The Joy of Tinkering

By Claire Booth

I am at my favorite point in writing – the tinkering. My manuscript is done, and now I get to go back and fiddle with it. That sounds pretty lackadaisical, but it's not. There are very specific things I look at when I’m at this stage in writing a novel.

Chapter breaks. I make sure that the word counts of all of my chapters are consistent. I have a tendency to stick them wherever, and sometimes I don’t realize that although my scene breaks are pretty rhythmic and well paced, my actual chapter numbering is horrendous. For me, consistent means relatively similar lengths, but that’s not the only way to do it. Some books work best with chapters that become shorter as you near the end. Or short-long-short-long. It doesn’t matter what you choose, as long as you know the pacing that you’re going for and stick to it.

Particular words. You know which ones I’m talking about. The ones that catch on the surface of your brain and tug incessantly. This is the time in my writing where I give in to the little bastards. My reptilian writer brain is telling me they aren’t right. I have to find new ones. Get out a thesaurus, go for a walk, do anything but pass over them. Your sentences will thank you.

Pesky little details. Yes, these are your responsibility. Check to make sure your main character’s eye color doesn’t change halfway through the book. Google to make sure that it’s Hollywood Boulevard and not Avenue. I love checking the facts and I do a lot of that as I write, but continuity mistakes like eye color are things you’ll catch only at this tinkering stage of the game.

And if you’re lucky enough to have a copy editor, don’t take it for granted. Their job is to save you from making horrible mistakes you don’t even realize you’re making (“hanger” and “hangar” mean two very different things – I was saved from myself on that one once). Their job is not to spend all of their time correcting stuff you could have gotten right with ten seconds of effort. And if you don’t have a copy editor, I know you’ll be doing this step several times over.

Read aloud. I know. This is the one tinker I don’t like. It’s tedious and horrible (unless you were a theater major, in which case, could you come read mine, too?). If you can’t bring yourself to read the entire novel out loud, at least do important passages or plot points. Get your pet to listen if that helps you get through it. Then reward yourself with some TV. After all, you’re almost an actor now after all those soliloquies.  

Do you have other tinkering skills that you use on a completed manuscript? I’d love to hear them – they’ll help me put off reading my manuscript to the dog.

On designing a cover with 99Designs

by

Scott D Parker

We are always told not to judge a book by its cover, but come on, we all do. You know it. I know it. We can’t help it. When we’re scanning at any of our online bookstores, and looking at the thumbnails of all the covers, were not seeing the blurbs, nor any of the prose descriptions. And, unless the author is someone famous, you’re not even looking at the author name. What you’re looking at is the book cover.

And, when you’re an independent author as I am, a book cover is one of the make–or–break items. In fact, it might be the number one differentiator. If I am looking at a bunch of new books scheduled to be published this fall, I’mreally only making a judgment on the book by its cover.

So how do you get a good cover? Well, if you have any artistic talent and can manipulate the software, you do it yourself. And when I say software, I am not talking about Microsoft Paint. I am talking the high-end software. I subscribe to the Adobe suite which gets me Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe InDesign. There are other options, but those are the three that I use frequently. For all of my Western short stories--including the new one, "Mosaic Law," I created my own covers.

I designed the basic template and then filled in the gap with individual pictures drawn from stock images from such places like Shutterstock. But I’ve never considered something I personally designed to go into the cover of one of my novels.

I hire graphic designers. I had one guy—a former coworker—create the images for my first two novels based on my direction. Another friend of mine—ironically, also a former coworker—helped design my third novel, ALL CHICKENS MUST DIE. But when it came time to create book cover for the first Lillian Saxton novel, ULTERIOR OBJECTIVES, I wanted something different.

If you listen to a lot of these self-publishing podcasts like The Creative Penn or The Self-Publishing Podcast, you will likely hear advertisements for a website called 99designs.com. After hearing about it for over a year and a half, I decided to give it a try. The first thing to know is that this is a contest. When you sign up for the service, you get to choose what level—bronze, silver, gold, and platinum—you want to use. Naturally, bronze is the cheapest and platinum is the most expensive. In addition, the number of graphic designers that could potentially submit a design based on your directions increases with the more cash you lay out.

After you decide on your level, you have to fill out a few forms. The first of which is the title of your contest. You want to make this title as eye-popping as possible considering this is a contest. I chose a few key action words and phrases. I wrote out a lengthy brief detailing what I would like to see, color schemes, and other things that inspired me. I also had a crude pencil sketch that I took a picture of and uploaded. I have to say that it’s a little bit nerve-racking when you push the save button and the contest launches. You don’t know how many designers are going to show up or even bother to submit designs.

The first day, a designer contacted me via private email and suggested that I make the contest private. The difference between a private contest and a public contest is pretty obvious. The public contest means that when a designer submits a potential cover, everyone can see the designs, and the possibility of plagiarism is evident. A private design contest gives the author the potential to have many different styles of cover designs without the artists being influenced by each other. In my case, with a pencil sketch and a detailed brief, I kept it as a public contest on this, my first experience.

The process was extremely easy. The website software pings the author to judge the designs via a star rating. And when it came time to select finalists, all I had to do was click on the designs I liked. They moved forward while everyone else did not. I was very pleased with the process, and I will certainly be using 99designs again in the future. I would certainly recommend them for anyone out there needs to have a professional book cover created but doesn’t know how, but doesn’t have the time, to do it themselves. They can also do logos, banners, and any other kinds of graphics you might need in your author business.

And the cover I received for my book? Fantastic! You’ll see it soon as I roll out the publication of ULTERIOR OBJECTIVES: A Lillian Saxton Thriller later this fall in the cover. Needless to say, it was exactly what I wanted.

Perspective

I've been a big ball of stress. My big personal flaw is never feeling like I'm doing enough until I'm doing so much I'm crumbling under the weight of it. There's always that sweet spot where I have just enough to do to feel motivated and satisfied, but it passes quickly.

This leads to some strange bouts of self doubt. I am running a magazine and feeling like I'm not working on anything. Yesterday, though, I got a little TimeHop reminder that I published my first short story four years ago.

Four years! It was a much needed shot of perspective. I've actually accomplished a hell of a lot since I decided to start taking the writing thing seriously. I'm not going to get into listing all my publications and accomplishments (because when I see it all on paper it feels like very little again, and the drive to "do more" gets the better of me).

It wasn't a crime story, it was a love story, mostly. I worked on it for weeks, passing it back and forth with a good friend I've since mostly lost touch with. I found out it was going to be published while watching a Chinese Dragon show at the San Diego Zoo.

I got this tattoo the day it was published:

It's based on a line in the story, "A murder of crows was living inside me."

It was a big day, but it was only four years ago. Only. I gotta work on keeping that in mind.