book covers

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Blog Tour! With Michelle Athy — Unforgettable Characters! And Cover Reveal for L.G. Keltner’s Self-Help 101 or: How to Survive a Bombardment With Minimal Injury

I’m celebrating the release of my new fantasy adventure novel, Trouble By Any Other Name, the sequel to Lady, Thy Name Is Trouble!

Over the years I’ve “met” thousands of characters in books, movies, and TV. A good number of them didn’t stick in my memory, like people passing in a crowd. We spent time together for a few hours while the story lasted, but once it was done the characters faded into obscurity. But a magical few of them stayed with me, forever etched in my memory. What is it that makes these characters so special? Stop by Michelle Athy’s site, The Sunflower’s Scribbles, to find out!

*****

Also up today: Cover Reveal for L.G. Keltner’s upcoming release:

Self-Help 101 or: How to Survive a Bombardment With Minimal Injury

 

Burntcover

 

Title: Self-Help 101 or: How to Survive a Bombardment With Minimal Injury

Author: L.G. Keltner

Genre: YA/holiday/humor

Length: 25,000 words

Cover Art: L.G. Keltner and Jamon Walker

Release Date: June 28, 2016

 

 Blurb:

Dani Finklemeier has self-published her guide to taking over the world, but she still isn’t rich. Now she’s eighteen, still babysitting for money, and looking forward to starting college in the fall.

Of course, she has to survive a 4th of July outing with her family first. That’s a challenging prospect considering she has to be in close proximity with a group of cousins known as The Fallible Four. As if that weren’t enough, she also has to deal with the fallout of her parents learning more about her relationship with her boyfriend Seth than she ever wanted them to know.

The good news is that, if she survives this holiday, she’ll have plenty of material for another self-help book.

 

photoL.G. Keltner spends most of her time trying to write while also cleaning up after her crazy but wonderful kids and hanging out with her husband. Her favorite genre of all time is science fiction, and she’s been trying to write novels since the age of six. Needless to say, those earliest attempts weren’t all that good.

Her non-writing hobbies include astronomy and playing Trivial Pursuit.

You can typically find L.G. lurking around her blog, on Twitter, or on her Facebook page.

 

 

 

 

 

© Lori L. MacLaughlin and Writing, Reading, and the Pursuit of Dreams, 2016. All rights reserved.

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Celebrate the Small Things!

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. CelebrateSmallThings_Badge

I hope everyone gets a chance to check out all the authors participating in the 2016 2K Indie Book Tour. Their books sound like amazing reads. Celebrations for this week:

  1. A snow day! School was canceled last Tuesday because of an ice/sleet/snow storm. My kids were ecstatic. And next week is school vacation!
  2. I saw a flock of robins on a neighbor’s lawn this morning! Either the birds are really confused, or spring is on its way.
  3. More editing progress! The end is in sight.
  4. Carrie Butler of Forward Authority Designs did a fantastic job on the cover for Book II: Trouble By Any Other Name. I’m not quite ready to reveal it yet. Soon.

What other celebrations are going on out there?

 

 

 

 

© Lori L. MacLaughlin and Writing, Reading, and the Pursuit of Dreams, 2016. All rights reserved.

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Celebrate the Small Things!

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. CelebrateSmallThings_Badge

Leaf-peeping season is on the wane, and we actually had sleet and snow showers last weekend. (Definitely NOT celebrating that.) I do have other things to celebrate, though:

  1. My son was chosen as one of the Students of the Month for October! He’s been doing great in his first year of high school.
  2. I finally got started on the cover for Book 2: Trouble By Any Other Name.
  3. I helped set up our school’s Scholastic Book Fair, which starts next week. I love opening all the boxes and seeing all the new books!

What other celebrations are going on out there?

 

 

 

 

© Lori L. MacLaughlin and Writing, Reading, and the Pursuit of Dreams, 2015. All rights reserved.

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The Long-Awaited Cover!

Early last week, I received the long-awaited cover for my fantasy novel, Lady, Thy Name Is Trouble.

LadyThyNameIsTrouble_FinalCover_ScreenShot

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.

http://www.daisy.org/project/save-as-daisy-microsoft/

http://www.daisy.org/daisypedia/how-convert-microsoft-word-document-accessible-epub3

http://www.daisy.org/daisypedia/tobi-convert-daisy-books-epub3

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!!!!!!!

 

 

 

© Lori L. MacLaughlin and Writing, Reading, and the Pursuit of Dreams, 2015. All rights reserved.

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Celebrate the Small Things!

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. CelebrateSmallThings_Badge

I actually had some time to wind down this week, which was really nice for a change. I’m celebrating:

  1. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug extended edition! It arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago and I finally had a chance to watch it.
  2. The cover design for my upcoming fantasy novel is almost done!
  3. Thanksgiving vacation from school! My brother and his family are coming up again from PA, so we’ll be spending a few days with them.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

What other celebrations are going on out there?

 

 

 

 

© Lori L. MacLaughlin and Writing, Reading, and the Pursuit of Dreams, 2014. All rights reserved.

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IWSG / Font-tastic Dilemma

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.

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Click here to see this post with the various fonts.

Click to see this post with the various fonts.

I’ve been playing with various fonts, trying to decide which one to use for my book cover title. But it seems like there are a zillion fonts out there. How on earth does one choose?

My novel is romantic fantasy adventure. The romance element inspires thoughts of flowery and curvy script like Vivaldi from my computer’s font files or like this free file I found online called A Yummy Apology. Fantasy should be more exotic like Endor or Half-elven or Immortal, while the adventure element needs something strong and bold — Bodoni MT Black, Stencil, and Impact are all possibilities.

Swordplay is essential to the plot as well, which draws me toward a serif font that is clean and sharp like a blade. I really like Castellar and Imprint MT Shadow because of the added depth of the lettering. There is so much more to the main character than even she knows and in my mind, the shadowed depth of the letters symbolizes this.

So many choices. And once I figure out the title font, I need to decide if I’m going to use the same font for both title and author or choose another for the author.

Lori L. MacLaughlin (Cardinal), Lori L. MacLaughlin (Slender Gold), Lori L. MacLaughlin (Celtic) …

Which will it be? Sigh …

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Judging A Book By Its Cover

I’ve been researching book cover design to learn more about what sells and what doesn’t. In that all-important first moment when potential buyers see your book either online or on a brick-and-mortar store shelf, does the cover grab them and shout “Buy me!” or does it say “Meh” and let them get away?Book_I_WhiteCover

I read that analyzing covers of recently published books is a great way to get ideas that will make your book an eye-catcher. Sometimes I found it difficult, though, to figure out why some covers worked better than others. For example, on The Book Designer Web site, Joel Friedlander critiques book covers submitted by writers/designers, awarding gold stars to the best ones and useful comments to others. I went through and studied the covers, then read his comments to see if we had similar thoughts. Sometimes we agreed and sometimes not. The crux of the matter is that it’s all subjective. One person’s beauty is another’s bleh.

The site did have some good basic design tips which I found helpful.
• Decide what your principal focus will be and work around that. Use only a few images and don’t clutter.
• Don’t use a white background. Use texture, color, or illustration instead.
• Make sure the text stands out and is easy to read.
• The title needs to be large enough to be read when shrunk to Amazon thumbnail size.
• Use images, colors, and fonts that convey the tone/mood of the book.

A few seconds’ glance is all you get when someone picks up your book. In those few moments, your cover should communicate the genre, the theme or basic subject of the book, and the tone. It should lead the person into your story and make them not want to leave. I know that sounds like common sense, but it’s a lot harder than it seems.

I had some general ideas of what I thought should be on the cover of my book, one of which was to focus on my main character, a swordswoman with silver-blonde hair. Both the book I’m currently reading and the one I’m going to read next have swordswomen prominently on the covers. But then I read where one person didn’t like putting characters on book covers because she preferred to leave the characters’ faces to the readers’ imaginations.

What do you think? Does it bother you to have an image of the main character on the book cover? I’d love to hear your opinions!