WIN A KINDLE FIRE

March 1st is the big release date for MY ZOMBIE DOG and I'm promoting the book by giving away a free Kindle! (If the winner is a lucky US resident, they will win the Kindle Fire, for everywhere else the prize changes to a Kindle Keyboard 3G - due to Amazon shipping rules).

There's two ways to enter:

Buy MY ZOMBIE BOOK by clicking here and then fill in the entry form below. You will be asked for your receipt number from Amazon (it will be on the receipt Amazon email you - keep a copy of your receipt as proof of purchase if you win). Also, Tweet this competition with a link to this page and you get a second entry! You'll be asked for your tweet link, but if you're not sure how to do that, just use the hashtag #zombiedog in your tweet so it's easy to find.

or

Blog about this competition or about MY ZOMBIE DOG (you can review, talk about or interview) and then fill in the entry form below. You will be asked for your blog post link in the entry form. If you'd like an interview for your post, you can email me at charmaineclancy@gmail.com. Also, Tweet this competition with a link to this page and you get a second entry! You'll be asked for your tweet link, but if you're not sure how to do that, just use the hashtag #zombiedog in your tweet so it's easy to find.

Too easy! This competition runs from now until 31st March 2012.

You can only have one entry for blogging but if you blog and buy the book, you'll get two entries (plus another if you tweet about it!). Each entrant has the possibility of earning up to 3 entries.

Already own the Kindle Fire (I'm jealous!), it'd make a fantastic present to someone you love!

Why I'm doing this:

I love you guys and it's the blogasphere that has helped me to get serious about writing and learning the importance of a professional approach.

Also because of this book:

MY ZOMBIE DOG

On Zane’s 14th birthday he had to bury a dog. The next morning it’s in his room, tail wagging.

This is not the dog he wanted. No, Zane longed for a cool Collie or Shepard. Now he’s stuck with this scraggy, smelly undersized mutt. As if the dog wasn’t embarrassing enough, his mum wants to name it ‘Fluffy’. No way. Zane figures it dug itself out of the ground, so its name is Fossil. 

Fossil's a mean dog and will snap and bite at people... but why are those people bitten turning sluggish and craving strange food items like brains? Can Zane rid himself of this mutt and save his town from a zombie outbreak?

Now... Enter, and GOOD LUCK!

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DIY Book Covers

MY ZOMBIE DOG is nearly here!

Confession: I got it wrong. I thought I should format my ebook before the cover. You can learn from my mistake. The ebook needs to be formatted when it's ready to go live, BUT, you can use your cover for promotions and marketing leading up to the release of your book. I think you should finishing writing your novel first, but then get an image to place on your blog or on other peoples blogs. Get people familiar with your book before it's released. That's why I'm posting on covers before formatting:

Book Covers for the Indie Author

I've come to see there are two effective ways to produce your book cover, the first will usually generate a more professional effect and is a lot easier.


1. Pay a professional graphic artist to do it for you.
I know, it costs money and that worries you. This is an investment in your art. It doesn't matter how good your story is, if you do not market it to your target audience in an effective manner, they will never read it. I have been interested in the blurb of books, only to dismiss them because the cover looks crappy. I know I'm not unique, there's a whole cliche supporting my view. If the cover is crappy, it stands to reason that the formatting might be crud, which probably means the writing sucks - this is the train of though of your potential customer. Give them 100% on the WHOLE package. And if you do it yourself and you struggle, isn't that a week you'll be behind in your writing? Shouldn't you be getting the next book out there too? Budgets for book covers seem to range online from $50 to $200. I have a talented graphic artist working on my covers and my website. The end result will scream 'professional'.

2. Create your own book cover.

Despite telling you my first choice is to pay a professional, I did create a book cover for MY ZOMBIE DOG. This is for the same reason I formatted the book myself. This is my first book release and I wanted to understand and experience every step of the process. In future, I'll be able to have informed meetings with my graphic designers and digital publishers. It was also curiosity - I have a philosophy in life: how hard can it be? I then proceed to discover... quite hard.

If you are going to create your own book cover and you feel you have some talent in design, composition and colour, you'll need the following:

• An up-to-date computer with reasonable speed.
• Background image
• Fonts for text
• Tagline, Title and Author Name sorted (back blurb, review quotes, ISBN and barcode for back cover if you're producing a print book)
• Program for editing pictures, such as Photoshop
• Program for producing quality print media such as InDesign
• Pool of honest people to give feedback and advice

Background image

I love Shutterstock for photos, illustrations and vectors. It does have a subscription system where you can pay to download unlimited pics for a month etc, but I just buy a bundle of 5 pics at a time. This works out to about $10 per picture and you can download it in any size from small to extra large. There are plenty of other sites, just Google 'stock photos'. When you purchase a picture you are purchasing the license to use that picture for a particular use, such as book covers, t-shirts etc. You can manipulate the picture in Photoshop and I recommend you do, if it resembles the original too much, there is nothing stopping another author using the same pic for their book. I do see a lot of book covers duplicated on Amazon.

Fonts

Surprisingly, I think this element is the most important and even more important than your cover picture. The easiest way to spot a DIY cover seems to be in the typeface. Too many authors are just throwing any old text as their title on the cover and thinking 'that will do'.

Clarissa Draper did a great series on book cover design and this is her post on fonts.

The text type will depend partly on your book's style and genre, but titles should be big and easy to read (unless you're as well known as Stephen King don't put your name as big or bigger than your title).

To read more about why fonts should be big and clear go to Joel Friedlander's:

5 Great Fonts for Book Covers

One important thing to know about those 'free font' sites, is that some of them only give you license to use the font for private use. You need to find a site that offers commercial use, a good one that still has free fonts is Font Squirrel. I think it's also polite to acknowledge the font designer somewhere in your front pages (or back pages) where you would put credits for the graphic artist who designed your cover. By receiving recognition, artists can continue to find value in offering free products.

Play with your fonts, make your title pop. You can do this in InDesign by adding a 'stroke' (an outline to each letter), outer glow (light shines from behind each letter) or a drop shadow (kind of obvious what that is). I suggest making shadows anywhere from 30% to 75% opacity, solid 100% looks a little clunky and draws attention away from the letters.

Make sure your text contrasts nicely against your background, which means you need to make sure the colours stand out against each other but also that the tones and shades are different. If your blue text is the same shade as your green background, when Kindle converts your cover to greyscale (black and white) it will not be easy to read.

Text content

Of course your title has to be decided by this stage. Make it short and snappy. There are a few examples of successful long titles, but when appearing as a thumbnail amongst many other book covers on Amazon, a snappy title will stand out. I like big titles, I like to be able to read what they say even as a tiny thumbnail. Author's names can be small, even smaller should be your tagline, which can be read when the cover is opened. Check out the size of covers on Amazon and make sure you can read your text at that size. 

Pool of honest people.

I have you. My bloggers. For my cover art for MY ZOMBIE DOG I also used twitter (you can attach pictures) and asked people to please critique the cover. Google+ was great too. I mostly use my circle of writers in Google+, but I have another circle called 'iFriends', these are all the computer, techie and graphic people I follow. I rarely post to them (they're not so interested in hearing about my writing adventures) but I did post my cover to them and got some great suggestions for changes (my name was originally thicker and stark white, but it stood out too much). People like to be helpful, but I've noticed friends (including blogger friends) are reluctant to say anything negative incase they upset you. You need to give people permission to be honest in their feedback, and when you get negative feedback you need to be genuinely appreciative of it. This is the feedback that will help you improve.

This is also where you can get review quotes for your book. I'll be asking blog reviewers soon if they would consider reviewing MY ZOMBIE DOG or hosting me on their blog to talk about the book or about writing/publishing the book.

Want to know exactly what dimensions and size file your book cover should be? This is a detailed post by Webbish Books that will explain why you need two different sized images for your book cover:

Kindle Book Cover Size

You can also see:

4 Rules for Book Covers

Ugh - I have rules about blog lengths, but today I really needed to share all this information with you, hoping that some of it will help you out in your journey to publishing your book. And feel free to add honest criticism for the MY ZOMBIE DOG book cover! It's still a work in progress (my daughter wants to add a chomp mark out of one of the letters and I love that idea).

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200 Word Challenge

The challenge from Rach Writes was to:

Write a short story/flash fiction story in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be in any format, including a poem. Begin the story with the words, “Shadows crept across the wall”. These five words will be included in the word count. 

If you want to give yourself an added challenge (optional), do one or more of these:

• end the story with the words: "everything faded." (also included in the word count)

• include the word "orange" in the story

• write in the same genre you normally write

• make your story 200 words exactly!

I needed this exercise, I've been busy formatting, compiling and converting MY ZOMBIE DOG into a Kindle book this week. It's been very educational for me, but my brain was techno-fried. In my next post I'll share what I learned and some links for formatting ebooks.

Here is my flash fiction and I'm proud to say I met every one of the challenges above - Are you going to give it a go?

Just the Wind?

Shadows crept across the wall. Hector sucked in his breath.

Just moonlight flickering through trees. Nothing more.

Creak, creak, creak. What was that? His eyes bulged. The covers were pulled tightly to his chin despite the humid night.

It’s just an old house. Old houses creak. Hector wasn’t scared. He was thirteen now, not a little kid.

Scratch, scratch.

Maybe his parents were home early? But they wouldn’t be. He was big enough to be left alone, they would not be home until well after midnight. Downstairs, the grandfather clock chimed twelve times.

Midnight.

He was a big kid, too old to be scared. He leaned to his beside table and grabbed his torch. The light glowed a soft orange. Great, batteries going flat.

Rattle, clink, clink.

Just the wind blowing chimes. Wait… did they have chimes?

Squeak, clang.

The front door? No. Just his imagination.

Thump, thump… up the stairs!

Hector leapt up, but tangled in bedclothes he tripped. Sprawled on the floor he gasped as the handle to his door turned. He scrambled to stand, thrusting the torch out as a weapon.

“Hector? We’re home early.”

“I was fine alone.” 

The torch light flickered once, then everything faded.

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Platform Building for Writers

Part of my business plan includes promotion, for writers today one of the most effective ways to promote is to build a platform. Quite simply, this is just the space where you market yourself. If your platform is effective it can help guide readers to your books and generate sales.

If you've read any writers' blogs you'll already know that there is a huge supportive community out there. Other writers will not only cheer you on, give you great tips and ideas, but sometimes they'll even buy a copy of your book (I know I LOVE buying a book that I find on a blogger-friend's site). 

Let writers help you with building your author platform - a good start? Check out Rach Writes. Rachel runs the Writers' Platform Building Campaign and you can sign up! It's a great way to meet new followers for your blog. I've joined up - will you?

Want more on building your platform? Try my previous posts:

Writers Platform - is it worth the hassle?

Build your author marketing plan

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The Writing Business - My Plan

In my last post I spoke about the need for a writer to have a plan. This could be as elaborate as a detailed business plan or as simple as a list of steps you need to take to become published (and then don't forget the steps to market what you publish).

Today I thought I'd share with you my list - this is not complete, there are previous steps I've already completed (write an author bio, get a blog or website, get a good author pic... oh yeah, write a novel...). Maybe you'll find some helpful ideas on there, or maybe you can suggest some things I've forgotten! As I tick off each step I'll share my experience and you can learn by my (hopefully rare) mistakes. I'll be sharing my experiences organising book covers next.

From Manuscript to Book:

Edit book

• Check out professional editing organisations
• Circulate amongst Beta readers

Cover design

• Search contacts for artists, graphic artists and professionals at book cover design.
• Check Shutterstock or other photo sites for good stock photos.
• Check online resources.

Format e-book and Print On Demand book

• Check with State writers groups for contacts for digital publishers.
• Look at CreateSpace
• Kindle
• iBooks
• All others: Smashwords, Dymocks, Fishpond etc.

Advertising material:

• Bookmarks
• Postcards 
• Book Trailer - speak to Luke or Rhonda
• Slogans ('cause I have too much time on my hands):
• Zombie Dog hates your guts... loves your brains.
• Tell Zombie Dog to heel, and it’ll bring you a nice fresh one.
• Zombie Dog’s best trick: ‘play dead’ (Zombie Dog is not playing).
• Zombie Dog thinks you look nom nom.
• Zombie Dog, nom nom nomming her way into your heart (cross out, replace with brain).
• Brrrraaaains means I love you.
• (picture of two mafia guys tossing a body rolled in a rug to the doghouse) Sometimes Zombie Dog comes in handy.

Read Amazon guidelines

Decide on release date - promote book leading up to release

PROMOTE

• Check out books on promoting your novel.
• Read the John Locke guide
• Check out guides to ebook publishing
• Giveaway - Kindle?
• Organise blog hop
• Look up other promotional ideas
• T-shirts (overkill???)
• Talk to contacts in programming about creating a game app to pair with the ebook.

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Writing Business - Step 1

MY ZOMBIE DOG is ready for production and I've been looking into the business of writing. There's so much involved in getting your manuscript from story to book (or ebook), so I started by making a list of everything I could possibly think of that would need to be covered. Now it's time to start tackling that list.

Making progress through lists is so satisfying, I think I could be a professional list-ticker. I've now accomplished the first step to becoming professional at this writing gig (other than actually writing something). I've set up my ABN (Australian Business Number), this registers myself as a business and can be done (in Australia) by contacting the ATO (be ready to be on hold for over half an hour) or going to their website:

http://www.abr.business.gov.au/

You can be a writer without an ABN, but this way I can set up my business of writing and keep it separate from all other expenses/incomes. It also allows me to set up a business name or trading name for digital publishing. Here's hoping I have lots of tax to pay next financial year due to the overwhelming success of my ebooks!

My next steps include sourcing an illustrator for the cover art and organising to have the manuscript file formatted into an ebook.

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Time Travelling for Stories

Yesterday I time travelled. It was a family outing. My dad (Smithy to the locals of Brisbane) took us in his pride and joy - his 1956 Desoto:

We headed out to a small town outside of Brisbane called Marburg where there was this adorable old pub:

Then we browsed an antique store.

I figured out why I love old furniture, old buildings and old cars - because they have stories.

On the drive home I felt like I had travelled back in time. Smithy and Tim were in the front seat and I sat in the back with my girls. I was a kid again, looking out the window, singing tunes, imagining stories and yep, even falling asleep before we made it home (although this time no one carried me inside).

And was it inspirational? How does A MURDER IN MARBUG sound?

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