Amazon Surprizes

My picture identified as "Customer Image."

The things you find on Amazon! A picture of me!

And it shows up right above a negative review of William Bernhardt's The Game Master.  Thank goodness the author of the negative review's name is attached to the review and I don't think there's much chance someone will think that I am Wesley A. Rasmussen.

When you click on my picture it brings up my very short, quite positive review -- the one I wrote on Amazon. I posted a more in depth review of Bill's book on my blog.

Finding my picture on Bill's Amazon page sent me to my Amazon page for Murder on Ceres and a more complete reading of it. I don't usually scroll down as far as my reviews. Kind of feels like bad luck, like getting the mail could be bad luck because it could be all bills.

Instead I found this wonderful review of my book:

"Under the heading of science fiction you can find all kinds of stuff from the weird almost supernatural to just plain good stories about real people in a future setting. This book is strongly on the good stories about real people end of the spectrum and I really enjoyed reading it because of that. I have been reading science fiction novels since I was a small boy. Since I was a small boy a long time ago I have seen many things come to pass already that were in those first science fiction stories I read. In following the recent news I have noted that we have now landed on a comet, and are very serious about our efforts to study the asteroids. What we are learning about working around these low gravity bodies in our solar system will most definitely lead to the future reality of the setting the author skillfully weaves into the story developed in this book. So the story is set in a future setting we are already taking steps to make a reality, and it is about real people with real passions and real problems. Add to that a mystery with a surprise twist at the end, and I found it to be a good read set in the future that could be identified with by the reader today." by KJPapa

His review is from last November. That tells you how often I check my Amazon page. AND I don't know who he is. I can't tell you how exciting it is to have someone you don't know write such a review of your book. And he "gets it." Science fiction about real people.

After reading his review, I'd buy my book!

Now if Amazon had just put a link from my picture to my book . . . .

T is for Terren -- Excerpts from Murder on Ceres

On Day R we were introduced to Rafe, the protagonist in Murder on Ceres. Terren is his wife, a very important part of his life and his story. He introduces her in the first chapter.

She stood at the cook table, its malleable surface formed into a griddle. Even if she wasn’t a cook like his mother, he liked to give her the latest and best. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and nuzzled her dark curls. Her hair smelled of citrus and spice. She snuggled against him and turned the bacon.  His hands slid across her white silk kimono, smooth and soft like her skin. Her stomach still flat. No change with the baby. Too early.

“How about Cynthia?”  He suggested the name as he reached for a slice of bacon.

She smacked him with her cooking sticks and spun to face him. “Have you washed?”

“I love you.” He pretended innocence, making a second attempt at the bacon. “You are so pretty pregnant.”

“Cynthia? Certainly not, Rafael Sirocco. What if the poor baby has a lisp?” She threatened him with the cooking sticks.

“Thinthia Thirocco…” He mused, curling the ends of his mustache.

With his left hand, he caressed her bottom. She relented and kissed him. With his right hand, he snatched a piece of bacon and was out of the kitchen before she could catch him.

[Here Terren is visiting an old family friend and the plot thickens.]

She sat on the rug and felt like a little girl again. She traced the red zigzags of lightning that framed a stylized cornstalk on the rug’s blue field. Perhaps they grow corn in the ground in Denver District.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined two walls, filled with old-style books. Different sizes and colors shelved in no order that she could see. How could anyone find a particular volume?

Her mom always warned her. “Don’t ask. Any book you want to read, you can download. You won’t lose it or damage it.”

And her father would say, “Unlike real estate, they ain’t making any more of them.”

They’d been right. But she couldn’t say she appreciated it. Still, even without them there, she didn’t touch. Looking was enough.

The gate bell rang as Mark came downstairs. He spoke with Watson a moment then excused himself. A door banged open. Raised voices echoed down the hall. She set her cup down.

A man’s voice, taut with emotion. “No, I don’t want your damn money.”

“Leave now.” Mark sounded angry. Then in a more composed tone he said, “We need to be reasonable, work this out. We’ll talk later.”

“All you do is talk.” The man lowered his voice which sounded somehow more menacing. “This was your deal. You clean it up yourself.”

The closer she got to the entry hall and the confrontation, the slower she moved, not sure she wanted to see what was happening.

[Then we find her in Ceres’s Commercial Passenger Transfer Station leaving for the alien planet Earth.]

At zero g, surrounded by flashing lights and movement, her stomach rebelled.

The navigation rails into Outbound Security provided a sense of stability. Things could be worse. Head up. Eyes forward. Breathe normally. In. Out.

She handed her mobile to the security tech and passed through a scanner. She wondered what exactly they were scanning for. Weapons perhaps? Stolen diamonds and emeralds and rubies? She glanced at the ring on her little finger. Mark’s ring.

The tech held a small screen in front of her face and instructed her to look at the dot. He compared the retinal scan with her ID. Satisfied that she was who she was supposed to be, the tech confirmed her boarding pass, ticked the box next to Earth, and entered his own ID code. He returned her phone and directed her to the door marked Outbound Ferry.

As she waited, she watched people moving through the inbound side of the partition. New arrivals were scanned for identity, contraband, and illness. Tighter security met those arriving. Without the vaccinations she’d taken in the past six weeks, she wouldn’t be allowed back onto the Colony without enduring a two-week quarantine.

Watching the authorities screen arrivals made her stomach clench with fear. Where she was going, there were things that Cererians must be protected from. Diseases Cererians did not need to vaccinate against. Diseases that had no vaccines. “Perhaps dragons do be there.” She spoke under her breath, not intending to be heard.

“Frightening, isn’t it?” A tall dark-haired man with a well-trimmed beard said. “What the government thinks we need to be protected from.” He also waited.

“Sometimes they’re right.” Her voice was husky. She turned her face away, afraid her tears might show.

All too soon, the reader discovers things the government couldn’t protect her from. Available in paper back or on Kindle from Amazon, Murder on Ceres. 

Self-Publishing, Two Steps Forward

 by pinstriped briefs

I’m ready to upload my manuscript to CreateSpace and make a book out of it.

First they ask for the title and information. I fill in the appropriate boxes and save.

Next comes ISBN and copyright. Now it’s time for me to do some research. They provide information and discussion on both subjects which I read. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. It is a number that is unique to a book’s title, that book’s binding, edition, and publisher. It is not unusual to have vastly different books with the same title, but each will have its own ISBN. Libraries use that number as the identifier for each of their books. If you’ve ever had reason to have your library request a specific book on inter-library loan, they’ve used that number to get exactly the book you want.

Now I had to do some decision making. Bowker is the official ISBN agency for the United States. Bowker also offers a self-publishing program. Hmmm. But I had already decided on CreateSpace, and since Amazon is sort of the 21st Century’s Sears Roebuck Catalog, I’m sticking with them. At least for Murder on Ceres. When I get rich and famous I might want to move on up.  

Considering cost and marketing possibilities with Amazon, I chose the free CreateSpace assigned ISBN. I guess that time I worked in the Edmond Public Library has forever warped my perception of books. All of a sudden my book having its own ISBN made it seem more real to me than all those pages of text and that beautiful cover. Kind of like seeing your baby’s official birth certificate for the first time.

Now comes the question of copyright. Okay. All the books I read have the copyright listed above the ISBN. I checked out the information and discussions CreateSpace offers, then went to copyright.gov to see for myself. For a single author, same claimant, one work, not for hire, the current online registration fee is $35. That is doable. The current processing time is, however, three to five months. And I want my book now, or at least sooner than that. The good thing is an author has up to five years to apply for the copyright certificate. And the even better thing is a work has automatic copyright beginning with the date the author can show they wrote it. The certificate itself is useful in court should the writer feel their copyright is being infringed.  

Are you glassy-eyed yet from this bureaucratic maze? Ready to pitch your book to that nice agent again? No, I’m not. Okay, we’ll move on.

Now we come to the Interior. You know, your story, the whole reason for this exercise.

CreateSpace gives you choices. What size book you want to have. They suggest that
6 x 9 is currently the preferred size. I know it will fit nicely on a library shelf. I choose that size and watch CreateSpace’s video on formatting. I follow the instructions, save my document as a pdf, and upload it.

They have a free service called Interior Reviewer. It’s great. It finds errors in the text. Errors I didn’t think about. Certain things don’t translate for them. In my case I had used a symbol, the Greek letter Sigma. If you’re more adept at this than I am, you can do what is necessary to embed your non-True Type symbol. Me, I just made a quick rewrite in those two particular locations.

Did I say “quick rewrite” limited to those two sites? I lied. While I was fixing them I noticed this and that and fixed them, too. Then I realized there were extra spaces, not extra lines denoting space-breaks between scenes, but extra spaces before a sentence or between words. You know when you turn on Word’s paragraph function and it shows all those dots. I couldn’t let it go out with all those. So several hours later with only one Frappuccino, two cookies, and a yogurt I finished. By that time I couldn’t tell if it was a dot on the document or a speck on my screen.

I uploaded it again. Ran the Interior Reviewer and was satisfied that all was well. Then came the cover. Thanks to Grace, I have the cover art. But CreateSpace wants to know if I want the cover to be matte or glossy.

Matte or Glossy? I don’t know. They do offer to send me, for a nominal price, an example of each.

Okay. Send me an example of each. It’ll be here next Thursday.

Good.

I need a break.

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.