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Writing Update: The Search for Reviewers
October 15, 2019 at 5:00 am (Marketing)
I’m expecting the links to Advanced Reader Copies of my book to arrive someday soon so I’ve started looking for ways to find reviewers – lists of blogs that review paranormal romance and Amazon reviewers who read in that genre, as well as avenues suggested by my friends and publisher. Then there’s writing a letter to entice the reviewer to give my book a chance.
It’s a little overwhelming.
So, just to throw it out there, if anyone reads paranormal romance and would be willing to put up a short review for a free copy – let me know!
There’s more to do in every area, all the time. I have a basic web site up but it needs some work. My fellow writer, Christy Jackson Nicholas, kindly shared with her list of things that she does when she gets her Advanced Reader Copies.
Nowhere on the list does it include writing.
It’s as if this book promotion is a whole other job!
Yup, that’s exactly what it is. With good things, come new responsibilities. It’s going to take work, but when you want something in life, you have to be willing to do what it takes to get there.
(Oh, great. Now I have “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music playing in my head. Well, when you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. “Climb every mountain / Ford every stream / Follow every rainbow / Till you find your dream . . . .)
Writing Life Update: Looking Up
October 8, 2019 at 5:00 am (Marketing, Photographs, Writing Inspiration)
This past weekend, my husband and I went away on a 27 ½ hour vacation for our 9th wedding anniversary. I only took a few pictures, but they seemed to have the theme of “looking up.” (We had breakfast on Sunday in a bistro with a stained glass ceiling and then took a walk.)
I had a realization about my writing with the same theme.
I “owned” the term writer a long time ago. I write, therefore I am a writer.
Poet has been a little more difficult to own. I’ve self-published a book of poetry, but to be honest, the fact that it is SELF published reduces the legitimacy in my own mind. The two things that have helped me get there are acceptance by other poets and having had one poem chosen through a blind jury process for a collection. So, I’m a poet.
It suddenly occurred to me this weekend, though, that with the imminent release of a novel through Tirgearr Publishing, I can legitimately say I am a poet and a novelist.
It was a bit mind-boggling. I’m still reveling in that that.
Now, time to get back to writing.
Writing Update: Posting Poems on Facebook
October 1, 2019 at 5:00 am (Marketing)
Really exciting news — I have cover art for Earthbound!
But I can’t share it with you . . . yet.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share something I’ve learned recently.
I’ve been really frustrated with Facebook’s unwillingness to promote some of my poems. I set up a promotion and they accept it, but then they send me an email saying that there is too much text in the image so my promotion isn’t performing the way it should. They recommend I go edit the promotion to remove some text.
Well, it’s a poem. Removing words from an edited poem is not so easy. But Facebook doesn’t allow for such differentiation. There’s no little box to check telling them, “I’m trying to share a poem!”
I’ve looked at other poets who share on Facebook and they do tend to share short poems or excerpts. How are they delivering it to their followers or new people? Is it just because the poems are short? Are they spending a lot of money on it?
I did a little research. It turns out the number of words is not really the problem. The problem is the percentage of the image covered by text.
Facebook has, simply put, a 20% rule. They figure images that have text over more than 20% of image aren’t going to perform well and they don’t want to fill people’s feed with that.
I’ve been filling images with larger text so people can see it better. Wrong direction. In the future you’ll be seeing smaller text with a large margin.
I’ll let you know how that goes.
Editing the Ellipsis for Ebooks
September 24, 2019 at 5:00 am (Editing)
Publishing in any form is a journey each time with its own learning curve. I published a book of poetry on my own last year and learned several things about formatting the ebook, though I don’t think I got it quite perfect for all the different ways it can be viewed. I was, however, very happy with the print copy.
This time around I’ve been working with an editor that my publishing house, Tirgearr, assigned me. Author and editor, Lucy Felthouse, has kindly answered any questions I had. I was quite concerned by the sheer number of changes in the first draft but she told me to take it one at a time, and it went pretty quick. The second one went even faster. (The final read through still caught a number of things I hadn’t noticed before.)
One thing that I learned from her was in regards to the use of ellipses in an ebook. I had learned that the proper format for an ellipsis was space/period/space/period/space/period/space, with an additional space/period if the ellipsis came at the end of a sentence.
I noticed that Lucy was eliminating the initial space after the word. I asked why that was, if there was a different style guide that I should be referring to than I was used to?
She explained that the reason she eliminated the space was because in publishing an ebook, if the text wraps around, the sentence can become disassociated from the ellipsis and that can cause a great deal of confusion. I will remember that in the future.
Now, my book has been turned in to my publisher, and I await the next step!
The Friday Poem: But what?
September 20, 2019 at 5:00 am (Uncategorized)
A Friday mystery poem. Anyone care to take a stab at what changed, or continue the story with their own?
Editing Update: Oy vey.
September 17, 2019 at 5:00 am (Editing)
Editing my paranormal romance, Earthbound, has proven a little bit trickier than I expected.
I opened the document and decided to look at the summary of changes. Track changes said there had been over 3,500 changes made to the document. Yikes!
Apparently it counts every single little key stroke or something.
I went to review it but found that I couldn’t really follow the little light gray cursor as it jumped from change to change so I decided to print out a copy and review it that way then make the changes needed.
Big mistake, I added a lot of work for myself. Next time I’m going to play with screen resolution, brightness, and color saturation until I can see that darned cursor.
Finally, I got into the meat of reviewing and editing. I never realized how much I overused simple words like “that” and “but.”
Then there’s the phrases that I overuse, like “eyes narrowed” and “took a deep breath,” not to mention all the smiling and nodding that went on.
Oy vey. However, this too shall pass and I will have a completed book.
Onward!
