They say ‘never make your own book cover art’ and they (whoever ‘they’ are) are almost certainly correct. Nevertheless, I did make mine, and it was for the following reasons:
Formatting your novel for publication can be a nightmare. But, while there are many great formatting programmes out there (Atticus, Reedsy), and many paid formatting services you could take advantage of, you can get by with MSWord and make it look pretty professional. Continue reading
Apparently, self-published authors sell, on average, about 250 books. That’s on average, so it means sales figures could be anything from zero to thousands. Even if it was thousands, it’s not going to make me rich. And, realistically, a figure nearer zero is more likely. So I’ll probably make a loss from my writing, once I’ve taken into account all the costs involved in self-publishing. Continue reading
Everyone tells you to hire an editor to polish your text. And I’d love to do just that. But my book is over 140K long and at roughly £12 per 1000 words to edit, that means it would cost me about £1700. That’s just not in my budget! And, to be honest, I haven’t been that impressed by the couple of sample edits I’ve had. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to have a verb in my sentences, and I don’t like the POV to change within a single sentence. Both occurred in suggestions for sample edit ‘improvements’ to my text. Maybe I was unlucky, but it’s made me a bit nervous about shelling out a load of cash for line/copy editing. Continue reading
A book needs a cover. A cover should have a title, the name of the author and some sort of image that relates to the content of the book. How hard can that be? Turns out it’s REALLY hard. There are lots of mistakes to be made, and I’ve made most of them in the few covers I’ve designed for my books. And then there’s the book’s internal design. I’d thought that was all about inserting page numbers. WRONG! There’s a lot more to it than that. Continue reading
Some people have a million stories rattling around their heads just waiting to be told. But I’m not one of them. Faced with a blank page I’ve no idea where to start. Nevertheless, I like writing. I love the creative process and the craft of writing, the feeling of something forming, of giving it shape, of saying something, of discovering something about the world and myself. Continue reading
A long time ago I enrolled for an on-line writing course because I wanted to write a novel and thought I’d better learn how to do it. So imagine my disbelief when the first thing I was asked to do was write a poem. A poem? What did poems have to do with writing novels? But I’m an obedient soul so I did it. It wasn’t very good and to prove it, here it is: Continue reading
Naming characters is one of the most fun things to do when writing a novel, but there are a few pitfalls and I’ve fallen into most of them. So I thought I’d share a few tips I’ve picked along during my writing journey.
If you don’t, you might accidentally use the same name twice, as I did, or use a similar name, which could be confusing (see tip 2). A list is also useful to generate a dramatis personae: common in historical and fantasy novels. But what about short stories, where there are only a few characters? A list is a good idea here too. When I collected my short stories together for publication, I discovered I had 5 Julias and 2 Julians as main characters. If only I’d kept a list … Continue reading
When I started writing I was a bit dismissive of short stories. I enjoyed reading them but I didn’t want to write one. I was going to be a novelist so why should I bother writing short stories? However, for one reason or another, I’ve written a whole pile of short stories – 88 at the last count – and it’s turned out to be really helpful to me as an aspiring novelist – for all sorts of reasons: Continue reading
This blog post isn’t about string but it is about length. How long ‘should’ your writing be? This is something I’ve been wrestling with for years since I’m a chronic over-writer and I’m usually editing like mad to get something down to the ‘right’ length. But what is the ‘right’ length? A quick google comes up with the following guidelines which I’ve compiled from various sources (a few of the links are the bottom of this post): Continue reading