Tagged: Books
RIGHTEOUS BLOOD: Now Available
The picture says it all.
Three boxes, containing 70 copies of Righteous Blood, have arrived and I’ve already commenced signing books, filling orders, stuffing padded envelopes…and will lug the first load to the post office later this afternoon. The staff there have come to know me well over the years. I think of it as my patriotic duty: helping keep Canada Post solvent (and preventing it from falling into private ownership).
You can get Righteous Blood from me, or save on shipping by ordering it through your favourite indie bookstore or, I suppose if you have to, from an on-line retailer (Kindle and ePub versions are also available).
This one’s a page-turner, or maybe a throat-grabber is more accurate.
A truly terrifying book and my wife’s favourite of all my titles.
Which only goes to show, even the nicest, kindest people can have a dark side…
The proof!
Righteous Blood is in the house.
The proof is well-nigh perfect and I’ve gone ahead and ordered copies for friends, Saskatoon bookstores, reviewers, etc.
The book retails at $19.00 and the shipping costs will be similar to my previous offering, Disloyal Son. Check my Bookstore page for further details.
Come ‘n git it!
“Righteous Blood”: the promo flier
The printed proof of RIGHTEOUS BLOOD should be here tomorrow.
Exciting times. Like an expectant father, pacing about the waiting room.
In the meantime, I spent part of my afternoon devising a promotional flier for the book—then Sherron comes home from work, does a little creative re-arranging and suddenly the flier’s looking pretty darn good.
This will go out with review copies and also to specialty or genre stores that might be willing to stock my book:
As the flier indicates, e-book and Kindle versions of RIGHTEOUS BLOOD are already available.
Now just gotta get a look at that proof…
Self-Publishing: Q & A
Photo: Sherron Burns
Righteous Blood slowly creeps toward publication.
Susan, who’s been handling my interior layout, has delivered a text file for Lightning Source and is currently working on Kindle and ePub versions (to be read on tablets and other devices).
Chris, as you saw from my previous post, has devised another wondrous cover.
Both text and cover files were submitted to Lightning Source two days ago and the book remains in “pre-media”. If there are no glitches (there usually are), a proof of the book will be printed and dispatched to me via courier for close examination. At that point, if all is well, I give the go-ahead for publication, order however many copies I want to sell to booksellers and friends…and from then on, Righteous Blood is officially back in print.
But we’re not quite there. I mentioned previously that the folks at Lightning Source are more than a trifle finicky; their system has very strict specifications and that can be maddening. With previous books, I’ve had to re-submit either the text or cover files two or three times before I got it right. Crossing my fingers I’ve nailed it on this occasion and should know for sure in the next day or so.
Since I began posting about the process of publishing Righteous Blood, I’ve received a number of queries from individuals regarding various aspects of indie/self-publishing. Thought I’d post those questions and my replies for the benefit of all:
Q: You’ve complained various times about the difficulty and complexity of using Lightning Source as your printer—why stick with them when there are other platforms available?
A: Well, you know that old saying about the devil you know…but, really, I suppose I continue to do business with Lightning Source because they produce such lovely, professional looking books, plus they’re the platform that, in my view, promises the best potential access to booksellers around the world. As long as I pay my $12 annual fee, my books remain in Lightning Source/Ingram’s vast catalog, available to anyone who wants to order them, anywhere on the globe. I also like the fact that many mainstream, commercial publishers use Lightning Source as their printer—with over 30 years as a professional writer under my belt, I want all the benefits of high-quality services and standards. My books are created and designed to look identical to (or better than) any title released by traditional publishers. That’s my goal and Lightning Source helps me achieve it.
Q: Have you had any experience with Amazon’s CreateSpace or Lulu.com?
A: No, I haven’t. My understanding is that Lulu is more geared to beginners and amateurs. It’s where you should go if you want to print a few copies of your family history or a collection of your grandmother’s poems (or whatever). CreateSpace seems to produce a lot of stuff I have little use for: fan fiction, erotic shapeshifter romance, the silly shit produced by wannabes and sub-literates. Much of it only available digitally (because it’s so cheap and easy to set up). Both CreateSpace and Lulu are less costly and more user-friendly than Lightning Source, which is why certain kinds of “authors” are drawn to those other platforms. With Lightning Source, there are more hoops to jump through and that tends to discourage non-professionals. I guess that’s yet another reason I use them.
Q: I find the self-publishing process confusing and labor-intensive and I have limited computer skills. Your advice?
A: There is a learning curve and you can expect a great deal of frustration along the way. There are agencies like Upwork, who can provide you with connections to skilled men and women who have extensive experience typesetting and designing books. For a relatively modest fee, they can prep your manuscript so that it is printer-friendly, even set up a cover for you. The more services and help you require, the more expensive it gets. Again, if you’re only publishing a vanity book, something of questionable literary or commercial merit, go to Lulu, get it done on the cheap. You don’t need an ISBN, you’re not looking to get on bookstore shelves, you just want a couple of copies of a title for sentimental reasons.
Q: Even after all this time, do you find there is still a stigma toward self-published books?
A: Undoubtedly, and in my opinion that stigma is well-deserved. Technology and print-on-demand is allowing far too many people to publish their godawful, inept scribbling. It has empowered the wannabes, convinced them that for a few hundred bucks they can be SERIOUS writers. The cult of the amateur has done lasting damage to literature, reducing authors in stature and cultural importance since, after all, “everyone has a book inside them”. That kind of twaddle has enriched creative writing programs (and instructors) for decades.
Q: How much can I expect to spend publishing my book?
A: That varies. If you’re computer-savvy and can handle the set-up yourself, it saves a lot of time and money. Finding and purchasing cover art is another expense—again, if you have some design background, perhaps you could cobble together an eye-catching cover without having to resort to using someone else’s work. My books usually range from $1200-1800 (each), depending on if I’m using my own cover art, the length of the book in question and the number I want printed to sell or send out as promo copies.
Q: How do you promote your books?
A: Short answer: badly. I send out review copies but that’s usually a waste of time. Book reviewers are a dying breed and most of them have a dim view of self-published books, regardless of the quality. Last time I heard, something like a quarter million books are published in North America every year, and self-publishing has only contributed to that deluge. So much crap being printed and so many different forms of entertainment and distractions available to our potential audience. How do you draw attention to your work in that maelstrom? If you figure that one out, you’re on the fast track for a Nobel Prize…
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That’s it for now. If you have any further questions about self-publishing or indie writing in general, drop me a line at blackdogpress@yahoo.ca.
Write on…
Photo: Sherron Burns
RIGHTEOUS BLOOD: The evolution of the cover design
I had a dickens of a time with the cover of Righteous Blood.
For some reason, I resisted doing what I’d done on previous occasions: go on-line, to a site like RedBubble (or some place similar), tap in “dark fantasy art” as my search term and see what came up.
For So Dark the Night I must have looked through over a thousand images. Easily.
Not only was the effort of actually finding art to match the mood and message of Righteous Blood daunting, if I did manage to identify an illo that appealed to me I’d have to locate the artist (not always easy), secure their permission to use their art for a reasonable fee (ditto) and then, y’know, come up with the money for the transaction.
Earlier this spring I needed a break from writing, retreated to my basement dungeon where I like to paint and shoot my strange, short films, and slopped away happily on a couple of canvases. Both pieces turned out well, but my favourite was inspired by apocalyptic thinking: global warming, the massive wild fires that have raged around the world due to drought conditions and human tampering. I titled it “Red Skies” and quickly recognized how it might be the answer to my cover art woes.
(Click on images to enlarge)
Mark Rothko was definitely an influence, wouldn’t you say?
I sent a Jpg of “Red Skies” to Black Dog Press’s longtime cover designer Chris Kent last week, told him to use it as source material but not feel slavishly bound to the original. We had to be careful with other people’s artistic efforts but I wanted to give him permission to play with the image to his heart’s content.
Chris is a full-time teacher, a husband and father, an athlete constantly in training…but he also has an artistic side that he loves to indulge, a passion for design and art that’s very much a holdover from childhood.
Over the next few days, he tinkered with my painting, spitballing me a few initial notions like this one:
Cool, eh?
But I got a sense these first salvos were sort of tentative, Chris not sure how much license he had to tamper with my work.
But then, with his next flash of inspiration, he abandoned all fealty to the original and just fucking went for it. I opened up the file he sent, sat back and gaped at the shattered, fractured version of “Red Skies” that now graced the cover.
And went absolutely mental over it.
Sent him a few minor suggestions, nothing of any great import, he went away did some more polishing and then delivered the final version. His masterpiece.
What do you think?
In the crazy, hazy month of May
Cooler weather in these parts of late, which has at least partially subdued the massive wildfire (dubbed “the Beast” by one clever wag) raging near Fort MacMurray. A number of mornings we woke to hazy skies and a smoky miasma…and Fort Mac is a significant distance from us, hundreds of miles. Gives you an idea of the scale of the conflagration.
Twenty per cent of the city is destroyed, according to the latest reports. Terrible news but not as horrific as it might have been. And despite the scale of the evacuation, there were no serious snafus, no loss of life, which is a credit to everyone involved. Let’s hear it for those first responders and emergency crews!
Our prime minister insists that now is not the time to lay blame for the inferno, that we should keep all this talk of global warming and climate change on the back burner until the folks of Fort Mac return home and have some sort of rebuilding scheme in place.
So, Mr. Trudeau, we can’t examine the past (yet), but how about the future? How about re-envisioning Fort Mac not as an industrial, fossil fuel hub, but a northern centre for alternative energy? How about factoring in a “green” component to the reconstruction of Fort MacMurray, transitioning it from a polluting, bituminous holdover from the past into a sustainable city of the future? A federal-provincial partnership, an infrastructure project with an actual purpose and end game, rather than merely throwing taxpayer money around. Imagine that…
* * *
Sporadic blog posts for the past month and while some of that was work-related, there were other distractions and developments to annoy me like, for instance, health and dietary adjustments after I was diagnosed as a Celiac. Lousy, shanty Irish genes. So no more gluten for me (farewell Guinness beer, sob). And since I was cleaning up my act anyway, I decided to ditch coffee drinking (strong and over-sugared) and pledge myself to more exercise, a healthier life regime. Which has totally screwed up my daily routine and since I am an obsessive-compulsive this, naturally, led to quite a bit of upheaval and teeth-grinding. Really just starting to come out of it now.
And about time, too. Didn’t I promise I’d be posting about the process of bringing my book Righteous Blood back into print? A rebooted version of one of my most popular efforts, with new cover art, as well as a specially written introduction and notes on each of the novellas.
Step 1: Finally completed edits/proofreading and okayed the final draft last week.
Step 2: Chose my cover art (a recent acrylic painting of mine, titled “Red Skies”).
Step 3: Contacted my cover designer Chris and let him know there was another project headed his way.
Step 4: Signed on to Upwork and advertised for a person to handle the interior design/layout of my book. Upwork is a company that allows thousands of freelancers from around the world to post their resumès and hire themselves out on short term jobs relating to their area of expertise. Out of twenty-two possible candidates, I selected Susan, who has had extensive experience with layouts and typesetting, and hired her. She’s already impressed me with her communication skills and her promise to have something to show me later this week. That’s fast work.
Some blokes are lucky—they have the computer and graphic art background that allows them to do their own cover and book design. I am not so fortunate.
And not only that, the publishing platform I use, Lightning Source, is, to my mind, overly complicated, their parameters and specifications very precise. There is no room for error. If you submit text and cover files that fail to meet their inflexible specs, the files are rejected and you have to try again. This will be my ninth project with Lightning Source, I have a long history with them and in the end they do deliver fine-looking books, but they also drive me ’round the bend at times. I’m sure other folks have their own horror stories with Createspace or Lulu…the grass is always greener and all that. My advice is unless you have computer savvy or the resources to hire someone who can do the job, give Lulu a shot first. They’re much more user-friendly and oriented toward service and assistance.
Once I hear from Susan and have a firm idea of the page count of Righteous Blood, I then go back Lightning Source, download their cover template and send that to Chris. He’ll upload his cover design on to that template, tweak it, zip it to me for my approval.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’ve got my cover art, hired my interior layout person.
The book is now officially “in the pipeline”.
Further instalments to come…
The great Jim Harrison
“Poetry does this to us. You can quickly either soar or drown in depression. You can have a pretty good first line but not a strong enough thought to tag along more lines and sometimes in the middle words become bored and make war on one another. Notebooks are full of these fragments, shrapnel of our intention. Life is short on conclusions and that’s why it’s often a struggle to end a poem. Some are lost forever. Sometimes you walk around with versions of a poem in your head and it won’t come clean. You are enslaved to this language of disorder and can brood upon it for days and weeks. When the poem finally does work, your spirit soars and you forget the difficulty, like you forget pain afterward. Some of the extreme behaviour you see in the poet species is likely attributable to these struggles. When the brain spends this much time enfevered it is liable to affect the behaviour which for a long period was a common joke around academia.”
Jim Harrison, The Ancient Minstrel (2016)
