Welcome to Summer Saturday Short Story Spectacular!

Starting this Saturday, I welcome you to a very special summer feature here on my blog, something that I'm calling The Summer Saturday Short Story Spectacular! 

In honor of the release of my mystery story collection  Strange Faces, my first original Indie release, (release the balloons and cue the music from Chariots of Fire)  and one that I'm very proud of, I've decided that on Saturdays throughout the summer, I will be interviewing Indie writers of short fiction, either short, short fiction, sometimes called "flash fiction" or "postcard fiction" to writers of novelettes or novellas. 

There is a wealth of new Indie writing to be discovered out there, almost so many that it boggles the thinking, hence the reason for the focus of this blog. Maybe if you met writers, one on one and one by one, you won't feel so discombobulated when you're faced with a big page of Amazon new releases. 

I have had immense fun meeting some of these great writers online and reading their stories which have ranged from sweet and cozy mystery to other-worldy stories of exotic and fanciful worlds, and from noir to literary.

First, a few definitions:

Flash fiction - under 1,000 words
Short short story - 1,000-3,000 words
Short story - 3,000-7,500 words
Novelette - 7,500- 17,000 words
Novella - 17,000 - 40,000 words

I am asking all of my summer short story author guests to answer a series of questions, which, I hope, will help you to get to know them and their work better.  I've asked them for their favorite short story of all time. I also want to know how, in their opinion,  short story writing differs from writing a longer work, the most difficult part of writing short fiction, and then, of course, links where you may purchase their stories for your Kindle, Kobo, iPad or iPhone (or whatever you read your stories on.) 

So, if you love reading short stories, the way I do, I’m sure you will find lots of new and wonderful short story authors and plenty of reading material for the long hot summer. So, read the interviews, click on the links, read  previews of their stories and then download them onto your eReaders, and enjoy.

Here's a tentative schedule for Season 1, this summer. (It's subject to change, but I hope not too much change)

Episode 1 - July 5 - Barbara Phinney
Episode 2 - July 12 - B.C. Laybolt
Episode 3 - July 19 - David Todd
Episode 4 - July 26 - Donna Fitch
Episode 5 - August 2 - C.A. Rowland
Episode 6 - August 9 - VJ Schultz
Episode 7 - August 13 - Kaye George
Episode 8 - August 16 - Rosemary McCracken
Episode 9 - August 20 - Terri Judd
Episode 10 - August 23 - Bobbi Chukran
Episode 11 - August 27 - JM Davis
Episode 12  - August 30 - Valerie Douglas
Episode 13 - Sept. 3 - Lyn Cote
Episode 14 - Sept. 6 - Margaret Daley
Episode 15 - Sept. 10 - Lina Gardiner
Episode 16 - Sept. 13 - Melissa Yuan-Innes
Episode 17 - Sept. 17 - JA Menzies
Episode 18 - Sept. 20 - Ben Solomon


And yes, yes, I fully realize that there are not 8 Saturdays in August, not unless you're in some weird dystopian world where the planets and the earth and the rotation therein has been seriously compromised. And yes - I know the kids are back in school in September, but it's still technically summer! But, the response had been so overwhelming that I decided to include some author interviews mid-week and into September. 

So welcome to Season One  of the Saturday Short Story Spectacular! Come back each Saturday and meet a new author of short fiction. 

How to Create a Createspace Book in Four Easy Steps—Sort Of

Step One - write a great book.

Step Two - get a cover.

Step Three - have it formatted.

Step Four - combine the book and the cover and then go to the handy Createspace form and start inputting. Voilà!

Easy Peasy. Yeah. Well.

In the particular case of Strange Faces, I didn't write a book so much as compile a book—six short stories and one novelette under one cover. That completed, I went on to Step Two. 

One of my favorite evening zone-out pastimes is lounging on the couch, laptop on my lap, television on, and strolling through online pre-made book covers. There are plenty of cover artists who are doing this. Just do a Google search for "pre-made eBook covers" and you’ll see what I mean. Another pleasure of mine is ambling through Amazon and simply looking at book covers. (Go ahead, say it—I lead a boring life.)

In my case, I kept going back to Bookgraphics. I had already used her for a pre-made cover for Steal Away. I liked her work, and so I hired her to do up a "custom cover" for Strange Faces.

Oh, and another thing of note. You need a radically different cover for a print book than you do for an eBook. I kept wondering why, until I slapped the flat of my hand against my temple and thought, "Oh yeah, you got the whole back of the book to think about! And the spine!"

When you go to CreateSpace you have two options. You can pay or not pay. Quick, which would you choose? 

I guess it’s not that simple, though.  If you don’t have a cleanly edited copy (and more about that in a future blog, I promise), or if you don’t have a cover, you might want to try it. But I have no experience with it, and I don’t know anyone who’s done this. My advice on this score is to ask Dr. Google.

But since we already had a cover and a cleanly edited manuscript, we clicked on "start a title for free." When I use the royal "we," I’m referring to my husband, my book formatter, Rik.

With me looking over his shoulder, we opened an account and started the step by step procedure. Even though he has formatted almost 500 books, this is the first time he himself has "uploaded" anything to Createspace. He has formatted hundreds of Createspace books, but that’s where his job ends. Amazon’s guidelines suggest that the author/publisher put up the book herself. And you probably don't want Rik to know your bank account numbers.

Yesterday, after four days of back and forth (there’s always

something isn’t there??) our formatted manuscript finally met with Createspace’s final approval. We did a few high-fives, and then ordered our proof copy which should be in our hot little hands in a week or so.

So, no, right now, it’s not quite ready yet for general consumption, and unlike writers who traditionally publish with the Big Five - oops, I mean Medium Sized Five, us Indies don’t get to put "pre-order" buttons on our Amazon pages. But ya know? Maybe that’s somewhere down in the pipeline, too. 

For latest on the Amazon/Hachette dispute, Jim Bell, a Hachette author and an Indie author and a buddy of mine has written an excellent blog post about it. If you are really geeking into this, scroll down and read all the comments underneath. Very insightful!

It's All Up To You, Baby!

And when you're Indie publishing, it is all up to you, and that includes editing and covers and marketing and promotion and getting reviews. Oh my!

That first review of a book is always a milestone. Will people like it or does it suck? This one came in and had me picking up my pom pons and dancing around my living room on tiptoes. Alice Munro!!  Really and truly?! My writing reminds her of Alice Munro?! The Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro?! That Alice Munro?! Okay, enough with the question/exclamation marks, already!

But, it did make me feel good! Thank you to my beautiful reviewer.

Social Media - 

For the past few days, I’ve been working on getting Strange Faces eBook out in the social media stream so people can find it, read it, and hopefully review it. That mean all the usual suspects - Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. As soon as the paperback becomes available, I’ll be sending out a newsletter. Make sure you sign up! 

Create Space -  

My husband Rik and I have been up to our ears with the spring cleaning of our sailboat, aptly named Mystery. This boat is our summer cottage. When you buy a cheap old boat, though, things break. This year it needed a humongous amount of fiberglas poured into a hole in the bottom. Don’t ask. 

But, when that is finished, we plan to set up a Create Space account and get Strange Faces out there as a paper book.

Can I go for a walk with you? - 

I love audio books. They are great for 1) driving, 2) walking, 3) nights of insomnia 4) cooking. Soon we'll be looking into getting Strange Faces up there as an audio book

Amazon vs. Hachette - 

Okay, time to weigh in. I don’t fully understand what these two monopolous bullies are actually fighting about, (some of that is shrouded in secrecy) but I read the blogs and listen to talk NPR and Slate. 

Here’s what I think - It’s not big, bad giant Amazon (Even the name is 'big!') coming down on poor defenseless little Hachette. Nope. They're both pretty much big guys, but they represent two different and distinct camps in the publishing industry. In one corner, Hachette represents all those authors who are published by traditional publishing houses and like it that way, thank you very much. Their mantra is  - ‘We’ve always done it that way.” 

And in the other corner of the rink is Amazon, the upstart, the guy with the big fists who wants to come in and change publishing from the inside out and from the bottom to the top. 

Because I’m an Indie author, I tend to take my pompoms and flags and balloons over to Amazon's corner of the rink. Here’s what Amazon has done: Made it so I can put up my books for free. Case in point—I love short stories. I actually buy books of eShort stories. Yet, the gatekeepers in traditional publishing decided that for whatever reason, they don't sell. So, they're not going to publish them. But, I can. I can take my favorite stories and get them out there as an eBook and have readers actually buy them. 

They have developed a platform called Create Space where I can get my books in print with a minimal outlay of money by me. Take your time machine back to the bad old days of publishing. First of all, people who self-published their books were the acne-ridden, unpopular kids on the playground.  They paid Vanity Publishers enormous amounts of money, sometimes into the tens of thousands of dollars and ended up with garagefulls of expensive hardbacks they couldn't sell. 

Amazon has changed all that. Amazon has taken the stigma of self-publishing. Self-publishers get to wear the Cool Kids tee shirts. 

 They have another platform—ACX, which allows authors, again with minimal outlay of moolah to get their books narrated and turned into audio books and into places like Audible.com. 

As an Indie author I'm glad we have people like Joe Konrath sticking up for us. Here's another take on it, a thoughtful one which I found on the Maine Crime Writers blog site. 

And if you're nerding out on this, just Google Hachette and Amazon and you'll find enough reading material to last for days and days, until maybe the dispute is hopefully, resolved. 

NOTE TO SELF: Copy edits come BEFORE the book comes out, not after

So, here’s me being completely honest on this Indie pubbing journey—I ‘thought’ I had Strange Faces completely copy edited. Well, okay, I’ll blame it on my birthday. I also blame it on the fact that I’m a big picture person. I’m more concerned with plot “working” and characters staying “in character” than a misplaced comma or an extra space before a period at the end of a sentence . 

(Did you catch that?)

But first, my birthday. I was working along on compiling some of these favorite  short stories of mine, when it occurred to me that I could have Strange Faces out on birthday, it made me sort of, kind of, a bit rushed. Not really, but sort of. Because how fun! To release this on my birthday!

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I did copy edit it, first on the computer screen and then with a red pen on printed copies. But because it was just me, it wasn't enough. It takes two sets of eyes to correctly copy edit a manuscript. I will repeat. It takes two people. At least two. My husband, who is an eBook formatter didn't get the chance to read it through for copy errors because I kept saying, "We have to get it out tomorrow!"

Here’s why it takes two people—I can read over the same sentence five times and not notice the misplaced comma. Another person can come in and see it right, away. 

(Did you catch that?)

Which leads me to my next point, the actual take-away of this rather rambling blog. There are two kinds of editing. First, is what I call a global editor, although they are called other things by other people. That’s the person who notices plot irregularitries, or characters not behaving in character ways. That’s the editor who also notices that Wednesday isn't the day after Sunday, and how did Main Character’s eyes change from blue to gray halfway through the story? She’s the editor who notes general clunkiness and plot weirdnesses.

I love global editors. They help me write better.

The second level of editing is the copy editor. That’s the nitpicker. The comma slasher. The spelling queen. The grammar guru. That’s the editor that goes over the so-called finished product and finds missed words and missed 

(Did you catch that?)

So, why am I writing about this on this particular day?

Strange Faces ended up with a few copy errors which were pointed out to me by a friend in an email who had purchased the Kindle edition. (Did you just hear that groan of utter chagrin?)

So, we go in and change them, one after the other. What else can you do? My formatter husband says this happens to every author who gets their eBooks out there. “It’s no big deal,” he says with a smile. I think he's just trying to make me feel better. 

So, my FIRST bit of advice in this candid, tell-all blog on how not to do what I do—is read the thing a gazillion times before you get it out there. 

I’ve decided that in all future books I will 1) read it over for copy errors on the computer screen, 2) and then print it off and read it over with my red pen, and then 3) put the whole thing on my Kobo and read it like I’m reading a book. 

Maybetthen Ill finddd more copy errrors..

Going it Alone (but with a little help from friends!)

It’s quite fitting on this—my birthday—that not only would I be releasing my first independent book, (Strange Faces), but that I would be undergoing a major shift in my writing career. Since 1992 I have been traditionally published. That means I queried agents and publishing houses and got traditional contracts with advances that had to be paid back with royalties. I wrote 18 novels this way. 

During the past few years, I’ve fancied myself as something of a hybrid author with one foot in traditional publishing and one foot as an Indie. I’ve been able to get the rights back on many of my older and out-of-print books which I’ve re-edited, re-covered and gotten them out there for sale. But I didn't want to give up that elusive promise of a contract with the Big 6 - oops, Big 5. Well, maybe Medium Sized 5 by now. 

Like so many authors of late, though, I am stepping over that fence and planting both of my feet on the new green grass of Indie publishing. I no longer have an agent. I no longer have a publishing contract with any traditional house. I’m on my own.

It’s been a strange and weird and a long process over the past couple of years. And if I had a nickel for every coulda, woulda and shoulda, I’d have enough to buy a whole library of books for my Kobo. 

You have to have lived under a bush for the last number of years not to notice how much technology has totally changed our lives. How many of us drive down to the local video store and come home with a VHS in our hand for our evening’s entertainment? How many of us buy music CDs? Like me, you probably buy all of your music online and rent your movies from iTunes where you browse them in the comfort of your own living room.

The same has happened to publishing. As more and more readers devour their books on Kobos, Kindles and iPads, the old bricks and mortar bookstores have taken quite a beating. Used books are bought more for their collectible value than for actual reading. My husband and I don’t even go to the library any more. Our province’s library system is hooked into the Overdrive program, and we can “go to the library” while we sit in our easy chairs and click a few links. A good thing? Bad thing? You may long for the good old days, but it won’t change anything. The changes are pretty much here to stay and I’m predicting more to come.

Authors, too are changing. Instead of having to work through gatekeepers such as agents and publishers, we can just sit down at our desks and with a few pushes of a button, we can put our great Canadian novel out there for all the world to read. We set the price. We can even put our books on sale if we feel like it. Every day we can check and see how many people have bought our books that day, something that is virtually impossible with the older publishing model. 

Today, on my birthday—yes, back to that—I’m putting out my first book length original work, a collection of general market short mystery stories that I’m pretty proud of. In fact, I’m very proud of them. In the coming months I will be getting a new mystery out there, featuring a wonderful amateur sleuth that I love. More about that later. 

My intention in these blogs is to take you on this journey with me as I move through the self-publishing process. If you’re a reader, you’ll get to see what I do all day. (Oh fun!) If you’re an author, it might even be educational, or at least you can avoid the mistakes I’ve made.

I’ve chosen to align myself with a publishing group, The Alexandria Publishing Group, but I’ll write more about that in a future blog. There will be more about everything in future blogs, including the blogs I devour daily, the self-pubbing podcasts I listen to, the books I read, the online groups I belong to and the advice I follow. 

My birthday present this year was this huge mural of the NY city night sky. As I stand in front of it I can pretend I’m looking out and across to New Jersey where I spent all of my growing up years my nose in a book, and reading far into the night, and dreaming of one day being a writer.

So, I invite you to go on this self-publishing journey with me.

Down the Rabbit Hole...

It has been a very long time since I've posted anything here, and I wanted to take a few moments to offer up my excuses. But, as everyone knows, excuses are just that, excuses. But here's my reason for neglecting this space for so very long -

I've been writing - working madly on a new mystery, and since it's been awhile since I had any novel length new books out there, I decided to make that a priority. So, that said, this will be a short posting. Some of you have written books, so you know the mind-numbingness of it, the way it takes over your life utterly. 

If you read the top of this blog, you will know that I'm an introvert, and we can utterly cocoon ourselves into our lives when we're working on something, and that's not necessarily a good thing. 

I was hoping to get NIGHT WATCH, this latest thriller/mystery completely written,  edited and ready to go by next week when I head off to Bouchercon. I'm not sure that's going to happen. Ugh! 

So, if you've been wondering where I've been, this is where. Thanks for your patience, love and support. 

Head on over to my facebook site. We've been having some interesting discussions over there.

GOODREADS? AMAZON?

A favorite social media site of mine is Goodreads. I enjoy it not as a place to promote my own books and stories, but as a reader. I am a reader on Goodreads. It’s where I track my own reading. My reviews there are basically for my own benefit and rarely include more than a sentence or two. It helps me keep track of what books I have read and what books are still on my TBR pile. 

The most valuable place there for me are the book recommendations.  Based on my reading habits, I get lists of books that are ‘similar’  to what I enjoy. I’ve been introduced to a number of new authors that way. 

I also participate in a few 'book clubs.’ I love chatting about books. The members there don't even know I'm a writer  or if they do, I never promote there.  It has been my one 'safe' place where I didn't feel I had to promote every second. On Goodreads I'm a reader first, writer second. 

I’m not a visual person, so Pinterest pretty much bores me. Facebook is good, but sort of functions for me as a website. Goodreads is the place I feel I can ‘hang out with my peeps.’

Therefore I’m not altogether cheered that Amazon has purchased this massive site. If Amazon has all my preference info now - along with the names of the 50+ books I've read,  will I be inundated with ads? Probably. It’ll become one more site where I’m bombarded with marketing and feel I have to promote my own stuff or drown. 

I got off Shelfari for that very reason. 

Here are a few more links about the acquisition of Goodreads: 

http://paperoverboard.blogspot.ca/2013/03/goodreads-joins-amazon-family-please.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-simple-reason-why-goodreads-is-so-valuable-to-amazon/274548/