Proof copies can be hazardous to your health

You've seen this cover on my blog many times now, right. Her pants are clearly blue...

The first proof copy I got back, the cover was sooooo dark. When I mentioned it to Lori, she told me that the covers come back about 5x darker than you send them.

So I lightened it up to what you see here to the left. Lighter skin. A glint on the glass, purple fingernails, BLUE pants.

Yeah, the pants look black. And this time the cover is off center. Don't know how that happened. UGH!!!

So here is the disclaimer on getting proof copies: May cause frustration, anxiety, depression, nausea, vomiting, headache, heart pain. May cause hair loss in the form of you pulling it out by the root. In severe cases, could cause death.

This process is definitely a learning curve. A BIG one. After this round though, the second time, which I'm going to start ASAP with Girl in Motion, will be a breeze, right? RIGHT?!?

Formatting snafus and moving forward

Had a little snag in the formatting of Dissected, Lori has never worked with Createspace, so a couple pages were not being agreeable. As I'm writing this, I'm once again uploading again, so hopefully it's a done deal.

I'm in the process of designing the back cover. What do you think?

Next steps, setting up distribution with lightning source, getting barcodes. I haven't really looked into that yet, but I think it's fairly self explanatory, and setting my sale price. The book is a little longer than Never Eighteen and I'm considering donating a dollar of every sale to Mary Bridge Children's hospital here in Tacoma, so I'm thinking about a $9.99 sale price.

OH YEAH!!!! The book is done uploading and NO ISSUES THIS TIME!!! Woot! Means it's time to move forward.

I also still have to design postcards to send out to connections I made with Never Eighteen, libraries, schools, and indie bookstores, though I can't find my mailing list. knowing me, I wrote it all down by hand and threw it away, because I can be a complete idiot like that. (hopefully not, but yeah, it's been known to happen). I need to design buttons. The book cover makes that a little tricky, but I'll come up with something. And stickers. People like stickers. I also want new business cards.

I've pushed my release date back to August 27th so I can set up a local launch party, for which I need about 6 weeks lead time.

I met up with a bunch of indie writers in Tacoma last week. It was a very cool experience. I know I can learn a lot from that diverse group.

Almost done!!

Covers again and a little fundraising

So, after polling and much research and whatnot, I've chosen a cover. I'm not going to reveal it yet, because I'm still tweaking it. I've also decided, even though I really don't like asking for money, to try to raise the funds for costs of getting the book published. If you're interested in just checking out the campaign, or donating, you can find it here. Even if you don't want to donate, the site is kind of interesting.

Now, you're not giving and getting nothing in return. Oh no. With Indiegogo you get perks. So depending on the level of contribution, you'll get something. My undying gratitude, some SWAG, a signed book, and if you're a local, you could get more.

I'm getting pretty excited about this project. It's taking a lot of research about formatting, publicity (which I know pretty well already, but you can always learn more), book covers, ISBN numbers, distributing, and crap like that. I was thinking about an April release date, but foolish me forgot that I started marketing Never Eighteen long before three months ahead of time.

So now, I'm going for June/July.

That's all the begging I'll do for the day. I'm hoping to have a cover done in the next week. Maybe I can get one of my awesome blogger pals to do a reveal for me. *hint hint*

Formatting and other tragedies

First I'll give you a monkey, because there was no monkey in my blog yesterday.

There's a lot to do when you decide to become an indie publisher. Formatting is one of them. It's really not THAT difficult. Createspace has pretty clear instructions on how to do it. But unfortunately, I apparently was not indenting my manuscript correctly and that made it a little bit of a bitch. Luckily I have some Facebook friends that are Word masters and they helped me through my idiotic mistake and now I'm cruising along, in fact, I'm pretty much done with the formatting part.

Next step is more editing. I have some betas reading it as we speak. One is already finished with it. He read it in a day. Good sign. I'm hoping the others will have it done in two weeks time. I'm hoping for an April release.

After that, I have a friend who is a great editor who is going to go through a all in one editing process for me. She's going to go through my formatting, do line editing and copy editing.

Then I had an offer from someone to help me with formatting, so I hope she'll also take a look at my formatting, just to have one more set of eyes look at it.

Then the hopefully last round of edits, formatting fixes and voila, finishing up the other details and I have a book out.

If you're thinking about self publishing, my friend Karla Brady has a great blog that lays out the process for you step by step. Check it out here.

That is all. Have a great Tuesday!