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Monday, August 27, 2012

The secret life of cats...


By RR with No comments

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Nathan Fillion says...


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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Switch channels...


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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Troll dreams - trilling about Trylle

The new slick cover for Trylle book #1.
Self-published books have an unfortunate stigma.

They're often seen as vanity projects, and dismissed by mainstream book reviewers, bookstores and established authors as embarrassing aberrations on the publishing landscape.

Self-financed, often self-edited (or worse, not edited at all - some would say it's more or less the same thing!), and often sporting covers with garish fonts that only a self-published author could love, there often isn't anything to recommend them apart from their content (but hey, that's as it should be, right? Don't judge a book by its cover and all that? Wrong...but anyway...).

The point is those who do bravely dip their toe in the self-publishing waters are already working under a significant disadvantage before they even get to put their wares under the noses of the book-buying public.

That's IF the aforementioned self-published author can convince their local bookstore to stock their title, and let's face it, unless it's something akin to a local history title with a ready-made audience, it can be a hard, and oft-times impossible slog. Shelf space is money.

Anyway, I'm getting slightly off-track because what I really want to write about is modern-day trolls and princesses and love stories that give Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series a run for its money.

I want to write about Trylle. Specifically, the Trylle trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend) by Amanda Hocking, a 20-something American author who has also penned Hollowland (an apocalyptic zombie novel) and the My Love Approves series (all about vampires and humans, think Twilight but edgier) among others.

Anyway, Amanda has become something of a media success story with journalists focusing on the thousands of novels sold and millions made via her e-publishing exercise.

Thanks to a cheeky pricing strategy, a solid social media marketing approach and the support of the indie-loving blogging community - and let's not overlook the product, a very good product - Amanda's star has risen quickly.

And she has also filled many would-be writers with a rare kind of hope - there is, apparently, another way to get published, reach an audience and make money. That's if, like Amanda, you can get the recipe right.

But to my mind the most important thing she has done is follow her dream all the way. She believed in herself enough to exhaust every possible avenue to ensure her novels saw the light of day. She gambled. She backed herself. She won.

Intrigued by her publishing success story, I purchased the Trylle trilogy and I've been pleasantly surprised so far. I don't know what I was expecting, but whenever the word 'self-published' is bandied around one can't help but be cautious (and this is from someone who has self-published!).

Sure it's easy to be critical - editing is an issue, but to be fair I have read several books from mainstream publishers of late where words are missing and typos are a not unfamiliar sight. Sweep those concerns aside for a moment, because the essence of any book is, of course, the story. Typos be damned, the story rocks.

Sure maybe she's not the most technically brilliant writer around, but I like her style - it's relaxed and pitch-perfect for her target YA audience.

Her story ideas are original and engaging.

Her characters are suitably tortured and exciting.

And for a Gen Xer '80s tragic, there's more John Hughes references than you can poke a stick at!

Need I say more? Get thee to Trylle!

* Since I first wrote this review Ms Hocking has signed a deal with St Martin's/Macmillan and taken her Trylle series (and a suite of other titles) mainstream.

The original cover for Trylle book #1, designed by Amanda - I really liked it!

By RR with No comments

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Top 10 most read books...


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Saturday, August 18, 2012

We've all been there...


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Thursday, August 16, 2012

Some books are good enough to eat...


London's Victoria's Kitchen is onto a winner with these delightful cupcakes!

Rightly described as 'deliciously fabulous', you can see more of their fine work at http://www.victorias-kitchen.com/

By RR with No comments

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Write, read, do, write


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Monday, August 13, 2012

Judging books by their covers

My first book cover effort - shamelessly echoing
a cover I spotted in a book store!
I confess I have an artistic streak. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming to be any good – I just have a need for self-expression that occasionally goes beyond the printed word.

In my past life I designed newspapers and magazines, and frequently created the kind of symmetry and modular layouts that helped make reading a daily joy for readers. These are the sort of design skills no one ever notices because they take it for granted that the paper or magazine always looked this good and were this easy to read. Maybe I should have been a graphic designer. Or not.

My second stab - a bit more academic!
And not quite 'on the money'. Yet.
So what does this have to do with publishing?

Nearing the completion of my first self-published book I decided to have a stab at designing the book’s cover. I had seen some covers that I really liked and set my mind to replicating a couple of them – an eye-catching tabloid-style of cover with block colours and arresting images, and a darker more academic effort. I've included both in this post.

If it was any good, I reasoned, I would have saved myself some money and added an extra string to my bow (writer, editor AND book designer!). As it was, it really wasn’t very good at all - but at the time I thought it was Magnificent! Genius! A Work of Art! That was until I showed a graphic designer friend Tim Hartridge who politely considered it. He never said ‘Oh sweet Jesus this is an abomination!’, but he did design something much, much better.

I’m not above sharing my book cover boo-boos for a few reasons:

1. To show you that yes, of course it is possible to design your cover (it might even rock - or not).

2. Creating your own cover can occasionally help a graphic designer with their brief (however in this case it really didn’t).

3. Graphic designers always do it much, much better!

In the book-buying world, books are often largely judged on the quality of their covers. While we prefer to think intellectual rigour and well-crafted writing triumphs when it comes to selling books, just as frequently readers will walk out of a bookshop with a so-so written mass-market novel that caught their eye because of the pretty pictures and flowery fonts. Yes, really.

When you produce a book for publication there are many steps to refining and polishing the raw product before it is ready to be shared with the world – and this includes how the words are arranged on the page, and the front and back cover.

If you’re smart you will hire and editor to pick up all of your mistakes – and there will be many, no matter how clever and careful a writer you are.

And if you’re really smart, after spending so much time and energy writing, and then having your work professionally edited, you will make another really important investment. You will hire someone to create a whiz-bang cover for your book. A traffic-stopping ‘look at me’ cover of epic proportions you would be proud to hang as a poster on your wall – or in a bookshop window.

Many graphic designers offer additional services such as laying out the inside of the book, the creation of book marks, flyers and website design to create a strong connection between your marketing materials and your book.

This doesn’t have to cost a lot. There are a lot of people offering cheap book covers – even cheaper if you’re publishing only in the e-book format. However if you’re publishing a book I’d recommend at this stage to pay for covers in all formats.

Graphic designers will often present you with several concepts but you can save a lot of time by indicating the type of cover you want - whether you do this by referring them to book covers you like, or have a stab at designing something is up to you.

Paying for the services of a good graphic designer is part and parcel of investing in yourself, and getting your readers to invest some time in getting to know your writing.

Professional intervention results in the final cover!
An eye-catching X-Files-ish effort. Spooky!


By RR with No comments

Some inspiring words...

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Sunday, August 12, 2012

Self-publishing in Australia



When I wrote my first book, a school textbook, it was all very straightforward – I penned the words and someone else sculpted them into a more pleasing form, found illustrations to support what I was saying and pulled it all together in a nice, shiny little package called a book.

Many were printed and found homes far and wide in libraries and schools across Australia. As it was a commissioned project, it was a reasonably pain-free endeavor. I was paid a small up-front sum for my work and registered with the Australian Public Lending Scheme (PLR), which pays authors a royalty every time someone borrows one of their books (a worthy scheme that has paid me in excess of $6000 since my first book was printed).

Fast forward five years and my second co-written book, Australian Big Cats: An Unnatural History of Panthers – a tome on folklore, and a labour of love – had been pitched to four mainstream publishing houses without any interest.

I could have persevered or found an agent but, as a former journalist, and one with newspaper layout experience, I was actually itching to give self-publishing a go. I was confident I could pull together a book every bit as readable and eye-catching as any mainstream tome – I just needed to find out how to do it.

And rather than bore you in real time as to how all that happened, I’ll give it to you in a nutshell – I researched all of the self-publishing avenues available and eventually jumped on board with Lightning Source, creating a company name to give me entre to the printing company’s vast resources.

Next I found myself a talented graphic designer. I’m afraid when it comes to books, looks count far more than they should – and I was desperately passionate that my book should be up there in the supermodel stakes. Fortunately a good friend of mine also happened to be a gun graphic designer, and his cover would later prove to be a key selling point.

While project-managing the book’s layout and cover, I bought an ISBN and a domain name and taught myself how to build a basic website using templates from the iWeb program on my (Apple) iMac computer, which previously worked with the Apple.com server to host my website. This hosting facility no longer exists and I have been forced to bone up further on website building and hosting.

The site - www.australianbigcats.com.au - went live with the book cover image and a giant countdown clock, and I began to promote it in chat groups and blogs across the web. The marketing of the book had begun in earnest and it hadn’t even seen a printing press! (I’ll talk more about the marketing side of things in a future post.)

Around the same time I created a Facebook page for the book, which now boasts more than 500 fans (not bad for a niche book!). Incidentally, the website has now received more than 17,600 visits.
With the help of my graphic designer we uploaded the book cover image and content to Lightning Source and waited two weeks or thereabouts for the formatting to take place at their end.

At that time Lightning Source had no presence in Australia so I had to source a local digital printer to print an initial run of 500 books for in-store distribution. Altogether we printed 850 books before making the decision – based on cost, time and distribution - to print solely through Lightning Source.

This had the added attraction of being ‘print on demand’, meaning we wouldn’t have to fill our house with boxes of books – instead, they would be printed as they were ordered by readers from various online bookstores.

Two years on and sales are steady and, thanks to the Lightning Source set-up, I sit back and wait for the money to roll in while I work on other projects.

At present I’m contemplating an e-book version of our book – how quaint! I hear some of you cry – but we have had our reasons for holding off, both marketing and software-related.

We’ve also since re-published a book, Savage Shadow: The Search for the Australian Cougar, on behalf of another late author’s family using the same method – another labour of love with a similarly brilliant cover (if we do say so ourselves) – so time has been finite between work and…I want to say ‘play’, but really it’s more work! I’m also considering a permanent price drop to further encourage sales.

I wouldn’t want you to think our printing projects haven’t been without stumbling blocks – there have been plenty! They have included formatting errors requiring subsequent uploads, undetected editing errors, missing stock, poorly printed books (it does happen), booksellers slow to pay for sold stock (thus holding up the financing of subsequent local print runs), distribution issues and various other gremlins.

But it has been a fantastic experience, and one I will most definitely repeat. Having already trod the path twice, I will be more prepared for the next project and, with the burgeoning popularity of e-readers and e-books, in a much better position to reach potential future readers.

Self-publishing isn’t a river of gold for everyone, but it is a fantastic opportunity for would-be publishers and authors.

The best advice I can give is if you want to be taken seriously and attract readers, then spend the time and money to bring your manuscript up to scratch, and present your final product in the best possible light. That means hiring editors to polish your prose, and graphic designers to work their magic with your book's layout and cover. And becoming your own project manager/marketing manager.

Your readers will love you, booksellers will be bowled over by you, and maybe, if it’s the sort of luck you’re after, an agent or mainstream publisher will fall in love with you too!

By RR with No comments

Friday, August 10, 2012

What's read cannot be unread


This is exactly how I feel about certain books. What has been read cannot be unread.

You know the ones. The tomes you pick up on a whim, find deeply engrossing but forever leave their mark on you - like a brand.

For me that book was Peter Benchley's Jaws. No, not the film (that would come later) but the images conjured up by the words on the pages.

At the time I was a well-read 10-year-old who loved nothing better than swimming in the ocean with my beach-loving cousins. By the end of that book I was a shore-loving shark-phobic junior burger with a 'wisdom' beyond my years.

I had plucked the offending book from my uncle's bookshelf one summer holiday, desperate for something to read and morbidly drawn by the chilling cover, which showed a bikini-clad woman frolicking in the ocean and the mother-of-all fish with pointy teeth looming up beneath her.

Decades later I still find it hard to swim in the ocean, wondering what could be swimming just below my furiously paddling legs, and whether or not it's true that sharks often mistake us for seals, or whether they can sense fear and vulnerability (and if, as recent studies would have us believe, they really do hunt like serial killers!).

The fact that Benchley could tap into such a primal fear so deeply and so well speaks volumes about his skill as an author - not just as a wordsmith spinning verbage for the page, but also to his skill in selecting a subject that could resonate so deeply and for so long with such a big audience.

So big an audience that it's rumoured the author made enough money on the book, film adaptation/rights and syndication that he was able to live off the proceeds quite well for 10 years!

The words didn't come easily for Benchley, then a magazine feature writer - his first 100 pages were rejected and he had to go back to the drawing board - but come they eventually did, thanks to the guiding hand of editors at Doubleday Books.

The book was inspired by several very real sharks caught in the 1960s off Long Island and Block Island by the Montauk charterboat captain Frank Mundus, who was also supposedly the inspiration for the main character, shark hunter Quint.

Here be monsters indeed...

By RR with No comments

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Millennium book 4 to be published?

  

A close friend of the Swedish crime writer has revealed the plot for what he says is the fourth book in the Millennium Series - and it'll have protagonist Lisbeth Salander's estranged sister Camilla in a key role.

Kurdo Baksi, who wrote My friend Stieg Larsson last year, said the author had more books in the pipeline, a Swedish newspaper reported.

Baksi told the Expressen the fourth book in the series was set on Banks Island, a remote island off the west coast of Canada, and features Camilla, who was last seen briefly in the second novel The Girl Who Played With Fire . The deepening relationship between Salander and investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist would also be explored.

Baksi said Larsson had completed the introduction and finale to the fourth, untitled, book.

It has been widely reported that Larsson had planned to write up to six books in the Millennium Series.

Murdoch Books distributes the series in Australia.

By RR with No comments

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Library book returned 33 years late!


A library book 33 years overdue has been anonymously returned to Gordon Library on Sydney's north shore in Australia. Originally due December 1978, the book was only reunited with its library in March 2011!

Attached on a post-it note was a cheeky message: "Sorry for the delay. Next day OK?"

All we can say to that is it must have been one good book! So what was it?

The Faber Book of English Verse by John Hayward (1958).

By RR with No comments

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