Submission Day – Firewatchers Sequel

(This may be a long post because it was an important event.)

Some days just demand chocolate. Pardon me as I chase those few bites with a few sips of tea. Ah. OK. Ta Da – I think. Today, I submitted my manuscript and cover for my next book. KDP approved. The proof copy is on its way. By this time next week, the sequel to Firewatcher may be available for sale. Have you noticed that I’ve skipped details like the cover art and the title? There’s a reason for that.

Uploading the files only took ten minutes. Writing the book took two years. Creating the cover took two weeks. Coming up with the title took two hours. And yet, some of my books have hit this stage, and then taken weeks to convince the software that ‘what I saw was not what I got’. So much for WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). That’s why I hesitate to publicize the title or the cover too soon. There’s always something to fix, or at least improve; but is it good enough? The digital proof looked good enough. I went the extra step and asked for a physical proof, too. That should be delivered within days. If all goes well enough, the book goes ‘live’ a week from the upload.

Notice that ‘good enough’. Some seek perfection, and expect to achieve it. I’m currently reading the Terry Pratchett novel, Making Money. A bit of well-written humor is well-received. Sir Terry sold over 85 million copies of his books. He could afford multiple professional editors. The book has typos. It isn’t perfect. Perfection is a bar too high for me. ‘Good enough’ is good enough for me.

And yet, I want to see the physical copy because some flaws are too flawed. That one time when a graphic printed white lines on a black square instead of the typical black lines on white paper, shudder…

Since Grammarly did its check, the story text had to finally pass from a Google Doc on a Chromebook, to a docx file on a Windows machine, to a pdf on a Windows machine, to the upload onto an Amazon machine. Simple, right? As simple as getting Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and Amazon to agree on something. I’ve now learned to write in the simplest program (Google Doc) and format on a Windows machine from which a pdf is created. For me, that means a comfort zone of Chromebooks; then reformatting to a docx file on a USB drive; which I then take to the local library’s Windows machines for formatting; and from which the final pdf is created. I then copy around the final pdf and can return to the Chromebook at home for uploading to Amazon.

Does that sound silly? Sure, it is; but if I don’t do that, I’ve seen errors in margin settings, gutters, page numbers, etc., which is why I ignore headers and footers. For Firewatcher, I lost one week to the fact that Google treats every page the same, but Microsoft mirrors margins, so the right side of the left page and the left side of the right page don’t get lost in the paper as it dives into the binding. I found a work-around that time, but it moved half of the lines off by a half of a character width. It looked fine, but Amazon/kdp balked and wouldn’t print the book. 

By the way, I’ve used word processors for over forty years and know that the more sophisticated the program, the more likely it is introducing hidden characters. Ugh.

Ideally, Grammarly should’ve been the final word on the words. Realistically, while fixing errors in Grammarly I found errors that Grammarly missed. Then, as I was formatting it in MS Word, Word found errors. All four of us, me, Google Doc, MS Word, and Grammarly found errors the others missed. Don’t expect more of a human. We’re all fallible.

You may imagine that, if I was to chronicle every edit this post would be as long as a book. Got specific questions? Add them in the Comments.

Keep in mind that formatting is more than getting the margins right. Title page, ISBN, acknowledgments, About the Author, other books, etc. are all extra pages that must get added. Do you have chapters or headings? A Table of Contents? List a characters (which some tell me is much appreciated.) Do you care if there’s a blank page at the end of a chapter, or that a chapter starts on the left versus the right? Rather than over-think it, find a book you like and see how they did it. Better yet, find three and compare.

That first item alone, the Title Page, alludes to a task that can be tough: picking a title. Yes, it only took two hours – and occasional thoughts that way as soon as I started thinking about the book. My books start as files, and files do best when they have names, and using that name is a good way to keep track of the files. Some flexibility is beneficial. “Sequel’ was non-descript, but I abandoned it when I realized there could be a sequel to the sequel. ‘Sequel to Firewatcher’ was more descriptive, but made for long filenames where half would get truncated in the directory. For a long time, I used a character name, like in the first book; but the character name I picked was Messenger, which can easily be confused with books and movies about Joan of Arc. I put them all in the same file and only changed the ones that needed to be updated.

But the title…

This is my ninth book, so by now, I know that overthinking isn’t working. Well, it is work, but it is rarely useful. Instead, whether with tea or wine or beer or whisky beside me, I get out pencil and paper and just start writing down short phrases. It becomes silly, and that’s part of the point. The serious titles come first. They can be the most obvious, and also the dullest. Then comes the blathering of words that can be meaningless, but as they are written, some are obviously atrocious and become a measure of what to avoid. Within that list, however, there’s usually an unexpected resonance. Home in on that, and hopefully find something short, sensible enough, memorable enough, easy to spell, and appropriate to the story. Done. And you’ll see it soon enough, but not yet because that’s something that can pervade everything, so it is worth checking again. Is anyone else using it? Could be, but is it a conflict? (Modern digital concern: If the words are smushed together, do they spell out something bad? Think about it.)

And now comes the cover.

Sad to say, people judge books by their covers, the book’s covers, not the person’s covers. Years ago, I heard some data that was broken down by what sells a book: 95% of sales are based on the front cover, 3.5% are also based on the back cover, 1% also look at the first page, and the remainder might read a random page. The cover is that important.

The modern digital concern is that the cover is not 6 inches by 9 inches. The cover is seen as an icon that may only be one inch by a half inch. In that small area, the buyer may be looking for nice art, a legible title, and maybe, maybe the author’s name. I suspect back cover material isn’t as important as the online description, price, and eventually reader reviews.

(Note: ebooks avoid a lot of the cover work, but also heighten the importance of that icon.)

Despite years of work, sales can be reduced to the control of a half a square inch of pixels.

And yet…

First sales rely on the cover. Subsequent sales rely on the first readers convincing other readers to read it, in which case those years matter.

But the cover isn’t just those things. The cover is also the spine, the bar code, and the back cover text. That can be another book worth of advice. 

I cheat somewhat. A good friend of mine is also an expert professional illustrator. I sketch up an idea. He gets creative with it, then practical with it, and hands it back to me. We don’t always agree, but the end result is always better than what I made. Of this entire process, I spend more on the cover design than any other aspect, and it is still only a few hundred, not the thousands I know some spend.

One key handy creation is a jpg or pdf of the front cover. It is a handy graphic for business cards and social media. Gotta Share it, both hand-to-hand and electron-to-electron.

A recent addition to the process: Disclosing whether AI created or helped or was ignored for parts in the process. (I checked helped, and then, not much.)

Whew.

From what I can tell, I may have finally found a process that works. I won’t know for sure until after the proof arrives. As I wrote above, there are many more questions to resolve. I’ve taught classes in writing, publishing, marketing, and the economy of the self-publishing world. If you have something simple to ask, ask in the Comments. I consult, too. I’m also open to group classes, even for groups like writers groups and such.

Is that enough? It must be because I am tired. I am also at the beginning of a new phase that writers shouldn’t assume away. I’ve spent so much time writing that, now that the book is probably done, I need, need to fill the time. For some, that’s trivial. For others, that may be daunting. What? Go out and do something frivolous? Is there a class for that?

Thanks for coming along for the ride. Stay tuned.