It's been a long road, but I'm still here, and there's news

This was a thrill ... in fact, the whole project has been a blast. Mike Adamson's Tales Of the Middle Stars anthology has just been published, and it was by tremendous pleasure for me to provide the interior illustrations, while Italian artist Luca Oleastri provided the cover. I also edited the whole collection, which was another kind of pleasure, and seeing the book go on release today -- hardcover, paperback, and ebook ... well, as I said, what a blast. 

I can't recommend the book highly enough, and not merely because of my involvement. It's a luminous collection of stories that embody what I, personally, think of as "science fiction." This is SF as I prefer it ... as I fell in love with it as a child. In this work, there is an enduring sense of wonder even while this is fiction written from an adult perspective, about a tough, unforgiving universe seen through adult eyes. Please do check it out. 

In the last week, I've also invested a lot of time working hand-in-glove with Mike to bring his website up to date (ah, the old days when I used to write code for a living...! Way back when, before there were website creation programs that did the job for you. I just dated myself, didn't I?), and again, I'd like to invite you to go over and take a look. It's ostensibly a writing website, but it's one of the most visually exciting sites I've ever seen, with so much art, colour, and old-fashioned verve.

Mike also invited me to place a gallery page of my own on-site there, so -- how could I resist. The result is "The Artist" page, tucked away on the The Worlds of Mike Adamson, and I have to say, it's beautiful. "Thrilled" is an understatement. It looks like this:

...and by far the hardest thing about it was choosing a tiny handful of images to "speak for me" across more than a decade of work. I might go back and swap them out every couple of years, to give more pictures an airing.

The book and magazine covers in the right-side column are the publications in which I've appeared as a writer ... and on that score, I have a little news to pass along at last. 

What a great pleasure to be able to report that Falling will be appearing in ANALOG Science Fiction, probably some time in 2026. 

This one was a lot of fun to write, and for the first time I was able to "go play in the Jovian system," with  FIFO worker on the assignment to end them all. Fly in, fly out work is one thing ... but when the flight to and from the job is a year old, it's a life-changer. In Falling, the central character is out there for the best and worst of all reasons: money. Without it, everything falls apart, yet the quest to earn it is not conducive to family life. And yes, our hero is left a partner and child back on Earth. What's a mother to do?

This story had been in my mind in one form or another for some time, but I'd usually pictured it as taking place on Mars. The thing is that I've written so many stories set on Mars that -- 1) I didn't want to identify myself as "that writer who only writes about Mars," not to mention -- 2) I felt as if I needed a challenge. Get out of the familiar environment (which is almost a witticism) of Mars and make a foray into the Badlands. And they don't come much "badder" than Jupiter. So...

Much research later, Falling found itself completely restructured. The central character changed from being a detective assigned by the department on Earth to investigate a murder in the industrial south of our neighbouring world to being an engineer working with the heaviest heavy industry imaginable. And the stage on which the story plays out shifted from the aforesaid Martian industrial wasteland to the upper atmosphere of a giant world that really, seriously, wants to kill you. Result: a story with which I was extremely happy. 

And the cherry on the cream is that this one will be appearing in ANALOG Science Fiction in a year or so. It's always a thrill!

Next: back to the very serious job of editing, with two major projects ahead of me for Mike and after both books are delivered, he and I will be collaborating on a novel...

And on a personal note, visitors to this blog might be wondering where I disappeared to, about nine or ten months ago, vanished without trace. Was it my own health breaking down again? No, not this time. In fact, it was my husband. The "indestructible" Dave turns out to be far from indestructible. We've known for about the last eighteen months that something wasn't right, but in September 2024, it was time to go to the doctor, face a battery of tests, and find out what it is, and how bad.

Well, it's not good. In October last year, they gave him two years to live. 

Let that sink in. Naturally, I had bigger things to think about than a hobby with art. There were things to do, challenges to be defeated, a new way of thinking to be embraced. Nine months later, here we are. Dave is still with us, but ... but ... but ... You know how it goes. The future is in flux; nothing can be guaranteed, we take nothing for granted, and I don't (can't) make promises about what I'll deliver next year. Will I get back to doing art? Possibly. Maybe. The truth is that my art lies very much under Dave's shadow, and anything remotely like CG work will bring back so many memories, it may be so exquisitely painful that I just can't do it. Short answer: I don't know. I'll continue to write; this I can promise, because that's something I've done since childhood. But few visitors to this blog come here to read. 

Future art might be about embracing AI because I have no access to computers powerful enough to do CG work. Or it might be about sketchpads, pencils and paint. Who can say? For the moment, my time belongs to my dear husband of many years, and every day is precious. Wish us well, and cross your fingers. Science may come to the rescue with a cure, in the nick of time. I always did say that Dave had the luck of any ten people all added together. Okay -- let's see that luck work for him, for us, again.

Done and dusted: eighteen covers? No sweat. Well ... okay, a little bit.

Finally, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, adjusting and re-re-repainting ... here's the last image in the current commission set of book covers, DONE. It's been a huge job:

You have to conceptualize the thematic material, then track down the cover elements, do the background painting, design the character, design the render, do the render, paint render and background together in post work -- and along the way wrangle a superior raytrace that'll actually serve the purpose, according to today's demands. You'll be lucky to get through a project in a day; and very fortunate indeed if the client doesn't want something changed later --

Which is why you always, always keep all the project files for every piece of art. I have everything going back to the reference photos for every item in this eighteen-cover commission, and several times I was sooo glad I had them, because I had to go back in and work on some detail or other.

But we're done now, and the last job was to add the text elements for title and author byline, on each cover. Ye gods. One last thing I did was to track down the best available art for six other existing covers and reprocess it through to meet the same size and shape requirements -- and in one or two cases, to redesign the text elements to bring these others into line with the new edition.

The result --

-- nice. Very. I've uploaded this "proof sheet" (as we used to call such an item in the days when we used to contact-proof negatives in the darkroom) at about 2300 pixels wide, so you can really get a look at the new work. If you've been playing "spot the novel" I was working on during the last couple of months, here's your chance to find out how right you were! Some speak for themselves, of course, and others you could probably work out by identifying the giveaway themes in the background. A gargoyle. A stone circle. A galleon. A schooner. A light plane crashed in the sea. A break-bulk freighter. A rain forest.

Enjoy!

Next, for me ... I'm working on something of my own. I've got a fantasy novel going (!) and am dying to visualize characters and situations, so I'll be playing with art purely for myself. The novel is a lot of fun -- having a ball with it. Am six chapters through and starting to think about packaging and promoting it. Will I bother looking for an American agent --?! Ye gods. There's easier ways to beat yourself up. No, no, I'm going to have fun with this, not fifteen years of frustration and heartache, before I give the book away in 2032!

Can you even imagine 2032?

As they say on the TV news shows, "Back soon with more."

Assignment: rejacket about half of Mel Keegan ... and do it in three days, thank you. Ouch!

Click on all images to see at large size!

Every so often an assignment comes along, right out of the blue, and you wonder how in the world you're going to pull this particular rabbit out of the hat. This one was a beauty. Produce something like fifteen book covers, and get them "good to go" in two or three days, max! Ouch.

You're asking yourself, why this should be necessary? It's a long story, and one that caught me unawares. I'm rather out of touch with the business end of publishing at this point, because --

As the more observant Mel Keegan fans can hardly fail to have noticed by this time ... DreamCraft has actually closed its doors. This has been a while coming, and the close-down process was underway for more than a year, but ...

Yes, we've gone. DreamCraft as we knew it has passed into history, while Dave and I have gone on to other things; and I know this has left Mel somewhat high and dry. It's always like this when publishers close, and alas they tend to close their doors quite often, leaving writers scrambling. (Sorry, guys. We reached a point where it was necessary: life, the universe and ... everything.)

Since DreamCraft has been spiraling down for a long, long time, I haven't been keeping up with the changing requirements of the vendors, such as Kindle and Smashwords. All this, I passed right along to Mel, who's been keeping his titles online, right where they've always been.

Everything was smooth sailing till he received a surprise email from Smashwords, informing him (along with several gajillion other writers and publishers) that Sony's cover art requirements had changed. Say, what?!

Out of the blue, Sony (as in, the iBook store), decided they wanted BIG images to illustrate their catalog. Heaven only knows why, because teeny little thumbnails are all they ever display -- but Kindle has this same requirement. Beats hell out of me: don't ask. Truth is, it also probably beats hell out of Mark Coker, the boss at Smashwords, which is the vector and portal by which folks get into the Sony store, right? For years, Mark Coker's requirements ran along the lines of small images, 400x600, that kind of thing: small and quick to up/download -- made sense.

Then, bam! Not only does Sony tell Smashwords, the distributor, that they'll be needing BIG cover images, but also, nobody's going to be grandfathered in ... so all you guys out there who have looong backlists at Sony, supplied via Smashwords, will have to upload new cover art. Oh, brilliant.

Now, this might not be a problem when a book is pretty new and the art's on hand -- but what about books that go back many years? Do you still have the art? What version? What size? You guessed...

Most of the art for the Mel Keegan covers goes back as much as ten YEARS ... some of it doesn't even exist anymore at large size. We had a hard drive crash and lost a tonne of data a long while ago. It was never an issue, as the old covers were just "there," sitting where they needed to be, in an acceptable format --

Until suddenly they were no longer acceptable. And there was no way ... none! ... to just open up an old file and whip up a big version. Soooo...

Leave it to Gmail to dump two out of three of the Smashwords notifications directly into the trash, so Mel didn't know anything about this till almost the eleventh hour. Then, leave it to Mel to not check emails for long enough that the covers on 15 of his titles had actually gone down at iBooks before he realized what was going on, and sent up the balloon! (Okay ... Mel's working hard and putting up with way too much strife in his personal life for me no apportion any blame here, in reality. Just kidding, kiddo.)

So: panic. "Help! I need about thirty BIG covers fast, what can we do?!

 "We?" What's all this "we" business?!

First thing I did was go through the old hard drives, searching for the ancient developmental files for the old covers. Found some that worked just fine. HELLGATE stuff -- no problem. Images like MORE THAN HUMAN, HOME FROM THE SEA and whatnot -- these are new enough for the art to be there when you look for it. So half the list was easy.

The problem was, I came up fifteen covers short. Fifteen book covers that are going to represent Mel, catch the eye and (duh) convince prospective readers to part with dosh, in the Sony store. Gak. What now?

Now, you're going to have to get creative; and whatever you're going to do, you better do it fast. So the job can't involve fifteen new paintings, each of which take a whole day ... nor can it involve fifteen new Lux renders, each taking up to 40 hours! The window of what was doable was fairly small. Hmm.

The first thing I looked at was using a powerful imaging engine to double the size of some of the old renders. Irfanview is the best I know for this: better than Photoshop. Sorry, guys. It just is. So I was able --

-- to get some pretty good base art to work with; and then a lot of painting began. For example, check out the cover for GROUND ZERO. That one was worked up from a small image enlarged by a 2:1 ratio. The result was good enough to pass muster, when a lot of digital painting was added over the top.

We got away with a few covers using this technique. Another two that were workable-with on this model were SHADOW AND FLAME and TIGER, TIGER. But...

-- for a number of the others, it just wasn't going to work. In some cases, the only artwork surviving was way too small, and in a couple of cases there was nothing for it: it was a fresh render, or bust! And in two cases even this was impossible, and the problem was cured with public domain artwork over which a tonne of digital painting was performed.

The covers using the public domain art are FORUNES OF WAR and WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT. And the two for which the new renders were done are BREAKHEART and CALLISTO SWITCH. (Also, the work for AN EAST WIND BLOWING was interesting, since it was compiled from an old render of mine from years ago and a public domain photo of the Sutton Hoo Saxon-era helmet, plus a lot of Photoshop work.)

And in one case, I got to do a "flash" painting at high speed: STORM TIDE. This one actually turned out to be a damned good painting, even though it was whipped together in under an hour. It's a photo of a storm sky from years ago, and a photo of the ocean from last December, joined at the horizon line and then color-matched in Photoshop ... and then a lot of overpainting using Photoshop brushes. I have to admit, I was surprised and pleased by the results. I'm quite proud of this one!

Finding the original art for the TIGER, TIGER cover was an adventure ... a trip through history in the form of hard drives that haven't been accessed in a looong time. But there it was, albeit too small to be useful today. Irfanview did a terrific job of resizing it, and then a lot of Photoshop work was done on top of the art, to bring it up to scratch for today's usages...

And in the course of hunting this one down, I stumbled over rafts of digital art going back to something like 2005-2007 ... many PCs ago, and long before my association with 3D and Photoshop. Dang, but there's some gorgeous art there! Am going to dig it out, and post it on the blog here because ... well, it ain't 3D as such, but it's gorgeous art that I haven't seen in years. The truth is, I'd forgotten all about it.  So watch out for a post or two resurrecting all this stuff.

This is the first project where I've ever used public domain -- mashable -- images. The images for this one, above, and for FORTUNES OF WAR, were sourced from Wikimedia (commons.wikimedia.org) where the provenance of the images is supplied, and licensing details provided, so that you, as an artist, can be sure you're allowed to do what you're doing. They have about a zillion images, but you'd be surprised how few are available on any given topic. You're not choosing from 200 images of Cruades era subjects, for example; so getting a picture to fit is something of a crapshoot. With these two, we were lucky.

So, with the artwork more or less sorted, the next job was figuring out a format to hold it -- a template. Mel is wrangling his backlist himself right now; and this will likely continue to be the case. It made sense to draw the old titles together as "The Mel Keegan Collection," and this made it easy to design a quick, eye-catching template ... which you see here. Nice!

So, the whole assignment took a smidgen under three days, and the uploads were done by the end of that third day. Whew! And when I'd actually sunk my teeth into it, it was actually a lot of fun. Gave me the chance to do some work in Bryce 7 Pro that would otherwise never have occurred to me -- such as the new render for CALLISTO SWITCH, which you see on the left here.

Packed among the materials in Bryce 7 Pro is a fantastic set of photographic textures of the planets ... Jupiter, Mars, Io, what have you. This was a marvelous chance to load up a spaceship model, make some spheres, slap on the textures, set the lights, and click Render!

The interesting this about this one is that by the time I came to do this render the template had been designed, and I was able to have Bryce render this picture at the exact dimensons I wanted it. It's so odd, watching Bryce render something that looks like ... a bookmark. Then it went into Photoshop for some overpainting which reminds you somewhat of MORE THAN HUMAN, and ... done.

The question a great many readers will be asking right now is, what's next for Mel Keegan, since DreamCraft has pulled up stumps and vanished into the night...

Last I heard, MK was talking to a couple of publishers, though I have no idea which ones they are, or what the outcome of talks might have been. What I can tell you is that, for the time being, Mel Keegan is actually in control of the old DreamCraft domain and brand. Yep -- he owns the domain. His existing books will remain online at Amazon, Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo and what have you.

What about new books? Well, publishing is nowhere near as easy as many writers assume! If Mel goes that route, he's about to find himself wrangling the zillion-and-one details that make your life ... interesting. Tell me about it. And yes, he'll probably do that. And yes, I'll tell you about it when something comes along, because I've put up my hand to do cover art ... this was fun!

Free ebooks! Because I'm having a birthday...

Yes, it's my birthday weekend. Don't ask how old I am: 'tis a delicate question. Keith Hamilton Cobb (tall dark and beautiful, dreadlocks and all) had the right answer, when someone asked him how old he was -- in fact, he was about forty, not that he looked anywhere near it. But he said, "Old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyway." Well said.

So, since I'm having a birthday, I thought -- let's party. Let's have freebies, and ebooks make the best e-gifts. I thought about wallpapers, but in fact the blog is full of them -- I've been uploading art at 1200 and 1600 wide for over a year now, and all you have to do is go back through the "of interest" posts, save the art and you're done. So then I thought about ebooks.

Here are three, and I've formatted them to work well with the 10" screens. In fact, we just got a netbook with a 10" screen, so I was able to test them for size and appearance. If you want to see the whole page at once, in the proper orientation, use Acrobat's "rotate page" feature, and stand the netbook on end, as if you're holding a large book. Also, I set the type for the stories in 14 point, so even if you're reading at 75% page size, it's still easy reading.

(The only thing I haven't done is to test these books on the 7" tablet ... because the battery appears to be flat, and it takes forever to recharge. But I think it ought to work just fine, because of the 14 point text.)

So, here are two ebooks, all made in Serif Page Plus, for those who're interested in the "how" aspect. I've done them as PDFs specifically because I wanted to achieve a blend of art and text with an overall "storybook" layout, like this...

...and so forth! As much as I love the epub file format, you can't do this kind of thing in epub ... they're strictly for reading, with "header art" style illustrations -- not what I wanted here. So, good old PDF it is this time.

I've done three books, and by now you'll pretty much know what they are! I've made up The Legend of Chino Vollias as a very lovely book; I've done the same for Invitation to the Crypt, which you read a few days ago, for Halloween ... 

Someone was asking about Photoshop the other day, I forget who, but the answer is -- Photoshop: Elements 10 is included FREE on the installation disk for the Wacom Bamboo. The program is worth several hundred bucks, and if you're buying the mouse pen/tablet drawing set, there it is, registration number and all. I got the Wacom Bamboo for my birthday ... actually, I got it weeks ago, have been using it and loving it:

The only difference between what you see here, and my setup is that mine is organize to run left handed. I'm, uh, ambidextrous. I know it's really weird ... some things I like to do right handed, some things I do left handed. So my Wacom is set up exactly opposite to what you see here. And I love it!!

So where's the goodies, right?

Here you go:

An Invitation to the Crypt -- almost identical to the version published on the blog a short while ago; richly illustrated, formatted to suit the 10" screens or a laptop, whatever. The only downside is that the art has pushed the file size out to just under 3.5MB. That's not too bad, when you think about it. There's no DRM on the file ... the only thing I would ask is, if you're going to share it with friends, please ask them to visit the blog and download their own. Why? Because when they get on the blog, they might spend half an hour looking at my stuff, and that would be nice. Any warnings? None. There's a "subtext" relationship, if you choose to see it ... Amadeus and Rick are almost certainly intimate. But the story is written in such a way that if you prefer to overlook this and see two good friends, that's all you'll see. [Sorry: dead link. But you can still read the story in its newer, polished format -- with a suite of new artwork. It has had a title change and is now Invitation to The Crypt, and the new artwork looks like this -- more than worth a look, trust me. You'll find it on my writing blog, right here.]

The Legend of Chino Vollias -- in every way identical to the story which was published for the "Happy Post 700" blog entry ... also richly illustrated and formatted the same way, to suit the 10" screens. The download size of this one is also a tad high because of the art -- you're looking at a whisker over 5MB. Sorry guys, but high-rez art does this to the file size. Again, there's no DRM, and the only thing I ask is that if you want to share, send your friends here to pick up their own copy ... same reason. Any warnings? No. There some nudity, but nothing you won't see on any beach downunder. There's a passing allusion to the fact Chino swings both ways, but the main romance is actually straight. [Sorry: dead link. But stay tuned: I'll be publishing the story to my writing blog momentarily, at which point this link will be live again, albeit as a streaming-read, web based, not a PDF.] 

You might notice that the download links refer back to my old, defunct 2012 gallery site. The gallery is done, but these links should still work. If they don't -- it's fixable, but I'll need someone to let me know that these links have gone dead!

Enjoy ... um, "Happy Birthday to Me." 

Jade, 3 November (celebrating over the whoooole weekend!) 

From manuscript to bookstore ... a route map to get you there!

Renaissance eBooks

The other day I was asked a very good question, and this is an excellent opportunity to answer it, for several reasons. One, I'm in  a blogging mood. Two, I've actually started writing myself. Three, since I've started writing too, I'm thinking analytically about the process of publishing, something I haven't done in years -- and this was the meat and potatoes of the question put to me, which was this:

What does it take to edit, format and publish a book from the time an author hands over the writing to the moment when readers can buy it online?

That's a highly astute question! Let me see if I can put the process into perspective here ... and at the same time show off a little of the art I did as a cover artist for one of the other ebook publishers, while I was working with them in 2010 and 2011.

Here goes...

Renaissance eBooks:
Bonds

The publishing process all starts with an evaluation of  the quality of the work that's received by an editor or publisher. Some writers are good enough to deliver what I call "bulletproof copy." This is work that's virtually good enough to go when it lands on my desk. Mel Keegan falls neatly into this bracket, but he's the exception, not the rule. It's far more usual for a writer to need at least a degree of "remedial" editing to get the work fully up to speed.

"Remedial" editing is just what it sounds like: a tidy-up job. Very few writers have grammar that is 105% perfect, 110% of the time. Even fewer writers will be able to hammer out a denouement that is flawless, or close to it. And even fewer will be able to achieve crystal clarify of exposition every time, all the time. A good editor will go through and make recommendations for how a work should be massaged to get it to the point where the reading experience will be highly pleasurable. And let's face bald facts: the writer is trying to please the reader, because they want to sell copies of not just this book, but their next one, too!

Renaissance eBooks:
Mooning the Stars

So if you're a writer just finishing a book, you might want to bounce it off a couple of reliable "beta readers" before sending it to a professional editor, to get some perspective. The better the work is before you send it in, the better your chances of selling it!

Some writers ... those with many years of experience ... will be able to do all this in their own heads, or perhaps somewhere between their eyeballs, fingertips and computer screens. Let's say you're already darned good and you're sure of the veracity of the work. Next job? Copy editing. Here's where sharp eyes and vast amounts of concentration come into play, and it's true that the more human eyes on the job you have, the better the result will be. Copy editing and proof reading are about scanning on the most minute level, looking for typos (typographical errors), spellos (spelling errors which will elude the spell checker), and grammos (grammatical errors). Even if you known the difference between words like discreet and discrete, and compliment and complement, you fingers can type the wrong one on autopilot, and no spell checker will pick it up. Then there's rhyming typos, and near-mis typos ... like to and too, and the and thee and three, and about a thousand more...

Renaissance eBooks:
Vampire Girlfriend

Proofread till you think you're done. Then proof some more. Recruit your friends and relatives to proof for you. As a last resort, high a freelance editor or "proofie" to look at the work when it's as good as you can get it. They'll charge a fee, so make sure the work is very good before you send it to them. A freelance can either heavily correct four pages per hour, or triple-check 25 pages an hour. If the manuscript is problematical when you hand it to an editor, it could cost you a lot of money to get it up to speed...
(And here, it's worth asking the key question: are you sure about your grammar and technical skills? I mean, are you dead sure? Do you know for a fact you have a strangle-hold on the vagaries of the English language, or are you still playing it by ear, taking the occasional shot in the dark, and hoping to score? If you're not so sure of your English technical skills that you can do this stuff with your eyes shut, ask a good freelance editor to look at a few pages for you. Don't submit pages that have been corrected by someone else -- send your own words, just as you write them. If they come back heavily annotated, you'll know it's time to hit the books and learn this trade before you try to sell your work.)

Renaissance eBooks

If you do have to hit the books ... don't worry. It's all part of the process. Every writer, bar none, has to go through this. You'll get through it too, and you can enjoy the journey. The bottom line will be the same: you'll become a good writer who's ready to go pro. It'll soon be time to submit your work to an editor -- or, time to go idie, if you've caught the DIY bug. And let me assure you right here, there is nothing wrong with going indie! It can be a lot of fun, and if you do it right, it can be lucrative, too. The only thing readers demand of you is complete professionalism, so you'll need to gird your loins and give them what the want: 1) a top-notch story. 2) Good writing skills. 3) "Proper" book packaging. 4) A lovely cover that will catch their eyes in a catalog. (The eye-catching cover is essential, because if you don't catch the eye in the catalog, readers won't even be reading your sample chapter.)

So the next step in this logic chain is packaging. Once you've reached the point where you firmly believe the body of the work is polished till it shines, it's time to get it into a shape that's acceptable at market. To quote Han Solo, this is where the fun begins.

Renaissance eBooks

You might think packaging starts with the cover ... and you'd be dead wrong. Your first question needs to be this: "Who'll be reading this book, and what will they be reading it on?" It's true to say that about 75% of your readers will be reading on a Kindle! So you can let Kindle worry about packaging the product. Make sure you get the "front matter" right, and do a top-notch html file for upload to them, and they'll take care of the rest. But if you only release through Kindle, you're losing twenty out of every potential hundred bucks. It's worth going the extra distance and producing at least two other file formats: epub and pdf.

Everyone in the world can make a pdf these days, so I won't even go there; but epub is still new enough to be worth talking about. Even now, it's a marginal format -- meaning, fewer people are using it than ought to be ... because it's not only better than pdf, it's far, far better  than pdf, and if the format is properly promoted in the near future it won't go the way of Betamax! If it does, I'll be grinding my teeth, because epub is the perfect format for any device I own (BeBook, Android tablet, smart phone, laptop, desktop) while pdf gives me no end of headaches on the BeBook and 7" Android tablet ... and on the phone, phhhtttt. Forget it. Phones hate pdfs. Yet most people (up to 80%, according to the forecast) will be reading on phones inside the next few years!

Renaissance eBooks

So here's a tip: don't get too cheap. Spend forty or fifty bucks or so, and get a proper program to make proper epubs. Play a hunch, and guess that there's going to be gajillions of readers like me in the future, who're more and more predisposed to using only epubs because pdfs are just too much hassel ... and we love to read on our phones. So long as you have a program to make the epub for you, you have no problems. The file will be fully professional -- which is what readers demand. If you try to use one of the online "converters" ... well, they're free. That's about all you can say for them. The product? Crap. Sorry, guys.

Now you're cooking: the book is well thought out and plotted, well written and edited, proofread to death; you've done your html for upload to Kindle, your epub and pdf making software is on standby. Now -- now! -- is the time to think about your cover art. And this is where someone like me comes into the picture.

Renaissance eBooks

There are artists out there everywhere, and a lot of them are very, very good indeed. The only thing you need to make sure is how much they're going to charge, and if their work is what you want/need. As a hint, or tip, don't pay an arm and a leg, because there are artists who'll deliver fantastic stuff for under $50 -- even under $40; and if you'll take an "off the peg" or "ready to go" piece of work, you can get out of this particular wood for under $30! A red hot tip? Unless you're as sure of your artistic skills as you are of your grammatical skills, don't try to do the cover yourself. Its another of those instances where getting too cheap will hurt you in the long run, because ... well, now you're tickling the wonderful world of marketing books, where having a great cover is one of the concrete ground rules. I'm only going to say a quick few words about marketing books, because this wasn't part of the original question!

Fabian Black

The original question was about what goes into getting a book from the submission copy to the point of release, but What Happens Next is an even bigger story. For instance, it's easy to whack your book onto Kindle, but here you are now, with a fantastic epub and pdf ... what next? You'll need a website and/or blog to sell them. You'll also need a file server to deliver the books and track sales, and pay you. Good news: anyone with PayPal can get a Payloadz account, and this answers almost every question you have about file serving and tracking, in one hit. A website? Well, give some serious thought to using a Blogger blog like this one! Whack your "buy" buttons into the margins as "gadgets," and run your blurbs and covers in the posts. Umm ... duh. But what about getting into those other stores, like Apple iBooks, and B&N Nook, and Kobo, Sony, and so forth? Well, up to very recently I'd have had to say that Smashwords was the best way to go. They're an aggregator, or accumulator -- meaning, they take in books at one end from writers and indie publishers, and they hose them into the big online stores, like the aforementioned. But...

Fabian Black

It is nooooo secret that Smashwords can, and does, drive saints to drink. There's a thing the boss, Mark Coker, calls the 'meatgrinder.' I've had reason to call it 'the sausage machine,' because it can make you feel like you've been through a garbage grinder yourself! It's the conversion engine at the heart of Smashwords that takes in the trim, spruce .doc file you submit and (theoretically) converts it into html, pdf, epub, mobi and so forth. When it works, it's a dream. But it doesn't always work, and when it doesn't, you get error messages about things that don't actually need fixing ... a book can wind up 'caught in the machinery' for months. Mel Keegan's Flashpoint was caught that way. It went into the big online stores (other than Kindle) four months late, and there was not one thing we could do to get around this. In all fairness, I'll admit that 80% of the time the Smashwords engine works just fine. But when it chooses to hiccup (or barf, as Dave says), it's the most infuriating process in the world. And it turns out, you have an option. Read on!

Lately, Lulu has branched out into ebooks. Not only that, but Lulu will put you into a lot of the same stores that Smashwords reaches ... moreover, somehow (and I have no idea why), the sales at Nook and so forth tend to be a leeeetle but better via Lulu than via Smashwords. But here's the big thing: the process of getting to Nook and iBooks via Lulu is very, very easy. You send them a pdf and they do the rest. There's only small downside: the epub file will have unjustified text. Before you have the heebie-jeebies about this (too late, right?) it's a good idea to do some research not only into the devices people will be using to read, but also into the software they'll be reading in. One of the most popular epub readers -- free and downloaded hundreds of thousands of times -- is known as Moon Reader. And no matter how brilliant your epub is, Moon Reader will not display justified text. So, before you ditch Lulu as an avenue to get you easily, painlessly, into the ebook stores, think about the number of people who're reading on Moon Reader. Ahhh....so.

Now that you have have your stock and distribution figured out, you're ready to start marketing ... and you'll be asking, "How do I sell books?" That really is another question, and not one I'm going to tackle here, because it's way outside the scope of the original question. However, Mel Keegan has written a fantastic article on this subject, which is about to appear in a book, some time in July 2012. When that book comes out, I'll return to this post and update it with the url.

So ... how long does it take to go from Finished Book, to In-store and Earning? This depends on how much editing you need to go through, how long the book is, how many proofreads you can organize, how exacting you'll be with the cover art, and if you go smoothly through the process of upload to the engines which get you into the stores. Kindle takes just a couple of days to get a book into the catalog ... on the other end of the scale, if you decide to publish in paperback too, you'll need to format everything, then order a physical proof for delivery by mail, give it the OK, or correct it and go to another proof, and so forth. Paperbacks are a different animal, and a complex one, which might account for why the vast majority of publishing these days concerns ebooks! If you can organize reliable editing and proofreading, and you know what you're doing with the software, you can get through a normal-length book in a month or so. That's a book of something like 80-100,000 words. Longer books simply take more time. An artist should be able to deliver a finished work in anything from a few days to a week, depending on what complexity you're asking for. Then, entry to the Kindle catalog takes a couple of days, and getting to B&N, iBooks et al via an aggregator can take from a few days to a few weeks.

Then the marketing starts ... and as I said, I won't tackle that here, but will wait till the book for which MK has recently written a very good feature is released, and will return and update this with the url.

Hope this has been useful!

Jade, July 22