Category Archives: Books

30 Pounds/4 Months: WOW!

Okay, I have to admit: I’m surprised. I had no idea the new diet and cookery book, 30 Pounds / 4 Months, would go over the way it has, right out of the box. The other evening I sold $100 worth of print copies in less than 15 minutes.

Here it is again, not to belabor its spectacular cover:

→ → →

The print copy came out looking very good. I’m pleased with the cover, whose image was created by Foxy Forest Manufacture. And the interior design, facilitated by Joel Friedlander’s book design group, looks clear, readable, and professional.

However, I’m less than thrilled with the Kindle version. There, we uploaded to Amazon’s .mobi platform, and the book appeared to go up without a hitch. Proofreading in Amazon’s downloadable “Kindle Previewer” — the one you install on your computer, never the online version in Amazon’s cloud — showed an e-book that looked similarly clean and crisp.

We thought it was perfect.

Then in the course of posting “preview” links so prospective buyers and the merely curious could read a hefty chunk of the book’s contents, I noticed the interior content was all wonky! B-level heads appeared larger than the chapter titles, and paragraphs intended to be set first line flush left showed first-line indent…including all the lines on the copyright page.

Downloading the .mobi file to my iPad — a trick, since it has to be opened from an e-mail — showed the same corrupted formatting in the iPad’s Kindle reader.

I do not know when I’ve ever been so furious! At least, not since the last time I was that mad.

So my e-book designer, who does not come cheap, now has the manuscript and is trying to wrestle it into something that will look halfway decent on Kindle. I’ve asked him to produce it as an ePub, a format that can look very handsome, indeed, as an iBook, so we can market it at Barnes and Noble as well as at Plain & Simple Press.

Until then the print version is available here: email us from our “Contact” page with a request for the book, your name, and your address (will not be shared with anyone, ever!). The price is currently discounted to $10. Shipping and handling within the United States is $7.95, for a total cost to US customers of $17.95.

If you would like the book shipped outside the US, let us know and we’ll provide the cost for international shipping for your approval, before sending it to you.

Building the Print Empire

Okay, okay: “the print anthill.” What can one say?

Manager at a local Whole Foods opined that 30 Pounds/4 Months might find a place on the store’s shelves. However, the buyer for that segment of the store had left and they hadn’t replaced him yet; he suggested I come back in a few weeks and try again.

Well, that’s heartening. It’s not the only WF in town, not by a long shot. Plus we have a local chain of gourmet stores that really is friendly to local businesses. One of my neighbors started baking and selling very fancy (indeed!) cookies after she and her husband were laid off during the Recession. She started with Local Gourmet right down the street, and before she knew it had more business than she could handle. The income kept the wolf from the door: they did not lose their home, nor did financial disaster befall them when they had a baby in the middle of all this.

I figure a diet book that urges people to buy nothing but whole, fresh foods and shows how to fix them should be right up the alley for those worthy grocery purveyors.

Also, believe it or not we still have one surviving REAL bookstore here. It’s much beloved and is doing well enough to branch out. It has two stores, one of them right down the road. And I’m told the owner has said she will consider peddling self-published books if they look professionally designed. Dorkish, no…but if you’ve done a decent job of writing & design: maybe.

So my plan is to take the 30 Pounds and Slave Labor in her direction, also bearing with me the fistful of books I’ve emitted through “traditional” publishers, so she’ll know I’m more than the average little old lady with a publishing hobby.

Accordingly, I decided to order a copy of Slave Labor and one of the first collected Fire-Rider volumes through the new PoD vendor. Thought it would be a piece of cake…but it turned into a humongous project that absorbed the entire day.

An old friend who used to do design for Arizona Highways and was the art director at Scottsdale Magazine for years did the Slave Labor cover. And a very nice job of it he did, indeed. It was the first of my little publishing efforts, and so it never occurred to me to ask him to provide not just a PDF but also a high-resolution JPEG or TIFF. At the time, I didn’t know any better.

Asked for the latter, he couldn’t find one. The PDF he’d sent me was 72 dpi. Why? No clue. But that was all I had.

I’d created a wrap-around cover for Slave Labor quite some time ago, but it also seems only to exist in PDF. To sell the book through a retailer, I needed to add a bar code, which I hadn’t done before because I had no intention of selling a print version at all. There seemed to be no way to add a new design element to a PDF.

So I had to take the PDF of the Kindle cover (72dpi????? HOW did I get this thing on Amazon?) and convert that to a JPEG and then create a new cover and then add the bar code.

In converting from PDF to JPEG on a Mac, you can tell Preview to save a 72 dps file at a resolution of 300 dps. That’s rather futile, because if you don’t have 300 dps to start with, you’re not going to end up with anything like a real 300 dps image. It’s kind of like trying to turn a piece of gauze into percale: yeah, you can weave more lengths of cotton thread into it, and yeah, you’ll probably end up with a sturdier piece of cloth. But it ain’t a-gonna be percale. Similarly, your system can “guess” at the colors of the missing pixels and where they might have been, but the result ain’t a-gonna be a true 300 dps image.

It certainly won’t print with the perfect definition. But I think it’ll be good enough for government work. I hope. I reproduced the back cover and tightened up the back cover copy. Looks OK, I think. I hope.

The copy was easy enough: it was already formatted and just went right up there.

Posting the Fire-Rider collection to the PoD folks’ site was another matter altogether. The cover was ready to go, but as I looked at the content…not so much.

Among the many fixes that needed to be made: one chapter’s first page, which which should have appeared on a recto (odd-numbered) page…well, it did so, but only with an extra blank page (i.e., two blank pages) in front of it.

Say what?

Fixing that screwed up the TofC, but that’s not such a big deal with a print book.

Then I realized…waaaaiiitaminit here! If this were a real print book, when a verso page is left blank it would also be unnumbered. Well, no: it would be numbered but the page number and running header or footer would not appear on that page, just as they do not appear on the opening page of a chapter.

It’s easy to persuade Wyrd to refrain from showing headers & page numbers on first pages. But…that’s about as far as it goes.

The fix is simple, but it’s (urk!) manual. To hide the running header/footer on a blank verso page, you have to insert a “shape” (a rectangle will do the trick), set it to show no fill, no line, no shadow (yes, goddamn Wyrd auto-inserts a freaking shadow on those things). Then bring it forward, keep it in the body (not in the header or footer) and slide it over so it will cover the offending characters. Works like a charm, as long as you’re not bothered by activities best described as “time-consuming, ditzy, and annoying.” It helps a great deal if your bookoid is not 320 pages long…

That and a few other housekeeping tasks helped to fill a good 12 hours. But I think the result will be very attractive.

If you’d like to buy a five-star reviewed sci-fi saga, lemme know in the comments below. I figure to make a profit selling it in a bookstore, I’d need to charge $12 to $14. But because you’re You, I’ll discount it to $9 + shipping and handling.

Adventures in Self-Publishing: Kindle “Preview” Tool

About two o’clock this afternoon I started on some of the publishing-related chores filling the To-Do list, after having completed some morning tasks that slopped over the noon hour. Several things really needed to get done today. None of them did get done, alas. Because… In the email came a notice from the Kindle folks bragging about their new “Preview” tool: a snippet of code that you can install in your website to direct readers to a fairly lengthy peek at just about any book published at Amazon.

Well, the sales potential is obvious, no? Since copying and pasting code into a WordPress page is fast and painless (usually…), I decided to belay the scheduled jobs and instead post “Preview” ads for key books I’m trying to peddle at Plain and Simple Press, at Fire-Rider, and at Funny about Money. This shouldn’t have taken longer than about 45 minutes or an hour. Max. With dawdling and Murphy’s Law figured in.

It’s now after 7:00. I never did get the Fire-Rider website updated or a page of reviews posted there. I’ve gone around in circles uploading data, making a horrifying discovery, and deleting data. And I. am. mad. as. a. CAT!

To make a long story short, after I had posted a “Preview” link to 30 Pounds / 4 Months, the new diet-cookbook that has been selling moderately well, compared to the other opuses we have online, I belatedly took it into my hot little mind to click on that link by way of testing it. What came up was a gawdawful formatting mess!

This, after I had checked, checked, checked, and re-checked that .mobi file in the large, clunky Kindle Previewer that you can download from Amazon and save to your hard drive. The one that downloads files and opens them in about half the time it takes for your hair to turn gray. In that Kindle previewer, downloadable from your Amazon Author “Bookshelf” — where you go to publish your golden words — the formatting appears to be PERFECT. But when you see it in Kindle’s fine new marketing tool, it’s sh!t.

The other books looked OK — I checked them at the time I uploaded the “Preview” links and foolishly assumed all was well. But this one is a screaming fiasco.

And of course, this happens to be the book that I expect will sell. Indeed, in hard copy it is selling rather briskly.

By the time I went back into all my websites, deleted all the “Previews” of the cookbook from every page I’d put them on, changed the links on the cookbook widgets away from the websites’ new PREVIEWS! pages and back to Amazon’s pages, and revised and updated a Funny about Money post burbling on joyfully about the new fine opportunity, I’d killed the entire afternoon struggling with this little headache.

If that weren’t enough to push the blood pressure into the ionosphere… At this point I have no idea whether 30 Pounds appears to be properly formatted when it’s loaded into a Kindle device or whether it’s a jumble of wacked-out heads, subheads, and wrong paragraph formatting.

I could, in theory, drop the price to 99 cents for a day or two or three (or however long it takes to return the price to the $9.99 that will return almost a whole dollar‘s net profit on the thing). Then I could pay Amazon for the privilege of letting me download it into my Kindle device so I can see what it actually looks like. But you wanna know what? I ain’t a-gunna do that!

My position is that Kindle should be able to provide publishers with a previewer that actually shows what our customers will see! And if they’re going to promulgate a previewer to be used as a sales tool, they should provide one that doesn’t make hamburger stew of formatting that looks fine in the previewer they claim shows what we’re publishing.

Ham and eggs? Or corned beef hash?

30 Pounds / 4 Months is on its way!

We’re pleased to announce our new cookbook, 30 Pounds / 4 Months, is already online at Amazon. Better yet, the print version is on its way. We should have page proofs in hand before Christmas, and the book with actual, touchable pages made of paper will be available just in time for us all to slim down after our holiday excesses!

We are thrilled to be able to offer this updated, much improved edition of our old diet/cookbook, How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months. We know you will be delighted with it, and we also can guarantee — from our own experiences — that if you follow its diet guidelines you will lose weight without signing on to a fad program and with no risk to your health or happiness.

One of our readers at Funny about Money remarked that the 4 Months diet comes under the heading of “common sense.” That it does. Sometimes we just need a little help in sticking to plain old common sense. Try it out. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results, and you’ll also get a collection of over 100 tasty and healthy recipes.

Enjoy in the New Year!

Coming Attractions!

Recently, having surpassed our short-term publishing goal, we decided to slow our production pace by about 50%, partly to allow the writing team to focus on longer, more interesting stories and partly to give me a break from the 14-hour days. Interestingly, the result has been that more projects of higher quality have blossomed.

Soon to appear, for example, will be a revised and much improved version of the ill-fated diet/cookbook, whose first incarnation was titled How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months.

The new version is renamed. Its new title is 30 Pounds: 4 months. Here’s a draft of the cover, still very much under construction:

I’m not nuts about this design. What’s really desired is one of my friend La Maya’s gorgeous original oil paintings, rights to which I wish to purchase… She’s out of the country just now, but will return next week. At that time I hope to strike a deal with her. Possibly, for example, she’d be willing to share this one.

How I Lost was the first book I posted to Amazon all by my little self. The very first Plain & Simple Press effusion, Slave Labor: The New Story of American Higher Education, was formatted and posted by a professional e-book formatter, and it came out looking very nice. After I discovered, however, that one can upload to Kindle direct from Word, nothing would do but what I had to try it myself.

Naturally, I picked the single most difficult, complicated book we’ve emitted through Plain & Simple Press and Camptown Races Press combined. Not only is it plenty long, it has a complicated set of heads and subheads, almost every recipe contains a list, and at one point (no longer!) it was illustrated with graphs and jpegs.

With a little fooling around, How I Lost loaded right up into the Amazon store, and from what I could tell, it looked OK. When I reviewed it in Amazon’s previewer function, it appeared tidy enough: the paragraphs seemed regular, the heads and subheads appeared to be consistent throughout, the table of contents seemed to work well enough, the lists of ingredients in the recipes looked like…well, lists. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

So I sat back and waited for the vast wealth to roll into the Money Bin.

What rolled in was a squawk of rage from a dismayed reader. The fonts, she said, were all over the place, illogical and unpredictable. Heads and subheads were cattywampus; so were the ingredients lists. And by the way, she really, really, really hated the writing style!

😮

Not everyone can love you. And by this time, I’d learned that on Amazon your competitors will often take aim at a new book and post reviews blasting it. So I wasn’t very concerned. Besides, after forty years in the writing biz, I do have a stainless-steel ego. Just spell the name right, Duckie!

When I had time — some weeks later — I downloaded a copy to the iPad and opened it.

I was horrified! It looked nothing like what I thought I had posted. The reader was right: the book was a dreadful mish-mash. Fonts that I never knew existed popped up at irregular and illogical intervals — no rhyme nor reason to why some words would appear in italic, some boldface, some roman, some huge, some damn near submicroscopic. The only consistent rule was that all tables and images needed a magnifying glass to be viewed.

By then I’d put up about 35 bookoids and real books on Amazon, and, practice making something closer to perfect, I’d learned a few things. Relevant to this fiasco: what you see in Amazon’s on-line “Preview” tool is decidedly not what you get.

Amazon invites you to peek at your uploaded document with its “Preview” tool but neglects to tell you the result will bear no resemblance to what your readers see in a Kindle reader.

To view an even vaguely accurate rendition, you have to download Amazon’s Kindle reader software into your computer, fire it up, and then download your posted document into that.

Viewed in the computer-resident software, the mess that was my book became eminently visible.

And as I read the copy, I realized that yes…it was pretty bloggish. Many of the recipes had been tossed together for Funny about Money and bloviated with copious hot air.

So, I took it down from Amazon, making it unavailable to readers.

We slowed our production schedule almost a month ago, but it’s taken this long to catch up with all the pressing tasks I couldn’t get done while trying to keep up with the unrealistic work demand. Now that the dust has settled, though, I hope to return the cookbook to the market within the next couple of weeks.

In addition to getting rid of all the jpegs and the re-flowing the entire 255 pages of fine print into a clean new Joel Friedlander template, I cleaned up a fair amount of the copy. The tone is still very casual, but the most bloggy passages were cut. It’s about ready to re-post in its new incarnation, but while I wait for La Maya to return and decide whether she’ll share a painting, I probably will go over it again in search of more hot air to delete.

So, watch this space: a grand new cookbook is coming your way! Sensible weight-loss advice included.

Print on Demand: Get Your PDF Right

I was disappointed when my dearly beloved print-on-demand guy announced he wouldn’t print a hard copy of our first collection of Racy Books for Racy Readers because he considered it to be pornography.

That was fine, but it left me in a bind (heh!): I’d planned to take a couple of copies to a trade shindig that’s coming up on December 5, just to show off what we’re doing. The stash of books for the display would include the collected Family at the Holidays stories, plus one or two Fire-Rider collections, Slave Labor, and the cookbook.

Slave Labor and the How I Lost 40 Pounds cookbook already exist in hard copy. My guy printed a single copy of Fire-Rider: The Saga Begins and did an adequate job of it…not great, but good enough.

So I needed to find a new PoD vendor, one who was not too nicey-nice about what he runs through his computers. First search yielded another press that said it wouldn’t print “pornography.” But a Google search for print on demand erotica brought up a number of printers, including one right here in town. Not only do they print romantic erotica, they even have a little online bookstore from which they’ll peddle it for you.

😀

Pretty clearly the technology they use is the same or similar to the first guy’s. The platform where you submit your content and cover art is similar. In both cases, you format your book in Word or InDesign to desired trim size, generate a PDF, and post that to the printer’s site. This is very easy.

Except…when I uploaded the Family at the Holidays copy, the system balked: it read the page size as 11 x 9! The trim size is 5.5 x 8.5 inches. And the first guy’s system had no problem recognizing that.

After some tergiversations — I had to go back to Friedlander’s crew, who designed the template, to figure out the problem — I finally got it up online.

The issue is that my Mac doesn’t have Adobe Acrobat and after my recent experience with Adobe (in which they ripped me off to the tune of $90) I’m not anxious to buy anymore software from them. Why was Wyrd for Mac not producing an adequate PDF?

Well, it goes like this:

If you enter section breaks instead of page breaks, you need to format each section separately to reflect the correct page size!

Why would you use section breaks in hard-copy layout? For two reasons:

A section break lets you paginate the front matter in Roman numerals and the body copy in Arabic numerals, as is customary.
You want the first page of each chapter to begin on a recto (odd-numbered) page. Entering Section Break (Odd Page) on the last page of each chapter insures that will happen.

To do this in Wyrd, go to Format > Document (not File > Page Setup). Select Margins > Page Setup > Paper Size. In the dropdown menu next to “Paper Size,” select “custom sizes.” In Wyrd for Mac, in the pane that comes up you’ll see a box with nothing in it and boxes for paper size & the like grayed out: it appears you can’t enter any values to set the page size.

To create a custom page size, click on the little arrow on the lefthand side of the button right below the box. A new paper size title will come up (you can call it what you will) and the boxes on that page then become life. STET the “left,” “top,” “right,” and “bottom” figures (assuming you’re using a template with the margins already defined) and enter the width and height of your trim size. Click OK.

Now you have a “Custom Size” you can apply to every section in your layout. Go through the Word document and do that manually for each section. Then save as Word and save again as a PDF.

Et voila!

Fool-proof? Probably not. But it worked this time. When I went back and uploaded the rejiggered PDF, it was accepted without a hiccup.

We’ll see how it worked when we see the page proofs. But I have good hopes.

I couldn’t use the one book he did print off (before he discovered what he was printing), because as I mentioned the other day, the cover graphics needed some adjustment. Those fixes are now made, and I think it’s gonna look pretty good:

No bar code on this, because we don’t intend to sell the hard copy at retail. If we ever do, though, it’s easy enough to generate a bar code from the ISBN and stick it on the back cover.

So I’m looking forward to seeing how this one turns out. If it’s successful, I may sell hard copies of the collections through Camptown Races Press and Plain & Simple Press. Or what the heck: maybe right here!

🙁

This, That, & Publishing

Busy day coming up, but wanted to post a couple of updates:

The plan to publish a hard-copy version of the first Fire-Rider collection (books I-VI) developed into a more complicated project than expected. To make a long and exceptionally frustrating story short, the Wyrd template I used to lay out the pages corrupted — or else it’s PDF, which is unknown. It took quite a while to identify the problem, and once the problem was discovered, the solution required rebuilding a 371-page document from scratch.

Once that was done, though, the PDF and the cover loaded fine, I think. LOL! We’ll find out soon enough: when the page proofs get here, we can actually put our hot little hands on them. That should allow us to see any problems and fix.

The final cover came out reasonably well, I think.

I cut the back cover blurb considerably; added a short pull-out (the italic passage). Instead of arranging the titles of books 1 thru 6 in a vertical list on the front cover, I set them horizontally, separated by bullets. They seem less distracting that way, yet they’re readable.

This book will not be sold on Amazon (at least, I have no plans to do so at this time). I’m having it printed to produce something to take to a shindig next month, where we’ll be invited to present our works.

However, if you would like a copy, I’d be happy to sell it from this site. Just leave a query as a comment to this post. It was expensive to produce — the page proofs, which are printed and bound like a final copy — came to over $11. So I’m afraid that retail price is going to have to be a little more than $11.99. However, JUST FOR YOU, and just for a limited period, I’ll offer it at that price through this website.

In the Racy Books for Racy Readers department, we’ll also have a hard-copy collection of the Family stories:

This one is at the printer, too, for production of a proof. LOL! The book actually contains eight stories…that will have to be corrected on the back cover. And there, my children, is why we have page proofs! As you can see, I haven’t even placed a bar code on it, so little do I have any intention of peddling it on Amazon. Or in hard copy at all.

The final version of this one, which also will go to the December chivaree with me, probably will have the author’s byline centered above the title, with the words Eight and Stories shifted rightward accordingly. And I think I’ll put the imprint’s name — Camptown Races Press — in small type at the lower margin of the back cover, since I’m less than 100% thrilled with the logo I came up with.

At any rate, soon the book will exist. It’ll be a COLLECTOR’S ITEM, by golly! What a Christmas present!

If you’d like a copy of it, let me know — again, contact me through the comments section to this post. Printing cost for this was a little more sane. I think I can afford to sell it for about $10, providing about $2 profit.

So, come one, come all! The first Fire-Rider collection, $11.99 (a give-away!) and the first Racy Books collection, $10.

Designing a Paperback Cover in PowerPoint: Success!

For some time, I’ve suspected that if you can build a credible Kindle cover in PowerPoint (which you certainly can!), you ought also to be able to build a cover for a print paperback version of your magnum opus.

Will it look gaudy and spectacular and eye-spinning, the way some professionally designed covers do? Well, of course not. But on the other hand, there’s something to be said for simplicity.

So today I tried it out. And here’s the result:

The cover pitch could be a lot snappier, but we’re not quite ready to go to print yet, so there’s time to revise that. The point is: the design!

It fits the printer’s specs, and when I went to upload this draft, by golly, it worked!

The trick is to learn the printer’s specs first, convert from inches to pixels, and use PowerPoint’s File > Page Setup function to create a virtual “board” (as it were) in the correct size. For the horizontal size, you need to add the cover width x 2 (i.e., the width of the front and back covers + the width of the spine + the width of the bleed x 2. Get the spine width and the bleed width from your printer’s website — the printer should be able to tell you the spine width based on the number of pages and the paper stock you choose. The height is simpler: height + (bleed width x 2).

Jargon alert: The “trim size” is the size of the book when it’s printed and the pages and covers are “trimmed” to fit the size of the book you have in mind. The cover’s “bleed” is a small margin around the outside of this “trim size” that your cover image should overlap: this prevents minor errors from leaving you with a white strip along an edge.

At my printer’s website, I entered the size I’d like the book to be and the number of pages. Up came the specs: The total width of the PDF I would need to upload should be 12.28 inches, and its height should be 9 inches.

PowerPoint measures these things in pixels. Often printers’ figures are emitted in inches: my books are laid out for an 8.5 x 5.5-inch trim size, for example. Have no fear: Google “inches to pixels” and you’ll find several calculators that will convert your printer’s specs to figures you can enter in PowerPoint. So, the required 12.28 inches (which includes the trim size + the bleed + the the spine width) = 1178.88 pixels; 9 inches = 816 pixels; and the .78-inch spine width = 74.88 pixels.

So, open a new “presentation” in PowerPoint. Delete the default text boxes; keep the portrait orientation. In File > Page setup, tell Powerpoint to give you a slide that’s 1179 pixels wide by 816 pixels high. It will complain; tell it you want those measures anyway.

In the slide, activate the rulers, horizontal and vertical. Create a text box that’s 816 pixels high by 74.88 pixels wide. This will be your spine. Center it on the horizontal rule’s “0.” Go to Format > Shape > Text box. Select Horizontal alignment > Center and Text Direction > Rotate 90° clockwise. Enter your author’s last name and the book’s title and format the font as desired (Format > Font; experiment around to find whatever pleases you). Then, if necessary, return to Format > Shape > Text box and adjust the spine’s internal margins to your taste.

Upload your cover image on the right-hand side of the spine. Its size should be at least 300 pixels; you’ll save your PowerPoint file at 300 pixels, too, when the time comes. Adjust the size as necessary so that the image fits the space between the margins and the spine textbox.

To delineate the spaces for the bleed and the spine, go to View > Guides. Click to check “Static Guides.” Unclick Dynamic Guides, Snap to Grid, and Snap to Shape. This will give you two visible guidelines: a vertical one, up the middle of the “slide.” and a horizontal one, crossing it at the midline. You want more than that: you want two vertical guides to mark the width and position of the spine, two vertical guides to show the left and right margins inside the bleed, and two horizontal guides to show the top and bottom margins inside the bleed area.

Various versions of PowerPoint have different ways of making extra lines, but the basic trick is to click a command key while holding your cursor on the guideline. Because this command is neither obvious nor easy to make happen, the easiest way to learn how to do it on your system is to Google a search phrase such as static guides Powerpoint [YYYY] Mac or …Windows. Enter your version of PowerPoint and Mac or Windows, whichever fits. Create the desired number of new static guidelines, and then drag them to the desired points on your rulers.

My screenshot software “disappears” these guidelines, so…sorry: no image available. But as soon as you get even one guideline in place, it’s easy to see where it should go.

If the image you’re uploading doesn’t already have cover lines, compose and design cover lines: title, subtitle, author’s name, and a tag if desired. KEEP IT SIMPLE! Remember that these elements may have to be visible in a thumbnail, if you’re publishing to Amazon, Nook, or waypoints. If a miracle happens and the book ends up in a bookstore, a browsing reader will have to spot your title elements quickly and without squinting.

In formatting the fonts for cover lines, experiment with PowerPoint’s many embellishments. I find “line, fill, shadow, and glow” are the most useful. In this cover, I used a white line with the author name (i.e., white font with a white line — this trick often makes thinner typefaces look more bold or pop out better) and a red line with the title, subtitle, and spine copy. I used a shadow with the main title.

Place each cover line in its own textbox! This allows you to control the spacing between the elements. So here, Fire-Rider: Books I-VI is in a text box and The Saga Begins is in a separate text box. The natural leading between the two lines was too wide, but with each line in its own textbox, I was able to pull up the main title to close up the space.

If your image is not shaped to fill the entire horizontal “board” (as it were), then you’ll either have to fill the back cover with another image or you’ll need to fill in the back with a color.

To fill in the back cover and spine with color, use PowerPoint’s Format > Slide Background > Fill function. You have several choices here. The simplest is just to pick “… > Solid” to fill in the area not covered by the image with a solid color compatible with your image’s colors.

I used Format > Slide Background > Fill function > Gradient to fancify the fill colors for the book’s spine and back cover.

You can copy a color from an image in PowerPoint. This function is far from obvious. Here’s how:

When you select a color, you’ll see the presentation’s standard colors. At the bottom of that, you”ll see an option, “More Colors.” Click on that. In the tool that comes up (it’s likely to be a virtually useless color wheel), you’ll see a tiny icon that looks like a magnifying glass.

This totally unintuitive icon is the same as Adobe’s “eye-dropper.” Click on it to capture it. Then go to your image, mouse-over the color that you’d like to copy, and click to capture that color. This you can use to fill, or you can use in the “Gradient” function.

Gradient gives you two tabs, one on the left and one on the right, allowing you to blend two colors in a background or fill (you can use it to “fill” font characters, too, as I did for the “The Saga Begins” title). You can add more tabs.

For this book’s background, I placed the sky’s blue in the left-hand tab, the smoke’s brownish gray in the center tab, and one of the orangey colors from the flames in the right-hand tab.

In using “Gradient,” experiment with the “Styles and Direction” function to find the look you prefer. Adjusting the position of the tabs will also produce different effects. Just play around with these until you find something that works well with the title.

Enter back-cover copy and images in text boxes. The bar code is an image generated from the ISBN. You can either pay Bowker for one of these or you can search “free ISBN bar code” on the Internet. Several freebie generators will create ISBNs or PDFs for you. Convert a PDF or .eps to a JPEG or TIFF file (300 dps). Crop if need be, and insert the bar code image near the bottom of the back cover, well away from other copy. The bar code should be sized at about 1 x 2 inches. This is easy to do by moving it close to PowerPoint’s rulers.

Proofread. Proofread again. Proofread again.

The final steps are simple but mildly tedious:

Save the Powerpoint file down as a PDF. In the Save As…PDF function, click on “options” and be sure to select “300 dps.”

Open the PDF and save that down as a TIFF (.tif) file. Close the PDF.

Open the TIFF file in a Mac’s “Preview” or, if you have a PC, some kind of image editor. Crop the image in the TIFF to get rid of the white border generated by the PDF. Check the size; be sure it’s still the pixel size you entered in your Powerpoint file. Adjust if ncessary. Be sure it’s still 300 dpi (it probably will be; adjust if need be). Save.

Now save the TIFF as a JPEG. Close the TIFF and open the JPEG in Preview or an image editor. Check the size; adjust if necessary. Save. If you need a lower-resolution (i.e., smaller) file to send by email or upload someplace, do a Save…as on your JPEG and title the new image “[yourfilename] LoRes.jpg”. Close the 300 dpi image and open the new image; in Preview or the image editor, adjust the size from 300 dpi to 72 dpi. Save and close.

Et voilà. You should be able to use at least one of these images to upload to a print-on-demand publisher. Mine likes PDFs; others may prefer a TIFF or JPEG version. And it’s always handy to have a low-resolution file…you never know.

Five-Star Reviews!

Many thanks to the wonderful readers who left FIVE-STAR REVIEWS on the first three Fire-Rider stories at Amazon! You rock!!

The Writing Life: Never Rains but It Pours

Have you ever noticed that weeks and even months can go by without much happening, and then all of a sudden everything pops at once? It’s been like that around here.

Last week what should come in the door but…well…not one, not two, not three, not even four, but FIVE editing projects! I haven’t seen a lonely scribbler all summer long, and now here’s a mob of them at my door, just as I’m trying to crank 87 gerjillion Camptown Races Press books for the holiday season!

Speaking of the which, we’re about to promulgate our first Hallowe’en Treat: Janet and the Djinn, a whimsical story of a despairing jilted wife who answers a Craig’s List ad and gets a much more spirited romp than she expected. If you’d like an advance copy, come on over to Camptown Ladies Talk and grab one TODAY, before it hits Amazon. Sign up for the newsletter there (the form’s at the top of the page) and we’ll send you a .mobi or a PDF version ASAP.

Advance copy NOW!
Camptown Ladies Talk

So, back to the issue at hand: five freaking editorial projects when we’re trying to crank eight books this month, one of which I STILL HAVE TO FINISH WRITING!

Lordie! I haven’t been able to get to my own stuff in weeks. But I really couldn’t turn them down. We need the money to keep the business going. Not only do I have to cover the regular overhead — the Cox bill, the web hosting bill, the web wrangler’s bill, the association dues, the paper, the ink, the you-name-it — I now have four (maybe five, soon!) writers to pay. Pay for three of these projects, taken together, will keep us going another two months past the date I figured we’d go broke if we’re not turning a profit.

Crazy-making!

But last week I tried a plan that shows some serious promise: divide up the day in chunks, and devote each chunk to one (count it, 1) specific task. Don’t do anything else during that period, no matter how tempting or urgent it seems to be. Okay.

So, Friday went like this:

• Three hours: Post Bobbi and the Biker. Publicize: Build widgets, manage Twitter and post tweets there, write blog posts, plan marketing campaign.
• Three hours: Edit copy
• Three hours: Write scene for The Taming of Bonnie (Ouija Lover II)

Et voilà! There’s a nine-hour day, right there.

I ended up spending another three hours cleaning up some very messy computer files and backing them up to a gigantic flash drive and then to the iMac. That was quite a job, but it’s going to make life a lot easier.

Saturday was blown away with a three-hour meeting of a writer’s group I habituate — plus the two hours it takes to get there and back. When I got home, I discovered the power had gone out while I was gone, and it had knocked the wireless off the air. Try as I might, I could NOT get the wireless back online. I called my son, who was pissed that I bothered him on the weekend and not very friendly about the prospect of having to help me fix it. Continued to struggle with it. Went to bed with no wireless Internet access.

Naturally. Just as I needed to push HARD to publicize our first Racy Book for Racy Readers.

Sunday morning I managed to get the system back online and then fly out the door to choir. Singing occupied the rest of the morning.

I fell in the choir loft when one of my platform sandals came loose and dropped off my foot. Fortunately I wasn’t hurt, other than a few mild aches, but it was embarrassing and disturbing. Got home and had a drink with lunch. And then another. And then didn’t feel a whole lot like writing or editing. Blew off the afternoon with a nap and reading someone else’s naughty book.

So spent all of Sunday evening, way into the night, editing copy.

Today I’m going to try the three/three/three schedule again. It’s already almost 7 a.m. and I haven’t had anything to eat or walked the dogs, but hope to squeeze those things in before sitting down to work. Started around 5 and I’ve updated the Twitter buzz, posted the FREE ADVANCECOPY OFFER(!!!!!) at Camptown Ladies Talk and here, answered comments at Funny about Money, built widgets here and at Ladies Talk, reviewed copy I wrote on Friday, checked a subcontractor’s edits and sent her work, with a bill, to the Chinese academic client, worked briefly on the Mongolian expat client’s work, fielded e-mail, and…not gotten a heck of a lot else done.

It’s starting to rain: that gets me out of having to walk the dogs — they hate rain. Thank goodness!

And so, to post this, plug it on Twitter, and slap up a post at Funny about Money. Then: breakfast. Then: real work.