The story, as I’ve mentioned, is a continuation of my first novel. It’s called Red into the Sea, (the first was called Blue across the Sea). And yeah, in my delusional euphoria after finishing the first book I planed a whole color scheme series… Silly me.
This is Simon who holds a dying Emily. Due to her death, and the circumstances, he gets twisted with revenge and becomes “Synoc” leader of the Reno Reds.
Later, Synoc and his band of brigands raid, murder and burn the town of Cordero, their goal to steal child slaves.
The process, which in and of itself was a piece of cake, took me a half-dozen tries to get the format right (downloaded from GDocs as a .docx) to make the title and copyright and all that work out correctly. D2D then gave me a 6×9 (or any other size) PDF that I took over to https://www.thebookpatch.com/ (A POD service.)
There I fetched the cover template and built my own cover in Photoshop. With the JPG and PDF in hand, I uploaded both, proofed both and voila’, I was done. I ordered 5 copies at $8.50 apiece, and I had them delivered within about 10 days.
Bing, bang, boom – done. I never thought this was gonna be easy.
But it was.
What I learned:
So, yeah, it IS easy. Mostly. The writing and editing were by far the hardest part.
Your Microsoft Word version of your manuscript is the key to a good looking eBook and PDF for print version. Perfecting this takes time and effort and, well, you just have to beat it with a big stick until it complies with your wishes.
Draft2Digital will create a POD (print on demand) version of your book — all ready-made for you to take over to a POD site like TheBookPatch.
Now, D2D’s PDF is not “perfect.” It’s good, mind you, but you can’t control the leading, or font size. So, you get what you get. However, you can republish (within minutes) again and again and, until they DO provide better control of the POD PDFs, well, you’re stuck.
TheBookPatch didn’t quite represent the page count accurately. What I thought was X pages turned out be be X-60 pages which changes the dynamics of the book spine width. This is important because your homemade image MUST fit your book’s final dimensions. (I’ve subsequently fixed this…) Note: I was able to upload new text and new cover images — without a hick-up. Easy-peasy.
The cover image was ME, ME, ME.
I drew and colored the crappy sailboat and sailor (20×30 drafting paper).
I took it out back and put boards and some odd cable around it and took a picture with my phone (ayup, an old android phone).
Then I drew a frickin’ map — took a picture of that and Photoshopped the hell out of that puppy.
I also took a selfie with the same phone and used that as my “I’m special — look at me” image on the back.
Here’s the final cover… Nice huh?!
Will I do this again? You betcha!
Should you? You bet you! Write something, anything. Get it edited (as best you can) and publish that gorgeous work of narrative art!
“Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?”
I love Gene Wilder’s Willie Wonka. It is, in fact, my favorite movie. But of course, this quote comes from Shakespeare (whom I despise).
“Tell me, where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?” — The Merchant of Venice
[I don’t actually “despise” Bill Shakespeare. I recognize that he created many words we find useful in English today. I do find the imposition of teaching — ADULT PLAYS that are SPOKEN aloud to an ADULT audience — to teenagers to be an egregious breach of teacher-student trust! (I fucking hated Shakespeare during high school.)]
But that’s not why I’m here.
From whence do ideas spawn? Dreams? Recombinant cultural memes? The twisting of personal history, desires, regrets and failures? From the influx of a constant stream of media tropes? A blended mishmash of everything and nothing? Regardless, here’s the beginning of my next writing effort, bred, indeed, from the heart and mind (and soul?): Shadow Shoals.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 