A fairly unique experience.

I had an experience today that I don’t think too many authors would have had. At work, I catalogued a couple of books. Not unusual? No, of course not, except that when I went to put the spine labels on, they each had F STE on them. Yes, I catalogued and covered my own books for the school library! I’ve done it before for books that I’ve illustrated, but actually being able to put that spine label on was a wonderful feeling! Unfortunately, I haven’t had the joy of seeing them on the shelf (or even better, being taken off) because they went to the library on the Secondary campus and I work at Primary, but all the same, it was fun. I had secretly hoped that the school library barcode on one of them could be 24601 (anyone who knows my favourite book will know why) but unfortunately that was already taken and we’re up to numbers beginning with 26... Ah well, I can’t have everything!

News update.

Yet again, I haven’t been keeping this poor blog up very well. Though lots of things have been happening, I’ve simply not had time to write about it! So here’s an update.

News Item 1. Since June, I've completed the entire set of covers for The FRUGALITY Trilogy by Stuart Ayris (for ebooks and print – including an anthology of the three). As I said in an earlier post, I’ve been a fan of Stuart’s since I read his first book, Tollesbury Time Forever, so I was thrilled to bits to be able to do his covers. If you love something literary, but far more interesting than the usual plotless literary novels, have a read of Stuart’s books. Guaranteed to be something different!

News Item 2. I finally got my book cover site up and I’ve been busy (very happily busy I might add) filling it with pre-made covers. There was a slight hitch when I discovered that ‘KWSDesign’ which I’d planned to call it, was already a company in America (furniture designers, I think) so after much thought and difficulty finding anything that wasn’t already taken, I came up with the name of Magic Owl Design. After a month, I still haven’t sold any pre-made covers, but I have had lots of views and  got a customer for a custom cover, so it’s on its way. 

To add to the excitement, Rosen Trevithick, for whom I did the illustrations for ‘The Troll Trap’, has started a pre-made cover page on her ‘Indie Book Bargains’ site which she kindly let me join. By far the greatest percentage of traffic since she started it has come from her page. Thanks, Rosen!

News Item 3. As reported in my last blog post, I’ve been working to get my books into print. Last week, I finally experienced that precious moment when I held my first book in my hands. Treespeaker is a real book at last. 5x8 inches, cream paper and 320 pages. Beautiful. Sigh.

It’s now available from Createspace and Amazon. I set the price at $13.99, but Amazon immediately took 10% off. I don’t know how long that will last though.

I’ve ordered myself a box of them to try to sell at the local Writers Festival to be held in September. I felt very left out last year when all the other presenters had a table of books to sell and all I could do was hold up a picture on my iPad. This year, I’ll have the real deal.

A proof copy of Mark of the Dragon Queen should arrive in a couple of weeks. I doubt I’d be able to get any of them here by the day of the Writers Festival, but it will be nice to be able to say it’s available as well.

Strange coincidence or happy accident?

I’m nervously awaiting the arrival of the first proof copy of Treespeaker at the moment. CreateSpace has told me it should arrive within a couple of weeks. It has been a long, frustrating road to this point, but thanks to a lovely friend who took pity on me and offered to do the formatting (which may as well have been brain surgery for me), my first e-book is now on its way to being a real, three-dimensional, smelling-of-ink book.

In the process of trying to format it myself, I made an interesting discovery. At one point in the story, when there has been a death in the forest, Jakan the Treespeaker intones words over the body as they farewell it into the care of Arrakesh, the spirit of the forest. In the ebook, I had the words on the left hand side of the page, unsure if trying to justify it would muck up the formatting. This time, I thought it would look neater if I centred this song on the page so that it stood out. This is how it came out –

Arrakesh,

You are wind,

You are bird’s song,

Dew on morning grass,

Velvet on deer’s horn,

Shelter from rain,

Warmth of fire,

In us,

Around us,

Beginning to end.

Does it remind you of something? If I’d tried to write a song that formed a stout-trunked tree shape, I couldn’t have done it better, but this was purely coincidental. I have to admit to finding it a little creepy the way it worked out. A prayer from the Treespeaker forms itself into the shape of a tree?

The friend who did the formatting probably wished this coincidence had been in the shape of a frog or an elephant – anything but a tree – because getting this tree to stay together all on one page was a nightmare. Hopefully it has now come out that way on the printed page and not morphed into something else.

I’ll let you know when the book is available from CreateSpace/Amazon. In the meantime, I’ll worry about whether the cover is too dark, if the chapter breaks look right, etc etc. I do wish mail from the US was quicker!

Fantasy - the easy way out?

On a writers’ forum I visit occasionally, someone recently posted a link to a grammar quiz and challenged everyone to test their knowledge. One member tried it, didn’t do particularly well and commented, “It’s a good job I write fantasy.” This comment summed up, I think, how a lot of people judge fantasy authors.  There seems to be a general opinion that fantasy authors, especially self-published ones, only write fantasy because they’re not very good writers and it’s the easiest genre to write. I have reached the stage where I would rather tell someone that I write articles, than tell them I write fantasy. Even worse – I write children’s fantasy! Their eyes glaze a little when I say I’m self-published and then when I say I write fantasy, their lips twist into a smug smile that says to me, ‘not a real writer, obviously’.

The truth is that fantasy, written properly, is a difficult genre to handle. Writers in other genres have their world, with all its rules and regulations, set for them. They simply have to find a plot and some characters and then follow those rules. Yes, they may have to do some research, but once they know the rules, their path is set.

Fantasy writers, on the other hand, have to create a whole new world. That new world has to work and be clearly defined. Magic can’t simply be thrown in to save the hero; it has to follow the rules set and kept by the author. Furthermore, to satisfy readers, fantasy worlds have to be different from each other. If all fantasy authors wrote of worlds that mirrored medieval Europe, then readers would soon tire of reading their books.  Extra effort has to go into making new worlds unique in as many ways as possible.  Cliché plots and characters are not tolerated either.

I think this is why I love the fantasy of Ursula Le Guin so much. Her fantasy worlds are truly unique. As I’m not into the sort of fantasy that includes fierce battles, dungeons and torture, her gentle worlds appeal to me. They are so different and yet so clearly drawn that they become real as I read. She is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the best writers in any genre. If I could write half as well as her, I’d be a very happy writer.

Oh, by the way, if you’re interested, I scored 9/10 on the test. I couldn’t have told you the rule I was following to get the answers, but…

Dragon Box on Smashwords

In December 2011, I added The Dragon Box to Amazon's 'Select' programme. That meant not only that it could be borrowed by those who use Amazon Prime (for which I'd get a payment), but I could also give it away for five days every three months. For the first six to nine months, this system worked wonderfully. I had a few borrows (not huge numbers, but everything helps) and I gave away thousands of copies. Even better, after each giveaway, sales of the book would shoot up for ten to thirty days, giving me an income that tempted me to give up work.

Now, however, the bubble has burst. Giveaways still rise into the thousands (though not as high as before), but the sales afterwards are minimal. It seems that unless your book is picked up by one of the major advertising sites, thus propelling sales into the region that will take the book into the Top 100, there is little benefit - and Amazon is making it more and more difficult for those sites to exist. Borrowings don't offset that. So I've taken The Dragon Box out.

Where to now? Well, I've put the book onto Smashwords and it's undergoing review for distribution to iBooks, B & N, Sony, Kobo etc. I'm fairly confident it will pass, as it didn't have any autovetting errors (after much gnashing of teeth I got that right). I'm also looking at a couple of other options. I've not had a lot of success through Smashwords with Treespeaker and Orlando's Gift, but Apple does sell some, so I'm hoping I might have some success there, especially with a children's book when so many kids have iPads.

Mark of the Dragon Queen will finish with Select soon, too, and I think that will go to Smashwords as well. What I'd really like to do, is to get them all into print. It's just a matter of getting my head around Createspace. It's probably not hard once you get going...but I'm not very brave when it comes to formatting.

Meanwhile, here's the link for The Dragon Box on Smashwords. If you feel inclined to go there and tweet and/or Facebook it to your friends I'd really appreciate it!

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/297485 

Visualising characters

 My Number One fan (Sausage) and I have just spent an interesting week getting her a costume together for the annual Book Week parade at school. Book Week actually happened a few weeks ago in most schools, but our school always puts it off until the week of the local Agricultural Show, so that we have things to display in the schools’ area. Sausage decided that she wanted to go as Zoe out of my book ‘The Dragon Box’. It was her idea – honest! It was only then that I realised that I had never really clearly visualised Zoe, much less described her in the book. Obviously, she carried a bow and some arrows and was about eleven years old, but that was about it. In my head she was dark-haired, but I don’t think I ever said so. It was interesting to see that Sausage had been able to visualise herself in the part. She had a pretty clear picture. I even had to copy the dragon from the front cover and paste it into the recesses on the bow (which probably should have been wooden, but I was two lazy to walk to the stand of bamboo a mile away, to get what we needed).

This is what we came up with. Sorry it's only the hair – I’m still loath to put pictures of my children on here.

I have to admit that I almost didn’t put Zoe into The Dragon Box. After all, I was writing the book for boys. I’m glad I did though. I’m glad I made her tough. But maybe it’s also good that I didn’t describe her too well. Sausage, at least, had the chance to picture her for herself. 

I've never particularly liked books that have people on the cover. I always like to imagine what a character looks like and it rarely matches what the cover designer has used; and though my own main characters tend to be based on well-known people, I would never tell anyone who I had in mind. It’s part of the pleasure of reading, to imagine those things. The fact that I imagined Alan Rickman as Severus Snape long before the movie came out was a bonus, though JK Rowling says she wasn’t describing him. It was fun to see how Sausage saw someone out of my head!

Favouritism

As a teacher, I was aware that I mustn’t have ‘favourite’ students. Each one was special in their own way. As a mum, I wouldn’t dream of loving one of my children more than another. I love all three of them to bits. As a writer though, I have to admit to having a favourite amongst my books. It was my first born, but that’s not why I love it the most. I can’t even claim it’s the best written – only my readers can judge that. However, there’s a special place for it in my heart, because that’s where it came from – my heart.

That’s not to say my other books have been written in a half-hearted manner. I put my whole effort into them and I think they’re good stories. That’s what they are, though – stories. Treespeaker, on the other hand, was written from a different place than the others. I didn’t write it because I wanted to tell a story, I wrote it because I wanted to tell that story. I had to tell it. It was my way of sorting things out in my head. Sometimes I surprised myself by coming up with answers that I didn’t know I had in me.

Sometimes I have felt sad that Treespeaker has sold the least of all my books (apart from the short story, which understandably hasn’t sold many copies in the short time it has been out). In fact, before this past couple of months, I was beginning to wonder if there was any point in trying to sell it at all. With the birth of KDP Select however, I’ve found that it has been selling along with the others, even though it isn’t enrolled in the programme. (I object to the exclusivity clause, so won’t take it off Smashwords, B & N, Apple etc.) In fact, on one lovely day this month, I sold a whole 12 copies all at once. I’ve no idea why and it certainly hasn’t kept up, but it was a buzz while it lasted.

The truth is, though, that some books have a different sort of readership. There have been people who have reviewed Treespeaker who have obviously found whatever it is that makes the story different, and appreciated it.  Check the comments after one of the reviews on Amazon US and there is a lovely word used to describe these reviews. So rather than ruing the fact that it’s not selling millions, I’m grateful for the thoughtful readers I have had.

I wish I could come up with another story like Treespeaker. Yes, I’m still working on that promised sequel, but I don’t know if it has the depth of Treespeaker. It has taken me far too long to write to have come from the same place. But I think it will be a good story nonetheless. Time and readers will tell. Meanwhile, I’ll cherish every sale of all my books because each one is proof that it can happen and there was a day, not very long ago, when I thought it never would.