of the writers’ group that gave rise to Five Directions Press and produced most of its early titles. Each year at this time we go out to lunch, forget about the critiques, invite friends and fellow writers, and celebrate. That lunch is this weekend.

So a short post today to say that we’re enjoying the journey and to extend our thanks to our authors (who are also our staff), our indulgent families, and especially our readers. Let’s hope this is the first of many five-year anniversaries for Five Directions Press and its writers!

Catching Fleas

I’ve heard a story—perhaps you’ve heard it too, although it’s probably more an urban legend than reality—that the makers of Oriental carpets weave mistakes into their work, because only God is perfect. Frankly, this story always makes me laugh. Does anyone have to manufacture mistakes? I can make a dozen before breakfast without even trying, especially with a middle-aged memory working on my behalf. Which brings me to today’s topic: proofing.

As some of you know, I handle all the typesetting and proofing, as well as much of the copy editing, for Five Directions Press. I make my living the same way. And like most editors, I am a perfectionist. Show me a poster or an advance review copy, and my eye goes immediately to the extra space, the comma that should be a period or vice versa, the preposition that ends a sentence. I can’t help it. When I’m reading for pleasure, I wish I could turn off that inner voice commenting on faulty grammar or words that break across lines when they should not, never mind spelling and capitalization errors.

So it may come as something of a surprise that of all the parts that go into my job, proofing is the one I dislike most. Editing fiction is usually fun (if nonfiction not always—it depends on the topic), typesetting artistically satisfying, writing pure joy. But proofing demands intense focus on tiny, essentially arbitrary details. Worse, it’s so final. From proofing, a book goes to press, where any mistake that’s missed will remain visible forever. Small things, big impact—a classic prescription for stress.

Proofing is, of course, essential. Work riddled with errors brands an author or a press as unprofessional. But as an activity it is humbling, especially to a perfectionist. Proofing reveals the places where one’s eye skipped over the same mistake a dozen times before. In the novel I’m working on now, I read the file before typesetting, during typesetting, as a printed PDF after typesetting. I created an e-book and checked the formatting, although the error I have in mind would not show up in an e-book. Only when I went to investigate a problem the author identified—which turned out to be caused by her computer, but that’s another story—did I realize that I had assigned the wrong tag to one chapter opener, so that the pretty small caps that set off the first line everywhere else didn’t appear. This after going through the file about eighteen times to check specifically for typesetting errors: things like vertical justification (facing pages ending at the same place) and ladders (same word stacked two or three times at the left or right edge of a paragraph). I saw a thousand trees and missed the giant rock sitting smack where it should not be. That’s proofing.

One thing that helps, I find, is changing formats. Things I can’t see on screen or miss in printouts leap out at me in an e-book or the actual book. CreateSpace lets authors order bound proofs, which look exactly like the final output. I always insist on seeing the bound proof before I sign off on a book, whether it’s mine or someone else’s. In the past, I’ve found incorrect headers, photographs that printed too dark, tables of contents that didn’t match the chapter headings, authors’ names spelled incorrectly, and more—all this in articles and books that three to six people have read, sometimes more than once. We learn to read by recognizing patterns, to see words rather than individual letters. So faced with a page, the mind fills in the blanks, and nothing but kicking it out of its comfort zone lets the proofer see what’s really there or not there in place of what we expect to find. Then there are the errors no one could predict, like the cover that looked perfect on screen but developed a color mismatch or stray lines on export, visible only in the final output or when blown up to 600% in Photoshop.

And that is why I don’t worry about inserting errors in my work. Because hard as I try to root them out, they multiply like fleas, and there are always more to find. But as irritated as I become every time I finally catch sight of that giant rock, I’ve had to learn to chill. Because it’s true: only God is perfect.


Image: Clipart no. 109370633.

Publishing Too Soon

Writing is a tough business, especially novel writing. Almost by definition, it takes place in a virtual cave—one would-be author alone against the onslaught of the imagination. Characters talking in your head, moving pictures of setting and plot: isn’t this most people’s definition of insanity? Sure, the writer knows at some level that these are his or her creations, but tell that to a character who has decided that, come hell or high water, she is not embarking on that terribly convenient (for the author) mission that doesn’t happen to fit with her way of looking at the world.

In addition to the intense solitude of fiction writing as an exercise, budding novelists encounter another problem. To be able to write, you must first have learned to read. The vast majority of us learn to read at an early age, and those of us who become writers have often been reading for several decades before we produce finished work as adults. Since we are such accomplished and passionate readers, we tend to assume that we have what it takes as writers, and since we are writing alone, there is often no one to correct that misapprehension.

The third problem magnifies the first two: finishing a story feels fabulous. At the moment of typing “THE END,” almost every author knows this draft represents the greatest work in world literature, a piece of perfection equal to the classics. Every one of the nine hundred pages, now so laboriously completed, shines like the proverbial sun. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the first book or the twenty-first, in that instant of completion the thought of withholding this gift from its unwitting but eager readership seems cruel. And so the first draft gets pushed out into print before it’s ready.

In the olden days, by which I mean a decade ago, that last step was not possible. Vanity presses existed, but few people read the books they published. To reach a market, writers sent out typed, then e-mailed, queries to literary agents who, drat their uncaring souls, failed to recognize the genius. The agents did not reply or, if they did reply, sent standard responses. Writers had to work their way up to requests for full manuscripts, detailed critiques, and personalized rejection letters before they finally secured a contract. In the process, they did a lot of rewriting. And slowly, slowly, authors learned that, however necessary in terms of preparation and training, the mere fact of being avid readers did not mean that they had mastered the craft of novel writing.

Believe me, I know. I’ve been there and done that, as they say. Twenty-plus years ago, I sent queries to agents for novels that these days I can’t bear even to look at. I think of those queries and cringe. What must those agents have thought? But I know the answer: they had seen thousands of submissions just like mine, and within three pages, if not three paragraphs, they thought “here’s someone else who doesn’t know what she’s doing,” tossed my query aside, and sent the standard letter—or nothing.

At the time, I was disappointed, not to say devastated. But now I consider myself fortunate to have had that experience. It took me fifteen years to write a publishable novel, reading craft books and working with more accomplished fellow writers all the way, and in those fifteen years publishing changed. In many ways, it changed for the better, because a highly consolidated market rejected good books as well as those that still needed much more work. But in one respect, authors lost from the change. As I have discovered from hosting New Books in Historical Fiction and from co-founding Five Directions Press, it has become easy to publish a book too soon.

Not only beginners or self-published authors make this mistake. Even mature writers sometimes put out books at a point when they could use another round of editing or error checking, when the plot is still sketchy, when the main characters’ motivations remain cloudy or inconsistent and their developmental arcs unclear. In these cases, the writers are usually seeking to make money with additional titles or have signed a contract they must meet. Sometimes the writer has become such a big name that no one in publishing wants to criticize his/her books. But for whatever reason it happens, the person hurt in the end is the author. The established author at least has his or her early works for readers to enjoy. The new author may never recover from those slow beginnings, inept dialogue, clichéd emotions, and trite descriptions. At Five Directions Press, that’s one of the things we do for one another: we decide as a group when each of us can safely release her book.

So do yourself a favor. Put the first draft away, toast your achievement in champagne, and pat yourself on the back. You’ve earned every drop and chortle. You finished a novel, and that’s amazing. But don’t send the file out (or upload it for publication) just yet. Go back in a week—better, a month—take out the blue pencil, and revise. Read the dialogue aloud and listen to whether it sounds clunky. Show the manuscript to a writer friend you trust. Show it to a few more. Collect their comments and repeat. Get recommendations for books on writing and read them, or if you can, take a course. Hire an editor who specializes in your genre of fiction, who can point out where your specific story goes off the rails or needs further development. Join a critique group and learn while doing. Find a way that works for you. But whatever you do, don’t publish the first draft or even the third. One day, you’ll be glad you waited.


Image from Clipart.com, no. 20413568

The No-Longer-Dreaded Synopsis

Or How I Learned to Love What I Once Feared

As Elizabeth Sinclair notes in her how-to guide—the title of which, The Dreaded Synopsis, I have shamelessly adapted for this post—“Given a choice between writing one book and a synopsis and writing two books, most authors would choose to write two books. Even the word ‘synopsis’ inspires cold chills and neuroses in novelists” (5).

Too, too true. I can attest from experience that Sinclair has hit the proverbial nail smartly on its head here. Throughout my first three books, I loathed synopses. For the next three, I didn’t bother to write them. The great advantage of forming a writers’ cooperative, I told myself, was that I would never, ever have to write a synopsis again. And almost every writer I know would raise a mammoth cheer at that thought.

Why is that? What makes people who can spend years in a room chronicling the adventures of characters who live only in their heads and write multiple drafts of 100,000-word novels cringe at the thought of summarizing their stories in a single page—or even five pages? The terrors of a back-cover blurb (although I’ve learned to love those too) are easier to understand: a blurb is a marketing tool, so it has to reflect the book in ways both interesting and appealing, giving away just enough to catch a potential reader’s attention and make him or her pick up the book, but not so much that the urge to find out more fades away.

Of course, synopses act as marketing tools, too. Literary agents want them, as do publishing house editors. So much better to read a page than fifty pages, or even ten, especially when one faces hundreds—even thousands—of queries. And although a poorly written synopsis may not do justice to the novel it portrays, a well-written one almost always indicates an author who has mastered her craft. With only so many hours in the day, agents and editors can be forgiven for taking the risk of overlooking a few good authors to the benefit of others who have mastered this essential technique.

None of that, however, explains why I decided to write a synopsis for The Vermilion Bird. My reason may help you, too, over your dread of synopses (and I assume that if you have read this far, you like them no more than I once did). Quite simply, I realized I could use it to focus my thoughts and sketch out the central events of both the plot and—most essential—the character development of the novel. The plot relies in part on a particular political crisis that afflicted Russia in 1537 and followed a compressed but vital timeline. The crisis serves as background, of course; Vermilion Bird is historical fiction, not history. Still, the events drive the story, and I needed a clear sense of when characters needed to arrive and leave specific places and what openings existed between events when fictional development could take place.

For that, a timeline would suffice, and I have been constructing one in Aeon Timeline 2, a wonderfully useful little program that lets me track where various characters (including actual historical figures) are at given moments in time. But precisely because the fiction element ultimately dominates, the synopsis proved its worth. There the focus falls (at least, it should fall—a realization that opens the whole process up and makes it less overwhelming) on the characters: who the main players are and what they want; what brings them together and pushes them apart; which problems they need to solve before they can achieve their conscious and unconscious goals; and who has to interact with whom when for the whole unwieldy structure to cohere instead of fall apart.

As that information goes onto the page, flaws and strengths become clear. So do plot holes and weak motivations. The imagination kicks in, and the effect on the author is the same as writing every day: the characters come alive and start talking. In a page or two, a writer has room only for the things that matter. Finding those things before getting a long way into the book saves an enormous amount of time that must otherwise go into revision. The synopsis also requires an endpoint, which then provides a beacon in the midpoint of the book when, as generally happens in my case, the characters have pushed the story in directions I never anticipated and I need to rein them in and get them back on track. Redoing the synopsis after completing the first draft clarifies what needs cutting and where to expand. For all these reasons, it makes sense to learn how to write a synopsis, even if you never plan to show it to an agent or an editor.

If you have not read Sinclair’s book, I highly recommend it. It’s available in print and for Kindle, and it lays out the mechanics in clear, vivid prose, with great examples to get you over that hump. For me, it turned synopsis writing from a chore to a guilty pleasure, and what could be better than that?

To close, I offer not the full one-page synopsis for Vermilion Bird (too much information so early in the process!) but the back-cover blurb, an even more condensed version of my story-in-the-making. No doubt that will change, too, but the basic idea will remain. After all, I know now where the story is heading....

The Vermilion Bird (Legends of the Five Directions 4: South)

Maria Koshkina has spent most of the last three years wishing herself out of her in-laws’ household. So she should feel relieved now that her father has found a new match for her. Alas, he has picked the most annoying man in creation—not even a Russian, but a Tatar sultan who takes it for granted that she will ride at his side, read what he gives her, and advise him on the ins and outs of the Moscow court. And where her first husband had minimal interest in women—or at least in Maria—the new one has a healthy respect for the joys of marriage and no qualms whatsoever about seeking them outside it.
 
Her husband can’t decide quite what to make of this beautiful redhead who seems both untouched and touchy. Doesn’t she understand that a princess needs more than embroidery to survive? In the assassination-filled politics of the sixteenth-century Russian court, this unlikely pair struggles to find a way to get along before the undercurrents of rebellion sweep them away.

Less Alone, More Together

Five Directions Press is growing. Eight years after we became a writing group and four years after founding our coop, we have added two new members and will soon have four new books listed on our site (five new books in print, one of which has been featured on the site for a while).

Denise Allan Steele writes contemporary fiction set in her Scottish homeland and her adopted country, the United States. She is in the midst of revising her novel Rewind, which takes a humorous look at the ins and outs of love and politics under Margaret Thatcher—and how decisions made then reverberate decades later. We hope to have it available by the end of this year.

Gabrielle Mathieu, our first overseas member, joins us from Switzerland. Her Falcon trilogy straddles the line between historical fantasy and historical fiction. In 1950s Switzerland, Peppa, an unconventional young woman trying to make ends meet for a few weeks until she reaches the age of twenty and can inherit the legacy left by her father, unwittingly tumbles into a research program run by a sinister and cynical scientist. What is her connection with the falcon? Where does reality blend into drug-induced hallucinations? You will have to read this tightly plotted, deeply experienced story to find out—and even then you may wonder. Book 1, The Falcon Flies Alone, is planned for release in late summer or fall.

Another fall release will be the first book in Courtney J. Hall’s five-part Silver Bells, a series geared toward the Christmas holidays. While waiting for the sequel to Some Rise by Sin to make itself visible, Courtney has moved into contemporary romance, and A Holiday Wish should be ready by October. Noelle Silver, a wedding planner, considers changing to a different business when her own marital plans go bust right when she’s scouting locations for the ceremony. But a wealthy bride in a hurry just won’t take no for an answer, and before Noelle has time to adjust, she finds herself back in the game, organizing the wedding of the century despite opposition from and the appeal of one very attractive adversary.

Booktrope Editions, an innovative publishing model that ran for five years before I heard of it, announced earlier this month that it is shutting down as of May 31. The authors orphaned by its closing include Joan Schweighardt, who has agreed to re-release her Last Wife of Attila the Hun with Five Directions Press. We look forward to working with her on that project and thank her for entrusting her novel to us. I enjoyed the book, which has won several awards, very much when I read it in January 2016, in preparation for my New Books in Historical Fiction interview with Joan. You can learn more about Joan and this book by listening to her free interview and from “Dealing with the Dragon,” her guest post on this blog.

As for other news, don’t forget my own Swan Princess, which came out last month. If you haven’t read any of the Legends novels, you can start with this one, although doing so will undercut some of the suspense in books 1 and 2. So I recommend starting with The Golden Lynx and proceeding through The Winged Horse to the latest installment. I’ve begun work on book 4, The Vermilion Bird, but an onslaught of editing projects has put everything on hold for the last month. Hoping to start up again soon.

Last, but definitely not least, Ariadne Apostolou’s West End Quartet—a set of novellas that follows the fortunes of the women from the urban commune described in her debut novel, Seeking Sophia—should also appear sometime this year. You can read more about West End Quartet and Seeking Sophia, including reading or listening to an excerpt of the latter, by clicking on the title links, which will take you to the Five Directions Press site.