I thought today would be an exciting day with the release of my new book, and it has been, though not in the fun way I’d expected.
I posted my Celebrate the Small Things post last night, just after midnight, when my book went live. Later, when I looked at the download I’d preordered from Amazon, I noticed that there were no page breaks, and it had these weird symbols here and there in place of dashes, ellipses, and sometimes commas.
I called Ingram/Spark, and they said it was likely an issue with Amazon and suggested I contact them. I spoke with Amazon, and they said it was Ingram’s problem. I called Ingram back and talked with a different customer service person who was more helpful. She asked me to e-mail her screen shots of the problems, since they weren’t showing up in their files. I sent her the screen shots, redid my file and uploaded it, so they could compare and hopefully figure out what was causing the issues. The file I had originally uploaded had looked fine on my computer. The preview on the Kobo site looked fine, too.
At any rate, she sent everything to the processing department and said it could take 24 to 48 hours (business hours) to get a response, which means Monday or Tuesday.
So now I wait.
I apologize to everyone who downloaded a book with these formatting issues. I hope to get this resolved quickly.
EDIT: Thank you to everyone! I’ve discovered some formatting issues with the e-book, and I’m working to resolve them. I’ll visit and reply to everyone as soon as I get this ironed out.
Celebrate the Small Things is a weekly celebration created by VikLit and now hosted by Lexa Cain to celebrate the happenings of the week, however small or large. You can learn all about it and sign up for it here.
It’s here!!!!
This week I’m celebrating a very BIG thing — my first novel is being released today!
Whoo, hoo!! I’m so excited! To think that after all these years, my book is finally in print. Well, sort of. It’s currently available in e-book form, but will be out in print form very soon, if all goes well. The color issues have been fixed, and the print cover file is being processed. All my fingers and toes are crossed that it goes through this time.
Either way, I’m going to celebrate!!!
Trouble is Tara Triannon’s middle name. As swords for hire, Tara and her sister Laraina thrive on the danger. But a surprise invasion throws them into chaos… and trouble on a whole new level. Pursued by the Butcher, a terrifying assassin more wolf than man, Tara and Laraina must get a prince marked for death and a young, inept sorceress to safety. There’s only one problem – eluding the Butcher has never been done. Aided by a secretive soldier of fortune, they flee the relentless hunter.
Gifted with magic and cursed by nightmares that are all too real, Tara must stop an army led by a madman and fend off an evil Being caught in a centuries-old trap who seeks to control her magic and escape through her dreams – all while keeping one step ahead of the Butcher.
Early last week, I received the long-awaited cover for my fantasy novel, Lady, Thy Name Is Trouble.
I love the colors and the way the elements blend together.
I had hoped that once I got the file, it would be smooth sailing into publication, but was it easy? Of course not. What was I thinking?
Making the e-book cover from the cover file using Adobe Photoshop was simple enough. But then I had to figure out how to convert my MS Word file, including the cover, to the epub version 3 required by Ingram/Spark for the e-book. Calibre only converts to epub version 2. I searched the Web for a free program that would do the conversion without a huge learning curve. I know some HTML, but I’m not a programmer. Ingram/Spark would have done the conversion for me, but I really didn’t want to pay them the $250 or so to do it.
I ended up using a program from the Daisy Consortium: a “Save as Daisy” add-in for Word, which, along with the Consortium’s Tobi and Pipeline 2 programs (all free downloads), allowed me to convert my file. Interestingly, the programs’ original intent is to create books with sound for people with vision problems. Below, are the links to the programs and the instructions.
The instructions weren’t hard to follow, but I did have to do some uninstalling and reinstalling of the programs to get them to work together the way they were supposed to. I persevered, though, and in the end, I had the necessary version 3 epub file.
I’m sure there must be other ways to do a free conversion of Word to epub 3. If anyone has experience with other programs, I’d love to hear about it.
At the end of last week, I uploaded all the files to Ingram/Spark, set a release date of February 27th, and crossed my fingers that everything would go through. The customer service person told me that file processing generally takes 3 to 5 business days.
The e-book files went through with no problem, but they found an issue with the print cover file — something about the CMYK color percentages being too high. The file needs to be adjusted and resubmitted. Unfortunately, it’s not something I know how to do. So, until I can coordinate with the cover designer, who I think is away on vacation since we have school vacation this week, the print version of my book is on hold.
However, the e-book version has already been picked up by Amazon and Barnes & Noble and is available for preorder. I discovered this when I did a search on the book title out of curiosity over the weekend. (My jaw hit the floor.) I hadn’t expected it to be listed so quickly. I’d read that it could take two or three weeks to show up on retail sites.
Now, I’m having a hard time getting my head around the fact that Friday is the big day. THE DAY! After almost 30 years of chasing this dream, it’s down to 2 days. It seems too surreal to be true. In 2 days I will be a published author!!!!!!!
In two previous posts, Western Kingdoms of Alltyyr, Part 1 and Western Kingdoms of Alltyyr, Part 2, I described some of the various kingdoms that comprised the fictional world I had created for my fantasy novel, Lady, Thy Name Is Trouble. I always draw maps to go with my stories, partly because I love drawing maps, and partly because I need that visual reference to plot characters’ movements.
A couple of people commented that they would like to see the map, so — here it is! It took me a while to ink it in, which made me wish I hadn’t drawn it in quite so much detail. 🙂 I’m worried that it won’t look professional enough, compared to the maps I see in traditionally published books, but it’s the best I can do, so hopefully, it will work.
Right now, it’s just black and white. Someday, I want to color it in and hang it on my wall. I think it would be really neat to have a section of wall covered with maps of my fictional worlds.
Last week, Loni Townsend over at Squirrel Talkparticipated in the 777 Challenge. The idea is to pick one of your WIPs, go to the 7th page, find the 7th line, and post the next 7 lines or so. At the end of her Challenge, she wrote: “If you would like to participate, consider yourself tagged.”
I thought it sounded like a fun idea, so I decided to take her up on it and post the appropriate 7 or so lines from page 7 of my soon-to-be published fantasy novel, Lady, Thy Name Is Trouble, which, to me, will be a work-in-progress until I hold it as a book in my hand.
So here goes…
*****
The clash of battle began to fade.
Tara headed for the door. “Now is our chance to escape. This is not the time for vengeance. There are too many of them. We need to get away and warn Faragellyn. I doubt the Sulledorns intend to stop here.”
Kaden pounded the edge of his fist against the wall. “I will not be driven from my own castle!”
An ear-splitting scream rose above the battle sounds.
“Aurelia!” Prince Kaden cried.
“Wonderful. That’s all we need.” Tara whipped out her sword and dashed into the corridor.
*****
What did you think of this snippet?
Since I wasn’t specifically tagged for the Challenge, I’m not going to officially tag anyone else, but I’ll say the same thing that Loni did: If you’d like to give it a go, consider yourself tagged. 🙂
Today’s the day for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) where, on the first Wednesday of every month, writers get together to share their insecurities and offer encouragement. The IWSG was created by Alex J. Cavanaugh, and you can learn all about it and sign up for it here.
I will soon be sending out ARCs and requesting advance reviews for my fantasy adventure novel, Lady, Thy Name Is Trouble. I know that getting reviews is vital if I want my book to rise above the obscurity that self-publishing can bring. A solid word-of-mouth campaign is essential for an Indie book to succeed.
So it stands to reason that if I’ll be requesting reviews, I should be willing to give them in return. I’ve never written a book review because of the horror stories I’ve heard about authors who took offense at not-so-shining, albeit honest, reviews and retaliated by trashing the reviewers’ books, giving them terrible one-star reviews on all the online sites, and having their friends do the same.
The thought of going through something so devastating has persuaded me to keep my opinions to myself. However, I don’t feel that it’s fair of me to ask other writers for reviews if I’m not willing to reciprocate.
I would love to know how other writers feel about this. Do you write reviews? Do you ever worry about the bad apples out there trashing your books?
Laekan Zea Kemp very kindly shared her list of indie/self-published book reviewers that took her many, many, many hours of work to compile. I would like to personally thank her for her generosity!
As an indie author I know how difficult promo can be when you’re doing it all on your own. I spent the past three months sending out hundreds of emails, prepping blog posts, creating media kits, formatting review copies, and corresponding with readers and bloggers in preparation for my book tour for The Girl In Between and it’s during times like these that I’m reminded why self-publishing is not the easy way out. I’m mentally and emotionally exhausted but promo is just another part of the job and an important one seeing as obscurity is an indie author’s greatest adversary. The good news though is that there is an entire community out there of book-lovers turned bloggers who are willing to help authors in any way they can.
When I started sending out review requests for my first novel two years ago I had no idea how difficult it would be…
Celebrate the Small Things is a weekly celebration created by VikLit to celebrate the happenings of the week, however small or large. You can learn all about it and sign up for it here.
I know Friday is long gone, but this week I would like to celebrate more video! I made another trailer for my fantasy novel, Lady, Thy Name Is Trouble. This one is more of a character study, rather than a preview of what the story is about, like my last trailer which you can see by clicking here.
I thought this would be a more interesting way of introducing my main character, Tara Triannon. Any and all feedback/comments are appreciated. Thanks!
Based on comments on my first attempt at a book trailer for my fantasy novel, Lady, Thy Name Is Trouble, I did some more Photoshop work, swapped out a couple of photos, and added text to the pics that had none.
Is this an improvement? Or should I just leave it the way it was? If you have time to watch both, please let me know what you think in the comments.
When I first thought about creating a book trailer for my fantasy novel, Lady, Thy Name Is Trouble, it seemed a daunting task. How do you capture the essence of a book in a two-minute video? How do you convey the mood, the characters, the plot twists?
To get ideas, I watched trailers on YouTube. Many of them were for books by best-selling authors, though, and they were so far beyond what I could do, both technologically and financially, I started getting discouraged. There was no way I could create something like that. However, the fact remained that I needed to make one, so I attacked the project the same way I do any large task — by breaking it down into bite-sized pieces.
First, I wrote a script telling what the story was about in as few words as possible. Then I split the sentences into phrases and brainstormed a list of possible visuals that might go with them. I spent a LOT of time going through royalty-free photo sites, looking for photos that matched my ideas and reading licensing fine print. I finally decided on iStockphoto.com. They had a one month subscription option that included up to 250 photo downloads with no daily download restrictions that cost much less than buying photos individually with credit packages. The only downside is that you are required to use the photos you download in an end product or publication as specified in their licensing agreement within 30 days after the end of the subscription. I’ve downloaded about 30 photo files so far and only had a problem with one. I called their customer service line, and they immediately e-mailed me the photo. I didn’t have to wait long on the phone before I spoke to a person, and there was no hassle.
Once I had the photos, I used Adobe Photoshop to modify them as needed and then set up the photos and text in a MS PowerPoint presentation. I’m familiar with PowerPoint, so it was easy for me to put everything together and run it through a slideshow to see how it worked. It took some trial and error to get it looking the way I wanted, but it was more time-consuming than difficult.
Next came the music. I’d also gone through some free music sites, trying to find something that would fit the tone of my book. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I knew it the minute I heard it. Free Stock Music had just the right one. The music file was too long for what I needed, though, and would require editing. After some online researching, I found and downloaded the free Audacity music-editing software. By using the online manual, I was able to figure out how to edit the music file fairly easily.
Fitting the timing of the slide changes to the beat of the music was a challenge. I had to add up how many slides per section of music and factor in the transition/animation delays. After several more trial and error sessions, I succeeded in lining up the slide transitions to the beat.
Once I had everything set, I saved the file as a Windows media video (.wmv) file. Originally, I had planned to do the trailer in MovieMaker, but I couldn’t get the photos and text to look the way I wanted them to, and PowerPoint was so much easier for me to use that I decided to go that route.
Am I happy with the trailer? Yes, very. I’m a little annoyed that somewhere in the conversion to the movie file the timing shifted slightly so the photos don’t always switch on the beat of the music like they do in the original presentation, but it’s tolerable. I feel like I’ve captured the suspenseful and adventurous tone of the book. One thing that’s missing is the romantic element. I may have to do some more tweaking to include that as it’s important to the story, and maybe find a way to show a little more about the characters. I’ll also have to add the book cover when it’s done and put in the publication date.
So, without further ado, here is my first attempt at a book trailer. You may have to put it in full screen mode to see it. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them!
Current work includes epic fantasy, science fiction, mystery, romance. Follow me on Bluesky @nathaliemlromer.bsky.social! Visit nathaliemlromer.com for information and news about the author and her publications.
Writing, Reading, and the Pursuit of Dreams 