Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: eBook

OPERATION: X-RAY

November 3, 2020 /

In all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself.

In the run-up to Raether’s launch, staging and scheduling the e-book was easily done and completed early. The other preparations filled me with so much excitement and terror that I had little time to think about the Kindle edition. If Amazon KDP prompted me to provide X-ray content, I missed it. You may be familiar with X-ray from Prime Video. It will pop up information about who is in a scene in the movie you’re watching. Some clever combination of annotators and algorithms connects the content of the movie to IMDB, which Amazon owns.

X-ray annotations are available for Kindle e-books. They are not folded into the e-book file directly, but live in a database in the Amazonian cloud. Launching the annotation web app is cleverly hidden in the ellipsis menu. Like so.

Launch X-Ray, if you can find it.

I stumbled onto this a week after launch. Given the choice between writing about and around the book vs. trying to figure out how to market it, I took what I thought was the easy road and got to work annotating.

Everything’s automated.

Except the things that aren’t. The system does a decent job of combing the text for character names and specialized terminology. Some of the terms will have Wikipedia content pre-selected. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to visit each and every character and term and:

  1. Write a short character profile or term definition.
  2. Chose a Wikipedia entry to supply the definition.
  3. Exclude the entry from X-Ray.
  4. Realize that this entry is a nickname for a character and needs to be added to that character’s profile as an alternate spelling.

Sample character entry.

I expected Operation X-Ray to run over a couple of sessions in as many days. I was wrong.

Terms real and imagined

Raether is written in close third person perspective with multiple point-of-view characters who come from different backgrounds. The narration uses vocabulary from the POV characters’ worlds without slowing down to explain the terms. It mixes real and fictitious Pacific Northwest geography. It coins new jargon around the recently discovered Raether’s enzyme. The number of people who will get all the references is a demographic of me, because I wrote the story and the story required the research.

I like to think that you can enjoy the story without knowing the details of the Ruger firearms catalog or all the Native American names for Washington’s stratovolcanoes. The story doesn’t hinge on any of these details and provides enough context that you should have enough of the idea to keep reading. X-Ray is there for readers who enjoy stopping to indulge their curiosity. For the real-world terms, the Wikipedia text does a fine job. For the products of my imagination, I provide more details to flesh out the story’s world.

In the current X-Ray, there are 24 custom entries and 163 Wikipedia terms.

Characters central and minor

The core cast of Raether numbers about twenty. There are a great many more secondary and named minor characters. X-Ray’s automated search counted a total of 143. Some of those were false-positives. ‘Roooowf’ is a noise a character makes, not a new character. After coalescing the nicknames and excluding the super-minor characters, the current X-Ray has entries for eighty fictitious people.

The character profiles should enrich the reader’s understanding of the major characters but not reveal anything that would revise that understanding. The text of the novel should be the reader’s guide to the characters. This sets up a balancing act for the X-Ray profiles. They need to be interesting enough to reward the reader, but not reveal secrets. I erred on the side of being shorter and less interesting. X-Ray content can be revised at any time, so I may revisit this in the future.

For the minor characters, I recapped what we already know about them as an aid for readers who might have lost track and explained a few that came up in passing conversations.

Beyond Raether’s X-Ray

X-Ray is a nice supplemental feature that I would like to provide for future books. To make it easier, I’ll need to keep better track characters and terms. In Raether, it was all in my head. I should at least maintain a spreadsheet of who’s who and what’s what. Such accounting will help during rewrites by challenging me to justify keeping minor characters. I’m looking at you, Timothy Wood, Esq. Scrivener has facilities for keeping track of characters built in, so The Gray God will start in a better place when its time under the X-Ray comes.

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 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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