My Steps To Self Publishing

Where have I been again? Yep, I’ve been busy working on another book. This one is a novella. “What’s a novella?” some might ask, well it’s a bit shorter than an novel. See definitions of the differences below.

So back to my novella….

Previously, it was going to part of an anthology, but the project was, unfortunately, unable to be completed. The good news is that when working with anthologies you can take your own work, apart from the others, and have another book for yourself!!

Now, Dah-dah-dah-dah-dahhhhh!!!!!…. to my AMAZING Book Cover Designer.
As you know, she starts of with a sketch.

MAKE SURE TO CLICK ON THE PICTURES TO GET A GREAT VIEW!!

I start with describing what I would like the cover to look like. I wanted: a mermaid, a dragon, four women characters in blue jeans and T-shirts, fairies, a mountain and trees with twisted trunks. Yeah, yeah. I’m a bit detail about my covers, but I love to have them match as close to my stories as possible.

After viewing the draft, I needed to have my character with the ponytail have a much longer ponytail because she sits on it accidentally sometimes. So, she made that change and made the first color design.

Next, we needed to add a few updates. The boulder the mermaid sits on needed to be gold. Also, my 3rd character needed more tightly curly hair. The Pegasus, I wanted the face a bit more updated because my sister said it looked more like a goat. And we needed to add some brightly color fairies flying around.

And, of course, I get so very excited when I see such awesome work. So, yeah, I got to say that word again.

Until Next Time!

See the previous post for Creations’s Book Cover design steps.
See the previous post for Jetta’s Book Cover design steps.
See the previous post for Irid’s Book Cover design steps.
See the previous post for Ruby, Flesh and Heart Cover design steps.
See the previous post for The Made Cover design steps.
See the previous post for The 9th Symbol design steps.

YES! It’s ALIVE!!!!

Uh huh. I created more Book Trailers just to spice up my websites. Uh huh. Yes, I did!

I don’t know. I just enjoy making them. For me, it brings more life to my books when they are ready to be read by the masses! And I just so LOVE editing them and putting music to the screens.

Yeah. Yeah. They’re still pictures, but I like it anyway. I ESPECIALLY like it when I can get music that brings out the feeling of the images and words I’m trying to convey. It brings depth to the entire project. It brings it TO LIFE!!

So…check out my Book Trailers for the 2nd and 3rd Books that are available out there to be read and devoured.
Come in…Take A Bite!

Jetta (Book 2)

Creations (Book 3)

Yep! Yep! The Book Cover for the third book of The Calling Series is in. Wanna see some pictures? Hear ya go!

First we have a couple of draft copies. I sent a description of each character I wanted on the front cover and my Book Cover Designer came up with this.

I needed a few changes: 1) switch the poses of the two middle characters (because Metz is the sexy one and Vegan is a leader, so their poses had to switch), 2) make the one with the feathers shorter (because Metz is short), and 3) make the first character have more curls in her hair. This was the final draft.

So, now to color! Yes! My favorite part!

Back again to lights. I mention this with Book 2 of this series and my IRID novel. With such darkness, I needed some light or sparkles in the black clothes, and I wanted the last character to have a peak-toe shoe since her pose was just sooo sexy!

Then I went back a third time, some weeks later because I really had an image of one of my characters to have a BIG AFRO! Yep. Alien girl with an Afro. And she came back with this.

I just couldn’t BELIEVE that I finally got books 1-3 of The Calling Series available to look at and to motivate me as I finish up their final polishing for sell. This has been an incredible journey!

See the previous post for Jetta’s Book Cover design steps.
See the previous post for Irid’s Book Cover design steps.
See the previous post for Ruby, Flesh and Heart Cover design steps.
See the previous post for The Made Cover design steps.
See the previous post for The 9th Symbol design steps.

Until Next Time!

So, yep, I’ve been on hiatus working on my 2nd and 3rd books of The Calling Series, as well as taking vacation and just taking an overall break. And, YES! I’m so Excited!!!! Jetta, Book 2, of The Calling Series has the book cover completed!!! Yes! Yes! Yes! Below are the stages of development.

So, first, there’s the sketch draft….

I needed to move two characters around, placing the smiling one in the middle. She made those change and sent me color.

The other change was that I had to add the word “Series” to the subtitle and remove the face of the red cloak. And there was also something very else…. I mean, it looked good, but it was missing something… Hmmm… What? What was it missing?

I thought about my other book cover, Irid, and remembered it was missing something too, and the hubby suggested putting some stars in the darkness between the colors and that brought out that book cover and it was amazing! Just that little bit of something…. And then I had it. LIGHTS. I told her rope lights, like back in the 1970s, or something like that, but not too cheezy. Some kind of electricity to make the metal shine. And so she did something better.

I was so very please with this cover. And I didn’t think I could be so happy about every single one of my covers, but I am.
It’s a wonderful feeling to be very happy about your product and not having to “settle” for something you’re just not quite satisfied with. It’s just wonderful!

I’m done with most of the setup for Jetta to be published, but I had to have one final thing to add. A MAP!

I made a little sketch of a map and sent it to my cover designer and asked for something better.

She came back with a black map that just blew me away! But I also needed a map for the interior of my book. So she made that one too.

And there you have them!
AWESOME and AMAZING!
All these pictures just make me want to sing, I tell ya!

Next is the Book Cover for Creations. I can’t wait!


See the previous post for Irid’s Book Cover design steps.
See previous post for Ruby, Flesh and Heart Cover design steps.
See the previous post for The Made Cover design steps.
See the previous post for The 9th Symbol design steps.

Until Next Time!

If you’ve been writing a lot over the many years and seeing the technology times change, you probably have some files from “back in the day” with those v2, v3, v4 file names on them. You know the ones—those different types of versions of stories that we keep.

And if you’re anything like me, they were probably written years ago and you just don’t know what the differences of them might be.

Well, thank goodness for the age of technolgoy! MSWord 2007 and later, I found out, has this Compare feature. Now, it might have been in other version too, but I just found out about it with this one. Right under the Review tab, there’s these two options you can have to compare documents: 1) Compare and 2) Combine.

Compare allows you to look at both documents side-by-side, but it’s the Combine feature that I’m in love with. It will combine two files, place in into a brand new document and highlight the differences and you can go through and Accept or Reject the changes.

OOoo Weeeee!!! I love technology!!

You just don’t know how this helps with all those different versions on my drive that I’ve transferred and kept over the years. I didn’t know if they were exact or there was some slight variation for most of those files. And forget the timestamp, because after so many years of transferring files from one PC to another, that time/date stamp becomes insignificant.

So, yeah, I’m in love with MSWord right now. I know it’s expensive and most people have gone to other alternatives (i.e. Open Office), but MSWord has gone up 10 points for me…. Well, er, at least for now since it can definitely do something for me that I don’t know of any others can do. Heh. Heh.

And if you know about any other software that can do the same thing, just let me know, and I just might have a change of heart…again. 🙂

Until Next Time!

Running your own business, your self-publishing busines, can be lonely, frustrating, expensive (sometimes) and a bit fearful. That’s why I really value my peers who are doing the same thing that I’m doing.

Everyone takes different paths and find different leads, and you really won’t know or understand those options if you’re all alone and not speaking to anyone.

I’ve gone to several forums over the past couple of years, but I mostly spend time on the Kindleboards. A lot of times, I just see the same ole statements, questions, excitement etc. etc. And it gets boring after seeing these same things over and over…especially after being a member for a few months.

But then there’s those times where a jewel sparkles!!

There have been several things I’ve learned from my peers this year, but the most recent information was regarding Amazon’s KDP Select and the Mysterious Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) change to “check” option.

Amazon’s KDP Select

Looking at the discussion board regarding Amazon’s KDP Select, I was able to see different sides of the story of this brand new project Amazon has decided to take on. Honestly, I didn’t know anything about it until I read it on the forum. It sounded GREAT! at first glance for those who saw the advertisement. But there were those peers who read between the lines to make a decision if this was a valuable option for them. Thanks to my peers, I made a decision that, at this time, the KDP Select would not be valuable to me for several reasons.

For one, it’s limited to Amazon Prime members who own a kindle, AND they can only borrow a book once a month. To be an Amazon Prime member, that’s $79/year, which is basically $6.58 a book each month. I know that’s not counting the the benefits of have the two-day free shipping, but it applies to many who have to do A LOT of shipping on Amazon to get any benefit from it.

The question is, how many Prime members are there? Also, they can only borrow one book once a month? That’s not that many books for availability for ONE person. It’s all numbers from here. You have to have A LOT of individuals who want to borrow YOUR book for THAT particular month to earn anything.

There’s also the exclusivity of the novel for 90 days (Only eBooks–does not include paperbacks) in the Kindle Direct Publishing Terms and Conditions.

Exclusivity. When you include a Digital Book in KDP Select, you give us the exclusive right to sell and distribute your Digital Book in digital format while your book is in KDP Select. During this period of exclusivity, you cannot sell or distribute, or give anyone else the right to sell or distribute, your Digital Book (or content that is reasonably likely to compete commercially with your Digital Book, diminish its value, or be confused with it), in digital format in any territory where you have rights.

Authors don’t have to take down their books at other distributors. They can opt to put only their next new novel and wait the 90 days, pull the book from KDP Select and send it out to everyone else. But for me, 90 days is an awfully LONG time. What happens during that time when people have interest? You can’t do anything but have them wait until the 90 days is over. Then there’s the ambiguous statement about not having another book that has “more value” than the one with Amazon? Huh? So, I guess, if a novel is more successful elsewhere online, then you violate this terms of agreement??

Amazon is basically asking for First Published Rights, but I think for very popular authors, this might bring customers to Amazon. It becomes a “status” club where only certain fans would have access to read that book FIRST while everyone else has to wait.

For those Authors who have a lot of books underneath their belt and can afford to have customers “wait” and they don’t mind the “wait” and not getting much money in return…it might benefit them. However, for authors like myself…I would really need to have a lot of sells already to benefit from this type of program.

EFT to Check Mystery

I almost skipped over a discussion regarding some strange thing that happened with accounts at Amazon. Instead of receiving an automatic deposit of money into the bank account, the authors were notified that they would be receiving a CHECK. A What?! That wasn’t what they had selected for the delivery of their money. They had opt for the automatic deposit option–EFT. Sure enough, when they went to look at their option, it had somehow changed!

As I continued to read, several other authors chimed in that theirs had changed too. I just thought it was a fluke. I figured it just affected just some people who just didn’t know what they were doing. I decided to take a look at my account anyway. First, I had to remember how to check it (It was at the Top Right where I had to click the “Deana Zhollis’s Account” hyperlink). Then, low and behold, I saw my options were set to received CHECK as well.

What?!

I changed my options back to EFT for the US, UK, and DE (FR, ES, and IT were ok).

Wow. How odd!

I would have never known what had happened until my next payment came in the mail instead of my bank account. Then I would have been frustrated and confused on WHY this had happened. That discussion thread save me a lot of headaches and emails and phone calls to resolve something that kind of…just happened for no reason.

Thank Goodness for Peers!

*~*~*~*

I know these two examples were both related to Amazon, but it’s not to put Amazon in a negative light at all. It’s the bread-and-butter for many authors today–especially self-published authors. I’m simply showing the huge value of what information one could receive when one is a part of a community with a common business service/product. A Community of Writers is definitely a tool you will need while self-publishing.

There’s always something new to learn, and to grow, in anything, … you must keep learning.

Until Next Time!