Tag: ebook formatting

Breaking the Top 10, and a big thank you

As I’m writing this, “Memoirs of a Snowflake” holds the #8 spot in the Kindle Store for the general short story category — #150 overall.  Almost 1,000 people have downloaded it since it went free over the weekend, and it’s already garnered some fantastic reviews!

All this positive attention makes me want to thank all those who have taken the time to post reviews of my work, so I thought I’d do that here.

Specifically, I’d like to thank L. Christensen for the early 5-star review of Genesis Earth, and her very favorable reviews of my other work.  Full disclosure: L. Christensen is one of my first readers; however, I did not solicit any of her reviews–she posted them on her own.  Also, I’d like to thank Katie Armstrong for the other 5-star review of Genesis Earth–I have no idea who you are (well, a vague idea maybe), but thank you!

Another reviewer who’s been very kind is EA Younker over at goodreads.  She’s posted some glowing 5-star reviews for “Memoirs of a Snowflake” and “Decision LZ1527” on that site, as well as a more critical but still encouraging 3-star review for “From the Ice Incarnate.” Thanks for taking the time to read my work!  I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Over on Smashwords, Ernest Winchester posted a nice 5-star review of “Decision LZ1527,” only a couple hours after I uploaded it.  More recently, Michelle Glorioso and Annie B posted some extremely gratifying reviews of “Memoirs of a Snowflake.” Thanks so much!

Of course, not all the reviews have been glowingly positive. “From the Ice Incarnate” has garnered some criticism from readers who feel that it was missing something, either sufficient character depth or a satisfying ending.  I appreciate the feedback; short stories aren’t my forte, so I’ll be sure to keep that in mind as I work on my short form.  Also, Genesis Earth has garnered a couple of critical yet well-reasoned reviews, most notably from the review site Science Fiction Addiction.  Once again, thanks for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully.  And thanks to all the other generally positive reviews which I haven’t mentioned specifically here.

So far, Bringing Stella Home hasn’t gotten any reviews, so if you’ve read it and enjoyed it, I would appreciate it very much if you would take the time to do that.  In the meantime, thanks for all your support!

Getting ready for publication

So the edits for Bringing Stella Home came in just a couple days ago, and I’m hoping to finish running through them either today or tomorrow. After that comes formatting, then uploading to the various ebook vendor platforms.

I have to admit, even though this is my second full-length ebook, I’m a little terrified.  Formatting is always tricky, and I want to try out some new stuff (such as interior images and a logical TOC) that might not carry over well into other formats.  That, on top of all the usual fears associated with sending your work out into the world, is pretty nerve-wracking.

It doesn’t help that I’m currently working full time–or that a bazillion other things are conspiring to totally eat away this weekend.  However, I’m determined to get this book out, and to get it out right.

I don’t currently have any plans for promotion, but I’m not too worried about that.  I’ll probably put something together when I finish Sholpan.  On that front, I’ve finished the first draft of the novella, but decided to run it through a pretty substantial edit to make it more satisfying for people who read the novel first.

But…yeah.  I’ve got the cover art, got the blurb, got the edits, got the interior map…the only thing left is to write up the author’s note and acknowledgments, format the book, and put it up.

Crazy!

 

Buy me lunch and I’ll teach you how to make an ebook

Okay, this is insane.  For a long time, I’ve kept up with Writer Beware as a source for quality news about publishing scams, but now…huh?

Recently, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch have been giving a TON of warnings about “agent-publishers” –agents who are electronically publishing their clients when they’re supposed to represent their clients’ interests to publishers.

DWS and KKR have both been unequivocal about this–any agent doing this is running a scam and should be avoided like the plague.  And you know what?  I believe them.  Why?  Because using entirely free and/or open source software, I can create a professionally formatted ebook from any of my manuscripts in less than an hour. 

Less than an hour.

And I’m not a computer expert either, just a blogger who knows some basic html (which you, too, can learn free of charge at w3schools).

Well, just today I read a post on Writer Beware about these agent-publishers that made my jaw drop.  Summary: agents who ran publishing operations used to be considered scammers, but things have changed so that that’s legit now.  The phrase that really got to me was “unimpeachably reputable agencies.”

Huh?

According to DWS and KKR, these “unimpeachably reputable agencies” become scammers the moment they start publishing their clients’ works.  Clearly, someone is wrong, and my own experience tells me it isn’t DWS or KKR.

Making a professional looking ebook is literally easier than writing a query or a synopsis.  Light years easier.  Paying someone a commission for doing it is like writing the boy down the street who mows your lawn into your mortgage contract.  It makes literally no business sense.

And yet people still think that this agent-publisher things is legitimate?  Wha…?

Okay, you know what?  If you’re a writer in the Provo/Orem area, I’ll show you everything I know about making an ebook if you’ll buy me lunch.  Heck, if you live in Salt Lake and are willing to take me to this awesome Lebanese place, I’ll make a special trip just for you!

I’ll show you what you need to download, install it for you, teach you how it works, and run you step by step through the formatting process until you have a beautiful ebook on your hard drive.  I’ll teach you everything I know (which honestly isn’t that much), and I’ll do it all for the price of lunch.  Just email me at joseph [dot] vasicek [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll write you into my schedule.

Why would I take the time out of my day (and away from my own writing) to do this?  Well, for one, I really like Lebanese food.  But more importantly, it’s in all of our interests as writers that none of us get caught up in these crazy scams.  They don’t benefit us and will actually hurt us all in the long run, if we let them happen.

So yes, once again, if you’re a writer living anywhere between Provo and Salt Lake City, I will show you everything I know about formatting ebooks if you will buy me lunch. I’m not even joking.

And I love Lebanese food.  Once we’re finished, I think you will too.

Back in Mass

Mass = Massachusetts = “back east,” for all you unwashed Utahans!

My sister’s wedding is this weekend, so I’m back at my parents’ place helping them get everything set up.  It’s going to be a busy day tomorrow, but I’ve got my netbook and will probably get a couple good hours of writing in.

I managed to write a bit on the plane today, but not as much as I was hoping.  My goal is still to finish Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1 by May 14th; I’ve got about 15k-20k left to go, and since I’m taking the next few weeks off to work on writing projects, I shouldn’t have any problems meeting that deadline.

Yesterday, I took the unedited manuscript of Genesis Earth and formatted it nice and pretty so my friend Laura could read it on her Kindle, and…man, it looks like a real book!  There’s something about seeing your work in the actual form that people are going to read it in that is just…well, for lack of a better word, magical.  It’s definitely motivated me to get GE up quickly, as well as Journey to Jordan.  More on that in the next few days and weeks to come.

It’s getting late out here and I’d better get some sleep, but before I do, I want to put a plug in for my new favorite webcomic, The Zombie Hunters.  Ross Wolfe, Quark’s renowned zombie expert, introduced me to the comic a couple months ago, and I have been totally hooked ever since.

The comic is set in our world after the zombie apocalypse, where a band of five thousand survivors struggles to rebuild civilization on an island that was previously the site of a major research campus.  The zombie plague has a dormant phase, where the infected can live normal lives, but turn into zombies when they die.

The infected live in segregated barracks as second class citizens, but teams of them regularly venture out into the wastelands to salvage supplies from the zombie-infested ruins.  The comic basically centers around one of these teams of zombie hunters; their struggles and challenges, their relationships with each other, and their hopes and dreams for the future.

The storytelling is fantastic, the characters are engaging and real, the post-apocalyptic setting dark, gritty, and yet totally immersive and frighteningly believable–man, it’s just awesome.  And the longer it runs, the better it gets!  I can’t wait to find out how Charlie the half-life fits in with his ability to communicate with the zombies, or to get the full backstory with Jenny and Milo.  And I love the banter between Jenny and Sammie, her alcoholic sociopath best friend.

Right now, though, the main storyline is on hold while the author works through some business problems, but the short story is absolutely fantastic.  I love her fantastic use of point of view–how she gets into the little boy’s head and shows the apocalypse unfold from his perspective.  And the kid’s grisly end…man, zombies are even freakier when you never see their faces!  I wouldn’t be surprised if I have nightmares tonight about it–I have in the past.  Crazy awesome zombie nightmares, heh.

As a side note, may I point out what may quite possibly be the perfect weapon for the zombie apocalypse, the AA-12 shotgun.  All it needs is a bayonet and like a bajillion clips of ammo.  A must-have for any zombie contingency plan.

But yeah, let me just say I am in awe of The Zombie Hunters.  Awesome, awesome story–every time it updates, I get immersed again in the post-apocalyptic world, and it is amazing.  If I ever end up writing a zombie apocalypse story (which will probably involve starships and space travel in some fashion), I would be tickled if it’s even half as good as this excellent webcomic.

Goals for May

The last two weeks have pretty much decimated my writing routine.  Between family stuff and a 40 hour per week temp job, I’ve pretty much fallen behind on everything.

However, the good news is that with the money from the temp job, I can afford to take a month off to work exclusively on writing projects.  Here’s what I plan to accomplish, in order of importance:

  • Finish Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1.
  • Finish the online TEFL class.
  • Publish Journey to Jordan on the Kindle.
  • Finish >50% of Worlds Away from Home 3.0.
  • Prepare Genesis Earth for publication.
  • Release the short stories on Nook, Smashwords.
  • Switch to Linux.

A hefty bill, especially considering that my youngest sister’s wedding is next weekend.  However, I think I can definitely do it.  I’ve got about 18k words left in ITND, and with the feedback from my first readers, I’ve got tons of ideas for WAFH.  That project is going to be fun.

Journey to Jordan shouldn’t be too hard, either.  I found a good WYSIWYG html editor and played around with some test files today until I figured out how to make it work.  Now, I just need to play around with an actual Kindle to see how small I need to make the interior illustrations/photos to make sure they look good.  After that, it’s just copy and paste from old blogs, with a little spot editing and some time to write a foreword.

Journey to Jordan is going to be a lot of fun.  It’s a travel journal, not a science fiction novel, but my experiences in the Middle East definitely shaped my writing style, and it might be fun for readers of my novels/stories to see where the influences came from.  If all goes well, I can have it up by the 14th.

But above all else, my priority is going to be writing. I want to get back into a steady routine, plugging out a good +2.5k words each day until ITND is finished.  The deadline for that is the 14th, but I want to have it finished sooner if possible.  It’s going to be hard with my sister’s wedding, but I’ll do the best I can.

Of course, this is all assuming that I can take the whole month of May off.  However, Pioneer Book called me up on Saturday to set up an interview–they’ve got a position open, and I’m pretty optimistic that they’ll want to hire me.

If that happens, great!  I’ll just push some of this stuff back into June and juggle part time work with these writing projects.  Full time work is much harder to juggle, but if things don’t work with Pioneer Book, the guys at the temp job want me to come back in June.  So either way, I won’t be broke (inshallah).

The ultimate goal, of course, is to make the writing pay the bills.  That seems more possible to me now than ever before, but it’s still a ways out there.  2015, though–that’s the goal.  I want to me making a full time living as a writer by 2015.

But for now, I’d better get some sleep.  After all, I want to write +4k words tomorrow.  Wish me luck!

From the Ice Incarnate is now available from Amazon

My third indie published short story, “From the Ice Incarnate,” is now available for $.99 on Amazon.  You can read it on the Kindle, of course, but if you don’t have one then Amazon  has free plugins for just about every device imaginable.

If you haven’t read any of my other stories yet, I would recommend starting with this one.  It won first place in the 2009 Mayhew Short Story contest at BYU, and is probably one of the better pieces of my writing.  It’s also taken from a scene in my novel Genesis Earth, which is currently a quarter finalist for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

I’ve also reformatted both of my other stories, “Memoirs of a Snowflake” and “Decision LZ1527,” improving the covers and making them look more professional overall.  I also redid the cover for “Decision LZ1527,” changing the font and enlarging the image to make it look crisper.

I’ve already blogged pretty extensively about the epublishing process in the last post, but I’ll say something about it here.  Putting stuff up on Amazon is not that hard, but making it look professional can be a little tricky.  In the future, I think I’m going to use the process outlined below:

Step One: Write the book in Open Office.  Save manuscript as an open document text.

Step Two: Using Open Office, set the font to Times New Roman size 12, bold titles and chapter headings, replace underlining with italics, spacing to 1.5 lines, add in special characters for scene breaks (if needed), etc.  Save as an html file.

Step Three: Using The Gimp, create a cover image and export as a 600×900 jpeg.

Step Four: Using a WYSIWYG html editor, adjust formatting as needed, add anchor tags for the table of contents (if needed), etc.  Save as html.

Step Five: Using an ebook creator program such as Mobipocket, combine finalized html file with cover image and all other interior content.  Edit metadata, create table of contents (if needed), etc.  Export as .prc or epub.

That’s basically the process I used for “From the Ice Incarnate,” except I uploaded the .doc file straight to Amazon and then downloaded their html conversion of it.  Kind of an ad hoc way of doing things, but hey it worked.

This will probably be my last short story for a while.  My reason for putting them out was mostly to learn on them, and I have learned a TON.

My next epublishing project will probably be a full length book, either one of my novels, or an ebook combining my blogs and journals from the summer of 2008, when I went on the BYU Jordan study abroad.  I want to figure out how to do a table of contents and add interior images, and that seems like the best project to learn it on.  Plus, I’ve always wanted to turn that material into a book.

That probably won’t come out for a while, though.  In the meantime, feel free to check out my other stories!  I hope you enjoy them; I appreciate everyone who reads my work, and do my best to write stories that are worth reading.  And if  you feel so inclined, post a review or blog about it.  Every little bit helps!

A word about ebook formatting

So it turns out that ebook formatting is a lot harder than I’d thought. I was hoping to finish chapter 13 in ITND tonight, but I’ve spent the whole #$@! time just trying to get “From the Ice Incarnate” up on Amazon.

Fortunately, I think I have a much better idea of what I’m doing now.

For “Memoirs of a Snowflake” and “Decision LZ1527,” I just uploaded the .doc file and had Amazon reformat it automatically.  The stories were short and simple enough that it worked rather well.

Then I decided I wanted to put the cover in the body of the ebook, and foolishly thought I’d just put it on the first page of the .doc file I was uploading.  Long story short, I discovered that that’s not a good idea–the ereader doesn’t read it as a cover, and it looks like crap.

Also, I discovered that the ideal size for an ebook cover is 600×900 pixels (for a standard 2:3 aspect ratio).  From now on, all the covers I upload will be 600×900.

So then, when I uploaded “From the Ice Incarnate,” I kept noticing these weird indenting problems in the preview.  No matter what I did to change the .doc file, it wouldn’t go away.  Out of frustration, I downloaded the html file that Amazon had formatted it into and noticed these weird <div> tags popping up on short, one line paragraphs where they should have been <p> tags.  Don’t ask me how they got there, but they were a pain to fix.

So then, I tried uploading the modified html file, and found to my great joy that the problem had been fixed.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t see any way to put in the cover–and the cover for “From the Ice Incarnate” is REALLY awesome.

Frustrated but undaunted, I turned to Mobipocket Creator, an open source ebook creating program.  I’d tried playing with it before, but found it complicated and confusing.  Well, now that I knew what I wanted it to do, it wasn’t hard at all to figure out how to make it work.

First, I created a new project in its own designated folder.  Then, I added the corrected html file to the “publication files” page.  Where it asked for a cover image, I uploaded the 600×900 jpeg (I do all my editting in The Gimp, in a much larger .xcf file).  Then, I filled in the metadata, such as book description, suggested cover price, etc.

When I was finished, I hit “build,” and voila!  A slick looking .prc ebook file that looked EXACTLY how I wanted it to.

I uploaded it to Amazon, and it looked great in the preview.  I’m not sure what it’ll look like in the finished product  yet, since it takes 24 hours to upload, but I fixed “Decision LZ1527” as well.  Once I knew what I was doing, it took maybe five minutes to create the ebook on Mobipocket Creator.

So here’s what I’m going to do from now on.  I’m going to bypass the whole .doc thing altogether (since I use Open Office, not MS Word) and go straight from .odt to .html using a WYSIWYG html editor.  For the cover, I’ll use The Gimp, with the project files as .xcf and the finished images as 600×900 .jpegs.  I’ll combine it all in Mobipocket Creator, and upload the .prc ebook file to Amazon / Pubit / Smashwords / wherever.

Sound daunting? (Charlie, I’m talking to you, hehe)  It’s actually a TON of fun, once you get the hang of it.  And let me tell you, when I saw the finished product, it was awesome.  Totally worth it.

Trouble is, I haven’t had any time to work on my novel, which is frustrating, because I’m working an 8 to 5 job now.  It’s temporary, which is nice for a full time artist/creator like me, but man, I’m going to miss all the free time I used to have.  I want to finish ITND before the end of the month, but I’ve still got a long ways to go.

In the meantime, let me give you a sneak peek on my next ebook.  It’s a short story based on an excerpt from Genesis Earth, which won first place in the 2009 Mayhew short story contest at BYU.  Of the stuff I’ve posted up to Amazon so far, I think this one is far and away the best.

Here’s the cover:

Pretty cool, eh?  I ripped the font from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.  The image is from NASA, taken by the Hubble space telescope.

So anyways, that’s what’s going on with my ebook venture.  I’m kind of glad I haven’t done much to publicize the other stories, because they need a lot of work.  If you bought one already, don’t worry; the stories haven’t changed at all, just the formatting.  I’m not sure if you can re-download those once you’ve bought them, but if you want one of the new ones, let me know and I’ll figure it out.

And if I’m missing something in terms of html or ebook formatting, please let me know.  I’m not quite hopeless, but I’m still horribly ignorant when it comes to this kind of stuff.  Any suggestions (especially for a good WYSIWYG editor) would me much appreciated.