by Wendy Hawkin | Jul 5, 2018 | writing and publishing
A newly printed box of books arrived from IngramSpark. I am delighted with how they look. I did all the re-formatting myself and it was a steep learning curve. But they are beautiful and I love them. Book design is an art.
When I published To Charm a Killer, I sent it out for formatting and it came back looking clean and professional. But I thought: I can do this myself. I have a fair knowledge of desktop publishing. How hard can it be?
It was hard. But I persevered, and I’m quite proud of this edition of To Sleep with Stones. Here’s how it looks with the changes I made to last year’s printing.
I added more white space to the top and bottom (margins), eliminated the chapter number, changed the position of the page numbers, and added a drop cap in the same font as the chapter head—this font is Celtic Garamond and I love how it fits the book. My cover designer used it, and I was able to purchase a commercial license for it. I also found a free-use Celtic icon to use for scene breaks that I really like. These are things a reader might not notice, but when you’re designing a book, they’re all important. You can read about my formatting experience here.
The beauty of being an Indie publisher is that you make all the decisions. Yes, it is a steep learning curve that I’m still climbing, but there are times like this, when I can sit back and hold my baby in my hands and just feel good.
by Wendy Hawkin | May 23, 2018 | journal, writing and publishing
For several years, I taught English in high school. I’m not a short story writer, though I did write one for a contest last year. I like a larger canvas that I can sink inside. But, what follows is one of the lessons I used to share with my students on how to write a short story. Much of it came from my own amazing high school English teacher, Regan Devine. Is that a great name for a character or what? He’s real and here he is.
How to Write a Short Story
Writing is a craft. Like most crafts it looks easy, but in reality it requires hard work and practice. Manifestos are written on the subject. This is just a wee primer to get you started.
The Bones: A particular character in a particular place at a particular time is beset with a problem or conflict that he or she must resolve. Keep it simple: essential characters (no more than three) in a single setting over a short span of time. Here’s some sage advice:
o Put a man up a tree
o Give him a problem or maybe several, each one worse than the last
o Help him find a way down
Structure: Beginning, Middle, End
I. Beginning
Start with a situation: a man is in a tree. Do not give backstory unless it is necessary. Use a narrative hook. Make your reader ask question(s). How did he get up there? Will he get down? How?
Start as close to the inciting incident (first crisis) as you can. This incident or problem shakes him out of his ordinary world. Problems/conflict can result from nature/environment, humans, or something in his own mind.
II. Middle/Main Conflict
The man struggles as you build tension and suspense by “raising the stakes”. If he succeeds in solving one problem, give him a worse one. Someone is throwing stones, threatening him, or shooting at him, a wild animal waits at the foot of the tree, a tsunami is on the horizon, a hurricane is blowing all around him, he is injured, he is starving to death, he must get down by a certain time or his friend or lover or kids will die. Allow the character a moment to rest and reflect in between crises. Build to a climax.
III. End/Resolution
He gets down, saves himself or whoever was in danger (resolves his problem) and has somehow changed. Or maybe he doesn’t get down and dies trying. Some stories have unhappy endings.
Everything Else
Central Theme or Guiding Light: You must have a reason or point for telling this story, a message or thread of meaning that runs through from beginning to end. Stick to it.
Characterization: Make your reader care about what happens to your character. Reveal one key characteristic in your main character and challenge or change it via conflict. Subtly show this characteristic, rather than tell it. Character is revealed through action (how he acts and reacts), tone and attitude (how he thinks about things), language and imagery (how he speaks).
Point-of-View: You can either write in first person (I came, I saw, I conquered) or in third person limited omniscient (she came, she saw, she turned around and left). The trick with viewpoints is to remember that your character only knows certain things, and we see only through his eyes. You, the writer, know much more. Let your character discover and show things through his actions. Don’t give information your character would not know. Also, only write in one viewpoint, don’t shift.
Pacing: short sentences and paragraphs create speed for fast paced stories. Longer wordy sentences slow things down for a breath of reflection.
Vivid Imagery: Paint a vivid picture by appealing to the five senses. What does the character see, smell, hear, taste, and touch? You want to bring your reader into the non-ordinary world of the character.
Words: Use precise, concrete, accurate detail. Do not use passive boring verbs like: is, was, has, get, take, watch, went. Use particular verbs to convey action and attitude. Avoid using adverbs (anything ending in ly). Instead of “she walked slowly” say “she ambled” or “she strolled” or “she staggered”. This is the time to use your thesaurus sparingly.
Dialogue: There are rules.
o Every time you have a new speaker begin a new paragraph.
o Enclose everything the speaker says in quotation marks.
o Use dialect and grammar to reveal character.
o Break up dialect with bits of action.
o Where the quotation is interrupted by some action or to identify a speaker, do it at a natural pause and enclose each part. “I won’t go,” Jesse said, “unless you go with me.”
o If a quotation extends for more than one paragraph do not close it at the end of the first paragraph, but open the next with quotation marks.
o Put the comma, period, question mark, or em dashes INSIDE quotation marks.
o Use an em dash (two dashes—) when the speaker is interrupted or cut off
o Put colons, semi-colons OUTSIDE quotation marks.
“Sorcha?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“It’s me.”
“Mitch? Why are you whispering? Are you okay? What’s that noise?”
“Look, I need help. I’m stuck up a tree and—”
“How’d you—?”
“Will you just listen?” I hissed. I knew I should have called John, even if Sorcha was my new girlfriend. “Look. I climbed up a tree at the Hellerman place to rescue my mother’s stupid kitten but I can’t get down.”
“Sorry? What did you say? I’m just doing my nails and I dropped my phone.”
I began again. “I climbed up—”
The growling escalated as the dogs clawed hunks of bark from the tree trunk below me.
“Mitch? What’s happening? What’s that noise? Where are you?”
“Dobermans … mean Dobermans.” I heard nothing—no reaction. “Sorcha? Are you there?” I stared at the black screen on my cell phone. “Damn,” I growled, and hurled it at the dogs.
Topics:
“I don’t know what to write about. My life is boring. I’ve got nothing to say.” This is a common block for writers. The truth is, you have scads of stuff to write about. Our lives are composed of interwoven stories. Some people say write what you know. (That’s a cliche, by the way.) Sometimes this works, but you can also write what you don’t know—what you can only imagine. This is the beauty of Fiction and what Imagination is for. We read and write to leave our ordinary world along with the character, to go to exotic locales and experience through story things we never could in reality. I say: write what intrigues you.
Write about places you’re curious about. Create quirky characters and drop them into unusual situations. Ultimately, we humans have similar wants and needs—love, friendship, comfort, safety, joy, adventure, and to go home in the end.
Finally, write in a genre you love to read. If you’re into science fiction, fantasy, romance, drama, mystery, history, write a story of that type. If you’re hooked on your story, chances are other people will be too.
Revision: To Look Again
o Type your story.
o Run a spelling and grammar check.
o Do a general edit for rhythm, pacing, and errors. When you do this read your story out loud. Have someone else read your story out loud.
o Then complete a line-by-line edit where you weed out: adverbs, clichés, errors, repeating images or actions, too much dialogue or description.
by Wendy Hawkin | May 9, 2018 | journal, writing and publishing
Indie publishing is an adventure. It also comes with a steep learning curve and can cause all manner of frustration and back-aches as you sit at the computer for hours cursing and sighing, and occasionally cheering when you finally get something right. I’ve become tenacious about publishing and I crowed last night when I finally got it.
One of the tasks that seems to give Indie authors the most trouble is preparing a finished manuscript for upload to the distributer (CreateSpace, IngramSpark, etc). I don’t usually publish how-to posts, but as I’ve been learning, I’ve encountered so many people having the same issues, I thought I’d try and simplify the process with a few key moves.
First of all, this is for writers using a Mac. The basic question I googled the past few days was this: how do I save a pdf copy in book size on a Mac? This is what I figured out after reading a zillion threads written by frustrated Mac users. I discovered that Macs are built to do this, so you don’t need to buy Acrobat software. You just need to know how to do it.
A Word About Formatting Ebooks
Ebooks and print books need two completely different formats. Kindle Direct Publishing provides an excellent guide for formatting and uploading your ebook to Amazon. Just follow along and you’ll be successful. (Although one glitch I have discovered is that when you use a Mac, you have to save the final Word doc as a Web Page, Filtered in order to get an HTML file for upload. Otherwise, any photos don’t appear when you proof it online.) Another format you might need to upload is e-pub for Kobo, I-books, etc.) I publish through IngramSpark so I upload the e-pub version on their site. You can download Calibre for free (thanks Sionnach for this tip) and convert several formats in a snap. But print books are a whole different process.
Formatting Print Books
So. Print books. First of all, the formatting is different. You want your book to be visually appealing, error-free, and set up professionally using Word styles. You have to pay every time you upload a new edition to IngramSpark, so try to get it right. There are a couple of ways around this. Join ALLi (Alliance of Indie Publishers) and get their coupon code or wait for one of Ingram Spark’s free offers. Right now, they’re offering free revisions until May 31 and a new title upload for free until June 30.
I’m preparing to release the Hollystone Mysteries as a trilogy within the next year, so I’m setting up my own formatting guide using Word styles so they’re all consistent. The last few weeks, I’ve been re-editing book two. I decided to change the book size from 6″ x 9″ to 5.5″ x 8.5″ because I thought it might look and feel better. After editing and formatting, it grew from 276 pages to 310 pages and that meant the trim size would be off for my existing cover. My cover designer, Kat McCarthy at Aeternum Designs, graciously resized the cover for me. Thanks Kat. It took a lot of finagling to get the most white space as possible without going over those 310 pages. Last night I was still playing with this—even changing words here and there to make it fit. As I said…OCD.
When I thought I had it perfect, I drove down to Staples with my Word file on a flash drive because they said they could convert it to the size I needed in a couple of minutes. However, once it was up on their screen, my fancy font that matches my cover (Celtic Garamond Pro) didn’t show up. I’d used it for the title page, drop caps, and headings, so I was ready to scream! “Bring us a PDF and we can re-size it for you no problem,” she said. So I drove home and hunkered down at the desk again. While I was giving it one more appraisal, I noticed that on page 6 the scene break icon and the page number were not centred correctly. NO!! I discovered that the footer style was set to “normal” which meant it had a .25 indent and that was throwing off the centring. I fixed that and played with the white space some more. Then I put it up on the big screen.
Suddenly, I noticed that the first four pages (section 1) were actually appearing in book-size; whereas the rest of the book was still showing with the text in book-size but on 8.5″ x 11″ paper. This is the problem people are screaming about on the threads. So I went back in and tried one last time. Hallelujah! This, in three steps, is what I discovered over the last three days.
How to Save a Book-sized PDF on a MAC
- Go to File—Page Setup. Set the desired size (5.5 x 8.5) formatted for any printer. Make sure everything in Word is perfect. Check all styles to be sure everything is centred correctly. Check paragraph format—watch for first line indents that need to be removed that will affect the centring).
- Go to top screen menu: Format—Document. Check all margins and “apply to whole document”— If just “this section” is ticked, it won’t work. (This was the clincher!) And you have to do this every time because it defaults. Even making this demo pdf of my first chapter, I found errors and had to resize the doc.
- Go to File—Print and in the bottom left click on “pdf” and choose “save to pdf”
This should save the document in the book size you require and look exactly like the interior of your book.
Good luck on your Indie publishing journey. If you get stuck or have any questions, contact me or leave a comment and I’ll try to help you as best I can.
with all good wishes, ~Wendy
P.S. After all that, when I tried to upload the new file size to Ingram-Spark they said it was too big for a revision and I’d have to upload it as a new title. Argh! Consequently, I went back to the original cover. My books are now all 6×9!
