Just before I had to head out for a family obligation, I was suddenly struck by how amateurish and God-awful the art on the cover of Trang looked, so after obsessing on it all evening, I got back and tweaked it a little and made it smaller. I'm calmer about it now, although I have no illusions about my artistic talents.
It's hard because sometimes those kinds of freak-outs happen for no good reason, and other times they happen for VERY good reason, and good luck telling one from the other. When I applied to graduate school I was convinced that the essay I wrote was the deadest thing in the whole entire world, it just lay limply on the paper like a week-old fish, and it so impressed the person who read it that he immediately picked up the phone and offered me a very generous fellowship. So, you never know--although I write a lot better than I draw, that's for sure.
(And you know how people try to be supportive by saying stuff that's obvious bullshit, like "You'll be an artist someday!" That kind of stuff is really not helpful.)
All righty!
Since I've got the large-print interior done, and it's a pretty simple business to modify the cover to fit the large-print edition, I uploaded all of that to CreateSpace. I also coughed up the magical $39 that makes everything cheaper--since I liked the quality of their work and intend to use them, it made sense to do that before I had to buy another proof.
Oh, and do you know what a marketing dummy I am? Back when I asked 11th Hour to do the cover, she said, You know, you should really post about this on the Firefly board. And I was like, Really? I haven't posted there in years, it seems kinda low to show back up the minute I need something. And she was like, Don't be a dummy, they'll enjoy hearing about it!
And whaddya know, they are buying it, and to all appearances anyway, enjoying it. Which makes perfect sense from a marketing perspective: I really liked Firefly, they really like Firefly, we probably have some tastes in common, duh.... I always hate the idea of networking and am reluctant to do it because it seems like using, but the reality of it is that often you do have something to offer people.
That's not too hideous, is it?
So, I finished the drawing for the cover (and yes, if primitivism ever comes back, I'll have a career as an artist). It's certainly not fine art, but it's aliens and violence and weirdness, plus it's small, and I think I've got the rest of the cover looking more fun--almost cartoonish, really, which is fine.
I confront my limitations
The layout was going so swimmingly, I decided to humble myself by taking a shot at the cover art today. It didn't go as horribly as it could have, although I didn't attempt human figures, and I am relying heavily on the old trick of making a large illustration in hopes that shrinking it down will make it look less rough.
I also basically traced--I took a sharpie and made a rough drawing of, say, a Pincushion on one piece of paper, then put the paper with the illustration on it over it and used the outline as a guide. I think that helped avoid a lot of errors of proportion, plus it precluded the temptation to draw an outline of everything.
The most challenging bit is definitely the human figure, which is the unfortunate Philippe Trang getting the crap knocked out of him. I couldn't get the outline right, so I finally took a picture of myself in the mirror flailing about the way I imagine he might. That helped, but it probably means that Philippe will have a much larger butt than the poor man deserves. Maybe if I could find a picture of, say, Fred Astaire being knocked over....
Covers! On everyone's mind!
So, just as I was deciding that I needed to change my cover, I came across two different stories, one new and one, um, new to me about covers and book sales.
The first was this story in the Wall Street Journal about a book called The Madonnas of Echo Park, which is being given a new cover to juice sales. You need a subscription to actually read the story, though, which probably sucks for you. To summarize, the idea behind the old cover was that it would appeal to both men and women. Now, they've come up with a new cover, which is supposed to appeal to women. (Men in general don't buy as many books as women do.)
Maybe I'm saying this just because I'm a woman, but frankly, I think the old cover was pretty ugly. I don't know if it's actually going to help sales, but I think the new cover is much better looking. I also think that it looks more like Serious Literature now, which will probably help.
The other thing was this blog post from Joel Derfner regarding how they repackaged his excellent book Swish when it came out in paperback. This one speaks more to my concern that Trang does not look enough like adventure sci-fi: Swish is not fluff, and making it look like fluff turned out to be a very counterproductive strategy. I even empathize somewhat with the "Where's the Cher?" crowd, because for many months after my father passed away I deliberately consumed a media diet made entirely of saccharine, and I, too, would have been really upset to be getting a dead mother when I was promised hunky guys. (If you want fluff, hunky guys, and maybe Cher, try Joel's Gay Haiku instead.)
Keep your margins narrow
I laid out a couple of Trang chapters today using skinnier margins. Wow. It is like a thousand times easier to lay out a book this way. You have far fewer problems with loose lines, and you don't have to break nearly as many words. Seriously, it may be even easier than laying out a large-print book. So, it's easier, it costs less--I'm definitely going to be using minimal margins from now on.
So far I haven't had to push a line down (!), but if I do, I can in fact use invisible text--the test text did not show up in the proof.
ETA: I'm really pleased with how much faster this is going. I think it's because there are more letters per line, so if you're a few letters short, it doesn't look as dramatic. Like, if you have 20-character lines, but you only have 15 characters on a particular line because a word was too long and moved down to the next line, it looks really bad. But if you only have 35 characters on a 40-character line, it's just not as noticeable, and you don't need to move Heaven and Earth to fix it.
Obviously, the new layout is going to be much shorter, and fewer pages mean fewer places where the bottom lines don't line up. So that's also going a lot faster.
Perceptions can be weird
You know, when I got the proof, I was immediately struck by the idea that the font looked wrong, somehow--not like a real book font. And then on a whim I opened the book I am currently reading and compared it. And the font is exactly the same. It should be noted that the font in no way struck me as weird or amateurish or not book-like when I started reading that book.
When I'm a little nervous about stuff, I sometimes switch into this hyper-critical mode, where nothing seems right. It's not a very helpful frame of mind....
Heh
I'm reading over the proof of Trang, and finding mostly minor things to fix. At one point, Patch is saying something, and I used a comma where I really should have used a semicolon. I was about to replace it, and then I was like, No way in hell does Patch use semicolons. Even when he talks.
Other things are running to schedule, though
I finished the large-print layout today, huzzah! I'll have to wait on the new cover, but at least I know that will be easy to do.
And the proof came today! Well ahead of the estimated arrival time. It looks very nice, I'm quite happy with it--and that's a good thing, because it would have been a real pain to have to find another print-on-demand publisher.
ETA: I should note that I'm happy with what CreateSpace did. But I'm thinking of changing the font. Also, I was considering dropping the size of the font a point for the new layout, but looking at it--no. It's funny because I've printed it out at full size and thought it was mighty big, but looking at it in book form--no, it shouldn't go down another point.
EATA: The actual laying-out process added four pages this time. Last time it added six. I believe I had five pages before I hit CreateSpace's maximum page count if I used 23-point line spacing, so I must concur with my earlier opinion that that was simply cutting things too close.
Production delay
So, here I was, about ready to go ahead and put the hard copy of the book up for sale as soon as I saw the proof, but one thing was nagging at me: Wouldn't it make sense to do the new layout first? Especially if I was ultimately able to drop the price--it seems kind of annoying to be like, "Ha-ha! If you had waited a week, you could have paid less! Sucks to be you!"
And then, I was worried about the cover, in two regards. For starters, I'm actually kind of serious about my worries regarding the lack of wacky art. It seems like nowadays, there are two kinds of sci-fi: The fun adventure sort, and then the stuff that takes itself extremely seriously, where the author came up with their own kind of physics or their own theory about the meaning of the Universe, and then wrote a book to explain it all. The covers of these books tend to be sparse: A black background, with maybe a space station on it, or a vortex, or nothing at all.
Trang, a book in which quite literally no one knows how stuff works, and the lead character is completely ignorant of even basic technology, is not that kind of book. So the relatively sparse, dark cover is actually specifically misleading to fans of sci-fi, because the people who like the adventure stuff will be put off, and the people who like the really hard sci-fi will read it and then will be put off.
The other concern about the cover is that the lightning (almost typed "lightening"! bad girl!) is clip art. Like most people, I've generally used clip art with abandon, but then again, I've never sold something that had clip art on it. So I decided that I'd better double-check and make sure I can use it on a book jacket, and the answer is no--if you're going to sell it, you can't put clip art on it (at least not the clip art I have).
So, you know, that's pretty much the third strike right there. This means I'm going to do the new layout before I release the book, and that I'm going to have to--try not to laugh if you know me--create real cover art! Like, the kind where you draw it, and color it in--oh, this is going to be interesting. I'm not sure if I should try to risk human figures or just stick with planets and ships and stuff (human figures would be more suitable to the kind of book it is, though). I know I'm going to rely heavily on the fact that this art won't be very big, and that most of the cover art in this genre isn't exactly Renaissance Master material.
Can I still release it this month? God only knows....
Four more down!
I am done with the sixteenth chapter of the large-print edition. Only four more to go!
More on rejection letters
I bucked up last night and finished Publish This Book! which got a little better, mainly because the guy stopped trying to impress me with how much he drinks and how often he's gotten laid and did you know he occasionally takes drugs? He does! Because he is just that cool and not at all an exact clone of every other insecure 20-something out there, ever.
Anyway, the interesting bit for the purposes of this blog is that he includes his rejection letters for the book in the book. Recently I got my hair cut, and my hairdresser and I were discussing this whole decision to forgo traditional publishing, and she asked a question I often asked myself when I first started getting The Letters: When they say the book is good, entertaining, and enjoyable, are they just bullshitting me?
I don't know how true this is, but I've heard that when actors audition for parts in Hollywood the rule is: If they tell you that you're great, it means you're not getting cast. If they're really super-nice to you, it means you sucked. The more they lay on the praise, the worse you did. (Noncommittal hms are much more likely to lead to callbacks.)
Of course, New York City is culturally very unlike Hollywood--people rarely try to spare your feelings there, especially if they feel that doing so is not going to benefit you in the long run. So there was that general argument against that analogy, and that Very Honest Agent didn't seem to think the positive feedback was bullshit at all. The rejection letters in Publish This Book! offer further confirmation for that perspective. The letters offer very specific reasons for not taking up the book: The editors think the concept is thin (having read the finished product, I would agree), that it's not enough to support an entire book (even the author would agree with that one), and that it won't appeal to an audience other than frustrated writers. They don't praise the book, although there is some interest in other projects by the writer.
So I think it's pretty clear that rejection letters do tend to say what the person writing them thinks. They may be very frustrating, as they were in my case, and they may be couched in terms that require a native to translate, but they are, at the core, honest.
This 'n' that
Did more laying out of the large-print edition--11 chapters down, eight to go. It may actually come in a little shorter than I thought, which is good. (Although it does mean that maybe I could have done it with 23-point line spacing. Oh well--I'm not laying it all out again now!)
Also I fiddled with the front and back covers (I can't do the spine until I know the exact page length). Because the text takes up so much more room, the large-print edition is a bigger book (7" x 10" instead of 5.25" x 8"), but apparently the proportions are close enough that I could just expand the cover art without making it look all distorted and weird. Whew!
Good!
I wanted to see what I would need to do to get Trang below 400 pages (which is when you can start shrinking the side margins even more aggressively), and just by fooling with the margins of a draft I got it down from 550 pages to 360 pages--without having to shrink the type! So that's promising!
I had some real-life crap to do today, so I just worked more on the large-print layout. I really need to get cracking on Trust, the next book, in no small part because I keep telling people it will be coming out soon! I always procrastinate some before starting the next writing/editing round, so I kind of feel like this whole large-print layout thing is merely a very cunning delaying tactic on my part. But it is nice to have something you can do on days when you don't have a lot of time and are a little short on sleep.
*quiet weeping*
Yeah, it doesn't exactly save time when you lay out three chapters and the front matter on the wrong size paper. Not helpful.
Why do I talk myself into these things?
Wasn't I just very happy to be DONE laying Trang out? At least a large-print edition goes a lot faster--since it's not justified on both sides, you don't have to worry about loose lines, tight lines, or bad breaks. You can also bring down a line just by hitting the return button, since there's no difference between a paragraph break and a line break when the right side of the text column isn't justified.
Still, the double-spacing between paragraphs can actually make it really hard to get the bottom lines of the page to line up (and it can screw up the top lines as well, which isn't really something you have to worry about with a standard layout).
Nonetheless, I'm happy that this looks like it will work. The only thing I'm having to fudge is the amount of space between the lines of text. Per the APH, it's suppose to be 1.25 times the size of the text, so if you use 18-point text, there should be 22.5 points of space between lines. But Word won't support fractional points. If I make it 23 points, then the book gets almost too long for CreateSpace to print it--and judging from my experience with the first layout, once I finish lining up the text boxes, it will definitely be too long. If I make it 22 points, I have some breathing room. So I'm making it 22 points and hoping that that missing 0.5 points doesn't make the text illegible for anyone (I'm optimistic about that, because it looks like the APH standards are the most stringent). I should be able to price the book at around $20.
Hmmm....
I was thinking that, because I'm planning to shrink down the type font of Trang, that maybe I could repurpose the old layout as a large-print edition. But then I read the American Printing House for the Blind's large-print recommendations--wow. Eighteen-point type and 1.25 spacing between lines? That's BIG. On the other hand, they don't want the text to be justified on the right, which would make it really easy to lay out--I could just fiddle with the Kindle edition, because that already has extra spaces between paragraphs. At this point, it would cost me next to nothing to do, and I'm generally a big fan of accessibility. It would cost more for the reader because it would be really long, but if I don't make it available via Expanded Distribution, I could probably keep the price down to a reasonable level.
I think I just talked myself into doing it!
OK!
Trang is ready! I ordered my copy--they've sensibly set it up so that you have to buy a copy and approve it before they will distribute it. There were a variety of shipping options, and I chose the slowest not simply because it's cheaper but because I want to take a break from it and read it with fresh eyes. It should arrive in the middle of February, and then barring catastrophe, it will be available for purchase!
Layouts and distribution
About the next layout--I think I could cut even more by taking the text down a point in size. I don't want to get too aggressive about that, because obviously teeny text is hard to read, but I do think the print is pretty big right now. There's a weird multiplier effect because the shorter the book is, the smaller you can make the side margins (the binding will swallow up words in a thicker book), which of course makes the book smaller still.
The publishing-on-demand service I use is called CreateSpace and is owned by Amazon.com. They basically offer three distribution channels: The CreateSpace store (ever heard of that?), Amazon.com (now, that you've heard of), and something called Expanded Distribution (libraries and independent bookstores).
The weird thing is, you have to set a single list price (i.e. the price a reader will pay), but the amount you make depends on the distribution channel. For example, you could set a price of $20 for your 550-page book, and you would make $3.50 on every copy sold through the CreateSpace store (ooh! more than 15%) and lose 50 cents on every copy sold through Amazon.com (oops). Not that they'll let you sell your books at a loss, of course, but even if you were dim enough to do this, you'd probably go under posthaste because many more people buy through Amazon.com than the CreateSpace store.
The most expensive option for the author is Expanded Distribution. In order to use Expanded Distribution at all, you have to pony up $40, which also makes the book cheaper for the author, regardless of distribution channel. So unless CreateSpace makes a perfectly ghastly product, I'll pony up right away, which will bring the cost down, but not enough for me to use Expanded Distribution. Then I'll lay it out again (notice that I'm not making weeping noises--I have been shamed by Jeremy Robinson's example), put it on Expanded Distribution, and if I do a really good job, maybe drop the price by a buck or two for everyone!
(In defense of my crying and moaning about layout: I have to say that it (like all visual arts) is not something that comes naturally to me. I think I've made a decent-looking layout, but I feel like I have no instinctual understanding of how moving X will affect Y and Z--I just have to do it, see what happens, go back and fix what that screwed up, etc. You know how a really good hairdresser can just cut wet hair so that it looks great dry, even though wet hair is longer and a different texture than dry hair? I really, really lack that gift.)
Whew!
OK, I checked over the layout, and I uploaded both the interior and the cover to the publish-on-demand publisher! They'll need 48 hours to make sure I didn't just upload someone else's book, and then presumably it will be available for me to order. I'll buy a copy, read it over, and if it looks OK, I will make it available for sale!
Of course, "looking OK" at this point means basically "no chapters are missing." I just noticed two things that aren't exactly errors, but could have been expressed more elegantly...and I'm saving them for the next layout. Joel Derfner has a very funny take on the compulsion of writers to always improve their work, and how that runs headlong into the realities of production schedules, deadlines, costs, etc.,--which is probably a good thing, if you think about it. I have basically never read anything of mine that I didn't desperately want to take a red pencil to, until (and this happens, it's an interesting process) enough time has passed that I don't really think of the piece of writing as mine anymore, it's just kind of there. At that point, I usually really enjoy it and wonder what I was in such a lather about before. I suppose in a perfect world you'd always be that way about your writing--an impartial judge who simply looks upon it as text.
And someone who I don't know very well said some very nice things about Trang to me today, so yay! It's a good day!