Editing Giveaway Contest

C.A. Marshall is giving away a Substantial Edit of a mss on her blog! She is a Freelance editor, YA writer and literary agent intern. I seriously need this service. I’ve been going over the numbers for the book I’m publishing, and it looks like it will put me in the red, mostly because of the cost of editing. Oh, to have a free edit… *grin*

By substantial, she means plot, characterization, etc. up to 100,000 words. My anthology is rather less, and Dindi is bit more, but I still think it’s a pretty cool prize.

And you know what, beta readers? Thinking about this contest made me realize how much this is worth. I LOVE YOU.

Okay. Enough with the mushy stuff. Resume work.

ADDENDUM

She used Google Forms to make this cool form thingy. I want to learn how to do that.

You Tube Version of Book Trailer …and Animoto

I have class today, so I’m a bit rushed this morning. Here’s my booktrailer from You Tube, and here’s the url. Feel free to repost. 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHfM-zdPw2g

UPDATE: I wanted to talk a bit about making the booktrailer. I used Animoto and I wanted to talk a little about it.

I mentioned before it was easy, although it still took me four trys to get it right. Then I accidently uploaded to my You Tube channel titled, “Conmergence.4” which wasn’t a good name. Also, I made a few mistakes. Instead of “Coming Soon,” I should have put a date, like “October 2010,” so that in a year, when the video will still be floating around You Tube, it still makes sense and people can tell it is already available.

Of course, I could have had more pictures, not just thrown the book cover in your face over and over. This was my fault, not Animoto’s. I couldn’t upload pictures directly from my computer. Animoto would only take them from another site, like Smugmug or Flickr. So I created a Flickr site, uploaded my picture to that, and then told Animoto to grab the picture from Flickr. It wasn’t hard.

I picked the template of smoky blue from Animoto’s palette. (It’s called “Water.”) I also chose music from their collection. I could have uploaded music from my computer. I think. I didn’t try it.

Their trick is that they have some algorithm that bounces the picture around to the music. You choose the order of the pictures (and if you want any to be sideways or upside down). If you don’t like the way it turns out the first time, you can “remix” it. The first time I tried it, I had different music and a different template and I didn’t like the result as much.

For $3 a pop or $5 a month, you can go Pro, have a longer vid and remove their logo. I wanted to try it out first. I was happy with the experience. I could see how this could get addictive. It would be fun to do with photos of the kids on a regular basis.

There are some down sides.

Right now, they don’t have that many different templates. Even if you go Pro, there’s only 20 options max. Therefore, if a lot of people use it, or even if you alone use it more than a couple times, all the videos are going to start to look alike. The slick, professional booktrailer is going to look like just another knock-off. Not good. They need at least a hundred templates to keep it from get old. They seem to be still adding, so maybe they are working up to it.

The same criticism applies to their selection of stock footage and music. It could grow stale fast. And there’s nothing even remotely helpful for most book trailers in the stock footage. Okay, maybe if you have a nonfiction book or a contemporary, but nothing suitable for romance, fantasy, sf, mystery or even literary literature. It’s just not geared to that. However, the pictures and the music can be changed to your own, so this isn’t as big a problem as the limited templates.

I haven’t exhausted their selection yet, and maybe one of these days, I’ll do a Pro vid. We’ll see. I do hope they keep expanding their style selection.

Speculative Fiction Anthology Announcement, With Cover

Here it is, my official announcement. I’m going to independently publish a novella-length anthology of my short stories. It will be called Conmergence, and you can see my design for the front cover above.

I’ve given a lot of thought to this. I have, in fact, been considering publishing my epic fantasy (Dindi) series independently, but I’m not sure yet, and I don’t want to screw it up. Certainly, I don’t want to do a shoddy job, so I decided I needed a trial run first. (I may have mentioned this before, here, on Facebook, on Twitter, in an email…I have basically been thinking in public for the past several days, a habit which is a disturbing by-product of imbibing social media too frequently. I apologize if I became boring or tiresome or tried to bully you into beta reading… I was drunk on a new idea.)

One reason I decided to try independent publishing is that several people I respect have tried it and done well with it. I don’t necessarily mean financially, but even more importantly, they’ve created something lovely and worth reading, not just unreadable slush, such as one traditionally associates with self-publishing.

Here are some small, online presses that sell the backlists, and sometimes new works, of established, and, dare I say, utterly kickass authors.

Closed Circle –> Lynn Abbey, C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher.

Parsina Press –> Stephen Goldin

Yard Dog Press –> Selina Rosen

And I can’t tell if Jeffrey Carver has an actual store, but you can buy books through links to Amazon on his blog.

Book View Cafe –> C.L. Anderson, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Chaz Brenchley, Jay Caselberg, Brenda Clough, Kate Daniel, Marissa Day, Lori Devoti, Chris Dolley, Laura Anne Gilman, Sylvia Kelso, Katharine Kerr, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, Sue Lange, Ursula K. Le Guin, Rebecca Lickiss, Seanan McGuire, Vonda N. McIntyre, Nancy Jane Moore, Pati Nagle, Steven Harper Piziks, Steven Popkes, Phyllis Irene Radford, Patricia Rice, Madeleine Robins, Deborah J. Ross, Sarah Smith, Sherwood Smith, Amy Sterling Casil, Jennifer Stevenson, Judith Tarr, Gerald M. Weinberg, Susan Wright, Sarah Zettel.

Of course, all these authors had a platform, an audience, and the proven ability to write engagingly before they turned to epublishing and/or POD. Book View Cafe, for instance, is a cooperative only for previous published authors. Previously published in print, by royalty paying publishers. (It advertises things like Margaret Atwood in conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin, which, wow, makes me wish I lived in Portland.) It’s not for those of us still trying to break in. (Piers Anthony’s press, Mundania, does accept and publish new authors, although last I checked they were closed to submissions for a while).

How Publishing Really Works discusses the usual (and perfectly true) reasons most self-published books sell under 200 copies and also reports one agent who is not interested in a self-published book that sells less than 10,000 copies.

I don’t expect to sell 10,000 copies; I’m not even sure I can sell 200. If response is favorable, I’ll take it as a sign that selling my fantasy series myself is viable. This does not follow, logically, but… *shrug.* If sales are poor, I’ll take it as evidence that my writing still needs improvement. Actually, one’s writing always needs improvement. If you stop trying to better yourself, what’s the point?

What I shall do is document each step of the way, as others have done, to my benefit. Michelle is still running her series on self-publishing on The Literary Lab, and I am following it closely. She was brave enough to post her numbers, and I will too. If they are small, so be it. So far, by the way, I’ve spent $15 on stock photos for the cover. It took me approximately 16 hours of work, about four hours a day for the last four days. If I were better at Photoshop, it might have been faster.

And guess what…

I also made my first book trailer!

I’m planning another one, but for this, I used Animoto. It couldn’t have been simpler. I had one image, a few lines of text, and chose from their templates of movement and music. Voila.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

What goes around comes around, so feel free to critique the book trailer. I guess you may consider this the book trailer of the day. I’ll discuss the making of the book trailer/s in depth more later.

http://www.animecons.com/events/info.shtml/1961

Domey’s Booksigning

Earlier this evening, I had the delightful opportunity to pop over to Skylight Books for the booksigning of Strange Cargo, an anthology of the PEN Center USA’s Emerging Voices, including Davin Malasarn, my friend from The Literary Lab.

They even had wine. It was classy.

Sadly, I missed the readings, but even though I arrived quite late, the bookstore was packed. You have to understand, Domey and I met in cyberspace; this was our first meeting in person. I had a feeling I knew which one Domey was, but the crowd kind of freaked me out, and I hid in the children’s section, hiding behind my toddlers (they’re pretty short, so this is less effective than I’d like) until the mob thinned. Then I edged near the person I thought was Domey. He was talking to someone else, so I did that obnoxious cocktail party trick, where you loiter just close enough to a conversation that you’re no part of that eventually one of the participants nods uncertainly in your direction.

The longer I loitered the more I wondered what I would say if this was some other guy completely.

Fortunately, it was indeed the illustrious Mr. Malasarn, and it was worth all my introvert-angst to attend the soirée and meet him. I now have an autographed copy. Thanks, Domey!

“Are you being sarcastic?” – Zoe Who?

These are made with Xtranormal. I’ve signed up for it and played around with it a bit. It’s a fun service to use. Unfortunately, I have not been able to think of anything nearly half so funny as the Zoe Winters series about self-publishing. Each episode stands alone, but they are all worth watching, and it doesn’t hurt to watch them in order. If you haven’t seen the rest of the series, check it out.