Writing, rip offs and boutique publishing.

Hi Guys,

New topic this time - writing, and more specifically rip offs.

As some of you will know I contribute to a number of writing fora, partly out of interest and partly to learn a little more of my craft. And on these fora I often find myself fascinated by what other writers have come across in their journeys. In particular a week or so ago I came across a post in which a new writer had decided to take his first steps into the world of publishing through a boutique POD publisher, all for the one off price of $2000.

Now this is not a new thing. Prior to the advent of Amazon's Kindle many people used to use vanity publishers as they were called, desperate to get into print any way they could. And it almost never worked. They got a few bound copies of their book, the book never went anywhere near a bookstore, no one ever heard of them, and their pockets got lightened. I have actually heard horror stories of people paying a lot more than this guy.

However, I have to wonder how these companies still operate, and more importantly, why people still use them.

It seems to me that these companies basically prey on the vulnerabilities of people. That they offer services to those who are desperate to see their books in print and too gullible to realise that they can now do everything for themselves for free. In short they prey on the same people they always have. But the question is, why are these people still unaware of self publishing? Or as an alternative, if they are aware of what they can do, why do they feel they need someone else to do the publishing for them? Is it just timidness? Lack of confidence?

My thought is that in the last few years the world of writing has changed significantly. Self publishing has taken hold and an entire new universe of written words has appeared on our computer screens and smart phones. And while many people may pour scorn on the self publisher for not having a traditional deal with an agent etc, it does not change the fact that a great many new books have arrived which would never have been seen without it. Sure some of it may be crap, much of it may not be up to the standards of a trade published work, but there's a trade off. For a long time agents and publishers have been gate keepers to the world of what people read. They decided what people could read, because lets face it, if they thought a work wasn't commercial, they didn't publish it. Those days are gone and I think that's a good thing.

However to return to the topic at hand and boutique POD publishing, I'm guessing that not everyone has caught up with the writing revolution. And I'm also guessing that the world being what it is, there will always be desperate people, aching with every fibre of their being to see their book in print. I understand this, and prior to the self publishing revolution I was one of them, just thankfully a little too smart to fall for the sharks out there. (Though I did get a couple of letters from one such shark early on.)

So my message to all those out there desperate to see their work in print (or on a digital screen) is don't fall for this. The golden rule for all writers when publishing must be that you are the writer. It's your work. The money should always flow to you. It doesn't matter whether its a lot or a little, you don't pay. So if an agent comes back at you with a "reading fee", don't go there. Chances are he's not legit. If a publisher offers to print your book for a few thousand bucks, definitely don't go there.

And if you don't really understand the world of publishing, don't know what to do, and are frightened of taking that plunge half arsed, just keep these words in mind - You Can Do It.

It may require some new skills, editing and cover design being top of the list for any self publisher, but these are things you can do. Skills you can gain for a little effort. Or if you are truly desperate and don't have any friends or family with the ability, skills you can hire as you need them. And usually for a lot less than a POD publisher will charge.

Also, join some writing fora. They are invaluable.

Cheers, Greg.

Life Isn't Like A Video Game - Bugger!

Hi Guys,

Once more apologies for the delay in posting - but this time I have a legitimate excuse. I'm on dial up and something went badly wrong with the line a couple of weeks ago. As usual I blame the electric fence of the farmer next door, though the telecom man didn't seem so sure. Either way the upshot is that having had a repair done I'm now on a temporary patch, there's noise on the line, and an already diabolically slow connection has slowed to a crawl. (You don't want to know how long it will take to post this post!)

Anyway progress is being made elsewhere. Of Dark Elves and Dragons has been put out in paperback through CreateSpace, and while I'm pleased with it I'm in two minds about the cover. To my eyes it looks great, especially the text, but that's in full size. As a thumbnail the text looks blurry simply because the shadow I added to the text is unable to be seen clearly. So I have a decision to make I guess. Whether to sacrifice a text effect that adds punch to a full size cover or to accept that the effect will make the thumbnail sized text look out of focus. - The trials of self publishing! (I'll bet Terry Pratchett never has to worry about these things!)

The next book to go through the process of editing in preparation for printing to paper is Dragon, which is already with my sister.

In the meantime I've found myself with a little free time these past few days, and have fallen back into bad habits - otherwise known as playing RPG's. (Mostly Skyrim and Neverwinter Nights, but also some Arcanum - a brilliant game that doesn't seem to run too well on any OS more recent than 98.) And while playing and watching my fingers getting shorter from all the button mashing, I suddenly realised that I wish life should be more like some of these games. Maybe not the monsters, but there are some brilliant ideas in gaming that are lacking in real life. Things that I think we need to start working on.

First of course, and here I speak as a red blooded male, why do we not have a lot more highly attractive babes in tight fitting, skimpy leather outfits walking down the streets? For me at least this would be a welcome improvement in reality. Of course I may not be the most photogenic of people myself, and I doubt anyone would want to see me in a skimpy, body hugging leather outfit! - Not even me!

Then there's the health potions. Here I get sick I have to see a doctor, take pills, maybe have an operation, spend lots of time recovering etc. How much simpler would it be to just drink a health potion and be done with it! Come on scientists get inventing - we need this.

Naturally there's the superhuman aspects of your characters. In real life I doubt I could even crawl up a mountain. In Skyrim I can just run up one. I love that. And I love the long floating jumps you can make as you sail off walls and staircases. It's not flying but if someone could invent that for real it'd be almost as good.

Roller skating monsters - players of the Neverwinter series of games will know what I mean. Not that I want monsters in real life, but seriously how cool is it to watch an orc simply roller skating towards you, axe in hand.

Disintegration! Grief any magic would be awesome, but of all the spells this one from Arcanum is the coolest in my view. Simply watching your PC standing there, the circle of light forming around his feet, running along the ground, and then zapping your enemy so that there's nothing left - it's brilliant. Of course if I had this spell I'm not sure I could be trusted not to use it every so often - so brilliant for me, not so much for everyone else!

Playing with weapons. In real life they're heavy and I'm clumsy, not to mention completely untrained in swinging a sword. But anyone whose played Dungeon Siege will now how impressive it is to simply be able to pick up say a quarterstaff and swing it around like a martial artist with the push of a button. No training or fitness required. I so want to be able to do that, but I don't want to spend years training to do it.

And then of course how simply wonderful would it be to wander down the streets and see elves and orcs and dwarves and gnomes walking the streets with you? Seriously someone needs to get to work on inventing these races for real!

So anyway, that's my short list of some of the things in RPGs that have real life beat. I'm sure you all have your own.

Cheers, Greg.

The Man Who Wasn't Anders Voss - The Idea.

Hi Guys,

To start April off with a bang I published a new book - The Man Who Wasn't Anders Voss and I thought I'd share something about the book with you. Mostly I thought I'd share where the concept for the book came from.

As a writer I sometimes get asked where I get my ideas from, and in this case it is - and I'm proud to admit it - Star Trek.

This book began with one of the unexplained and potentially unexplainable mysteries about the show - the transporter. How does it work, and more importantly if it does work how is it that the guy being transported, having his atoms scattered through space and reassembled somewhere else, survives?

As a trekkie this has been one of the questions that has puzled me for a very long time. I mean it's fairly obvious that if you disintigrate someone into their composite atoms, they die. But then somehow when the atoms get put back together somewhere else, they live again. And that of course leads to the next question - how do you know that the person assembled elsewhere is the same person that was dissassembled?

So my take on this was that they aren't. That the transporter in fact kills the person sent and a completely new person with the old person's memories and features is created. In short a copy.

Naturally this wouldn't make for a good story. Not if the copy was in fact completely convinced that he was the original. Then as far as he was concerned and the rest of the universe, he would be the original. Only the original woul know better and he of course would be dead.

So that lead to the next key idea in the book. What if the copy in fact knew he was the copy? Then we end up in a whole new world of possibilities and plot elements, and key among them, identity.

All of us are blessed with one certainty in life - we are who we are. It never occurs to us that we might in fact be someone else. Other works have touched on this idea, that we might in fact be someone other than the person we think we are. That we might have say been brainwashed, or had amnesia. But the transporter gave me a whole new vehicle to examine this possibility, and to look at the conflicts it creates.

Identity is crucial to us. It is who we think we are. It is the one thing we never consider we could be wrong about. But if we were a copy of a man, perfect in every way, and so every memory we have is of being the original, but at the same time we also have the additional memory of the original having died and of being created from his remains, what would that do to us? Could we call ourselves by the name of the original even though we know we aren't him? Can we consider his family as ours? What about his actions, both good and bad? Can we truly be held responsible for the crimes the original migt have committed? Can we accept the credit for the good things he did?

So in large part this book is an exploration of those questions. Of the struggle of a man to decide whether he is in fact the original or is a new man.

And then of course I threw in some aliens, a transporter that doesn't work perfectly, and a rather nasty scientist with a God complex!

So that's where the book goes, and I hope that those who read it will find themselves asking many of the same questions as I have in writing it.

Cheers and as always, be good or don't get caught! (And if one is ever invented do not step into a transporter!)

CreateSpace and Me - The War of Words (And Images)

Hi Guys,

Thought I'd update you on how things are going in my quest for world domination (err - literary success?) Well the big news is that as of today two of my books have been approved for publishing in paper, Maverick and Alien Caller. And a third book Thief is now in the process.

It has been an epic battle getting the books through this process, in part because of my own limitations in all things computer related. But there have been some other problems arise which I did think I might mention for any of you considering taking this route.

1) PDF - CreateSpace demands PDF documents (or so I thought, however experience has proven that it ain't necessarily so). So because I don't have Acrobat, and really don't want to shell out the readies for the programme I went online to get a PDF conveter. The first one I found was Word to PDF by Abdio, which cost me forty bucks. It didn't work, producing documents that were poorly formatted and with great big gaps in words here and there. Naturally I wasn't impressed, especially when I sent off an e-mail asking for either a fix or my money back and heard nothing back. That, despite their promise to get back to me within 24 hours, was over a week ago. So that's my first DON'T of the process.

However it leads to my first DO as well. Or actually two DO's. The first is that when I reached out for help I went to the CreateSpace Community and got answers within hours. Useful answers. And the second is the answer itself a print program called Do - PDF, which was free and has worked absolutely faultlessly.

2) File sizes - for those of you like me the files you need to upload are not small, and conversion to PDF just makes them larger. Much larger. Word files doubled in size. Graphics files trebled and more through the conversion process. And if any of you are on dial up like me, that's a major pain. Fifteen megs, the size of the one piece file I created to do the book, takes an hour or so to upload. And then, as if to help me pull my hair out, CreateSpace itself kept logging me out after an hour and not saving the uploads. By the fourth time I really was screaming at the computer and threatening it with bodily harm.

However, again there is a solution, it's called cover creator. Initially I tried using it and it fell over and I couldn't understand why. It also didn't seem to have the layout I wanted, which was essentially only a bair template for the front cover, back cover and spine, all of which I had already prepared. But a more detailed search revealed that as you go through the available formats there are other layouts, and one of them 'PALM' was perfect for my needs. Better yet,the file sizes were already reduced since I could cut down my single large graphic into two pieces and throw away the spine since it was included as part of the template. And they were reduced even further because Cover Creator does not require the files to be in PDF format. JPEGs are fine. The result, one fifteen meg upload became two uploads of around two and a bit megs, and no logging out.

So for me the next DO - is cover creator.

3) There are of course fishooks in even this, and the main one is graphic sizes. With my layout being for a six by nine inch book and the requirements for the graphic being three DPI, I figured that the correct graphics should be 2700 by 1800 pixels. Silly me!

In fact the correct size for a six by nine cover is six and a quarter inches by nine and a half. They do mention this, but foolishly I ignored it. The upshot of course was that my graphics were slightly too small, and I didn't realise it. So my next DO is read the instructions for graphic file sizes and plan accordingly.

The second fishook is not mine though, unless my eyesight is really that bad and I am going colour blind! So I went through the process uploade my undersized files and it told me they were undersized, 295 DPI instead of 300. But as you go through the process little buttons turn green as you complete each step, and those buttons did turn green. So I assumed the undersizing was of no matter.

Then of course you get to the end having uploaded and twittered around with everything, a process that might take an hour or so, and you hit the button that says submit cover for approval, and I clicked it with transcendant joy. Only to go directly to hell as my cover vanished and I was told by the programme that not all parts of the process had been completed and so it was start again. The message wouldn't even tell me which parts were incomplete and of course I had no clue. After all the seven buttons had seven green colours on them which said they were complete.

So I did it again - same result. It was about then I started to consider taking to the computer with an axe! However I digress.

It turned out after careful detailed study that in fact only five of the seven buttons were green. Two were yellow. Unfortunately green is actually greenish yellow in this programme while yellow is infact yellowish green. In short they look almost identical! I am so glad that these people did not have a hand in designing traffic lights!

After that however, somewhat balder than before and hoarse from screaming at an innocent computer, things went more smoothly. Which leads me to my last DO.

There is absolutely nothing like having a paper copy of your book in your hand, and that is an experience that no reader or tablet can give you. So my final DO.

DO absolutely get a proof copy of your book sent to you in the mail.

Cheers, Greg.

Maverick Going Paperback

Hi Guys,

Thought I'd let you know what I've been doing, which is mainly to start going through the process of converting Maverick now that its been edited, into a paperback through CreateSpace.

It has been an awesome process so far. Both brilliant to see the results as they come out, and frustrating as I have to wrap my head around all sorts of problems. All the things I never thought about as a simple ebook writer. For a start I'd never heard of things called bleed and gutters. (And now I almost wish I never had!)

I've chosen the size six by nine for the book since it's rather long. This is very slightly larger than a standard paperback of eight and a half by five, but when I did my first PDF conversion of the text it came out at 850 pages. In this new format it's only 550 pages, which makes a huge difference in price and the sheer size of the book.

Above you can see the first version of the cover, (reduced in size since I'm on dial up and the time to upload a four meg file is extraordinary - worse if the farmer across the way has his electric fence running!) I'm pleased with it, though will probably do some tweeking when the proof arrives in the mail. I'm a natural tweeker!

My plans for the coming weeks are to get the proof and finish the process for publishing Maverick, and also to put out Alien on the Kindle and then start the process of converting that to paper as well. Over the rest of the year most of my other novels should follow - though I may be bald by then.

Lastly a very bad fantasy joke: Did you hear the one about the wizard who turned his car into a garage?!

Cheers, Greg.

Maverick Revised

Hi guys,

Just a short note to let you know what I've been doing these past few weeks. In a word editing. (Actually it's probably the most horrible word in any author's vocabulary! It is mine anyway.)

But the good news is that it comes with a purpose, and that purpose is to get some of my books into paper form (yes I know many of you younger people may not remember what that is any more!), through CreateSpace.

So so far this year both Thief and Maverick have been through extensive revisions and given new covers in preparation for the transition, and more will follow. However for those who've read them and want something new, currently my long suffering editor (sister) is working on the first edit of the next book off the blocks this year, Alien. I hope to have that out on the Kindle in the next few weeks.

In the mean time, because I may be the worst (most unreliable) blogger in history and feel the need to apologise - again, I'll leave you with an even worse joke.

A priest, a nun, a monk and a bishop walk into a bar.
The bartender looks up at them and says - 'This is a joke right?!'

Cheers, Greg.

Update On Writing: Thief Re-edited.

Hi Guys,

Been a while since I posted last but I have an excuse - the dog ate my homework! Well maybe not, but I have been busy writing so I figure that has to count for something. Anyway since publishing the second Wizard at Law book in January (and February has only just begun), I've also re-edited and recovered my first novel - Thief.

I'm really quite pleased with the way the cover turned out. It's a million times better than the old one I think you'll agree, and it's another step in my master plan to take over the world! Or at least to get a few of my ebooks published on paper as well by the end of the year.

Next to go through this process is Maverick. It already has a new cover and is being edited as I type (thanks Lucy!). I've also started the CreateSpace process for it, but I have to admit that when it comes to all things computers, I am somewhat on the slow side.

As far as writing goes, I'm currently finishing off Alien, a sci fi romance adventure in which a retired agent with a personal enemy that would make Superman tremble is visited by an alien woman that funnily enough has her own enemies. Of course the real fun starts when their enemies get together!

This is a book that has been almost finished and sitting around as an untouched file on my computer for years, like so many others. So I'm quite pleased to be finally completing it. Of course that leaves maybe eighty more all awaiting the same attention!

Anyway, that's been my year so far and I'm quite pleased with how its gone. I hope you and yours are having an equally good one. Oh and I thought this was funny:

If wishes were horses I'd need a lot of pooper scoopers!


Cheers, Greg.