Tag: self-publishing

This is the slowest launch in history. I am reminded of the scene in one of the later Mary Plain books in which Mary and the Owl Man attempt to launch a rubber dinghy with a plastic bottle of milk. I am beginning to think that Lulu make most of their money by forcing authors to buy proof copy after proof copy when they would swear blind they’ve already bought a bloody proof copy… Suffice it to say, there will be a slight delay to the paperback version. With any luck, it’ll be available to order later today. If it’s any consolation, I don’t have my copy yet either.

However! It is 2 February, and I promised there would be a launch, and I am going to launch something, damn it. The ebook version is available on Lulu. It comes in .epub format; if you want to read it on a device that does not like .epub, and you want to read it now, I recommend Calibre, which is free, and useful enough that I’ve made use of the ‘Show appreciation via Paypal’ button.

The remaining formats will follow, and the .epub version should filter through some of the more mainstream retailers, and I will update this blog with links when they do:

• Paperback
• Paperback via Amazon
• .epub via iBooks
• .epub via Kobo
• .epub via Nook
• .mobi via Kindle

I have the feeling that I ought to be doing something. This is nonsense. I am ill, so I should not be doing anything. This is the week I gave myself to not do anything, and besides, there’s nothing I can do until I get my proof copy. The only thing I could possibly do would be to make the book available, and I’m not doing that until I’ve had the physical copy in my hands and seen for myself that it hasn’t come out upside down, or stripped out all of the formatting, or something.

I’ve compromised by expanding the extract I put up a few weeks ago. It now includes the whole of the first chapter, to give potential readers a fighting chance of discovering whether or not they like my style. And that was just a matter of copy-and-pasting, so hardly counts as doing anything.

You see that there? That’s what I spent most of yesterday morning doing. This is for the print version; if you hold a piece of paper up over the left hand side of the image you’ll see what the ebook version looks like.

I was not starting from scratch. I got the basic concept down and sorted the flower out months ago. Yesterday was mostly about getting a clearer picture of the handwriting and then getting all the elements into the appropriate position so that they’ll print properly.

The handwriting, if you’re wondering, is excerpts from my own English undergraduate notes: the front cover is talking about The Faerie Queene and the back about Donne’s Holy Sonnets. I adapted the passionflower image from this photograph, which has been made available for such use under a Creative Commons license.

I then ordered a proof copy and went and had some lunch. Coming back, I immediately discovered two errors (a first line that should have been indented and a chapter heading that said One where all the rest said Chapter 1), so I had to pull the .pdf off and replace it with a corrected one.

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to make the cover sit properly on the front of the ebook.

Then I gave up and cooked dinner.

Then this morning I remembered that I hadn’t changed the ISBN on the copyright page of the ebook and so I pulled it off and uploaded a corrected version.

And I have no idea what new errors I’ll find when I look at the proof copy when it arrives next week. I would like to think that, after going through the electronic version, several print-outs, and the ebook, I’d have got them all, but there always seems to be something else to find, even if it’s just a niggly little thing like a missing indent. We’ll see. We’ll see.

… muttering at Lulu that there is no text smaller than 10pt, let alone 6pt, on pages 87, 119, or 265, damn it

… putting the cover together, which entails:

… setting the image size to the nearest pixel

… finding the .pdf of the barcode which I know I saved somewhere obvious

… getting a week’s worth of photographs off my camera to find the picture of my own second year notes on The Faerie Queene which are going to be the background image

… wondering where the hell the colour selector thing in Paint.Net has disappeared to

… remembering that actually I used the eyedropper and got the purple from the middle of the passionflower. Right.

… resizing everything. And then resizing it again.

… working out how to make a .pdf into a .jpg

… wondering why I can’t see the text I’ve just typed

… trying not to cry

… realising it’s because I’ve still got the passionflower selected

… finding that the onscreen rulers are helping me not one whit

… resorting to holding a real ruler up to the screen

… being really irritated about the blank space at the bottom right

… copying the blurb word by word from my own website

… working out how to rotate text through ninety degrees

… wondering what I’ve spelt wrong in the blurb

… wondering what I’ve forgotten to add

… forgetting where I’ve saved the resulting .jpg

… uploading the cover to Lulu

… deciding that it looks WRONG and going back to Paint.net

… uploading the cover again

… wondering whether occasional use  of the F word counts as ‘explicit content’

… ordering a proof copy

Which is quite enough for one morning. After lunch I’ll worry about the ebook. Don’t worry: I did take annual leave to do all this.

 

My computer has just started playing Get The Party Started. It’s as if it knows.

It isn’t quite party time yet, but a spreadsheet containing ten ISBNs showed up in my inbox today. That’s one for the print version of Speak Its Name, one for the ebook, and two each for the next four books I publish. I’ll worry about the last eight at a later date. The point is, I now exist as a publisher, and the print version of Speak Its Name exists as a number, even if it doesn’t yet exist in physical form. This merits at least a small celebration.

Meanwhile, I’ve released my editors and put the ‘finished’ text onto my Kobo so that I can proofread on the train. I put ‘finished’ in scare quotes because, as I expected, I have found about thirty errors that got in during the editing process. Some of them are little things, like en dashes that should be em dashes; some are missing words; some are phrases that worked beautifully until I fixed something else near to them and now sound clunky and inharmonious. I’m about a quarter of the way through that, and am resisting the temptation to make any changes to the file before I get to the end of the text.

I’m also resisting the temptation to plug my shiny new ISBNs into Lulu and start making books. It’s been a long day at work and I’ll probably forget the title, or spell my own name wrong.

I was talking to one of my former colleagues the other day.

‘Kathleen,’ he said, ‘you read a lot. Have you ever thought about writing?’

‘Well, um, yes,’ I said. ‘In fact…’ And I went into the whole thing. Novel. Started out as Trollope-esque ecclesiastical comedy. Ended up as Christian lesbian coming-of-age. Written. Currently editing. Self-publishing. Likely to be read by all of seventeen people, but I don’t give a damn. And all the rest of it. This was a fairly significant conversation, because it was the first time I’d let on to anyone in the ‘real world’ about it.

As it turned out, he was about four thousand words into what sounds like a very interesting sci-fi thriller. I was impressed at his being willing to talk about it at such an early stage. I’ve been writing mine for years and am only just getting over the temptation to deny everything.

I think he was quite impressed by my having a finished novel, and a little bit horrified by how much I’ve deleted. At present, Speak Its Name stands at just under 80,000 words. At one point it was over 115,000, and that doesn’t include the huge chunks of earlier drafts that I didn’t deem worthy of copy/pasting into ‘Speak Its Name FINAL’, ‘Speak Its Name FINAL 2’ or ‘Speak Its Name FINAL 3’.

(I really do hope FINAL 3 is the last one. I want it off my hands!)

‘So…’ he said, ‘if you had known, back when you started, that you’d be cutting all these words, that you’d be self-publishing, would you still have written this book, as opposed to a different subject?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, because I needed to write it, because this needed writing about.’

And – I didn’t say – because I simply wouldn’t have believed it. Over the years I’ve read plenty of books, articles, blog posts, whatever, that told me how hard a writer has to work and how difficult it is to get published.  I ignored all of them. If I went back to the October of 2007, found my twenty-two year old self sitting at her aunt’s dining table and writing detailed character profiles in colour-coded ink, and told her that she’d have to rewrite the whole thing from the perspective of somebody’s love interest, lose about 40,000 words in the process, and that even at the end of it she’d have to publish the thing herself, she’d have said, ‘Oh, really?’ and kept right on doing what she was doing.

Was it worth writing 40,000 words that will never see the light of day? Was it worth all that time, all that effort, writing a novel that I’m having to self-publish because it falls between several mutually exclusive genres?

Well, if nothing else, I’ve learned how to write a novel. I’ve learned how to combine characters and plot, and dialogue and description, and what needs to go in, and what needs to come out.

And I’ve learned by doing it for myself. I could have read the theory until I was blue in the face, but I wouldn’t have understood it at the level I do now. Those moments where I went, ‘oh, but Becky needs to be the one who sets this going’, or ‘well, how about I just take out everything that’s not from Lydia’s point of view and then see what’s missing?’, those moments of deep insight whose profundity I can’t put into words, would have been worth a very expensive creative writing course.

And writing this particular book was a lot more helpful than any counselling session, in working out how to be bisexual and Christian myself. (None of the characters are me, but most of them have at least one of my issues.)

And I’ve written a book that I’m proud of, that I think is worth putting out into the world.

And I’ve developed the confidence along the way to take responsibility for that myself and not give a damn what anyone else thinks.

Any one of those on its own would have meant I hadn’t wasted the past eight years. Combined – hell, yes, it was worth it.

So… the reason for the existence of this blog is this: the novel that I have been working on (and off) since 2007 has been sitting on my computer for long enough, and I am fed up with this state of affairs. It feels like high time it was published and read by people who are not me and who are not necessarily my friends.

I have tried to find a publisher and/or agent without success. The main reason, I think, is that even I don’t know what genre the dratted thing is. The best I can do is ‘modern-day University of Barchester, with same-sex relationships’. I don’t even know whether it should be shelved under ‘General Fiction’, ‘Teenage’ or ‘LGBT’. It’s fiction. I know that much at least.

Apart from that? Does the ghost of Section 28 still haunt us? (Yes, but this may or may not be the reason I can’t find a publisher.) Are student politics terminally boring? (Yes, which is why I have edited most of them out.) Are you just not allowed to have characters who are simultaneously queer and Christian? (Possibly, but I missed the memo if so.) Whatever. I believe that there are people out there who would be prepared to read Speak Its Name (for such is its, er, name) despite, or even because of, these reasons.

I am not particularly invested in the idea of being a super-high-powered-world-renowned-high-earning-genius-famous-prolific author – but I have put a lot of work into writing this particular book, and it would be a pity if somebody who would like to read it, or something like it, never got to because I was being too proud to put it out there under my own steam.

And so I am taking deliberate and considered steps towards self-publishing. (After all, if it’s good enough for my parents…) At the moment the novel is working its way around a list of kind but ruthless friends and their red pens, and I am hoping to make it available, probably via Lulu.com, by the end of November.

More about the book here