It's a Book with a Cover

I finished the first draft of Murder on Ceres the week after Easter while luxuriating in the hospital. From my mood, you’d never have guessed I was NPO and hooked up to fluids. I felt like I could conquer the world. I had conquered the world! Everything was all caps and exclamation points!

Now to publish!

I’d seen vanity press published books. They didn’t stand up against the traditionally published works but I couldn’t afford that kind of capital outlay anyway. It was DIY publishing for me.

I used my money to hire an editor. My editor is Grace Wagner, my daughter. I would caution that not everyone has a family member that is actually competent to take on the task. The rule I followed is if the family member can’t command that kind of pay from nonfamily, then hire someone who can. $2000 is not out-of-line for this work. If you can’t afford it, wait and save your money until you can. This is not a step that can be scrimped on if you’re serious about your work.

A month after finishing the first draft, a month of diligent work, I finished the rewrites and shipped it to people who had agreed to be beta readers. And that’s important. They were people I could trust to tell me when something wasn’t working, a character was behaving uncharacteristically, the chronology was off, the science was just flat wrong, anything that threw them out of the story. People who would be wowed by my imagination, or didn’t want to make me mad, or wanted me to say nice things about their work would not do.

Beta readers are so important. They don’t know everything the writer knows about the story so they can’t fill in the inevitable gaps. The writer knows the main character’s father’s name is Charles. The beta reader should have no idea who Charles is until they’ve read the manuscript.

Rewrite! Rewrite! And each time, the rewrite is less extensive, more focused. Easier. No longer adding or deleting whole scenes. A sentence here. An attribution for dialogue there.

Now it’s a good, sound story. A clean manuscript.

Print on demand is available. No need to pitch anything. Ooooh. It sounds so straight forward. It costs nothing to upload a book for Kindle or Nook. And for a print book, you pay for how many books you can afford – fifty, a hundred, ten. They do, however, offer choices. You can actually do it yourself or you can pay for their services.

Services? I have access to the talent and the know-how. I can follow directions. I'm not afraid of work. And, best of all, I may not have the time to wait for an agent to discover me, but I have the time for this. I'm doing it myself.

Okay, I have the book. But no cover. That same editor daughter of mine is a really good artist. But she says “No.” Not even for the money. She says she’s not good enough on Photoshop yet to do a professional job and my book should have a professional-looking cover. She says, “If you’re serious about this, it has to be a professional job.” She’s right. Hand crafted is good. Homemade is not. Unless it’s a cherry pie.

I start checking out art websites. My personal favorite is www.Deviantart.com. Their name is a bit off-putting but their artists run the gamut from uninspired amateurish to highly polished, original, and professional.

I had an idea what I wanted. Murder on Ceres is a Sci-Fi/Murder Mystery. So I wanted a cover with a representation of the dwarf planet Ceres with the infinity of Space behind it. And maybe a noir image of my police detective hero, ala Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. I know, I know. Spade was a private detective with a fedora and he looked like Humphrey Bogart. Not right for my book. But you know what I mean.

So, how to choose an artist. Directly contact the artists whose work I especially like and pitch my story to them, see if they’d be interested? Run a contest with the winning entry getting the assignment and the pay? Announce what I’m doing and what I want and let them come to me?

Before I did any of that, Grace decided she could handle the job.

We talked about what I thought I wanted. She tamped my enthusiasms down. The dwarf planet and space – okay. Sam Spade – not so much. A representation of the cylindrical Ceres Colony floating around the planet – no. She explained that the cover has to look good as a thumbnail, because that’s how most readers will see it on whatever website they’re shopping. And intricate does not a good thumbnail make.

She did the design, choosing the colors based on what does well in the marketplace. Did I know anything about that? But she does. And the thumbnail needs to look good full-sized sitting on a shelf.

Grace chose the fonts. The font for the title is a little 30’s noir, Ever After (free from the designer Michael A. Hernandez Jr.) For the author’s name the futuristic Bocemina by Erion Dyrmishi. (For this one I needed permission to use it commercially. An email to the designer got a quick response with the permission.)

So, I have a book. I have a book cover. Now to get everything ready to upload to Amazon’s createspace.com for the print book and kdp.amazon.com for the Kindle edition. More about that later.