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!

Help me choose my book cover

I posted this on my author page on Facebook, but I know some of you aren't on there, so I wanted to post it here too and get your input. Here are the top three covers from facebook, will you please vote on your favorite for my new book Dissected. To help you out, here is a short summary:

Sydney Warner, a teenage girl, whom after being abandoned by her mother at a young age, becomes a thrill seeker with a penchant for extreme sports and a fascination with death. She’s brash, she’s spunky, and she doesn’t take crap from anyone. 
 
Withdrawn and broody David, from English class, is the boy of Syd's dreams, but love soon becomes just another extreme sport when Syd finds out that David has cheated on her with her best friend. Betrayal, loneliness, and a mishap with a picture frame set Syd on a course of self-destruction that includes alcohol, drugs, and self-mutilation in the form of cutting.

 After nearly bleeding to death during an arm carving mishap, Syd is tossed unwillingly
into a teen psyche ward where she comes to realize she’s not alone. Through new friendships, unwelcomed therapy, and her love of the stars, she finds alternate ways to cope with her emotions on her path to forgiveness and redemption. 

I'm putting numbers in the captions, so you can just give me the cover #. Thanks in advance! You can also let me know if there is a particular font you like as well.

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Changed My Mind

I'm gung ho. I've decided not to send Dissected to the agent again. (notice how I changed the name again?) I'm just going to throw my hat into the self publishing ring.

And I'm excited...really excited.

I'm doing a lot of research. I've had many friends who've gone before me who are willing to help out. I'm designing the cover. If this one goes well, I may just do them all this way and forgo traditional publishing all together. Who knows?

Any of you out there self pubbed? If so, how's it going?

Ousted

They posted the results of the pitch round for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest today. I did not make it. This is the first time of the five times I've entered that I've not made this first round. Am I shocked? I have to admit, a little. I've used pretty much the same pitch the last four times. It was bound to eventually fail me.

Maybe I was a bit over confident.

This round of course tells nothing of what kind of writer I am. It only tells that my pitch was worse than 400 other YA entrants. Oh well. Moving forward. Here are my plans:

• Wait for editor to finish reading An Unbalanced Line. If she rejects, that is the novel I'm planning to self pub. If she wants it, revise Lockdown and self pub.
• Revise Dissection and send back to agent that wants to read it. If she doesn't want it, self pub.
• Continue working on other books, Rumpelstiltskin retelling, post apocalyptic YA and other things I've started. I need to buckle down and get some of these written.
• Continue with side projects.

No matter what book it be, I am going to self pub this year. I cannot fathom the idea of not having a book out for another two to three years.

I congratulate and wish all the contestants still in ABNA the best of luck.

Monkey Madness Tuesday: Dear, Spammer

You get the monkeys today because I didn't feel like blogging yesterday, I felt like I had nothing to say. Today I do. I'm feeling some angst. So here I am. 

First of all, to the spammers who keep commenting here on my blog anonymously, go away. Get a life. Don't come back. No one is going to read your comment and follow your link. Are you stupid or something?

Secondly, I'm frustrated about my writing career. I have no idea which direction to go. I have about five projects going. I can't seem to focus. Meanwhile, I've got things tied up with editor and contest. I feel like a chicken with my head cut off.

Thirdly, I have another frustrating ongoing thing I can't really talk about but I'm so tired of dealing with I want to rip my hair out and I really don't understand it, it seems so stupid.

I have to say this. Thank god for kickboxing and xanax.

Image courtesy of samurai/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net