Becoming real...like a Velveteen Rabbit.

I submitted the interior pages and the cover design to CreateSpace, both in .pdf format as required. In just a couple of hours I received an email which stated that both files had been checked and found suitable for printing. Now all I had to do was request a proof copy be printed. Actually, I ordered five copies of the proof, just because I wanted a few to show off. It was about 4:30pm when I received an email saying they had received my request. Less than five hours later, I received another email which said my proof copies had been printed and shipped!
This is one of the blessings of living in our tech-savvy world of 2010. Just imagine that you can go online, order a book which does not even exist as a physical object yet, and within a couple of hours it is printed and bound and packaged and on its way to you. Wow!
I paid for medium-fast shipping, which meant that I would have to wait from Thursday night until Tuesday to get the books. I was restless during that time.
Well, today is Tuesday. The box arrived just before noon. I tore it open and there were five beautiful copies of the book I had created. What a great feeling! And what an easy and sensible way to publish!
I looked over the copies. Each one has the word "PROOF" on the final page, but they are otherwise exactly like the finished copies will be. I went back online and clicked the "Approve proof" button on my account page...and that was it! My book instantly became available for sale on CreateSpace's site and it will pop up on Amazon within a few days.
I ordered a few boxes of books to have on hand. Now it's time to start planning the release party.

Looks good on paper...

I have to confess that it was exciting to see my book for sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I contacted a few friends who'd already read the novel in manuscript form and asked if they would write some reviews. At this moment, there are three on Amazon and only one on B&N...perhaps a measure of Amazon's massive popularity and importance in comparison to Barnes & Noble.
Over the weekend, I told several people about the availability of my ebook. About 97% of them said, "Aren't there going to be any printed copies? I don't read books on my phone." This was a bit of a surprise, since I've probably read 200 books on my phone over the past five years. That's one of the reasons I chose to do an ebook: that's how I read most of the time now.
Still, it gave me pause. I was aware of CreateSpace, Amazon's "print on demand" service, but had never seriously investigated it. Now I took some time to click around on their site. Once again, I was also impressed by Catherine Ryan's blogposts about her experience using CreateSpace for her Disney book (see previous post). It's impressive that technology has advance to the point where someone can order a book online and it gets printed and bound within hours and sent out to the customer. For authors, it's a pretty great deal, since you don't have to buy a few hundred books and hope you find buyers for them. You don't really have to buy even a single copy, other than your proof copy. Actually, you don't even have to buy the proof copy, but you'd have to be very brave or very stupid not to.
I decided on Monday that I would give CreateSpace a try. You can choose what size you want your book to be from a list of several possible sizes. Although my previous book was 5.5"x8.5", I decided to try a larger format; I selected a 7.5"x9.25" trim size, which is pretty large. I had created a cover already for the ebook, so I only had to adapt it a bit for these new dimensions.
Then I started laying out the interior pages. I sort of enjoy this, but many people would find it tedious and frustrating. CreateSpace requires a certain amount of margin space. Then you've got to pick a nice, readable font, decide what point size your text should be, what font to use for chapter headings, etc. I use a program called InDesign to do this sort of layout. The end product for CreateSpace has to be a high-quality PDF file, so you could probably do it in Word if necessary.
Once I flowed all the text into the pages, I went back and worked on the first few pages: the small title page, the "official" title page, the copyright info, plus pages for dedications, quotations, etc. The actual text of the novel doesn't begin until the seventh page...and THEN you have to make sure that the seventh page actually SAYS page number one. Otherwise, your book looks amateurish.
After that, I went through the entire book, line by line, fixing hyphens at the end of lines wherever possible. That's something most people don't know they should do, but all publishers are meticulous about it. I also corrected whenever a paragraph ended with a single word on the last line. In the print biz, that's called an "orphan" and is unprofessional.
After the last page of the novel, I put a brief "About the Author" blurb. My book ended up being 318 pages, which sounds like a lot, I guess...but the word count is just over 102,000.
I uploaded the interior to CreateSpace. Now to finish the cover. Yes, I already had the front cover, but I needed to design the back cover and the spine of the book. And you don't know how wide the spine will be until you know exactly how many pages will be in the book. CreateSpace told me that my 318-page book would need a .8" spine, so I experimented with placing the title and author name in that narrow strip. Then I had to fill a back cover, too. Okay, I knew I'd have a picture of me and a little bit of bio, but what else? I had to leave a box at the bottom in a very specific spot for a barcode. Another neat thing about CreateSpace is that they will provide an ISBN number and barcode, which are necessary if you ever plan to have your book sold in a store. For the rest of the back cover, I wrote a couple of paragraphs which I hoped would entice people to read it. I also added a picture of something that's important in the book. I had to make sure and design some EXTRA space around all four sides of the cover. This is called the "bleed" and ensures that, when your book is printed, bound and then trimmed, none of the important parts of the cover are missing and you don't have a white line around the edges where it didn't quite get cut right. Here's what the complete wraparound cover looks like:

Getting the book ready to submit to CreateSpace took quite a few hours, even for an experienced graphic designer; don't rush on this part, though, or your book will look shoddy and amateurish.
Sorry for the length of this post, but there are so many details to look after in this process. Next time, I'll tell you about what happens after you hit the "Upload" button.

EEEeeeasing into ebooks...

More than a year ago, I made some initial steps to convert my first published book, Shiny Spots In The Rust, as an ebook. I checked out the pertinent pages on Amazon's site and tried to format my manuscript file accordingly. Amazon has an emulator which supposedly lets you see how your file will look on a smartphone. Despite repeated tries, I could not get page breaks to remain when uploaded; everything seemed to run together. So I gave up and didn't follow through.
Recently, though, I received an email from Barnes & Noble regarding their own ebook venture, which makes books readable on B&N's Nook reader or on phones equipped with a Nook app. Since I had just been thinking that I ought to do something with my unpublished novel, I decided to try their site out. They also feature an emulator and I experienced the same problems trying to follow their instructions. I checked back with Amazone to see if their ebook program had progressed any since I first tried it. It seemed like the answer was no. Both sites make it very difficult to know how to format your text file and their emulators do a poor job of showing the results. I was frustrated.
But I went back to visit a site I'd come across a couple months ago. I had downloaded an ebook about an Irish girl's experience coming to America to work at Disney World. It's called Mousetrapped. I found the book to be a pleasant read and rather casually decided to check out the author's blog. There, I was greatly interested to read Catherine Ryan Howard's entries regarding her venture into self-publishing. She gives some great, step-by-step guidelines to formatting for ebooks which are much, much more accessible than those from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. I followed her directions and soon decided I would submit my novel to both B&N and Amazon. I uploaded the text file and the cover .jpeg at 11:30 on a Friday morning. When I woke up the next morning, my ebook was already listed as for sale on both sites. Can't beat that for speed! And there is no charge to do this. When you sell an ebook, you get a nice share of the price while the web merchant keeps a share for themselves. No printing costs, no inventories to manage. It's really a no-lose situation.
Wanna know the financial stuff? I set the price of my ebook at $9.99. When I sell a copy, I get $6.75 of that. This is a much bigger slice of the pie than you would get from a traditional publisher.
The only problem with self-publishing this way is that you're not gonna sell any copies...unless you do some promotion. But that's another subject

How it came to this...

After I wrote This Is Where I Came In several years ago, I formatted it in a page-layout program and designed a cover; I was able to do this because I'd spent years in the graphic design business. I wanted to have a quality, professional-looking presentation instead of a raw manuscript to show to prospective agents and editors. I did this even though I think that agents and editors are not greatly impressed by such tactics. My goal was to make it easier to imagine my novel as a real book. I even did some full-color promotional cards to give out at conferences. People liked seeing the things I'd made, but it didn't help a great deal.
I attended the annual Agents & Editors Conference which the Writers League sponsors. Part of that conference is a 10-minute one-on-one conversation with an agent or editor in which you can pitch your book idea face to face. This went well and the agent requested that I send the entire manuscript to her office. I got a polite rejection letter, but kept plugging away.
As I said in the previous post, I would eventually be signed by two different agents, neither of whom was able to place the book. It might have stayed in my desk drawer forever, but something happened last week.
I read a book.
Let me rewrite that slightly: I read a crappy book.
It was a novel which had actually been published by a small publisher. As I read through it, I couldn't believe anyone would print this book. It was sophomoric, with shallow characters and the most cliched plotting imaginable. I began to think that I had given up too easily, because I was certain my novel was better than this one. I dug out my old manuscript and began reading it for the first time in years...and I liked it. In fact, I was brought to tears by one part which I'd forgotten.
So I decided to do something. I don't really want to devote the time and effort of going through the tedious hunt for an agent. In addition, something had changed since I wrote my novel; I had become an ebook devotee, first on my Palm Pilot, then on my iPhone, and now on my glorious iPad. It's increasingly rare now that I buy an actual dead-tree book anymore, preferring to carry a stack of books in my iPad at all times.
So why go through that process again? I decided instead to go the electronic route. It's not that I expect to sell thousands--or even hundreds--of books. But at least my book will be available on a world-wide basis. Next time I'll tell you how I decided where to sell my ebook and how I got it ready to present.

This Is Where I Came In is a novel I wrote several years ago. I expended a great deal of effort trying to get it published. I was signed by a literary agent who tried for months to get the book placed. After that option lapsed, I was signed by a second agent, but he was also unsuccessful. I eventually tired of the process and stopped trying to find a home for my novel. But in recent months, I've researched the possibilite of publishing TIWICI as an ebook. This blog will tell my experiences in seeking to accomplish that.