the ebook world

I’ve read a few books on my iphone touch recently, using Stanza, which is free from the apps store. I’ve focussed on out of copyright books from gutenburg.org (a very interesting project to epublish out of print books and make them available for free). I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, because my son told me he had read it as a teenager and was very enthusiastic, and followed that with The Trial, which is one of those uncanny books that reads as very contemporary.

And I’ve read Flatland; A romance of many dimensions by Edwin A Abbot, which is about a land in two dimensions; am dipping into Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Montaigne’s Essays, and have some Herodotus, Homer and Dostoevsky waiting in the wings.

I still really prefer to read books as books, but the carry-around aspect of the ipod is a winner and it is easy to read and use. It works splendidly for print, but Stanza does not cope with pictures of any kind, so seems best for fiction and poetry.

I have not yet bought an epublished book. I still buy books on paper. However, I am now selling one. There’s a process for doing it for free at Smashwords.com and I’ve converted my final word file in accordance with their instructions, which took a couple of days, and submitted it. Search its title - Take It Easy - on the Smashwords site if you want to check it out. It costs $5.96 USD to buy it as an electronic version. You can choose what format you download it in, everything from html and pdf to epub and a whole lot of others. I don’t know anyone who would want to read a novel on their computer, and there’s nothing much in the way of an ebook reader on the market in NZ except for the ipod touch/iphone. If you happen to have an Amazon Kindle, I think you can download from Smashwords, but I’m not clear yet on that.

So now I’m going to read the Smashwords book on marketing. Don’t hold your breath.

A year later

The absence of any further posts since March of 2008 makes it fairly obvious that the whole promoting area failed to hold my interest. I didn't realise how apathetic I could be about the publicity machine. I kind of knew what to do and couldn't bring myself to do it. Just as I got myself some expertise in the design and layout of the book I should have got some for publicity. I did reasonably successfully promote Take It Easy to New Zealand libraries. And among my friends. I now find I don't care how many I sell and am inclined to give it away if anyone is interested.

So now I will turn this blog into a general one. Wonder if I can change the title of and take off the pjpress and just call it 'out there'.

I don't have another novel underway. There's no big idea for a novel floating around in my consciousness. I am writing some short stories and a little poetry and enjoying that, but am easily distracted from it. Oh dear.

I have books

I have books! Boxes of actual, physical copies of my book. Zenith publishers have been great to work with and met every deadline we agreed to. See how they work at publishme.co.nz You can buy a copy for $28 plus freight from the same website – click on new releases or search on the book title or my name.

The cover looks fantastic, with colours richer than those in the image on this blog.

Now I am in marketing mode, not my favourite activity. However, needs must. The Women’s Bookshop in Auckland and Unity Books in Wellington will carry copies. I’ll work on expanding further into the independent bookstore network. My focus at the moment is libraries and my own networks, which are extensive, I can hook into several email lists and will be in the next newsletter from The Women’s Bookshop, which goes to 4000 subscribers.

I’m having a launch next Sunday at 4.30 here in Paekakariki at the local community hall. Writer Renee will launch Take It Easy. To help cover launch costs I will sell, for $10 a copy, some of my previously published books.

the cover & Launch

Here is the front cover.The artist, Seraphine Pick, was very gracious about me using her painting as the image. The blurb on the back, which was sooooo hard to write, reads:

Isobel is confronted by a decision from her past that she thought she had dealt with. Now she wants to understand her actions and that means digging back into her past. Surely she was fighting for her own sense of who she was, not just reacting to an arid childhood. A wobble in the foundations of her relationship with her partner Iris intensifies as Isobel seeks understanding of herself and of the meaning of family.

I tried very hard to make it cliche-free.

A date has been set for the launch - 30 March, here in Paekakariki. Renee, friend, writer, playwrite and poet will launch it and many of my Paekakariki friends will be involved. My partner Prue will MC the event.

We have a time line that is designed to get books in hand by Easter, which gives a week, more or less, with public holidays involved, before the launch date.

Production progress

This is the logo Jill and I have worked out for pjpress. Inside the box the black and white can be reversed. I'll put the cover on the next post, when I have a version with the new blurb text. Setting up a page on google pages, a kind of faux website as far as I can tell is my next step. Learning these new techniques is what I find hard, probably because I don't really understand what I am doing, I am just following instructions that don't necessarily mean a lot to me and my brain works best when it understands what's happening.

Very soon I will have a proof-reading printout, which my partner and a friend will proof-read for me - have done a copy edit - and then it will be ready to go to the printer who will provide a printed proof copy, which will be the moment of truth for how it actually looks as a book. I am planning a launch for 30 March, here in Paekakariki where I live, more in a later post on that.

layout, fonts and more

Holidays are over, layout is underway, cover designs are going back and forth between m e and Jill, who is doing the design work. There's a logo for PJ Press, too.

For me, because the details of designing and laying out a book are the least known aspects of this project, having Jill involved is essential. She knows the technical business of what used to be called typesetting and now is computerised. Selecting a font went differently from how I expected. I had a couple I liked, maybe a bit old-fashioned, but had the right feel - Garamond and Bookman. When I saw them in a page sized as for the book I wasn't so keen. Jill came up with Bembo and bingo! there it was. In fact, what we are heading towards is using that one font, in different sizes, for everything, including the cover, which Jill tells me is unusual. But so far I like it. The text will be in Bembo 10pt, with spacing between the lines as Jill has worked it out for readability, 5mm para indents.

We have gone for a simple page layout, page numbers centred at the bottom, no headers, chapters numbered but not named, each one starting on a new page. The book has three parts, each part starting with a quote so each of these will have a full page. There is a lot of detail to decide on. It matters, I think, and the end result should be that the reader doesn't especially notice any of it.

The cover is looking great. Pink (a kind of a melony pink from the artist's image) and grey sound bad but are looking good. The hardest part is the words for the back cover. As soon as I start writing something the cliches flow in a great torrent. One of the main plot points is not one I want to reveal on the cover, it's an unusual, possibly shocking, decision the protagonist made in her early life and to talk of a 'secret' in the blurb straightaway suggests sexual abuse, which has nothing to do with it. I've read lots of advice on how to write this and none of it is helping. I've just emailed version 3 to Jill but who knows if it is the final one.

My next job is to go to the sales website and work my way through that.

blurbs, front pages and such

Paying attention to the front pages of a novel, the bits before the story starts has shown me how varied they can be. Previous books, acknowledgements, publisher information, dedication, bio, ISBN and so on. I think I won't include a photo of myself. I found it really easy to get an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) from New Zealand's national library. This, I have learnt is a number unique to any published book in the world. It is easily converted (Zenith/Publishme will do this for me - see earlier posts.) into a bar code which goes on the back of the book cover and which retailers link to the shelf price on their computers.

So I've put together all those front pages bits. The hard part is the blurb for the back cover. Even thinking about writing such a blurb creates an outpouring in my mind of cliches. I think it will be very brief. At the moment it is two sentences, but I am not at all sure this will be the final wording:

"Sleepless nights send Isobel off to a therapist, until she turns to a different approach to sort out the impact of her past on her present. As she starts rebuilding connections there’s an accident that somehow puts her in conflict with her partner, Iris."

I'm even thinking I might drop the second sentence. In which case the back cover will be very empty! Might have to put a photo! I notice that on some books something from the front cover is repeated on the back.

So I'm nearly design-ready. Jill, the designer, needs to get all the files on a CD and as a printout. I'll hand them over about 14 Dec and she'll check that she's got everything and can open it all and then I go away for ten days! She, meanwhile, will be doing the design and typesetting. (As well as coordinating the feeding of our cat.)