ebooks

Being My Own Publisher

Here is my current writing-related to-do list:

Nothing in there about writing anything, or even revising. It’s all publishing, all the time. I suppose this is the best reason for having someone else do the publishing stuff.

I passed a major milestone on December 10th, when Islands of the Gulf Volume 1, The Journey and Islands of the Gulf Volume 2, The Treasure officially became available in print versions, joining The Friendship of Mortals.

But because I made all kinds of small changes to the texts of those two books before publishing in print, it only makes sense to transmit those changes to the ebook versions as well. Unfortunately, “transmit” means “go through the lists of edits and make them in both the Smashwords and Amazon KDP documents.” Tedious stuff, transmitting.

Then I can get on with the final book of the Herbert West Series — Hunting the Phoenix — correcting errors I have noted in my e-reader, formatting, writing the back cover description, arranging for the full print cover, etc. And finally, uploading the corrected ebook documents. The whole series will then be fully available in both ebook and print versions. Then I can finally get on with something new.

Now I begin to understand why it can take months or even years between signing a contract with a publisher and actually seeing a published book. And as my own publisher, I can’t even blame anyone else for the slowness of the process.

Preparing To Re-Launch

It’s coming on to four years since I published the first book of the Herbert West Series. Two years after that, in 2012, I published the other three. Now I am planning to upload revised texts with added content and professionally designed cover images to replace my homemade and, to be truthful, rather lame creations. As I write, I am awaiting what I hope will be the final draft of the cover images. It’s been a thrill to see what a graphic designer has created from my descriptions of the works.

And the trilogy is now a series. I decided the whole “trilogy in four volumes” thing didn’t work. The middle two books of the series are still Islands of the Gulf Volume 1 and Islands of the Gulf Volume 2, but Volume 1 is now The Journey and Volume 2 is The Treasure. You wouldn’t believe the amount of brooding and fretting I did before deciding on those words, but I’m satisfied with them.

And only cataloguer-librarians would be able to appreciate my reservations about introducing all this complexity. Instead of simple titles and a series, those two books now have volume numbers, series numbers and part-titles. Once all this is done I will have to create catalogue records for them, coded in MARC format, just for fun. Then there’s the whole question of edition. If I were reissuing these books in print, they would be new editions. But ebooks are different. I think. Sort of. (Non-cataloguers may safely ignore this paragraph).

I have also rewritten the descriptions of the books — brief ones of fewer than 400 characters (60 words), and longer ones in the neighbourhood of 2,000 characters (about 400 words). The short descriptions are the sort of thing you see in a publisher’s catalogue; the longer ones are more like jacket blurbs (interesting word, “blurb;” check Wikipedia for its origin). For the blurbs, I started with texts of short synopses I’ve written over the years, but swiftly realized the fundamental difference between a synopsis, which is intended to encapsulate a novel for presentation to a publisher, and the tantalizing jacket blurb that tells the potential reader just enough to make them want to buy the book. You definitely don’t want to create “spoilers” for your own books!

Right now I am working with my Word documents, adding extras such as Afterwords and excerpts from the sequels to each book, as well as creating hyperlinked tables of contents. Once all that’s done and my new cover images are ready, I will re-launch all four books. That may happen as early as next weekend if all goes well.

What with work and all this activity, I have neither time nor mental capacity for other blog topics. The garden (which isn’t doing much) and further thoughts on hypocrisy (which is everywhere) will just have to wait.

Loading Up the E-Reader

A couple of months ago I finally bought an ebook reader, having grown weary of disengaging from interesting books at bedtime. I always read in bed for a while last thing at night, but not on a computer. After years of working with my own and others’ manuscripts, I have no problem with text on a computer screen, but I think “laptop” is a misnomer for computers that are still rather heavy and fragile, safer on tabletops than on laps. And it was ironic to have published four ebooks without owning the primary instrument for reading them.

In selecting books for the e-reader, I decided to start with self-published books. Recently there have been recurring and endless debates on the Fiction Writers’ Guild at LinkedIn that always seem to boil down to “Are self-published books more likely to be badly written than traditionally published ones?” I don’t pretend to have any credible statistics, but I recommend the following well-written self-published books, discovered without a lot of effort on my part. Several of them are free, none of them is more than $2.99. $2.99, folks! Less than the price of a good cup of coffee. You have to admit that’s a real bargain for a good read.

Clear Heart by Joe Cottonwood. “A love story for men about nail guns, wet concrete and strong women.” OK, it’s a “guy book,” but it worked for me. In addition to a complicated bunch of love stories, there’s a lot of stuff about the art of building houses that reads like it comes from lived experience.

Northern Liberties by Glenn Vanstrum. A historical novel about the artist Thomas Eakins set in 1870s Philadelphia, it delves into the creation of Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic. The story combines elements of art, medicine and history, with a murder mystery woven in as well. I liked this book so well I also bought another one by Vanstrum — Let Fall Thy Blade. I’m only about a quarter through reading it, but so far it’s impressive.

Effie Perine by Buzzy Jackson. This is an odd tangent from The Maltese Falcon, featuring Sam Spade’s secretary. By artful timebending it combines the 1920s, 1970s and 1990s, honouring Hammett’s detective and the classic movie while adding unique elements that kept me guessing — and reading.

Three short works by A.M. Kirkby — Rise Above, Sword of Justice and A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads. These are beautifully written, understated stories of supernatural and natural horror. I especially recommend Rise Above.

He Needed Killing and He Needed Killing Too — a pair of murder mysteries by Bill Fitts set on a Southern university campus, featuring a retired tech guy turned private investigator. These are leisurely-paced books, related by a first-person narrator with a congenial, relaxed style. Anyone who has ever spent time in academia will find something to relate to here.

Finally, of course, there is my own Herbert West Trilogy (in four volumes), a hefty opus of which I speak often. The first book, The Friendship of Mortals, is free.

All of these books are available on Smashwords, and my reviews of them are also to be found there.

A Trilogy in Four Volumes

Last Monday I published Islands of the Gulf, Volume Two, the second volume of the second book of my Herbert West trilogy. Ever since I decided to publish the middle book of the trilogy in two volumes, I’ve had niggling doubts, mostly because of the numerical complications. This must be because I am a cataloguer and therefore hyper-conscious of data relating to books.

So I decided to clarify things by writing a short history of The Herbert West Trilogy:

I wrote the first book, The Friendship of Mortals, in 2000-2001. It is based on H.P. Lovecraft’s story (or rather, six serialized stories) entitled “Herbert West, Reanimator.” By the time I finished it, I realized that a sequel was in order, because unlike HPL’s Herbert West, my protagonist isn’t ripped to shreds at the end. Psychically, perhaps, but not physically.

In one of those “why not?” moments, I decided to set the sequel here on the west coast, specifically on a fictional Gulf Island in the waters between British Columbia and Washington State. First I had to get Herbert West — who now called himself Francis Dexter — from New England to the other side of the continent. This was a medium-sized story in itself. Then I had to create the island and the principal characters with whom Herbert/Francis would interact. By the time these interactions played out in 2005, I had a truly huge book on my hands. When I decided to publish it as an ebook on Smashwords, I thought it would be best to issue it in two volumes. Why not two separately titled books? Because the two halves don’t quite stand alone. Both must be read for the complete trajectory.

Besides, the word “trilogy” sounds much better than “tetralogy.” Hence, a trilogy in four volumes.

Book 1: The Friendship of Mortals

Book 2, Volume 1: Islands of the Gulf, Volume One

Book 2, Volume 2: Islands of the Gulf, Volume Two

Book 3: Hunting the Phoenix

Books 1 and 2 are available on Smashwords. Book 3 will appear later this year.