S L Flynn

An author's blog

Category: Author’s Journey (Page 1 of 3)

Generative AI has been well-trained on a corpus of generic science fiction art.

Get Ready to RUMBLE!

October 31, 2023 /

Na-No-Wri-Mo, here I come!

Right back where The Gray God started from!

At the gym today, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo 2023, the current iteration of the 50,000 words-in-a-month writing challenge. Yes, I am writing this on October 31st, 2023, the day before the challenge begins. As with my previous NaNoWriMo, an important part of my motivation here is to hold my feet to the fire writing-wise. Also, per my previous NaNoWriMo, I’m charging into this without a solid outline. Hey, I’m happy with the results of the last run, so I’m optimistic.

The same, only different

This time around, I’ll be working on Untitled Science Fiction Project. In previous blog posts, I discussed the lengthy worldbuilding phase of this project. Since then, I’ve been working* on character backgrounds in the form of mini-autobiographies, which flesh out the details of their pasts and refine their distinctive voices.

I’ll be working in Scrivener again. It’s a great writing tool. Its ability to break a manuscript into independent scenes makes jumping around the plotline easy. This is especially boon-i-licious when you have scene ideas scattered from beginning to end. You go where the muse takes you to get your precious word count goal for a given day. NaNoWriMo doesn’t require you to produce a coherent product, just 50,000 words of product.

I’ll be sticking to my plan of developing the story as a screenplay. This worked, albeit unintentionally, for my first novel, Raether’s Enzyme. The screenplay format is brisk, lean, and hyper-focused on key story details: character, setting, and plot. A screenplay can serve as a super outline for a novel. You have the essentials, which can then be developed into prose.

Another key lesson from the previous NaNoWriMo is: Always cheat, always win. The best you can hope for in NaNoWriMo is first draft quality. Unless you’re Stephen King, who routinely writes at 2000 words/day. By cheating, I mean counting material that may not make it into the final product. Say, for example, the as-yet-unwritten mini-autobiographies. Those are pure backstories, but I’ll count them. Bits and pieces of them may get woven into the ‘real’ story.

Wish me luck

Please. To the extent I succeed, I’ll have built momentum for Untitled Science Fiction Project. Yay! Getting it to a good state before production and publicity work for The Gray God kicks into gear is the goal. If you have a NaNoWriMo account, you can follow my progress on my NaNoWriMo here. I’ll be posting updates on Facebook and X as the month progresses.

*Of late, my level of work output brings to mind this scene from Office Space.

Peter meets with the Bobs in Office Space.

“Well, I Wouldn’t Say I’ve Been MISSING It, Bob.”

The Gray God will be published by Wicked House in 2024!

June 27, 2023 /

I’m happy to announce that The Gray God has found a publishing home with Wicked House Publishing. Stay tuned for updates as my novel of cosmic horror progresses down the road to publication!

The Fractal Dimension of a Half-built World

March 18, 2023 /

All the world’s a stage

Every story requires worldbuilding on the part of the author. The stage must be set, and the lights hung, before the audience files in. For historical fiction, the author reconstructs the world of the past such as the story demands.  Contemporary stories also require research. Readers are distracted by flaws in 1:1 scale models of subjects they know well. The audiences for science fiction and fantasy don’t demand realism per se, but they want a measure of consistency that respects the effort they put into suspending disbelief. They reward the crafting of fantastical worlds that exceed their expectations.

Untitled Science Fiction Project (USFP) requires worldbuilding on my part. I’ve been working at it for a while now and think I’m where I need to be to shift my emphasis toward the characters and plot of an actual story set in the world. This post outlines how I came this far and owns up to some of the mistakes along the way. More experienced writers may notice unowned mistakes.

Genesis Vector

My previous two projects, Raether’s Enzyme and The Gray God have been described as dark. (I like to think Raether has a dazzling and beautiful light at the end of its tunnel.) While I was writing The Gray God, the red band trailer for Hellboy (2019) dropped. When I realized it was a reboot, I lost interest in the movie. But I’m a sucker for epic trailer music, and the cover of Smoke on the Water by 2WEI got its hooks into me in a good way. I knew then that I wanted the next project to have an epic score. I wanted it to be awesome and fun. That’s all I knew. Was it science fiction or fantasy? Didn’t know. Just knew that it would be cool.

Spoiler: It’s science fiction

Yeah, you knew that already. USFP. I didn’t know it until The Gray God was off with the developmental editor. I just have more science fiction in me than fantasy. To honor the original intent, I set some stakes in the ground early on.

  • It’s not hard science fiction. Well, not The Martian levels of hard. Meeting that bar and leaving room for epic Rule of Cool shenanigans is, well, very hard. So: reactionless thrusters and faster-than-light travel are in play. Aiming for 3-4 on the Moh’s Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.
  • Adventure is possible. So, no 1984 levels of dystopia.
  • The Singularity hasn’t happened. The emergence of godlike AI or similarly godlike post-humanity rewrites all the rules and dominates the world. By its very nature, the world after the Singularity isn’t one we can anticipate. There’s room for recognizable stories among the still-human survivors, but my last two stories had eschatological overtones. I need a break from that. Maybe you do too.

I strive to tell interesting stories that are fair to their characters and worlds. Towards those ends, I’ve set additional constraints.

  • Humanity tends to make a muddle of things. The future holds progress, but we’re still a bunch of primates prone to screeching and flinging poo. Nation-state conflict is still a problem, but systems of cooperation have prevented Armageddon.
  • It’s not your utopia. Or mine. We all make mistakes. Sorry.
  • People are still people. Genetic engineering and cybernetic augmentation are enabling technologies, but they operate on the periphery of what it is to be human.
  • People still fight. Yes, there are killer drones and robots, but their hackability has prevented warfare from being completely automated. Attempts to do so ended badly.
  • No near-peer aliens. The odds of encountering intelligent life that happens to be technologically on par with us is too low. It could be rationalized somehow, but to be fair, I think the odds favor our finding Precambrian swamps and/or being found by aliens that operate in Clarke’s Third Law territory.
  • No force fields. This one’s really arbitrary. A line drawn between USFP and free-wheeling space opera. This is a tough one that I may revisit. Characters and ships having ‘shields’ allows for more spectacle, but it seems like a technology that would permeate its world. I want to see if I can pull my adventure off without relying on this trope.

The sum of these constraints suggests the science fiction space inhabited by The Expanse. Sure enough, it does. I dig The Expanse. An interesting (and certainly deliberate) feature of that world is how it downplays computer and information technology in human space. People use computers, but they remain the sole agents of change before the arrival of the alien protomolecule technology. I respect that choice. It keeps the story centered on people and allows the action to be driven by human nature and human politics. Writing in today’s world of emerging AI applications, I feel that pending a Butlerian Jihad (Frank Herbert’s way of factoring AI out of his Dune universe), a future world should have forms of machine intelligence. That pulls us toward the kaleidoscopic virtual worlds of cyberpunk.

So, one more stake in the ground:

  • Artificial intelligence, robots, and networking are prevalent, but not dominant, in human affairs. We’re somewhere short of the Singularity and our interaction with the machines hasn’t transformed us into something unrecognizable.

Science Fiction is home to numerous subgenres. My constraints exclude some and contain others. Choosing among the available subgenres further informs the worldbuilding by highlighting tropes that characterize the subgenre. Within limits, you can blend subgenres in a way that pleases readers. As The Gray God embarked on its journey through the submission process, the component genres coalesced in the space bounded by the constraints. USFP would combine military science fiction with (post-)cyberpunk skullduggery.

Then I thought of an entertaining way to bring the two subgenres together. I’ll leave it at that, for now.

Exploring the Trope-iary Maze

Genres all have characteristic tropes associated with them. I read many of the foundational works of military sci-fi and cyberpunk over the years. In the lead-up to USFP, I read more recent works. I saw which tropes carried their weight across the years and I had a good time. Too good. There are legions of books, movies, anime, comics, and video games that play in these genres. I risked cheerfully chasing tropey knowledge across source material indefinitely. It was time to cheat.

The internet abounds with communities who delight in building encyclopedias or wikis. Wikis exist for anything that has a fandom. There are wikis for tropes. TV Tropes started with the modest goal of cataloging the tropes of television shows. Over the years, it expanded to cover all media with an emphasis on science fiction and fantasy. It names tropes great and small and provides positive and negative examples from books, movies, television, games, and more. If you love stories, trivia, and encyclopedic scope, it is as glorious as it is dangerous. I spent untold hours of my youth studying The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, The Star Trek Concordance, and the D&D sourcebooks. That joy in disappearing down a rabbit hole came back in force as I plunged into TV Tropes to explore my genres. It’s light, fast reading. You can argue with some of its examples and make note of others as source material that demands attention. And you can wander off course chasing the patterns of themes and ideas in unexpected directions. I did all these things and had a great time doing them. And I wasn’t getting a world built. I had to stop, or I’d need an intervention.

It was time to start filling in the space whose borders I’d defined. Thanks to the TV Tropers, I had a wealth of blocks to fit between the lines and a better sense of how they might fit together. And I found peace with the certainty that whatever I came up with, it probably already had an entry in the trope wiki.

Fire and Anvil

Organizing a worldbuilding project has come a long way since the days of notepads and graph paper. For Raether and The Gray God, I relied on OneNote and Scrivener to record the research and imaginary elements I was adding to our present-day world (Pacific Northwest Edition). USFP is all imaginary elements. Organizing the planets, technologies, governments, megacorps, and history could be done with the previous tools, but it turns out there are better ones for the job. I experiment with my writing process with each new project. USFP’s experiment includes using the new tools.

Worldbuilding–whether in service of story development, RPG campaign planning, or for the fun of it–created a market for specialized software that is up to the task. Two of the big players in this space are WorldAnvil and Campfire. Both offer a suite of modules to support maps, encyclopedias, timelines, character development, and more. So much more. Both are fundamentally web-based and have a subscription business model. Being web-based permits you to share your projects with other people in their worldbuilding community and collaborate on development. Subscription levels determine access to features.

Both products offer a rich feature set and showcase the users who have done amazing work with the tools. Two things tipped the scale for me.

  1. WorldAnvil is a purely online service. Campfire has a desktop client that can work offline.
  2. WorldAnvil projects default to public. Campfire defaults to private.

Call me old-fashioned. I’m just not excited about all the things being in the cloud all time. I also don’t think I should have to pay for a baseline level of privacy. So, I went with Campfire.

Fits and starts

The shape of the story world was bounded and a constellation of tropes floated about waiting to be placed in the puzzle. I had ideas re the characters and story in very general terms. My thinking was that by fleshing out the world and its history, I’d have a substrate that would inform both the characters and the action.

I jumped into the Campfire timeline module to sketch history over the several hundred years to come. Some combination of my thinking, the process, and the tool didn’t click. I set dates for key technological development and First Contact. The latter marks the end of Earth, Inc. and the beginning of the Probationary Era. And then I stalled. I couldn’t identify how granular I needed to be. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t patient or clever enough to build a history that delivered the world I wanted for my story. It was time to cheat again. I would build the world that suited me and write as much of its history as I needed to rationalize it.

The encyclopedia module would capture a snapshot of the story world. Tropes would find their homes among its articles. This clicked. Articles spawned other articles. Tropes were embraced or discarded. Technological limits came into focus. Research ranged far and wide. Ecological succession. Fusion power. Wabi-sabi. Terraforming. Torchships. Principal classes of naval ships. Intermodal cargo containers. Synthetic biology. Multinational corporations. NGOs. PMCs. Drone warfare. Cyberwarfare. Transhumanism. Corporatism. Social credit. Keiretsu. Lines extending from the present to interesting places in the future.  Each new article brimming with potential for more detail and suggesting related topics, demanding their own research.

It was a process that wanted to branch and grow forever. I realized that I don’t have forever. It was time to stop. For now. The systems of the world exist in sketch form. Political and economic ecologies provide opportunities for conflict and cooperation. Mysterious alien benefactors offer humanity new worlds for an unexpected price and threaten us with extermination for a specific transgression.

Mapulation

One of the joys of old-school worldbuilding was sitting down with some graph paper and mapping out planets, continents, kingdoms, cities, towns, and dungeons. As you might expect, the modern era has software to help you out with that. Campfire (and WorldAnvil) have tools to integrate maps into your worldbuilding projects, but both defer creating the maps to third parties. For good reasons. It turns out that a fantasy map-making program is a complex drawing tool in its own right. Two major players in this market are Worldographer and ProFantasy Software. They offer feature-rich packages that enable dedicated users to create rich maps ranging in scale from astronomical to humble abodes. I decided to take them out for a spin.

Fractal Terrains 3 from ProFantasy. The use of fractal algorithms to generate realistic rugged terrain goes back to the 1980s, famously starring in the Genesis planet sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Fractal Terrains harnesses that magic to create worlds with intricate mountain ranges and crinkly coastlines that you can zoom into from a global perspective down to a tiny island off the coast. (There’s a certain point in the zoom spectrum where things start looking strange.) You can control a wide variety of parameters: climate, sea level, tree line elevation, map projection style, and color scheme, to name a few. It’s pretty neat and there’s a free trial version to play with.

Campaign Cartographer 3 from ProFantasy. This will let you do any sort of map you want. In the hands of a skilled artist, it enables the creation of fantasy maps that are worthy of publication or inclusion in a AAA video game. It is incredibly powerful and flexible—to a downright daunting degree. For a newbie, its complex palettes of tools and customization options are labyrinthine. Everything you need is there…somewhere. YouTube tutorials are a must to even get started.

Worldographer has its own complexities, but like Fractal Terrains, it will offer to make a map to start you out. You supply the parameters, and it conjures a map for your world in the style of your choice. I found it simpler and more approachable. With my background in worldbuilding for Traveller, Worldographer’s process for setting up an icosahedral planet hex map was straightforward. This simplifies a globe into twenty flat triangles. You don’t have to worry about whether Greenland is bigger or smaller than it appears.

I set my parameters–I’m looking for an Ice Age world with more land relative to ocean than Earth—and rolled the world-making dice in Worldographer many times. The results were interesting but not satisfying. Part of it was that I had a vague notion that action on the planet would be split between a more temperate equatorial continent and an unsettled polar land mass. Rolling the dice wasn’t delivering that. No problem I could do that on my own. The other thing was the map was, for a lack of a better word, arbitrary. It wasn’t completely random. There was a system in play. It just didn’t feel right. I got it into my head that what was missing was plate tectonics. There were no great mountain ranges thrust up by colliding plates. It bugged me. More than it should have.

So off I went down a geological rabbit hole. It turns out that plate tectonics is hard and not thoroughly understood. The number of plates in play on Earth changes depending on who you ask and how close you look. And their movements are…complicated. So, I spent some time trying to build my world from the plates up and failed. A cool online simulator tried to help me, but still I floundered. Ultimately, I wound up drawing my world’s equivalent of Pangea, breaking the supercontinent up and utterly faking it.

With my continents in place in outline form, I iced things over from the poles based on Earth’s last glacial epoch. It turns out that my North American perspective made my idea of how icy Earth was rather exaggerated. Sure, Canada and much of Europe were unrecognizable. Many other areas weren’t that bad. It made sense when I thought about it. There were still tropics and hot deserts. It’s not like those ecologies evolved after the glaciers retreated. With that in mind, I tried to fill every hexagon on my map with something that made sense. It also turns out that climates and biomes are…complicated. I was obsessing over details that could inform my story, but they probably wouldn’t.

The mapping process had gone over budget. Just like the encyclopedia. It was time to put it on hold until I could focus on regions that the story needed. I wouldn’t know which until I had more of the story in mind.

How long is the coast of Britain?

By the light of fractal geometry the answer is: It depends on the length of your ruler. The coast “gets longer” the closer you look at it. If your ruler is 200km long, then the length is 2400km. With a smaller ruler, say 50km, you can trace out the details of the coastline more precisely and get a result of 3400km. We see increasing complexity as we zoom.

In each phase of my worldbuilding adventure I had no good idea what the right size was for the ruler. I kept zooming in and finding/inventing ever-increasing detail. My trope research, timelining, encyclopedia writing, and map-making overshot what I likely needed to make my story work. If this story leads to a series, I might recoup my investment. As it is, I won’t be able to work in all the detail I’ve come up with, but I’ll have plenty of things to choose from.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s to set a time budget for your worldbuilding and stick to it. You can always come back a fortify your imaginary world later. Better a half-built world and a story than an exquisitely built world where nothing ever happens.

Moving forward, I plan to focus on characters and story and build whatever else is strictly needed. Like hero spaceships and villain lairs. Such fun!

The Gray God’s Editing Odyssey

April 11, 2022 /
Witch's Jelly/Butter.

Absolutely not from outer space.

Almost three years ago, The Gray God reached its Narrative Complete milestone.  I had a story with kids, cults, and monsters. It was okay, but very much an early draft. I put it on the back burner while I prepared Raether’s Enzyme for submission to literary agents and then self-publishing. My mushroom monsters simmered all the while, getting varying amounts of editorial love, evolving into something that you might want to read. This is the story of that evolution.

Reader Zero

A good friend volunteered to read the Narrative Complete draft. This was a generous offer given that he has negative interest in stories featuring young people making bad decisions. He returned with numerous useful notes and keen observations, the most important of which was that my main character was playing hard-to-like too well. I had intended Pete to be rough-edged. You don’t get into his sort of troubles by being a shining beacon of humanity. Nonetheless, the reader wants to either feel for the character, look forward to his downfall, or secretly revel in his transgressions. Fixing Pete to Reader Zero’s satisfaction wasn’t in the cards, but I resolved to smooth and soften some of the kid’s rougher edges.

The Real First Draft

The Gray God sim-sim-simmered. I reread it and studied the distribution of word counts across its chapters and acts. Some of the chapters ran long. I identified new chapter breaks, which gave scenes more room to breathe. When I look at the chapter breakdown now, it seems like it’s the way it always should have been.

The ending was too short. It wasn’t strange or horrible enough. I had teased monsters, alien horrors, and certain conflicts, but the pay-off was perfunctory. I split the final chapter in two and did my best to deliver blood, gore, madness, and cosmic horror.

As I made these changes, I kept an eye on the growing word count. The sages of the internet recommend that horror novels weigh in at 80,000 words or less to have the best chance of acceptance by agents and publishers.

My second courageous early reader took The Gray God home and returned with helpful notes and positive feedback. The characters worked as I’d hoped, as did a plot twist I was particularly happy with, in an evil way.

Wise of the Machines

Bad writing is noise that obscures the signal of the story. Computers can’t identify plot holes, weak characterization, wooden dialog, or a host of other story flaws, but they’re pretty good at spotting typos, misspellings, some grammatical errors, and overuse of words. Playing to the strengths of the machines, I enlisted Word, Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and AutoCrit to filter out some of the bad writing noise than was fuzzing my story. None of these tools plug into Scrivener, so the process included exporting (compiling) the Scrivener project into a Word document for analysis. Errors and improvements then had to be made in the Scrivener project.

At the end of the process, I had a reasonably clean 80,000-word manuscript. I was ready for the next step in my insidious plan.

The Voice of the Outer World

Reducing the noise to expose the story was important for the next step: Developmental Editing. In a developmental edit, the editor is looking at how well the story works and provides feedback on the plot, characters, tones, themes, and general story quality of the manuscript. Any editor you’d want to hire for this service should have industry experience. That means they’ll have a keen eye for writing errors. It will probably be difficult for them to silence their inner copyeditors. To make it easier for them to focus on the story, it behooves one to deliver as clean a manuscript as practicable.

Developmental editing was a step I skipped for Raether’s Enzyme. It was important to me that Raether be my story—sink or swim—from beginning to end. I’m not as protective of The Gray God. It’s a more conventional—and possibly commercial—story. I went into the developmental edit intent on improving it in the direction of salability.

I returned to Reedsy to find a freelance developmental editor who worked with horror.

Ambitious amateur tip: Line up your developmental editor well in advance.

Of the three best matches for my project, one couldn’t take on a new project and the other two were booked months out. After toying with the idea of enlisting the other two, I settled on one and arranged for The Gray God to pass under her red pen later in the summer.

Once the ball was rolling, I soon had an editorial assessment, matching developmental notes for the manuscript, and some quality copy edits (she said she couldn’t help but fix errors when she saw them).

Her assessment highlighted what worked in the story and outlined areas for improvement with specific examples drawn from the text. It was well-written and full of actionable insights that I’ll apply to future projects.

Her manuscript edit was thorough and clear. I know what scenes and passages worked well for her. She flagged each point where the plot, setting, or character motivation was unclear. All the issues summarized in the assessment were noted in the Word comments with precision and the encouragement and coaching I need to make the story better for readers.

There was much to think about and to do. Specific issues called for delicate surgery in situ. The editorial assessment called out general patterns of weakness. I was light on character and scene descriptions. The longer dialog scenes drifted out into voids, unanchored by place or motion. It was a fair cop. I needed to fortify the descriptions and break up the dialog with meaningful actions. My inner screenwriter had delegated those details to the set and costume designers, and the actors, respectively. It was a problem I needed to fix.

Plot complication: The manuscript was already at the upper end of the word count for my genre. I consulted the editor and she said I could cheat it up to 85,000 words if I did it well. Doing it well (I hope!) and under budget required finesse. And removing a whole scene. Five hundred words mattered. The final total was just under 85,000 words. I won’t lie. I kept tinkering until I hit the limit.

The Chicago Way

The winner of a Clash of Copyeditors had an opening in her schedule and I jumped right in. She worked her diligent, painstaking magic to cleanse my manuscript of error and bring it into the light of The Chicago Manual of Style. She noted where things were unclear and offered improved word choices. The Gray God is mightier for her efforts.

I had come into a new pattern of error, which I will blame on Word. Word had been encouraging me to omit commas before conjunctions where the clauses were short. This may be what’s hip for business writing these days, but it is not the Chicago way. And given the alternative of sticking with Word’s suggestion or the corrections of a professional editor, I had to go with my editor. I spent a good long time porting commas back into the Scrivener project.

Another place where Chicago and my manuscript differed was on capitalization. Chicago has deprecated the capitalization of Marine, Army, Navy, and Air Force as stand-alone terms. That doesn’t strike me as right. And it would likely…disappoint…friends of mine who are veterans of those services. As used in the story, these words are short for United States Marine, United States Army, United States Navy, and United States Air Force. Those are capitalized.

Chicago has also chosen to not capitalize God’s pronouns and epithets. I get the idea of not capitalizing these words as a matter of secular style. When they occur in dialog from religious characters, I think capitalization should apply.

If I wind up self-publishing The Gray God, I’ll have the last word on these controversies, at least within the scope of my book.

My editor also informed me that in the interest of inclusivity, words from other languages are no longer set off in italics. There are always trade-offs.

The Package

A clean, polished manuscript is a fine thing to have, but delivering it to an agent or publisher comes after you pitch the book via a query letter. The Gray God needed a short, punchy query letter to intrigue the industry folks, or at least let us all know that the book isn’t what they can risk their time championing before gatekeepers further down the line. Some agents also want to see a short synopsis that lays out the main beats and ending of the story. Spoilers be damned! The manuscript, query letter, synopsis, and author biography form the package of documents you need to have ready before you submit your first query.

The Gray God’s package is complete. It is time.

Stalking Who on Facebook?

August 4, 2021 /

In an earlier post, I discussed stalking you on Facebook. The you I stalked proved less than productive. I resolved to try again. This post documents my latest attempts to find a more productive you.

A proactive marketing department looks out into the world and identifies unmet or underserved customer needs. An author identifies emerging or surging areas of reader interest and crafts a story and a book to satisfy an audience’s hunger. Or their clues them in. Harry Potter’s success heralded years where Young Adult Fantasy was hot. Savvy authors with empathy for, and understanding of, that audience had an audience waiting for them if they could deliver a quality story.

Tensile Press’s marketing department (me) is not proactive. Raether’s Enzyme was written with only the haziest notions of who its audience might be and no data to back those notions up. Since the book’s publication, I have been struggling to divine the traits of readers who might enjoy the story. Facebook ads are my divining rods du jour.

WARNING: This post is NOT a how-to guide for Facebook advertising.

It’s a what-I-did story. Laugh or sigh at my mistakes. Root for me making slow progress toward enlightenment. Don’t try this at home and expect great results.

The Experiments

The previous experiments cast a wide net and caught no hungry eyeballs. Sad trombone.

The key to narrowing the net is hidden in Facebook’s ad-building user interface. With what is immediately visible, you can easily constrain demographics and assemble a list of interests. It takes a bit more poking around to unlock the amazing power of AND. With AND in your toolbox, you can take your base list of interests and say, “People interested in any of THESE, AND they must be interested in THIS as well.”

This narrows the audience for the ad considerably. Starting from a core audience and varying the AND portion, I set a series of divining rods aquiver. Facebook provides all manner of statistics for an ad’s performance. Key among them for my purposes was the Click-through Rate. Of all the people who saw the ad, how many at least clicked on it? Raether was enrolled in KDP Select. That made the e-book exclusive to Amazon, so I had all the ads link to its product page. I could see if there were any sales or Kindle Unlimited page reads associated with clicks on the current ad.

Experiment #1: Neal Stephenson

Location: United States
Ages: 24-65+
Interests: Speculative Fiction, Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Neal Stephenson.

A friend and early reviewer likened Raether to some of Stephenson’s work.

Experiment #2: Margaret Attwood (A/B Test with Neal Stephenson)

Location: United States
Ages: 24-65+
Interests: Speculative Fiction, Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Margaret Attwood.

There’s overlap between Megan’s and Offred’s predicament. Their freedom and agency are threatened, in part, because of something special in their biology.

Facebook allows for A/B testing. So, I ran Experiment #2 as an A/B test with the second half of Experiment #1. I might not be able to tell which clicks to Amazon came from which ad, but Facebook had something interesting to say about which of the two ads was more effective at getting those clicks. (Spoiler: Margaret, by a substantial margin.)

Experiment #3: Speculative Fiction

Location: United States
Ages: 22-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Speculative Fiction.

I shuffled the interests around. And lowered the age range by a smidgeon.

Experiment #4: Speculative Fiction – New Kids Mix

Location: United States
Ages: 18-49
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Speculative Fiction.

Facebook was reporting that it was tending to show the ads to older readers. I was curious if we were missing out on younger readers due to the algorithm’s caprice.

Experiment #5: Gillian Flynn (no relation)

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Gillian Flynn.

I was talking with another friend and early reviewer about the previous experiments. She suggested reaching out to Gillian Flynn’s audience. This was thinking outside my box and just the sort of help I needed.

Experiment #5: The Girl on the Train

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND The Girl on the Train.

Along with Gillian Flynn, my friend suggested Paula Hawkins in general and The Girl on the Train in particular. Facebook had the book, but not the author, as an AND-able interest.

Experiment #6: Hard Science Fiction

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Hard science fiction.

Raether can be viewed as science fiction. It asks, “what if?” and explores the implications for its characters and their world. “What if cancer could be cured by a substance found in the bodies of a tiny minority?” This is somewhat fantastical given what we know about the varying causes of cancer. But it might still be possible.

Experiment #7: The Hunger Games

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND The Hunger Games.

Raether’s protagonist is a bit old for the Young Adult market. Her dystopia is ambiguous. I was curious if there might be any cross-over interest from fans of The Hunger Games.

Experiment #8: Young Adult books

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Young Adult Books.

While I was in the neighborhood, I reached out to the wider YA audience. I left the age range open. There are a substantial number of adults who enjoy YA fiction.

The Results

In General

The audiences Facebook found for the ads tend to be older and female. There’s no way to tell if that’s an accurate picture of Raether’s audience or an artifact of who’s on Facebook these days and what Facebook happens to know about them. The age trend was bucked in Experiment #4 (artificially) and in Experiment #8 (organically, by Facebook’s reckoning).

Caveat Re Specifics

I was sloppy on controlling variables in these experiments. If an experiment was not competitive after a couple of days, I cut it short. Hey, I’m paying by the day for this advertising. This means that the raw numbers of impressions (how many times the ad was seen) and an ad’s reach (how many distinct people saw the ad) can’t be compared directly. The Cost Per Result and Click-Through Rates and the are comparable.

Experiment #1: Neal Stephenson

Cost per Result: $0.31
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 11.68%

Experiment #2: Margaret Attwood (A/B Test with Neal Stephenson)

Cost per Result: $0.16
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 11.30%

Experiment #3: Speculative Fiction

Cost per Result: $0.18
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 9.96%

Experiment #4: Speculative Fiction – New Kids Mix

Cost per Result: $0.21
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 6.9%

Experiment #5: Gillian Flynn (no relation)

Cost per Result: $0.16
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 9.06%

Experiment #5: The Girl on the Train

Cost per Result: 31
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 4.63%

Experiment #6: Hard Science Fiction

Cost per Result: $0.27
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 7.17%

Experiment #7: The Hunger Games

Cost per Result: $0.20
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 7.17%

Experiment #8: Young Adult books

Cost per Result: $0.62
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 3.23%

Right, but what about actual sales?

I’m getting to that. While I was refreshing my Facebook Ads Manager dashboard, I was watching my KDP sales dashboard. I attributed book sales to the ad that was running at the time. Kindle Unlimited page reads ramped up and tapered off. Some of the page reads in the early part of one ad’s runtime may be readers who picked up the book during the previous ad.

Here are the KDP report graphs. I added colored overlays to illustrate which experiment was running. For the purposes of Kindle Unlimited, Raether’s Enzyme is approximately 500 pages.

Experiment #5 performed poorly and isn’t highlighted on this table. Which isn’t to say any of the ads did amazingly well, but I am happy with Gillian Flynn, Speculative Fiction, and Hard SciFi. There are intervals where the sales and reads come close to covering the cost of the ads for a given day. But…

It’s not NaN, nor is it a profit.

Previous attempts resulted in no sales. When you divided the cost of the ads by the royalties earned, you were dividing by zero. That’s Not a Number. This time around, the ads went to closer approximations of Raether’s audience. Some of the Unique Outbound Clicks translated into sales and Kindle Unlimited reads, both of which generate royalties. Some royalties are not zero royalties.

July’s Kindle Unlimited Royalties are still pending. In the month of June, I spent $140.14 on Facebook ads and earned $81.83 in total royalties. That’s a long way from breaking even, but I’m learning things and connecting with a few new readers, who, in turn, may recommend the book to their friends. For indie authors, that’s where the hope lies.

Marketing Monday

March 17, 2021 /
Raether's Amazon Ad

Raether’s Amazon Ad

“So, you have a new novel for me?”

“Yes, sir, I do. It’s a thriller/sci-fi/superhero mash-up with an amazing premise, a smart, sensitive hero, bounty hunters, dogs, aspiring supervillains, monsters, hackers, magic, secret identities, gunfights, and a cure for cancer!”

“Wow-wow-wow!”

Raether’s Enzyme is a story I like. The design of the paperback and eBook are excellent. Readers from my circle of family and friends enjoyed it and wanted to talk about it. I remain confident that there are many more people out there who would like it too, but that confidence is largely a matter of faith.  Sales so far have been scant, but the handful of ratings that have trickled in have been good.

The new challenge is to connect my book with readers who might enjoy it. The name of the discipline that encompasses this endeavor is: marketing. I am now consciously incompetent at marketing.

Cosmic Justice

I spent most of my adult life being unconsciously incompetent at marketing, and proudly so. As an engineer, I disdained the marketing department. They were foolish, superficial people who brought nothing but confused “customer requirements”, suspect “market research”, and undue authority to the product development process. Any failure of our efforts in the marketplace were obviously attributable to the gross incompetence of the marketing department. It is right there in both words: market. Case closed. Engineers rule. Marketing people drool. Any Dilbert fan knows this.

Yeah. About that…

Now that I am responsible for both producing the product and marketing it, I regret my former arrogance and apologize to any marketers out there who are reading this. I’m sorry. I should have had more empathy and respect for the people who work hard to identify potential customers and divine their wants and needs. I should have been more curious about how that side of a business works. Having failed in these ways, I have made a thing—a good thing—without a plan or clue as to how I might show the right people that it exists. There are infinitely many ways to fail at marketing and a small number of ways to succeed. My inability to tell the difference may doom my book to obscurity. If I can’t up my game to a baseline of conscious competence (or get very, very lucky), I fear that I will have squandered the contributions of the friends and collaborators who helped Raether’s Enzyme get this far. I will own these manifold failures from end-to-end. It will be my own damn fault.

Beyond doom and gloom

Recognizing you have a problem is the first step to solving it. As a young engineer, my next step would have been to come up with my own definition of the problem and set about solving it. Asking an actual customer for their input would only have constrained my immense creativity and innovation. As a more mature person working in a domain where I am consciously incompetent, I knew that I would need to learn, experiment, and fail repeatedly to make progress. In the months since Raether’s release, I have divided my time between marketing tasks, drafting The Gray God, and playing Cyberpunk 2077. I won’t claim to have found the optimal balance here, but I have committed one day each week to turning the learn-experiment-fail crank. I call it: Marketing Monday.

Learn

An older post offered a high-level, author’s-eye view of the landscape of the traditional publishing ecosystem as I understood it. I went with self-publishing. That landscape is similar, but there are distinct features that I should document at some point. For the purposes of this post, I’ll call out one such feature. I’m not sure if it fits my para-publishing or para-marketing categories. Let’s just say that there are many people out there who offer insight, advice, plans, and coaching for indie book marketing. Many, many people. Since I haven’t successfully employed any of their advice yet, I can’t make a recommendation as to who one should listen to or pay for. There are some common themes I’ve picked up on.

Marketing begins months before launch.

I launched Raether prematurely. I knew this at the time but didn’t want 2020 to find a way to kill me and/or destroy civilization before I had published at least one book. A prudent and planful book launch includes building buzz on your mailing list and social media, seeding influential reviewers with advance reader’s copies (ARCs), and other networking efforts. All of which require a marketing plan to identify receptive parties and shape advertising copy (which is an art distinct from fiction prose).

The Amazonian Gambit

Amazon wants to sell books. It doesn’t necessarily want to sell your book. If enough customers buy your book for it to rise in the sales and popularity ranks (in general and within the book’s category), your book will earn a position of visibility to book browsers. It falls to the indie author to bring readers to Amazon for your book or to find readers within Amazon via well-placed Amazon advertisements. Making the latter work requires insight, a bit of data science, a good cover, and a great blurb. Marketing and sales stuff. Raether has a good cover. I am working on the rest.

The insights you need include a list of books and authors whose readers are likely to enjoy your book. This list allows you to bid for ad placement on the pages for your targeted books. Then, if your cover is good and your tagline is great, a reader might just click on that sponsored product link and consider your book as well. These kindred books may also lead to further insights as to how to best categorize your book. ‘Thriller’ is a broad category. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense\Thrillers & Suspense\Technothrillers is a more specific category that gets you closer to readers who like a little science and technology in their thriller. Fortunately for Raether, which includes elements of thriller and science fiction (in the most general ‘what-if?’ sense), Amazon will let you file your book under multiple categories.

Amazon will also let you associate keywords with your book. These are invisible to customers but not to Amazon’s search engine, which may use them when a customer isn’t searching for a particular book but is in the market for a story with a ‘strong female lead’ or ‘dystopian fiction for adults.’  You only get to assign seven keywords to your book in KDP’s self-publishing system, but you can use many more in an advertising campaign. Picking keywords starts with your own ideas as to what readers might be looking for when they don’t yet know they want to read your book. You should test your ideas by searching for them on Amazon and seeing if your book fits in with the rest of the results. Alternately, tools like PublisherRocket will mine Amazon for you. This process may result in additional insights regarding similar books and authors.

With the right categories and keywords, you can, in theory, become visible to readers. If some of them buy, enjoy, and rate/review your book, the odds of it creeping up the sales ranks improve.

Finding your book’s Facebook friends

Your friends read your book because they are interested in you. Who is inclined to be friends with your book? Advertising on Facebook is a test of how accurately you can describe your ideal reader. What age range do the fall in? What educational level do they have? What interests do they pursue? Those interests can be genres (categories), authors, or specific books. They can also be medieval Scotland or space exploration. Facebook will use its creepy insights into strangers’ lives to target your ad without those strangers having expressed a desire to buy a book about a medieval Scotsman travelling to Mars. On the plus side, you can reach readers who didn’t know they wanted a book like yours. On the downside, they may not be in the market because their to-read stack is already full, thank-you-very-much.

Organic crops are labor-intensive.

I confess that I harbored a ridiculous fantasy. I told myself it was nonsense but deep down I hoped that I’d tell two friends and they’d tell two friends, and the miracle of exponential growth would popularize my book by word-of-mouth. 100% organic success. I wouldn’t have to work for it and could put all my energy into the next project. This didn’t happen. Duh. Not that my friends let me down. They helped me and my book with generous plugs and the book launch was much stronger for their contributions. I am heartened and thankful.

The book marketing coaches say that authors—and new authors in particular—benefit from being recognized contributing members of bookish communities. If readers (and writers, who are also passionate readers) know who you are, you’re not some unknown author to them. If you’ve entertained, enlightened, or encouraged them, they already value what you write. This needs to be a long-term relationship. You can’t just parachute in, flood the zone, and pitch your book.

As someone who burned out on the dramas and politics of online communities before many people knew such things existed, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make this work.

Another approach is to build an author platform. Make yourself known as an interesting person. Your platform can consist of a blog, a podcast, a Facebook page, general recognition of your expertise, all of these, and more. Having earned an audience in this other domain, you have potential readers who will trust you when you say, “Hey, gang, I’ve got a book coming out. I think you’ll like it.”

Having a platform is critical to non-fiction authors. It answers a reader or publisher’s first question: “Who is this person and why should I care what they think?” Having a platform works for new fiction authors who can say something like: “If you’ve enjoyed my articles on medieval Scotland, check out new novel. It’s set in medieval Scotland.” Established fiction authors have their prior work to build their platform on.

As someone whose labored in obscure bowels of tech behemoths until recently, this platform thing has a chicken-and-egg flavor to it. Building the platform entails the same work as marketing my book.

Experiment

So far, my experiments have all been baby steps.

Raether Zero

The simplest Amazon ad campaign you can run is to set automatic targeting. Amazon will use your categories, keywords and whatever secret sauce seems appropriate. If a customer clicks on the ad, you pay for the click based on a bidding range you set. My automatically targeted campaign named Raether Zero generated 7,780 impressions (it was shown to that many customers), 7 clicks, no sales, and had cost me $15.85 by the time I turned it off and scratched my head. The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) was low and the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) was high. This can be attributed to poor placement or a bad ad. The problem is that the ad is the book cover and a short bit of text. I’m committed to the cover and will need to scratch my head some more to improve the tiny blurb the ad allows you to work with.

Raether’s Kindred Books

The next experiment involved targeting the ad at two books I think are related my story. Raether overlaps in style, setting, and plot elements with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Raether’s dystopian aspects and concern with a young woman losing claim to her body relate it Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Perhaps readers interested in these successful books would show an interest in my unknown novel. 11,202 impressions, 16 clicks, no sales, and $10.73 later, the answer appears to be no. Again, it may be that the ad doesn’t cut it. It may be that the book itself, as reflected in the cover and short blurb, doesn’t appear to be relevant.

Rocket 1

After pouring through How to Market a Book and Amazon Decoded, I decided to revisit my book’s categories and keywords and build a new campaign with a longer list of keywords and targeted books. PublisherRocket was my friend here. It allowed me to quickly test new keyword candidates, explore the categories of related books, and cross-reference books, keywords, and categories. I launched Rocket 1 and turned it off after 2,819 impressions. Most of the keywords were generating no or few impressions. There were only two clicks. Back to the drawing board. I may start it up again after revisiting the ad blurb and fortifying the book’s page.

The first one’s free…

Facebook kindly offered me a $10 credit to apply to advertising for my page. I had prepared an ad based on the assets supplied by my designer prior to launch, so taking Fb up on this offer was easy. I set up a (crude) audience profile and pointed the ad at Raether’s page here on my blog. Seven hundred or so impressions later I had not one nibble. This could be my ad. Or the imprecision of my audience profile. Or both. Or neither. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I am deeply ambivalent about Facebook. I enjoy seeing the good things my friends and family choose to share. I understand that employing programmers and keeping the servers running costs money and that Facebook needs to make that money somewhere. It makes it by selling advertising opportunities based on its creepy insights into its users’ likes and lives. And that bugs me on a gut level. I haven’t made peace with engaging with the ads they show me. Does it make sense—is it even right—for me, with my attitudes, to pay them to insert my ads into strangers’ feeds? I haven’t solved this conundrum, so I’ve been ignoring Facebooks endless notifications about how I can improve traffic to my page with their ads. A $20 credit with my next $10 of ad spending is generous, but I don’t want to give them my credit card number.

I must move past these blocks if I’m going to use Facebook advertising. I’m told it can be quite effective.

Fail

I cannot correlate any of my advertising experiments with a single sale of my novel. Bummer.

If at first you don’t succeed…

Repeat

I plan learn more about modern indie book marketing and experimenting with these channels and others. I expect I’ll fail again. And again. And I’ll repeat the process as needed. I owe it to my book and that’s what one does on Marketing Monday.

Welcome to the World of Raether’s Enzyme

October 21, 2020 /

Raether’s Enzyme is now a book, a paperback that you can hold and an e-book that you can download to your devices.

  • Amazon (paperback and e-book – including Kindle Unlimited)
  • Your favorite bookstore can order the paperback from Ingram.
    (ISBN: 978-1-7351839-0-9)
  • The paperback can be ordered directly from IngramSpark!

Reaching this milestone required trial, error, work spanning many years, and the advice, encouragement, and support of my friends and family.  Talented editors and artists transformed my manuscript into an experience that surpassed my expectations.

Previous posts on this blog told the story of this book’s creation. The story of its life will be written by readers like you.

A Dream of Launching

October 20, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In The Prints of Proof, I resolved the burning question of which book design for Raether’s Enzyme to bring to market by creating paperback proof copies of each design. After studying the proofs and consulting with my trusted beta readers, I settled on one of the three excellent designs. Eager to get the book to market before the murder hornets descended on me, I uploaded the book’s files to Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark, and Smashwords. Hilarity ensued.

Covering my assets

With the great power of self-publishing comes great responsibility. Promoting my books is up me.  For my soft launch, I’ll be announcing the publication of Raether’s Enzyme on my social media. With a little luck, some of my friends, family, and will find the premise of the story interesting. Some of those good folks will enjoy the book enough to recommend it to their friends. Word-of-mouth will spread.

To reach readers beyond my social network, I need to advertise. The twenty-first century is awash in advertising opportunities. To put it mildly. Exploring and exploiting them requires ad media tuned to the various marketing channels. Facebook, Twitter, et al have idiosyncratic requirements for what makes optimal ads on their platforms. As I prepared to engage my designer’s talents, my research revealed that the number of ad formats was daunting. When you add the number of images required to fortify my web site, Facebook page, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, the project was too large. And any or all these requirements were subject to change without warning.

Rather than ask him to produce all the ads and artwork I would need, I asked him to set me up with graphical assets that I could combine and arrange for all the scenarios I was facing and might face over the life of Raether’s Enzyme. The cover art for Raether is amazing. The title typography is dramatic. The background is a fascinating biofluid texture. He provided me with the title in SVG vector form and extracted the biofluid from the cover art as a PNG file. To round out the package, he rendered the cover as a paperback book and on a tablet (for the e-book). These building blocks empower me to apply my (admittedly modest) Photoshop skills to build ads that play off the strengths of his cover designs.

Ad-ing it up

I set to work building the images I’d need to announce the publication. There wasn’t room for the full back cover blurb. I distilled it down to three sentences, two of them quite short. Putting them into the artwork, I hit my first speedbump. The back cover text is in a font called Thonburi. The only free-to-use version of Thonburi I could find for Windows is for Thai systems. The text of my English sentences rendered as fragments of Thai characters. After consulting with the designer, I settled on Franklin Gothic Medium for my ad copy.

I knocked out the ads and banners on my checklist with time left to pursue a stretch goal: producing a video teaser trailer. By default, I resent PC makers pre-installing third-party ‘bloatware’ on new computers. It’s mostly crap I don’t need or want. The nice folks at MSI preloaded PowerDirector14 on my machine and I’m happy they did. The free portion of its feature set was enough to do the job. The learning curve wasn’t too steep. Before long, I had combined my assets, a few transition effects, and sound effects from soundsnap to create an intriguing thirty second video that had the flavor of a movie trailer. Minus the epic “In a world…” voice.

I was pleased with myself. I downloaded it to my home theatre PC and watched it on my big screen over and over again. The final image features the mock book and tablet. After working on the ads and the video for days on end it finally hit me: a dreadful certainty that the paperback cover I had uploaded to Amazon KDP and IngramSpark was still too dark. It failed to deliver on the promise of the ads. It was one week before Raether’s scheduled launch and I had to fix the cover.

Re-cover-y

Looking back, it was clear that I had settled for a darker cover too readily. My frustration with the screen-to-print issues got the better of me. I should have worked through the problems with the aid of the designer and landed a version of the cover art that printed well back in September. I had run an experiment on my own with an enhanced version of the cover art and a matte cover, but abandon it because the matte finish made the biofluid look chalky. I needed to recreate those enhancements and make them work with the glossy cover finish that worked so well with the liquid theme of the art.

Prudence recommended contacting the designer to ask for a version of the cover with the enhancements I believed would rescue the art from the CMYK darkness. Pride, courtesy, and desperation argued against that. I owned the mistake so I should fix it. It would have been rude (and unprofessional) to interrupt the designer’s work for other clients with my fire drill. The designer is in a different time zone, so even if I was willing to inflict my panic on him, it would be more efficient if I could make the changes and test them with KDP’s previewer on my own.

Easier said than done. I don’t need programs as powerful as Photoshop often enough to justify subscribing to Adobe’s software-as-a-service. For my occasional needs, I have work-alike programs from Affinity. They are generally potent beyond my ability to fully exploit. When I opened a copy of the cover PDF file in Affinity, I ran into two problems. The bleed portion of the cover image was missing. Affinity showed only white. That had the risk appearing at the edges of the paperback cover. The second problem was my old nemesis: Thonburi. All the back-cover text was a mess of arbitrary Thai characters if I had the font installed. Absent Thonburi, the software substituted another font. In the course of ‘fixing’ the imagery, I was breaking the typography.

Necessity is the mother of subscription. I couldn’t bring myself to buy into the full Adobe Creative Suite, but a seven-day free trial of Acrobat Pro DC enabled me to convert the cover PDF into a PNG file that combined (flattened) the image portion with the text. I adjusted that to match my matte cover experiment, boosted to contrast for good measure, and saved it as a PDF. KDP raised no alarms when I uploaded it. I ordered a new proof copy with next-day delivery and told myself to hold off on uploading the new cover to IngramSpark.

Hold the WordPress

My plan was to share the video from this very website, which is powered by WordPress and lives on a BlueHost server. WordPress had other ideas. My attempts to upload the video to the site’s media library failed. “Sorry, this file cannot be uploaded for security reasons.” What?! It’s a simple MP4 video file! It plays just fine on my desktop and my iPad! I consulted various oracles and tried different WordPress plugins to no avail. One of the plugins revealed that MP4 files were on the list of permitted file types. Something else was going sideways during the process and WordPress was barfing up an incorrect error message.

Well, bugger. I didn’t have time for a trip to Techsupportland.

I created a YouTube channel for Tensile Press and uploaded the video there. That should work, but viewers will have YouTube spraying ‘watch next’ content at the end of the video. Because YouTube.

Pressing the button.

The jolly, candy-like button. KDP advises that when you press the paperback publish button, it may take up to 72 hours before the files pass through final review and the book is available for purchase on Amazon. I was slipping inside that window and the proof copy with the new cover had not arrived. The new cover looked better and brighter in the previewer. No guts, no glory. I pressed the button. And waited. No guts, no glory. I uploaded the new cover to IngramSpark. And I went to bed.

The next morning I received e-mail from KDP. My files had failed the final checks. The message’s wording was that of a human being. At long last, actual human eyes had evaluated Raether’s files. It wasn’t the new cover that was the problem. It was the interior PDF, which had passed the automated tests over a month before. The interior design brings the biofluid effect inside the book. You see it in the front matter and in each chapter heading. It is super cool. The biofluid extends to the edges of the pages it appears on. For printing purposes, that means the artwork must extend past the edges of the books page into the paper that gets trimmed away, into the bleed. The interior file I had uploaded ended at the page edge. It did not include the bleed. This should have been easy for the automated tests that run when you upload to detect, but they didn’t. The final human-powered check discovered problem. This error also explained a few problems with the test copy I had ordered from IngramSpark. The designer supplied me with a full-bleed version of the interior. I uploaded it to KDP and IngramSpark, which accepted the update. I pressed the KDP publish button a second time. And waited.

The next morning KDP’s e-mail congratulated me on having published my book. That afternoon, the proof copy with the new cover (and bad interior) arrived. It looks amazing. The colors are a close match to the vibrance of the art on-screen. I hope you relish it as much as I.

The Prints of Proof

October 10, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Dance with Designers, three talented teams of freelance designers produced covers and interior book designs for Raether’s Enzyme. Each team’s cover captured a different aspect of the story and were viable keys to unlocking readers’ interest. The teams mastered the layout challenges posed by the manuscript’s stylistic flourishes. The dance ended with a cliffhanger: I had three great designs and could only bring one to market. There was one last test.

Kindle Direct Proof

The final test was to upload the designers’ files to Amazon KDP and request proof copies of the paperbacks. This would get me as close as possible to what a real reader would experience. I had prior experience with the system that gave me cause for concern. This time I had professional design products, not dev. I was optimistic. Too optimistic…

I’ll break here and to say that the trials I recount here are 21st Century First World Problems™. KDP and IngramSpark afford indie authors an amazing opportunity to create real live books without the overhead of a full-blown print run. Raether’s Enzyme would not be available in paperback if it wasn’t for Print On Demand.

Okay, back to our story. I chose the design I favored ever-so-slightly for the first proof. With the files uploaded and the automated tests passed, the online preview of the book looked promising. The cover was a bit dim, but the interior tracked the designer’s PDF file perfectly. I ordered four proof copies and sat on the porch steps waiting for the delivery.

The covers were rather dim. Areas that glowed on the screen with red were like dried blood. The magical cyan was the green of chalkboards. Whole areas of subtle detail were lost in the darkness.  I’ve worked in and with computers long enough to know that unless the screen to printer pipeline is calibrated, what you see on the former isn’t what you’ll get on the latter. The additive colors on your screen work differently than the subtractive colors used by printers. Gamut mapping is a science. But it struck me that in the years that KDP had been serving indie authors, it should be able to print the users’ cover files with greater fidelity.

Diving into the KDP community forums revealed that dark covers were a persistent issue. The best advice anyone had to offer was to print on glossy paper (I had chosen a matte finish) for a 10%-20% boost in brightness. That was useful. I would try that. But that would mean another week or so before the next (single) proof copy arrived. The process was broken. For the time being, I had to deal with it.

I imagined ways it could be better, wrote them up, and posted them to the section of the KDP community forums dedicated to feedback and feature requests.

First things: I’m still new to this but have been in the system since CreateSpace. I know that printing cannot deliver the luminosity and range of colors that you can see on the screen. I recognize that an ideal pipeline would include calibration of the monitor to the printer. I understand the difference between RGB and CMYK but am not versed in the art and science of gamut mapping.

KDP has done an excellent job with my books’ interiors. The covers of my proof copies are invariably MUCH darker than source PDFs and images. The new previewer hints and the darkness to come, but IMHO understates it. The availability of proof copies on demand is a miracle of 21st Century publishing, but the one-week time between requesting a proof copy and having one to evaluate makes an iterative approach to getting the desired cover very, very slow.

Any or all of the following would improve productivity and reduce resource use. Please consider implementing these features for KDP.

COVER PROOF COPIES. Allow the author-publisher to request a printing of just the cover.

FILTERED COVER PROOF GALLERY. Like a cover proof copy, but with multiple miniatures of the cover on a single sheet. One displays the cover as uploaded. The others show the printed results with variations on the cover. RGB vs. CMYK. Selected embedded color profiles (community wisdom is that these are discarded by KDP, so maybe not). Gradations of enhanced saturation and/or brightness. Label each so that the customer can adjust their cover to match the one that looks best to them.

SMARTER COLOR MAPPING. Amazon’s a smart, capable company. Do a better job at translating the customer’s colors to what the printer can deliver. Train a machine learning system to provide customer-satisfying results. Something to keep my spirits from falling when I open the box of proof copies.

GREATER TRANSPARENCY AND BETTER GUIDANCE. Community members have done heroic work in offering workarounds to weaknesses in KDP. They aren’t in a position to solve our problems with this aspect of self-publishing. KDP should tell us up-front how to get the best color fidelity for our book covers. At the very least, it should document which printers to target so that we have a better chance to get things right the first time.

KDP is an important partner in getting Tensile Press books to market. Addressing the issues around cover color fidelity will make it a cherished partner.

Thank you for your attention.
Sean Flynn
Tensile Press

This is a “compliment sandwich” with some “plussing” in the middle. These was no response from the KDP team. Various jaded community members took time out of their days to tell me that it was foolish to expect any improvements to the system. One helpful soul recommended that I send the same message to KDP tech support. I did. The response was a polite email thanking me for my input and assuring me that they would forward the message to the business unit. Time will tell.

With help from the designer and a glossy cover, the second-round proof copy looked great.

I still had two more designs to proof. Swapping in their cover and interior files one after the other would take weeks—possibly months if changes were required—before I would have all three in front of me to compare. I cheated by creating two new books with slightly different titles and KDP-supplied ISBNs. With the files uploaded for each, I ordered both as proof copies. In these cases, the covers and interiors were fine.

Proof of spines

Now there were three real-world copies of Raether’s Enzyme, each a unique embodiment of the story. The fruit of the dance with designers lay on my dining room table. I studied the covers under sunlight, LEDs, and the sky. Magical. Sophisticated. Electric. I paged through them all, weighing how each rendered the general text and played my various formatting games. A favorite emerged. A personal favorite. For a final final test, I met separately with two of my stalwart beta readers and asked for their impressions. Both preferred two of the designs. To my great relief, one of the two was my favorite. My marketing-savvy reader told me that an image should contain one, or at most two messages. He pointed to one of the proof copies and said that it had the most direct message. It was the design I had chosen based on the emotion in its cover and the way the design infused the interior. Sometimes marketing and personal taste converge.

The Bill-ion-aire, and the rest…

Amazon (via KDP) is a big market for independent authors. It is not the only market. I want Raether to available to as wide an audience as possible. Or at least as practical. Alexa will tell you that I’m quite fond of Amazon, but she doesn’t know that I like my local bookstores too and favor them when it comes to new books from my favorite authors. Readers enjoy their books on tablets, phones, laptops, desktops, and eReaders. They check out print books and e-books from their local libraries. Raether’s Enzyme should meet them where they want to read.

The self-publishing ecosystem makes this possible in numerous ways. After research and deliberation, I decided to split my non-Amazon betting by putting the print edition and the e-book into separate channels. Part of this was for eggs-and-baskets reasons. The other was to learn more about these channels for future projects.

Sparking Raether’s Enzyme

IngramSpark, that is. In many ways, IngramSpark is like KDP. Authors upload cover and content files. IngramSpark’s printing arm, Lightning Source, prints copies of the book on demand. KDP is a vertically integrated tentacle of the vast quasi-monopoly that is Amazon, who prints and sells the book. IngramSpark is part of Ingram Content Group, the largest book distributor and wholesaler in the United States. In that role, it is the ally, rather than adversary, of bookstores large and small. Adding your book to Ingram’s catalog makes it visible to your friendly neighborhood bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and your public library.

As in KDP, after your files are uploaded, IngramSpark guides you through setting the price of your book. This was my first real contact with life outside of the Amazon basin. I learned why paperback books cost what they do. To make money, bookstores need a wholesale discount. IngramSpark recommends 55% off the cover price. When I combined the price I had set for the paperback on KDP with the discount and the cost of production, Ingram calculated that my profit would be negative. I would owe for each copy sold. I needed to raise the list price by…a bit. To maintain the goodwill of the non-Amazon universe, my Amazon price would have to rise to match what I needed to charge to make things work with Ingram.

Bookstores very much want to be able to return unsold books for a refund. Margins are small. They need to manage the risk of stocking new authors. I understand and respect that. Tensile Press (which is me) can’t afford to be on the hook for a big return. Or a multitude of little ones. So, at the very real risk of Raether never appearing on a bookstore shelf, I opted out of offering a return policy.

Smashing all the words

The prospect of plugging into all myriad e-book stores daunted me. There are several outlets that will handle the multiplexing for you. I went with Smashwords. It has a good reputation and I have some pleasant memories of working with (what I think is) its founder, Mark Coker, back at Apple in the 1980s. When you upload to Smashwords, there’s little room for shillyshallying.  You’re either in the pipeline for immediate publication, or you’re available for pre-order. I freaked out. I hadn’t set a date in my mind, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t that day. I picked a release date a few weeks in the future. And I found a button on the dashboard to ‘unpublish’ the e-book. I clicked it.

Finger on the trigger

I sat there and asked myself, “If not then, when?” It was 2020. The murder hornets appeared here in Washington in the second act. Chekhov’s Gun required they be used before the curtain fell. Did I want to risk dying in whatever ether, cocaine, and peyote infused madness the 2020 writer’s room had in store without having published one book?

…………………Bang.

The answer was no. I republished on Smashwords with the original release date. I set the release date on IngramSpark. I set the (e-book) release date on KDP. The hammer struck the firing pin. The firing pin hit the primer. The powder began to burn. Raether’s Enzyme was on its way down the barrel and into the world.

Two days later an excited email arrived from one of my beta readers. Raether’s paperback edition was available for preorder on Amazon. After a moment of confusion, I realized that the IngramSpark had pushed the preorder to Amazon. As I write this, I’m working through Amazon’s support network to override that edition with the KDP version. Over the next few days, the e-book preorder surfaced on Apple’s bookstore. Print and e-book on Barnes & Noble. Kobo.

I am committing the quietest, softest, weakest book launch imaginable. I have flouted all the online guru’s advice for building interest. I haven’t sent advanced reader copies to influential book bloggers. I haven’t sought out the online communities where my (potential) audience dwells. I haven’t commissioned reviews to decorate the ad campaign I haven’t even planned. I haven’t raised an army of flying monkeys to trumpet the news to the far corners of Oz. My marketing-fu is rubbish.

Nonetheless, here it goes. There is much left to do before I can at least make an announcement via my limited social media.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

A Dance with Designers

September 23, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Clash of Copyeditors, two talented freelance editors improved my Raether’s Enzyme manuscript and I then struggled to merge their edits into a final draft. I bought my own copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and verified that we now use the lower-case internet. There was much rejoicing.

Two is Good. Three is Better. Right?

Clash’s dual-slit copyeditor experiment went well enough that I was keen to try it again with the cover and interior design. I liked Reedsy as a place to connect with freelance professionals but it was too early to put all my eggs in their walled garden. One of my eggs, yes. The other I would entrust to someone else. Someone out there.

Be careful for what you wish for. To that end, I started my search with the following criteria in place and immutable:

  • One stop shop. For the cover, interior, and eBook to be consistent, I wanted one designer (or team) to develop all three. Typography on the cover should inform the interior. On a more concrete level, the dimensions of a paperback’s cover spine depends on the page count of the interior.
  • Genre agility. Raether’s DNA contains thriller, sci-fi, and a dash of superhero story. The designer portfolios I was looking for needed breadth. There are artists and studios out there who can land your cover solidly within the romance, science fiction, or fantasy spaces. I was looking for an artist who could compose from a multi-genre palette.
  • License free. Once I had the completed work, I needed to be free to use it without accounting for additional use fees. You know, in case I sell too many books.
  • I strive to be clear and forthright in my dealings. I prepared a project brief describing scope and challenges as I saw them. The designers I wanted to work with would cite details or ask pertinent questions in the course of formulating their offers.

The project brief I sent to each designer began thus:

Short version

Cover and interior design for eBook and print. 114,000-word manuscript. Mixed genre – a contemporary thriller with elements of science fiction and superhero origin story. Includes text messages, email, simple tables, and a few other stylistic flourishes that preclude direct application of a template.

I am exploring this process for the first time. I may hire more than one designer. In that scenario you would be paid in full and thanked profusely but might not see your contribution to the book go to market.

The long version goes on from there into spoilers territory.

After a long search, I landed on a book design site that I liked. Their portfolio was diverse and included authors that I recognized. The prices were higher than I expected and did not include eBook formatting in the package that was otherwise right for my project. There was space for my brief in the request-a-quote form, so I added it. I clicked submit and waited to hear back via email. The response was disappointing. Boilerplate outlined a cover and interior package that started out $500 more expensive than the package I had asked about. That base figure covered a page count that was much smaller than I knew Raether would need. The quote disagreed with the web site and indifferent to the details I had provided. I chose to go no further.

I approached the next design site with the same brief and more trepidation. Unnecessary trepidation. The designer (interior) had read the brief and asked to see the manuscript to better set the bid. These were folks I could work with. I had my non-Reedsy design team.

All this while, I had encoded most of my criteria into Reedsy’s marketplace search queries and spent many hours reviewing bios and portfolios. After much sifting and sorting I got it down to two candidates. One had a strong, broad portfolio and a background that fit the project well. The other had a distinctive distinctiveness to his work. I wanted to see what he would do with the project. I requested quotes from both. Be careful what you wish for. They were both available. Both were interested in the project and attentive to its requirements. Both were fair and reasonable in their offers. Dangerously reasonable. As in: I could hire both of them for what that first design site was asking. So that’s what I did.

Dosado and Away We Go

Every dance has certain steps. The copyediting dance is relatively simple. The writer presents the editor with a manuscript and any notes that might be helpful. The editor may in time respond with questions about the manuscript’s idiosyncrasies. The editor delivers a version of the manuscript with their recommended changes tracked by Word. The writer happily clicks ‘Accept’ on 95% of the changes and agonizes over whether the remain errors are something super clever and special. The dance partners thank each other and move on.

The book design dance is more involved and iterative. The steps I observed while collaborating with all three teams went like so:

  1. The writer supplies the manuscript, notes about what they are looking for, and examples of relevant cover art.
  2. The designer creates two or more preliminary cover designs.
  3. The writer spends a day thrilled with and fascinated by the designer’s imagination and skill.
  4. The writer agonizes about which design to choose.
  5. The writer picks one design to move forward and writes up their thoughts on the cover.
  6. The designer evolves the cover in response to the writer’s notes and delivers one or more variations of the core cover.
  7. Repeat steps 5 and 6. The designers I worked with offered more than one revision as part of their services. If you need more than three, chances are there’s a communication problem or you don’t really know what you’re looking for.
  8. The writer signs off on the cover design.
  9. The designer takes the manuscript, front matter (copyright, dedication, etc.), back matter (acknowledgments, author bio, etc.) and instructions from the writer and combines them into a print-ready PDF.
  10. The writer reviews the PDF and responds with any notes and corrections.
  11. The designer updates the PDF in response.
  12. Repeat steps 10 and 11 as needed. (Raether needed due to its formatting extravagances.)
  13. The writer signs off on the interior. The page count is now known and fixed.
  14. Optional: Paperback full cover design. Skip if the project is eBook only.
    1. The writer supplies back cover blurb text and ISBN number.
    2. The designer extends the cover design to include the spine and back cover with barcode.
    3. The writer reviews the full cover design and responds with notes.
    4. The designer updates the full cover design.
    5. Repeat steps c and d as needed.
    6. The writer signs off on the full cover.
  15. Optional: eBook interior design. This is like the print interior design, with EPUB files taking the place of the print-ready PDF.

Working with one designer, a manuscript with conventional formatting, and a story with clear genre, this dance is intricate but the choreography is straight-forward. Working with three designers on a more complex manuscript (by novel standards), a mixed genre story, and consulting with my beta readers, is where the dosado comes in. From my perspective, it was more of a square dance than a waltz. I was switching partners, repeating steps, and listening for the next call. The extra work was rewarded with sustained excitement.

The Covers

In the first draft of this post, I went into detail about dance Steps 1 through 8. I described each of the cover candidates, my reactions to them, and which ones I chose to develop and why. That was the right thing to do for a private journal and the wrong thing to do for a blog post. While I had anonymized the designers, I was still exposing details of our collaborative dialog and painting with words works-in-progress that were not intended for a wide audience. To put it lightly: It was unprofessional. To put it honestly: I was betraying the designer’s trust.

Allow me to summarize. Each design team started with the manuscript, some notes, and a link to the educational saga of my own attempt at designing the book. The preliminary designs were exciting and diverse. Each artist found their own themes to emphasize and each of these pictures spoke a thousand words about what I had written. Each was a key with the potential to unlock the interest of readers who will enjoy the book. Studying the designs and writing feedback for the artists sharpened my understanding of what I was looking for. Picking one design from each team to develop forced me to separate what I wanted and liked from what the book needed. Reaching Step 8 was an awesome milestone, repeated three times.

Here are five of the things I learned during this part of the dance:

  • Don’t over-specify the design. What the designers created was far more interesting and original than what I had in my head. I put that creativity at risk by sharing too many of my own thoughts. If the designer’s process includes reading the manuscript, let the story itself make the suggestions.
  • Write good feedback on all the preliminary designs. You’ll only develop one, but what you loved about the others (and what didn’t quite work) will inform the evolution of your preferred cover. Getting your reactions and reasoning down in writing clarifies your thinking.
  • Putting your characters on the cover is hard. I read that without searching out a model and commissioning a photo shoot, you aren’t going to get a great match for features, expressions, or poses. This turned out to be true. Working with glimpses, abstractions, or silhouettes can put your protagonist on the cover without stealing the one of the most important things the reader imagines.
  • Test the designs at thumbnail size. Beautiful, subtle images and typography weaken when the cover is one of many thumbnails the reader is browsing through an online catalog. Unless or until the reader is looking for your book, the cover has to do its work when it’s small.
  • Favor fuel over maps when providing feedback. Inspire change rather than direct it. Request amplification or reduction of emotions instead of dictating new design elements. Identify problems in terms that allow the designer to find the solution. I did make some very specific requests. “Could we see the apostrophe more clearly?” The most nit-picky was: “Could we increase the kerning here?” Picking of nits should be the exception, not the rule.

On to the Interior

Dancing with designers inside the book’s cover is less emotional than the cover design. Absent interior illustrations, it’s all about layout, typography, and getting the fine details right. Some people have passionate opinions about fonts and might argue with their designer over which style of Baskerville to use for the body text. I’m not one of those people. Each design team picked a different set of fonts and all are pleasing to my eye. For a novel with the usual mix of narration and dialog, the first version of the interior may be the final one. Reviewing might catch widows and orphans, which are easily fixed.

Raether features stylings for which there appear to be no industry standards: dialog via text messages, email, and Slack chats. Its scene breaks take the form of headlines culled from the internet. These features presented a creative challenge for the designers. I had solutions for these problems and corresponding Word styles for the manuscript. The trick was to make them clear and pleasing on the printed page. As a general rule, a novel uses one font in its body text. There may be bold face in the chapter headings and occasional italics. After seeing the text messages in the main font, I asked the designers to use a sans serif font, like the ones you’re used to seeing on your devices, for all the electronic communication. This made the transitions between the digital world and the regular narrative clear.

The text messages were not done making trouble. In the manuscript and in each interior design, you see them as on your phone, with the messages from one person on the right and the other on the left. The designers had trouble keeping the messages on their correct sides. My bafflement turned to frustration. How are you getting this wrong? It’s right there in the manuscript! I didn’t actually blow up like that at them. I just made notes off all the places where the errors occurred. The errors were fixed. I cooled down and realized that if they were all having the same problem, it might well be in the manuscript. In the course of formatting the messages, I had allowed Word to spawn sibling styles for right and left side messages. Failure to consolidate those styles meant that while it looked right in the manuscript, the work the designers did to transform the message styles was error-prone. Document your fancy-pants styles and apply them with rigor.

The upside of needing revisions to the interior PDF was that I found seven manuscript errors that had slipped through copyediting. The designers were all kind enough to work those corrections into their revisions.

Popping down to the EPUB

EPUB is the (family of) standards underlying most eBooks. Under the hood, your typical EPUB eBook is a ZIP file containing XML documenting the book’s structure, CSS files describing its stylings, HTML files for all the chapters and sundry sections, and image files for the cover and any interior artwork. Having worked on Microsoft’s XPS documents and early versions of its web browser, this isn’t unfamiliar territory for me. Nonetheless, I sought help to ensure Raether’s eBook offered readers a polished experience.

Two of the three design teams opted out of the EPUB part of the project. To their credit, the Word files for the interior PDFs can be converted to EPUB and Amazon’s corresponding format via tools like calibre and Kindle Create. The process turned out to be mostly automated and otherwise straight-forward.

The third designer signed up for the job and probably wishes he hadn’t. Little did he suspect I would draw him into a vortex powered by my neophyte ignorance and long history in software development. He provided me with .EPUB and .MOBI versions of the book. I downloaded a variety of eBook readers to my PC, iPad, and iPhone to test out the file. I sideloaded the MOBI onto my Kindle Paperwhite. I changed color schemes and font sizes. There were problems. Some of them I attributed to dodgy apps. But on the Kindle, Kindle apps, and Apple’s books, I expected perfection and got bungled drop caps at the beginning of each chapter. The cover image was either clipped or stretched. I freaked out.

The designer was flummoxed. It looked great when he tested in Kindle Previewer 3. I downloaded this program and told it open the file. The other eBook readers had opened the file instantly. Kindle Previewer 3 popped up a little progress window. It wasn’t just opening the file. It was ingesting it. In the progress window, text flashed by. Something about ‘Enhanced Typesetting’. It turns out that drop caps are facilitated by ‘secret sauce’ that Amazon adds to the file as you hand it off to their KDP self-publishing site. Apple and the other big eBook sellers likely do the same. EPUB is an independent standard, but the big players “add value” to provide a more premium experience than the core standard allows. I needed to trust the system(s) to make things right. I apologized to the designer for raising the alarm. Ever the professional and diplomat, he said the project had been a learning experience for both of us.

When the Music Stops

I have three great designs. Each captures an aspect of my story and illuminates it with an artists imagination. Each is right in its own way. I want readers to see all three and pick the one they like best. But that misses the point. There aren’t any readers out there who will pay their good money for my book based on the strength of my name. I tempt myself with the possibility of selling different designs through different channels and tell myself it would be a form of A/B testing. Traditionally published books get different covers in different markets. I have spare ISBN numbers to apply as needed. Could I attract attention with such a stunt? Yes. Would I sow confusion where I need clarity? Probably. Am I trying to rationalize avoiding a hard choice? Definitely.

When the music stops, there can be only one. Somewhere down the line there may be an opportunity to share the other designs via special editions. For launch, I need one cover to share and advertise.

There is one more test to run. One more set of data to collect. I need proof that that each design works. Please stay tuned.

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