Coverage

Just thought I'd collect in one place the process I went through in making a cover for an eBook.

The rest is below the fold because this is a long post.

Trowel Tales

My Marshalltown (trowel) arrived today. Serious archaeologists sharpen theirs.

The author's copies (printed at cost, no mark-up) arrive in two weeks or so.








The Solstice is the 21st and my workplace goes dark from the 20th and doesn't open again this year. That's a lot of time I could have used for something. Instead I took time away from work to upload the novel. And to be sick. There's that.

This morning while visiting Quora I came up with the Parts for the novel I'm outlining. These, like the scene names I used for the last, are entirely internal references and will never be seen client-side.

Fox and Hounds

Prologue
The Show in Which Everything Goes Wrong
Down and Out in Soho
Three Times is Enemy Action
Daleks in the Subway
Yamatai

Yeah, if I wasn't me I'd need a lot of explaining. I don't actually know which are going to end up as numbered parts and which will be internal. There's several emotional revolutions not documented in the part names. I dreamed them up while helping someone outline a YA zombie book and not all my attention was on it.

And, oh yes, everything is finally approved at Amazon. I'm even spending a buck or two on ad space.

Gobble gobble gobble

On the day I uploaded, I woke up to a bit about the Ohlone on the radio. And I knew I had another edit.

In Chapter Three, about 2/5 of the way in, there's this exchange:

"Mound builders?"
"Not intentionally."

I remembered exactly what I had written and where I'd written it and I went right there and changed it to "Not the ones you are thinking of."

That's the level at which I had to deal with the text. I remember everything. And I was dealing with commas and double-spaces.

I'm a wee bit worded out now. Put together the start of a new website and added the first how-to-article to it. Edited my blurb, and my bio. And worked on the London book.

PENNY IS IN ENGLAND, and although parts of it are very old, none of it is merry.  

She’s finding out being a real archaeologist is harder than she thought—particularly when old enemies and an old shame come back to haunt her. 

She’s kicked off the dig, her channel is shut down, and soon she’s penniless in the cold streets of London.  

Then things get interesting. Deep under the streets of the old city, dragged into an ancient mystery and fighting for her life, Penny must come to grips with what it truly means to be the hero she once played. 

This should help a bit in outlining; I'm starting with a clear sense of where the book is going to be. I am committed now that The Fox Knows Many Things is going to be followed by Fox and Hounds.

After that it is still a bit up in the air between Go and Tell That Fox and Sometimes a Fox.

(The fox in question in the latter quote is Napoleon. The fox of the former is Herod!)

And I've already written the first 800 words. It's a stand-alone prologue, that's how I can do it without having to complete the outline first. Only gotta do that again, a mere hundred times more....

The prologue's about Doggerland. Why do you ask?

Harry Potter and the Formatted POD

I picked up a Bloomsbury edition -- in London's Heathrow -- of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Not "Sorcerer's," you bloody parochial classics-deprived Yanks!

Sorry. Getting in some practice.

Turns out the POD (Print-On-Demand) publisher I'm using doesn't do pocketbooks. It's been rather a struggle to understand the terminology. Everyone wants to talk about "paperbacks" and "trade paperbacks" and even though they sound like they are talking about the basic, you know, paperback book, they are actually talking about the larger sizes typically used for non-fiction.

In any case, the smallest I can print is the size of that Harry Potter book that's right now sitting on my desk as reference. 5.06" by 7.81", that is.

The eBook is live. I've started on the Amazon Author page and my own WordPress writer page. PDF conversion is done -- painful; there's no way to transfer the minutia of settings in Scrivener so I had to flip back and forth between formats transferring everything manually.

Turns out the mechanics of trim and bleed are pretty simple. Amazon will calculate it for you from your uploaded PDF (333 pages, cream paper, black and white with matte-finish color cover) and generate a to-scale template. Since Gimp is fully WSYWIG, I know anything exported from there will have the correct dpi and all that (just have to remember to collapse all fonts).

And once everything is approved and live, and I have the various social media presence objects properly built, I'll hit the publicity engine with some promotional sales and advertising.

Wrong Lever, Kronk!

My head is splitting. Some of that is the head cold.

I did the small edits, then crawled through the entire manuscript looking for bad dialog punctuation and doubled spaces. Don't know how ProWritingAid missed those last ones.

Uploaded all of the files to KDP. All that is left now is to hit the button and the book will be made available at Amazon.

Print is going to take a little longer. I have to make camera-ready text and a correct-to-the-bleed paperback cover.

There's also advertising and promos to consider.

And second thoughts. Do I want to change that one word? How is the new blurb working? Should there be more front matter? Is the cover too dark?

So much, I just had to guess where it was going to be when it all came together. That's the fun part of projects; when that much time is invested, there are early forks in the road that it simply isn't plausible to go back to.

The Fox Knows Many Things

And this fox's brain is starting to hurt.

Or maybe that's the sinuses. The pot is mostly rendered. The dirty secret to 3d art is the endless round of render, tweak, render again. As the final render series is over 4K pixels, those are long renders. Built the Mauser ammo and dipped into the appropriately named Bullet physics engine to drop a pile of them on the ground. Poser11 continues to not play nicely with the spherical world map function; first IBL/HDRI light map didn't work properly, and now the reflections look like shit. Something has changed. I've been doing reflection maps since Poser9 at least.

At least I've learned; to render in lighting layers so I can fix them in the final comp, and to let small stuff go if I am confident I can fix it with a paint brush a lot faster than I can fix it in the 3D scene. (No examples will be forthcoming. I have some stuff at a...different...graphic sharing site under a different name.)

I mocked up the cover with all the words and other graphics (well, waiting on the final renders), read up on fonts, wrote the blurb, put my data into Kindle Direct Publishing, and started an author's web site.

There's a lot of work in packaging a book. On the book itself, I need to do a couple small edit passes, including one looking just at closing quotation marks to make sure my various softwares didn't monkey up the capitalization on dialogue attributions. ("I'm not angry!" she shouted, but, "I'm out of here." He left the room.) And make sure I've set all the flags correctly so scene and chapter breaks come where they belong.

The blurb needs to be edited and there are some other bits and pieces that need to get added to the full text that shows up on the Kindle page. And I have to take another pass with Rocket at categories and keywords -- especially since I am going KDP Select and I have some additional keywords I can plug in.

The final assembly of the cover, of course. And then once the eBook is completed, go through the formatting and cover art stage again to get the paperback version into the shop.

And there's the usual mess of bio, picture...advertising, publicity, links...

Oh, yeah. And I really want to have another book in the store as soon as possible. I really should have started this with something other than Athena Fox. Because I know better now what I need to plan and outline a novel, and the Athena Fox series is constrained to stay in more-or-less the real world and be as accurate as I can afford about it. I could knock out two volumes of The Tiki Stars in less time than it would take to complete the London research for Fox and Hounds. And that's not even counting taking a research trip of my own out there.

Especially attractive if I could come up with the five hundred quid to "volunteer" at an archaeological dig whilst I was there...

What deaf banjo player gives Max Planck quartz?

I guess I've decided this is the cheap book. That is; not worth hiring editor or cover artist.

Well, not that cheap. But I'm hoping this is amortization. Get the tools, learn the stuff about cover design and so forth now, and then the next book it won't be a problem.

As long as I make December. And my new stretch goal is to have prints delivered by Jan 1. No pressure!

So.

I knew this way back, when I was still aiming for trad publishing, and sending off loads of short stories to the magazines. The best way to make money as a writer is to make money off writers.

This got really clear when I listened through a podcast on cover design. Which turned out to be basically an advertisement for the podcaster's course series, meaning the entire thing was pushing courses like the one that they were sort of but not really previewing here by interviewing a guy about his course and book, which does actually have some advice but is just as much an advertisement for his book-cover creation business.

Okay. It felt more Inception than it was. Still, I did feel several shells deep in the effort to actually get at useful information.

Once again, I've discovered the problem of being a fast learner. I quickly move to the "gifted amateur" stage but it is hard to find the resources to move up from there. Top-level searches and resources with wide circulation are inevitably aimed towards the first-time learner. At least for some things, past the transition hump are the serious resources. Which are usually serious money and time -- this is a good reflection of how "jack of all trades, master of none" works out with real subjects.

Come to think, Penny has the same problem. I should put this in the next book.

So there are a zillion tutorials on how to, kludge something up in PhotoShop. Rather fewer on useful techniques and pointers once you've gotten past "how to turn it on and what a layer is."

Anyhow, right now I'm trying to learn a little about fonts. Hours of podcasts, tens of pages, and one full book purchased and read and I have enough actual solid useful advice to fill maybe two typewritten pages. Double-spaced.

 Actually, assuming the more decorative design fonts actually work and don't distract too much from the total design, the main thing I got out of searching a bunch of fonts sorted by keywords was a desire to write the stories/settings that went with some of those fonts. Like, ooh, I want to do a story involving Celtic Britain so I can use that font in the title!

And the calyx is in renders. More adventures there. I am tempted to open Poser9, despite the broken Flash (Aaaah!) problem. Because I just can not get IBL -- HDRI lighting -- to work properly in Poser11. And apparently it doesn't work at all in the Superfly render engine, or so forums tell me.

Of course I'd already seen the problem coming. Red-figure Attic ware means large parts of the body of the pot are black. Especially the sides, if I am framing the central image. And I'm doing it against a black background.

I reversed the artwork, though, and I didn't really care for the black-figure look. Not for any connotations; just because so much red pottery just didn't look right in the composition.

So a couple of tweaks to go, then I'll render three to five layers. Since the light shaft is so hard to control, both the top light and the associated atmospheric effect (the "god ray") will be rendered on a black image. That light will be removed from the main color render. I might do the rim light as a separate layer as well. For that matter, it might be safer and easier to do a reflection layer separate (I mashed together some free pictures to make a semi-spherical "tholos interior."

And haven't decided if the bullets are going to be in this. I don't want to diffuse the focus but I also want something that says "action" -- a pot doesn't. And then back again to render a trowel for the back cover. (8×57mm IS rounds, since the appropriate rifle is an FN Model 24).

And, yeah. Back when I thought of using a pot instead of the Parthenon against mysterious brooding clouds, or a stock photo in a leather jacket running away from something out of frame, I was using artifact-based titles. I was amused by the idea of continuing to have the contemporary character and appropriate scenes showing up in ancient art; as the stamped image on a Roman coin for the story that was going to be called The Aurelius Dupondius, for instance.

Incidentally, for those that have forgotten, this is the image that is being referenced, both in the art and in the actual story:

Probably better than a paste-up of stock photos. We'll see. Here's the kind of covers you tend to see if you pop "thriller" and "history" into the Kindle search engine: some good. Some...not so good.