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.

C is for Character Development

C is for Character Development

 

If you want to write and write well, no matter the genre, whether memoir, thriller, or a grant proposal, you need skills. I recommend working with a good writing teacher. You can check out my teacher at www.williambernhardt.com. Bill always says, "show don't tell."

 

The following exerpt is from my, as yet, unpublished murder mystery, Murder on Ceres. The story starts out on a colony in low orbit around Ceres, the largest body in the Main Asteroid Belt. The protagonist is a police detective named Rafe. This scene introduces his mother Rose. Lucy is a friend of his wife Terren. Terren is distraught over the death of a very close friend. Charles is Rafe's father.

Door chimes startled Lucy awake. She glanced at the screen and saw Terren’s mother-in-law in the pop-up. Rose Sirocco’s eyes gazed inquiringly up at the door cam. Green eyes like Rafe’s. Two of the few people she knew with green eyes. She liked having someone look up to her, or at least seem to look up to her. Even a much older person. To be fair, at 162 centimeters, they were exactly the same height. Short by Cererian standards.

Her reader slipped to the floor as she got up to answer the door.

“Mrs. Sirocco.”

“Hello, dear. Didn’t Rafe tell you I was coming to sit with Terren?” Rose Sirocco looked her up and down. Probably noting her rumpled appearance.

Lucy finger-combed her straight brown hair. “Yes, ma’am. He did. I must’ve dozed off.” She picked up the fallen reader. “Three chapters deep in the latest Turner thriller. Guess it’s not that thrilling.”

“Oh, keep at it, dear.” Rose set a bright pink bag emblazoned with a crisp letter “S” on the floor. “Though not quite as thrilling as his last book. Still, it’s worth reading.” She put her blue beret and handbag, each also marked with an “S” on the entry table next to Rafe’s chess board.

She centered the white queen on the correct square. “Charles is forever accepting things in lieu of money for his legal services. This was from that woman they thought embezzled from the hospital.” An antique from Earth, the chess set was probably very valuable. “I can’t remember for sure. Maybe it was from that man accused of killing his wife and her lover. A nice man, really. Ah well, it was a good gift for Rafe.”

She straightened the mirror over the table. “Don’t you think this looks so much better here than it did in that tiny little place they used to live in?” She plumped her iron gray curls into shape. The hat had not flattened her hair at all. Like her, those curls would not be restrained.

“Don’t you have reading glasses, dear?” Rose turned to the house controls near the door and brought the lights in the living room up to near full-sun, dialed the room temperature down, and switched off the lights in the garden.

 “I think they’re much easier on your eyes.” She pulled food containers out of the pink bag. “Charles thinks mine are too heavy. They make little dents on my nose, but I think the graphics are so much better than the new ones.”

Lucy didn’t offer her opinion. She didn’t find an opportunity to.

 

Blog Hop

Thanks to Grace Wagner for tagging me.

1:  What is the working title of your book?
Murder on Ceres

2: Where did the idea come from for the book?
My favorite genres are mystery and science fiction. Diane Mott Davidson’s mysteries were my especial favorites. Her characters are believable and engaging. Her violence is done almost gently. For science fiction, I am drawn to Isaac Asimov. He provides believable, thought-provoking science.
I wanted to present humans as I think they are likely to be no matter the technological advances of the future. I want my characters to be accepted as real people by the reader. And I want my characters to realistically live in what is to them the normal universe.

3: What genre does your book come under?
Murder on Ceres is a natural cross-over, a traditional mystery set in the future.

4: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I’ve never thought of my characters as being like this or that actor. I will leave that up to the movie people, should it ever come to that.
No doubt, Rafe as the hero will be young and handsome; Terren as his wife will be tall and beautiful; Joe, the sidekick, will be older and ruggedly attractive. Mark, the antagonist, will be mature and charming. TePaki, the pirate will be tattooed and threatening.

5: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
In a time when Mars is the center of humanity and Earth is literally the Old World, humans will still be humans and murder happens.

6: Is your book self-published, published by an independent publisher, or represented by an agent?
I am seeking an agent.

7: How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Almost three years.

8: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End successfully marries science and character. His people seem perfectly normal and live normally in their very different world.

9: Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Carl Sagan is the who. “Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” – Cosmos
I believe out-migration from Earth is the inevitable and necessary next step for our species.

10: What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Our hero must solve a murder and bring the murderer or murderers to justice. He must survive professional and personal disasters, some natural and some man-made, from the lovely pearl that is the asteroid Ceres through the vastness of space to the beautiful blue marble that is Earth.

Tagging more Writers:
This I cannot do without permission. So if you are interested in joining in, give me a shout and we’ll do it.