Finalizing the editing, formatting for print and eBook

The Wizard King is now in the final stages before it transforms from manuscript to book. Today, I sat down with my editing team, Two Girls Friday, and we went over the edits they proposed for the manuscript. The double set of eyes really helped to find a variety of problems, and what one might have missed, the other girl Friday caught.  They sat with me on Skype, and discussed the issues they had with continuity, repetitiveness, run-on blathering and so much more. They were absolutely amazing, and I am really fortunate to get both girls Friday to work together on my manuscript. I am now in the process of merging the two separate editings, and we'll be on our way!

The cover is also in process, the front is almost finalized, the back is in the works, and the whole thing will be ready for release on February 1, 2014 (with copies available for early release for the Wizard World Comic Con).

So that's my update for today. Please don't forget to enroll in the Dragons of Midwinter Fantasy Book Giveaway. You could not only win the Wizard King, but over 20 more wonderful Fantasy books as well.

Some Seemingly Simple Tips for eBook Formatting

Formatting manuscripts for eBook ain’t no fun. But having struggled with transforming Tinna’s Promise into said format from .pdf, I did learn some valuable lessons, learned mostly by experience (and repeated fails) and also learned a great deal from Mark Coker’s style guide for Smashwords. How I write my manuscripts now is influenced by how I will have to format for eBook later. I try to keep up with the formatting needs now so I don’t have to wrestle with it down the road.

If you’re not the kind of person inclined to read the directions (as I am often too impatient to do so), I thought I’d share some basic instructions on how to do it quickly and simply.

I don’t know if all authors operate as I do, but I’ve been known to write blocks of a manuscript in new documents and then cut and paste the new text it, if I don’t have the original file on hand. I also have been known to email paragraphs I’ve written on the fly to myself right in the body of the email. To make things worse, when a book is edited by someone else on another computer in possibly another version of MS Word (or switching between word-processing software), and you add and subtract text from your main file, you’re very likely to end with a Frankenstein formatted manuscript and you won’t even know it. Word has all these various styles. Whatever the defaults are on whatever computers your manuscript has been whoring with, by the time you’ve cut and paste the last of your text in and added all your revisions, it’s likely your styles are all mixed up and there’s really no easy way of telling just by scrolling through it.

Unless you wrote the whole book in that one main document, and passed that same document back and forth to editors or proofreaders, your book is going to be a patchwork of invisible ugly that won’t raise its hideous head until you’ve published to eBook and downloaded the ePub. You’ll be happily proofreading on your reader when boom... your font sizes are all over the place and blocks of your manuscript don’t match the rest. It can be annoying. More so because when the document is open in Word, everything looks quite consistent. Smashwords’ ‘vetting’ process also alerts you as to what problems may remain with your formatting that is preventing it from being submitted for the Premium catalog—but it does not always detect some formatting issues that appear in your final ePub. I take this vetting process quite seriously because Smashwords converts your manuscript to a variety of eBook formats to suit a variety of eReaders, so if you can pare it all down to the simplest, elegant format, you’re good to go. So the intent is to make it work for all.

The first thing you should do is make it a uniform formatting ‘style’.

If you are worried about having too many formatting issues that might trip up the conversion process, my first tip is to take your text and drop it into Wordpad . That will reduce your whole manuscript to its simplest form without any fancy-schmancy formatting mumbo-jumbo added in by MSWord and whatever other editors you’ve been using and pasting from. However, do not paste into Notepad because that will also remove intended formatting; such as italics and even paragraph indents, making the whole manuscript one giant text block. When you paste it all back into a word document, it will probably paste as ‘normal’ style, formatting it in paragraph blocks again anyway. But if you have italics or other special formatting in your text, you’ll likely lose it if you use notepad. So stick with Wordpad.

The ‘nuclear option’ for formatting can often be accomplished with simply selecting all your text (ctrl-A) and clicking the ‘Normal’ style. Your paragraphs will be separated by a blank hard return, with no paragraph indent—much like this blog post. It’s the easiest way to go. You can justify the text as well and be done with it.


If you look for the yellow box, that's the option you want to choose.

However, if you want your text to look like it looks in the book, indents and all, you select all of it, and you click the next style over, ‘No Spacing’. Don’t be afraid, because it will look scary first off—no indents, just one continuous paragraph of text until the first hard-return.


Gah! WTH! Kill it with fire! Don't panic. We're not done yet.

BUT with all the text still selected, you want to grab the little indent arrow on the top ruler (it’s the top one of the two pointing at one another on the margin), and drag it out to where you want your indents to be. The paragraphs ought to fall right in place as they’re supposed to, and you won’t look so scary anymore!


Above the page there's the ruler. On that ruler are little grey arrow boxes. The top arrow
box determines your indent. Drag it out to where you think your indents ought to be.
I go with a quarter inch as a mean.

All you have to do is pick your preferred font (you can always stick with ‘default’) but in this case, I chose Garamond. Keep in mind, if you’re using some foo-foo-la-la font you found on Abstractfonts.com or something like that, your results could be questionable. Stick with the ones everyone has. Arial, Helvetica, Garamond, Times, etc). I also justified the text. I like it to look like the page of a book.


See? It's getting prettier.

Now... the next step is to check your text for formatting features that might interfere with the conversion process and make stupid things happen, like soft line breaks between paragraphs and sections that will vanish, and tabs that screw with your indents. Click on the little paragraph symbol (¶) on your 'home' tab (assuming you're using a recentish version of Word) and all your formatting symbols will pop into view. Once those are up, scroll through your text and look for messy things. There should be only the ¶ symbol separating lines and ends of paragraphs, nothing else!

Gt rid of ‘soft returns’ and use a hard return to replace them. That means replacing the little symbol shown below (arrow going down and then pivoting left) with the ¶. Just delete it, backspace and return; that ought to do it.



Delete those little arrowy bastards!



That also means you should watch for tab symbols, as shown below, the little arrow pointing right. Use your center function to center text, do not tab it out to the center of the page. Select your text while it’s up against the margin and click the center text button. Easy as pie.



See that tabby whore? Backspace it into oblivion! There should be NONE in your manuscript.

Once the manuscript is all cleaned up of that, you can move on to formatting your title page and your chapter headers.

The first thing is to create your title page. So at the beginning of the very first line of your manuscript, insert a page break and push your first chapter down. Use this new page to build your title page—keeping the page break right after the last word on your new page.


Type out your title page as needed. Note that the text is still indented.

Remember, your document is a uniform style now—and all indents are set to where you just put them. But when you want to center something on the page, you need to remove that indent on those specific lines so that it doesn’t put the ‘center’ off kilter.


Select the text on your title page only, and drag that little indent arrow back to the margin.

Select only the text you want to center or justify, and set the indent back to flush with the margin for just that selected text.


Oooh, ahhh... purdy.

Then center them and format them as needed. Smashwords’ vetting process does not like fonts over 18pts. Just a tip. On an eReader, the title on the title page doesn’t have to be more than that to stand out. You can bold or italicize things as well.  You can justify any text blocks on the title page, just to make it look neat (you can center it too, it’s entirely your call—it’s your book).

If you intend to add in a table of contents that’s hyperlinked, then here’s an easy way to do it.



I bolded the TOC words, and you can put whatever you like on each chapter line, of course.

Go to the next page and insert another page break, and type out your Table of Contents as you want it to be.

Then click down to your first chapter and add in your chapter header if it's not already there (be sure to fix the indent on that line and all chapter header lines (and any other sequence separators to follow, such as the ****s used to divide sections). This will insure all of them are truly centered.


Chapter 1 or whatever you want to title it.

 Once that’s done, click your cursor right after the last letter of your chapter header and go to Insert > Bookmark.

The window will pop up. You can only use text and underline, no symbols, you don’t have to put all that much in there, a simple 1 will suffice if you like to keep things simple.  Click 'add'.

Once that bookmark’s made, go back up to your table of contents and select the text you want to hyperlink to that bookmark. Then RIGHT click on your mouse and pick ‘Hyperlink’

On the hyperlink window, there’s a button that says ‘bookmark’. Click it baby.




'Bookmark' button is on the right margin of the little window, second button down. See it?

You’ll see your first bookmark there. Select, hit OK twice, and you have your first hyperlink. You repeat that process as you go along, making bookmarks for chapters in succession and connecting them to the text on your table of contents.




Select the first (or appropriate bookmark from the list and hit 'OK'.




Et voila. That's your first hyperlink. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Another tip, Smashwords converters (and other converters) are not fond of .rtf or .docx format. So when you save your newly formatted document, save it as a Word 97-2003 document, it will make your life simpler. That *ought* to do it. Some eBook publishing sites have their own license notes you need to add, so be sure you do that as well (as shown above on the title page).


Just for good measure, to avoid problems.

You can add in extra pages for dedications, other title listings, web information and more. Just don’t clutter up your intro pages too much, you can always add some addendum pages, and maybe some sneak-peek paragraphs of the upcoming sequel or your next novel.

Those are tips from moi. :)

Good news it is!

Another beautiful cover by Abigail Larson.

Tinna's Might is completed. At last! I'm very excited.  Editor Ien Nivens of http://www.literacracy.com/ did a wonderful job of hacking, slashing, cutting, molding and shaping this book, and put a tremendous amount of effort into convincing me what changes were necessary in order to make this book better.

The next step is a final read-through, which should be quick. After all those changes and croppings and moving of things, punctuation occasionally gets lost or cut, sentences are left hanging; those things need to be fixed along the way so the product comes out looking marginally professional.

I have and always will insist that editing one's work, even if it's for submission to a brick and mortar publisher, is imperative.  It's just the professional thing to do. And yes, hiring an editor can be costly, but there are people out there like Ien, who offer creative and fair alternatives in order to knock your book into shape, and help promote it to boot. So I'm just saying to all my fellow writer friends, look up Ien, do what you must to make your book professional; out of respect to your readers.

So we've hammered out a suitable copy, which I will post below. This time this book will be available as hard cover, soft cover and ebook.  The hard-copies will be available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online booksellers in a little over a month.  The ebook will be published for sale soon.

I will add that I decided to forego the illustrations. As one of my most enthusiastic readers and friends pointed out to me recently, "I don't like illustrations. It deprives me of the opportunity to imagine the appearance characters on my own--and that's one of the best parts of the reading experience."  I can't argue with that.  I will instead post the completed illustrations on this blog periodically for those who might wish to see them.

A screen capture of the book copy.

I am writing, writing, writing.

I am quickly discovering that with ebooks, the more titles, the better. At least that’s what I’m being told by a variety of authors who publish ebooks, and this has been somewhat proven to me by the rather brisk sale of the Blackroot novel I put on Smashwords sometime back. At 99¢, it is the best-selling ebook I have, outselling both Tinna’s Promise and even the free short-story collection, The Belletrist. It’s sort of shocking because Blackroot is such a departure from what I usually write, it’s gory and graphic, and a little weird. But the readers seem to like it. iBooks users especially, and lots of Sony Reader users. The desire to offer more titles has given me a creative kick in the pants, but on the flip side, it has also presented me with way too much distraction.

I am currently about 60% on Tinna’s Reign, editing for Tinna’s Might has slowed to a crawl, but it is still moving. I’d say we’ve moved up to about 84% completed, and I have two other books I’ve been pecking at, one called the Wizard King and another The Blue Journal. The Blue Journal is sort of out of my comfort zone, being written in journal form in first-person, which is challenging to someone who almost always writes as a narrator. The Wizard King is a strange hybrid of a Regency romance novel and a fantasy. I started it about four years ago, but it fell into my ‘false start’ pile, and then I was browsing my old starts and rediscovered it, and found some fresh ideas popping into my head as I started reading it.

So this means I’m working on four books concurrently. Probably not a good plan—most people will tell you to pick a project and stick to it until you’re finished, but it’s a bit hard to do when you are having a hard time finding inspiration on one, and have come to a complete halt while another has found a little pocket of inspiration to feed it. I guess, as I always do, I will go where my instincts point me, and let the organic, creative process work itself out.

The point of it all is to offer a broad range of titles for readers. I have the bones for a few good, meaty novels, and I’m working on finishing up the Tinna Trilogy. I may revisit Oromoii later on, but for now, I’m going to concentrate on these other titles and keep out of my false start folder for a few months—just in case something else catches my creative eye.

Argh.

Tinna's Might; about 80% edited

Yes, this is a slow process. I am sorry to keep those of you who are looking forward to book 2 waiting... but we're getting closer, I promise. The illustrations are also being developed. Very exciting. :D Just a quick note. :)

AAAAAARGH! Chapter Overhaul!

I think a paint-roller with red paint ought to be more appropriate.

Bless him... my editor just clobbered me with the Harsh Stick today.  Okay, it's excellent feedback and he's so infuriatingly right, that I want to throw myself off a bridge... not because of my errors, I can live with my errors, but because of the work it's going to take to make the fix.  Criminy!

We are heading slowly towards the final chapters of Tinna's Might, and editing has been moderately painless on the most part, some turbulence here and there, where only minor adjustments are required.  But this new adjustment is HUGE. It might turn Chapter 10 into Chapter 10 and 11.  And I'm somehow going to wrench more out of my creatively tapped brain to fix two rather huge mistakes that just take the wind out of the sails of the whole plot, and would likely make a reader lose momentum and give up on the book.

It's funny we don't see this as we toil through our stories. But it's important to look through the eyes of a reader and not an author.  Would you feel compelled to move forward if you already knew too much.  I was too generous with plot exposition and it killed all the momentum I'd worked so hard to build in prior chapters.

Editors are your first true reader. They are like the test-subjects, the guinea pigs... and if they see an issue, you need to listen, no matter how much work it is to fix.  ::groan::

I sure am whining a lot lately.  When I get through this hurdle, and closer to finalizing this book, I guarantee you I will be a much happier author.  Promise (at least until Tinna's Reign is finished up and is sent in for editing).

Them's fightin' werds!

"Take that, old bean!"

Fight scenes... I hate them. I hate reading them, I hate writing them. Blow-by-blow descriptions of battles small or army-sized, do not float my boat. Some readers love it. Not me. If I’m reading a book, and there’s a page or two of fight descriptions, I’ll just skip those paragraphs and take up where the story left off. My boredom with fight scenes naturally affects how I write them, and I’ve just gotten a little note from my editor telling me in none so many words; “Miranda, you don’t know what the hell you’re writing about. Your fight scenes suck.” And he is 100% correct. I suck at fight scenes!


If I could get away with it, whenever my books demanded a fight-scene (and they invariably do, because I am irrevocably drawn to writing about ‘power-chicks’ who kick ass, so I’m kind of digging my own hole here), I would simply write: “She came at her opponent like a spider-monkey and kicked his jerky ass into oblivion” for a fight scene, I probably would. But I can’t, so in this special case, I have to summon the assistance of someone who can. Luckily my editor has some experience in this realm, so he has helped me get through this first one. It makes me wonder about Tinna’s Promise and how much help those fight scenes require...!

The lesson here is that if you are knowingly weak about a certain subject; don’t try to fake it because it comes off that you’re faking it. It’s why writers who don’t have direct experience about something do research and make sure they get their facts right because invariably, someone is going to come along and say; ‘dude, that’s so wrong!’ And if you haven’t experienced something, you should refrain from trying to write about it, because again, your reader who does know about this stuff will be turned off. Credibility is an important thing when it comes to writing books, no matter what the genre. Aside from comic-book ‘credibility’ stumpers, like spider-bites and falling into vats of radiation (you ever wonder how it was possible that all the vampires and demons in the Buffy and Angel series were martial-arts experts as soon as they clawed their way out of the earth/hell-chasm?), most books try to create the incredible in a way that allows their readers to suspend their disbelief. And when you have small, feisty little dark-haired women kicking the ass and taking names of anyone that dares confront them, saving the world, and raising general hell, you sure as hell better be writing it all in a way that doesn’t sound completely contrived.

I spend so much energy and time espousing the benefits of editing not because I believe manuscripts (regardless of their being independent or commercially published) should be clean and professional, but also because an editor does so much more than fix apostrophe use and fix your homonym mix-ups; they are also your consistency checkers, they question your character points of view, they call you out on your bullshit and they help you shape your story into something *they* would want to read. And *they* are the readers you are striving to sell this story to. They are your test-reader, your first audience, so for God’s sake, if your editor is telling you something sucks, do not just sit there and whine about it or assume you know your potential readers better... listen to them and fix it. And don’t think so highly of yourself that you think you have all the bases covered and you know enough about something to just fake it.

Trust me. It just won’t fly

When editing reared its ugly head... Miranda turned her tail and fled

Tinna’s Might is turning out to be more of a bear to edit than I had arrogantly assumed. I thought the edit would fly by, but I am fortunate to have someone (Ien Nivens) editing the book who has invested himself in it as well and feels strongly about making bold suggestions for the work. The editor also happens to be a writer which adds an interesting element to the process. Recently, there had been a longer-than-usual gap of time between edited chapters. I dropped him a note asking him if everything was okay. He wrote back that he had the chapter finished and sent along a note asking me how open I was to suggestions of ‘significant change’. At first I was like... Uuuuuughhhhh... Seriously?

But then I read his explanation and could not deny that he was totally right. He was concerned about the timing of a significant turn in the plot, the build-up (or lack thereof on my part), and the way the story is divided up (chapter and break-wise) to maximize the impact of this plot-turn. Ien was completely 100% correct in this determination. It’s funny how when you’re writing and proofreading as you go along, in your head you think that something is impactful enough—that it makes a statement—when in truth, you haven’t featured it enough so that the reader will recognize it as a significant moment in the story. I simply didn’t see it. But Ien did. He was a bit reluctant to ask me to make this huge change, and sent me a note that was almost apologetic about it.

I promptly responded with a: “No, no, no! You are totally right. This is exactly the sort feedback I need!” note. His suggestion really proved to me that I picked the right person to edit this book. He was vastly relieved by my non-defensive response--and probably a bit surprised because we writers can be whiny sometimes. What Ien disclosed to me after was that he too is in the middle of his writing project and he realized he was asking me to do something he needed to do as well. So he took the extra time do it with his own work so he could feel okay about asking me to make a large change.

So to work I must go. His edits are wonderful and he’s doing a great job. But what I appreciate most is that he believes in what I’m writing enough to be honest with what he thinks needs to be changed. He’s cautious about it, probably worried he’s going to hurt my ego or something. But luckily, I’m okay with criticism. I even value it. A friend of mine calls criticism a form of ‘excellent failure’. She says it’s something to learn from, not something to hide from. She’s not wrong. Yeah, it hurts when someone picks apart what you’ve painstakingly written—but ultimately, these editors are looking at our work from the perspective as a reader—and helping us to make sure our story is told in the best fashion possible.

Ien is extremely respectful of my style, and so was my first editor, Dorrie O’Brien; although I have to say that I sort of wish Dorrie had been a bit harder on me—and suggested some big changes along the way. Someday, I might re-edit Tinna’s Promise. What I would change first off, would be the first chapter. I don’t think it was a great idea to start a book off with someone you didn’t really like very much (although given a chance, Taneth grows on you)—but your opening pages are crucial to draw the reader in, and an arrogant rant just isn’t attractive. You live, you learn. Tinna’s Promise remains something I’m very proud of and I stand by it, even with the questionable choice for a first chapter. But I do hope to fix it some day.

The moral of my story is... editing is a crucial process a book must go through. And honestly, it makes a better writer of you. Challenges and huge changes may arise, and it might make you want to cry into your soup, but in the end, you’ll have a better product for it and you’ll be thinking about that on your next project.

I cannot tout editing enough. I confess with Blackroot, I didn’t bother, but Blackroot is a source-story, not a full novel; I took elements of Blackroot and spread them out in the Tinna Trilogy, so I look at Blackroot like practice rather than the real thing, so I won’t invest on editing for it. It’s just a lark. The Tinna Trilogy is not. I take these three books very seriously. I realize how important it is to make sure that there is as much effort invested in lending them quality and worth as possible; not just for the readers, but for my own integrity as a writer.

So find yourself a good editor—and listen to them—even if the things they ask of you aren’t always what you want to hear.

E-book formatting is for the birds.

What have I been up to lately? Not much except struggling with the perils of e-book formatting. O... M... G... Seriously; what a nightmare. I have put Tinna’s Promise up on B&N’s NookBooks and Smashwords, I downloaded it to my nook and there are STILL formatting errors. The worst are the line-breaks problem.

I spent an entire weekend recently reformatting a pasted .pdf of the final manuscript for Tinna’s Promise. I had to go from the back of the book to the front, reintegrating every line of every single paragraph of the novel because the PDF paste had obviously kept each individual line’s hard break when I moved it to word.

Otherwise the
book would read like
this and it would
be oh so annoying.

Of course, had I used an iota of the intelligence that my daddy gave me, I would have thought to save my final manuscript that I sent the publisher into a folder somewhere where I could bloody find it. Then I would have had the original .rtf with all its soft line-breaks in all their glory. But I did not find it anywhere, and so I had to use the final version of the book in .pdf format as the framework for the ebook to insure I had all the right chapters and such.

Naturally, when re-formatting over 120,000 words of text, you’re bound to overlook a line break here and there (sometimes they hide), and you are also bound to accidentally delete spaces between words while doing it so you get the occasional mergedword. It’s really irritating. I also noticed that one book section had been merged into the paragraph of the prior section, making a hideous jump in the story in the same freaking paragraph. To discover this was really defeating. After I’d already re-uploaded it twice.

What I’m going to do this weekend is to try to re-read the damned book page by page on my e-reader, and follow along on my laptop, making changes as I go. I am *then* going to go and get my dog-eared, personal copy of Tinna’s Promise (with the old cover and cracked spine) and make sure that each paragraph matches the hard-copy version for the ebook.

When I do that, I will upload that ONE FINAL TIME to both PubIt! and to Smashwords. Of course that means it will take THREE more days for the modified copy to become available to buyers on PubIt, and put it back into Submission-Pending mode for the Smashwords general distribution catalog, which is another week.

Oh, and the really irritating part? Smashwords doesn’t let you overwrite your old, error-riddled versions, no. They keep every single freakin’ version you resubmit. Right now... I have FOUR versions; all in varying states of errorsville. It’s really embarrassing. They should take those down. Argh.

What I *should* have done was view my formatting and let the little dots and ¶ markers would help me track down the problems. But I didn’t use this wad of grey matter in my cranium I guess, and I just derp-de-derped my way through it while watching my DVRed shows from that week. Now I’m paying the price!

So I encourage you to yes, buy Tinna’s Promise in ebook format, it’s wicked affordable, I've put it up for 99¢ for a limited time(normally $4.00; it’s $6.00 on iUniverse) HOWEVER, perhaps you should wait for another week before you download it so you are sure to get the least buggy version. The latest version does however have the whole of Chapter 1 of Tinna’s Might previewed in it. Just so you know. ;)

Anyway, on the brighter side, look what my hubby gave me for an early Valentine’s Day present?



Squee! I’m sorry, I’m revealing the depth of my geekery here, but I am and have always been, since the late eighties, a track-ball kinda girl. Both my dad and I are (and were in his case) geeks that way. I’ve always had them, for a long time, until my last Logitech died after years of abuse. Now, instead of a normal computer, I have this tiny little netbook that I use to write with (in addition to obsessive internet browsing and Stumbleupon benders). I hate track-pads so I just turned it off and got a wireless mouse that had this thick jump-drive sized USB connector on it, and it was always sticking out the side of my little 9” screen netpad and annoying me.

I am cheap though, at least when it comes to spending money on myself, so I didn’t want to drop almost $60 on a trackball. So instead, I just complained incessantly to the ether (but always when my husband was within hearing range) that I wanted a trackball again—a wireless one, so I can just put it down anywhere I want, on my thigh, on the sofa, wherever, and that I want the thumb kind, not the one with the ball in the middle, and I wanted a Logitech with the itty bitty USB thingie (it’s teeny-like; Pez-size when plugged in) so there’s no thumb-sized protrusion poking out of the side of my little computer.

I must have whined enough, because hubby heard. I came home the night before last, and was doing something on my little baby computer, and started mumbling about hating my stupid wireless mouse and its behemoth USB connector, and he got up, went into the guest-room and then came out with an Amazon.com-blue-gift-wrapped package, which he hucked at me and said: “Fine... I’ll get you ANOTHER Valentine’s present... just take this already...” Yeah... Happy girl now. Silly things make me happy, I’m such a gadget whore—that’s from my dad’s genes, he was such a tinkery, geeky gadget guy too.

So at least now I have something smooth and comfy to help me through this formatting nightmare. Yay! Oh, and BTW.. I’m at *least* 50% through Tinna’s Reign. It’s turning out VERY dark... and there’s a scene in there that’s so dark, so raw, I’m almost afraid to keep it. It’s also very soon in the book; so it might be really jarring to some of the more sensitive readers. I dunno. ::groan:: I will keep writing, and then when I am ready to revise and proofread before editing, I’ll make my choice.

I revamped the http://www.mirandamayer.com/ website, by the way. NO MORE ADS! Yes, I finally sucked it up and bought hosting (told you, I’m cheap). I will add a bit more content soon... but at least there’s no more godaddy bar at the top. :)

Here is a picture of a passed out puppy. Just because.

Please.... edit. I beg you...

Independent writers... hear me out. It is no reflection on your creativity or your talent if you require the services of an editor. A real editor. An experienced, professional editor. It really doesn’t mean you can’t write, it should be a matter of pride, it should be a moral obligation to have someone proofread and edit your manuscript before you go out and have that baby published. Period.

Your readers pay a significantly higher cost for your print-on-demand work. What they should be paying for is a carefully assembled, professional package, from the cover to the contents. You paid money to have your book made available for print-on-demand publishing and ebook... then pay the money to make sure it is a product that respects the customer that is buying it. And by respect I mean having it EDITED. :::ARGH!:::

I’ve been reading a lot of indie work lately because it’s really cheap for my nook... and the thing that stands out most with these self-published authors is that they are not disciplined enough to keep from publishing their work when it obviously isn’t ready. PubIt! and Kindle authors especially—they seem apt to slap anything up there and call it finished, and that is a total no-no.

I read a book the other day; a Twilight-wannabe book where the author left at least one grammatical error per-page. From blatant misuse of words, to horrid spelling to outright bad writing—it was a bloody trainwreck. Last night I bought a book I wish I could return. In the first three pages, I was assaulted with the most horrendous writing. For one, the tenses are all over the place:

“The women laughed as they walked back into the house. When inside, Lizzie sits down at the bay window and gazes out thoughtfully...” GAH!!! This writer also writes dialogue like it’s written for Robbie the Robot; “I am glad you share my beliefs. This is an omen. We should go to Egypt. In my dream it was raining. It doesn’t rain in Egypt.” Who speaks like that? The writing is as dry as the desert the author is writing about and I couldn’t get past page 16. In the span of the FIRST TWO paragraphs, I was told three times that the space was an ‘expanse’. STOP OVERWRITING! Edit yourselves! I haven’t gotten through 2% of the story and I’m already bored.

I know I’m guilty of the repeated word or phrase. For instance, count how many instances of the word ‘albeit’ appear in Tinna’s Promise... I’m so annoyed I didn’t notice it until after editing. Editors are not the cure-all, but they can take something that’s over-thought and simplify it... they can take ideas that are not consistent and make them flow... they can make conversations interesting, they can make reading the text an easy, simple task and keep the reader’s eye from being held up by stupid errors.

Yes, my short stories are full of errors, yes my posts are full of errors, but I'm not asking anyone to pay for what I'm posting up here. If you are taking money for your work... G.E.T. A.N. E.D.I.T.O.R or DO NOT PUBLISH! Please. Damn. I want my $2.99 back!

/Rant

Editing pains...

It’s Friday and it’s an amazing sunny day out there… the first really nice day in a while over here in Portland. We are used to rain here, but sometimes when it lingers into June, we are puzzled by it. I am all for mild summers and lots of rain, I confess. I hate heat. I’m part mole, so I prefer to be in the cloud-filtered light and gloom, pale-skinned and squinting in the sun (when I do bother to venture into it and risk scorching myself red). Aaaaaaanyway, let me get to why I really decided to post a blurb today.

[whining] I got totally slammed by one of the editors doing test-edits of my first chapter yesterday. It was like he threw a first-edition of War and Peace at my head. I warned him! I told him the first chapter was ‘information heavy’ when I sent it to him. Of course it is… Here I am starting a story set twenty years after the prior one, and also assuming that not every reader is going to know what the heck is going on, having not read the first book… so I did a little bit of overcompensation in the first ten pages of Tinna’s Might. Shame on me!

That scares me, because I know how I am as a reader, and if the first few pages are hard to get through, I rarely ever keep plugging along until the author finds their stride. I’ll groan in annoyance and huck the book onto my dresser and then forget about it until library donation day. Part of the reason why I stopped doing reviews for my friend is because MANY, MANY, MANY of those independently published books were not written in a way to draw the reader in, making it impossible to get past the first chapter. I’d read one or two pages, and already be miserable. I’d give it a few more pages, and find my eyes and brain distracted by my dogs, by a steller’s jay outside, by someone driving past the house, by a random shiny thing… anything BUT the story that’s on the page. I would rather jam a fork into my eye than to produce a book like that…

So yes! I know, I know… I’m aware of this problem and I haven’t fixed it! Truth be told, I am having trouble figuring out how to break up this huge wad of background information and to sprinkle it around more evenly over a broader area… I’m not confident about how long a reader will want to wait to learn why certain things are the way they are. I need to back off my text for a few weeks, and then re-approach it with fresher eyes, and try to look at it like a reader again instead of being the storyteller.

The editor in essence chucked a sharp-cornered book at my head, frankly. It hurt but I needed it. I knew it was there, I warned him it was there, but why didn’t I just take care of it when I did my last revision? Because it’s DAUNTING. [/whining]

Blargh.

Anyway… onward we push, I suppose. Have a delightful weekend.

The drudgery and value of proofreading and editing.

Ugh, the process of proofreading can be grueling! Now, every writer likes to hear themselves ‘talk’ so to speak, and they often enjoy their own writing; we’re sort of egotistical that way… But heavens, reading and rereading your own writing over and over again… Blargh!!! It’s hard to edit yourself. It’s not the whole cutting and changing part (although I do know a few writers who really need to learn to let go of blathery bits), it’s hard to see the errors and inconsistencies in narrative that came out of your own brain. It’s like your brain just would skim right over an error that is so blatant, it would reach out and punch someone else in the head.

But I am doggedly marching on. My cover change process for Tinna’s Promise is well underway, and you will probably see the new cover on the book within the next month or so (Amazon takes a little longer to make those changes), but nonetheless, the newer, professional cover is submitted and polished. YAY! I love the new Tinnas. They’re beautiful. The Tinna’s Might cover is also being assembled; made to both match the first and to reflect the changes that have occurred since the events in the first novel.

I’m excited. I haven’t been this keyed up about my books in a while!

Above is a concept image drawn by a friend of mine. We both run a local writing group in our neighborhood, and she does reviews. I actually met her when I submitted Tinna's Promise for review and the mailing address was only down the mountain a bit from me. She is a busy lady, and has lots of hobbies, including drawing... She's been helping me a lot with my books and website, and I've helped her with some editing and proofreading.

I think having writing friends is crucial. They can act as inspiration and as support systems; but most importantly, as the all-important reality checkers. To all independent authors, I recommend you find a writing group, or some kindred spirits to hang with. It's amazing how they can help you get over writing blocks with random suggestions, and really give a boost to your competitive nature and get you writing!

Both my friend and I are great advocates for EDITING. We see a lot of independently published books that are insulting to the readers... POD books are expensive, and some authors have the audacity to ask readers to pay more for low-quality writing and badly composed concepts. No no no! So proofreading is the first step for me. After that, it's off to a book editor who will pick apart my grammar, my storyline, time line, character consistencies and more... this is so important. Tinna's Promise was professionally edited by Dorrie O'Brien, who did a phenomenal job.