Category Archives: Writing

April 13, 2012 · 3:37 am

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” – The Hunt

I’m trying to get these done faster as I get closer to the deadline with which I need to order this book. For those of you just now joining in, “1000 Words is my Honors College Project. The plan is to write ten short stories, each 1000 words in length (because “a picture’s worth a thousand words”) , accompanied by a book cover I design. I’m hoping to go into book cover design, so I’m trying to create a portfolio that I can use to promote my work.

 

SBibb - "The Hunt" Book Cover

 

Anyways, the latest short story I’ve completed (and published on Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/151461) is called “The Hunt.” It’s a short story about a young hunter defending herself against an intelligent cougar  stalking her family’s village. This one is meant to be young adult/adult, and adventure themed.
As an update on the previously published stories, Snow Witch is standing the same in statistics, The Carrier now has 70 downloads and one review, while Shafted Dreams has only 12 downloads. Though there’s only been a few days of having Shafted Dreams self-published, it has far fewer downloads than The Carrier did. I suspect it may have something to do with an uninteresting blurb, or the difference in being published late at night versus early morning (though the fact The Carrier is still getting downloads make me think this should be a mute point).

Anyways, I have two more stories currently written that need to be edited, one story that needs to have edits finalized (which also needs adjustments to the typography on the cover), then three more stories/covers to complete. I also need to create a cover for the anthology itself. And this really should be ordered next week. Needless to say, it’s not a good idea to procrastinate. Especially when it comes to editing.

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

April 11, 2012 · 3:25 pm

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” – Shafted Dreams

Another update, as the due date for completing this project draws closer… 

I have removed Snow Witch from Kindle (though it may still show as the system processes this), and made it free on Smashwords. There have been two additional downloads since then. It did recieve one review on Smashwords, which was two stars, but said it was worth the read.

The Carrier has 64 downloads since I uploaded it. There have not been any reviews as of this time.

I have just now uploaded the next short story, Shafted Dreams. Unlike the other short stories, it is a political commentary, and more on the literary side of genres. It is also told in three short points of view. I’m curious to see if it gets downloaded more or less, or has a difference in tendency to be reviewed. It is also a story I feel has a stronger cover, so I’m curious to see how that goes. Of course, I have uploaded it as free.

As a side note, I am noticing a theme starting to develop in this project, loosely themed around family. With that in mind, I’ll pay attention to that in other stories. 🙂

Anyways, the statistics of the project is as follows:

3 Stories completed.
4 Stories written but not edited.
3 Stories still need to be written.
5 Book Covers completed. 

1 Book Cover nearing completion.
4 Book Covers still need to be designed.

Anthology Cover still needs to be designed.

Let me know if you guys have any questions or anything you want me to go into more detail about with this project. 🙂

 

Shafted Dreams: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/151067

 

SBibb - Shafted Dreams Cover

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

April 7, 2012 · 1:33 pm

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” – The Carrier

An update on my “1000 Words” project.

For Snow Witch, once the free trial wore off, there were no more downloads of this story (except the one I bought as a gift for my fiance). As such, I’m currently looking at two possibilities: see if sales increase once other short stories are available for free, or make it free as well, and only make the actual, final anthology cost money. (I’m thinking $2.99 sounds like a decent price). Right now I’m waiting to hear back from Amazon/Kindle as to whether there is a way to make it free on Kindle, or if I should simply remove the story so I can make it free on Smashwords.

Either way, I plan to hold off on publishing any of the other short stories on Kindle until the full anthology is complete.

This is largely due to time. It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized that our final project is due on April 27th, the last day of regular classes before finals. Figure in two weeks for printing shipping a book, and that means I need to have completed the book by April 14th… a week from now. On the bright side, I guess I could do expedited shipping.

While I originally planned to do a large photobook version of “1000 Words” to showcase the completed book covers and stories, I’m starting to think that working with just the trade paperback version might be the best option.

Today I self-published the short story, The Carrier on Smashwords. Formatting was much smoother after having already done the formatting for Snow Witch. The one downside to running out of time to complete these stories, however, is not having as much time to find a proofreader. As such, I did extra proof reading of the story myself, and did it over a span of several weeks.

Once all the stories are completed, I do hope to find another proofreader for the whole anthology, or to look over it again myself, to try to catch anything I missed during this initial phase.

The benefit to going ahead and publishing it, though, is that it gives me the feeling that I must move on to the next story, regardless of if there might be more tweaks to be made. But if I were doing this for future projects, especially if it were a novel, I’d definitely want to find beta readers before it went live.

At the time of typing, The Carrier has had nine downloads, and no reviews (neither has Snow Witch). I just hope it is enjoyable. 🙂

Anyways, the statistics of the project is as follows:

2 Stories completed.

5 Stories written but not edited.

3 Stories still need to be written.

4 Book Covers completed.

2 Book Covers near completion.

4 Book Covers still need to be designed.

Snow Witch: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/139780

The Carrier: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/149719

4 Comments

Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

April 6, 2012 · 1:24 pm

My Recent Discovery of Book Trailers

So after reading the post (http://www.ravven.com/blog/2012/03/la-estrella-book-trailer/) by Raaven, which had the book trailer for La Estrella, I started getting an interest in book trailers. To be honest, I’d never really paid them much attention. I figured that if I’d read the blurb and that would tell me whether I liked it or not.

But then I started looking at book trailers, and the movie-like quality of them fascinated me. Some where less than thrilling, but others quickly caught my attention. The one Raaven mention, La Estrella, has me wanting to read the book, though I know very little Spanish. (Here’s to hoping it eventually gets translated).

Another one that caught my eye was also posted by Raaven (http://www.ravven.com/blog/2012/02/book-trailers/), called Harbinger. Personally, it’s not the type of book that I’d normally pick up, though I was fascinated by the trailer. I would give it a look now if I saw it in a book store, though I probably would have passed it over before.

Now publishers are also promoting thier books with book trailers through Facebook.

Starters instantly caught my eye, and I went on to read the sample chapter. Needless to say, it’s now on my to-read list (consequently, I signed up on Goodreads just to keep track of them all).

Starters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvNUsW1CItY

The other recent one was Under the Never Sky, which I’d previously ignored. After seeing the trailer, I definatly plan on giving the book a chance.

Under the Never Sky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0TnH3GEieE&feature=youtu.be

Would I go out and buy the book on the trailer alone? Probably not. But the ones that catch my interest do get me reading the sample chapters.

And one book trailer just made me happy, because it was advertising book two by showing the ending of book one. If you don’t want spoilers for Matched, you might not want to watch the trailer for Crossed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovn8-Jp3ckM

Anyways, twas a thought I had. Personally I really enjoy these movie-esque book trailers, and whether I self-publish or traditionally publish the novel I’m working on, I’d want to consider the possibility of making a trailer. 🙂

7 Comments

Filed under Book Covers, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

March 15, 2012 · 2:07 pm

Lucky 7 Writing Meme

Carissa (http://carissa-taylor.blogspot.com/2012/03/lucky-7-meme_15.html) tagged me in the Lucky 7 meme. She was one of the extremely helpful people who have beta read my young adult novel, Distant Horizon, that I am working on. Looked like fun, so I thought I’d give it a shot. 🙂

Here’s how it works:

1. Go to page 77 of your current MS

2. Go to line 7

3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written. No cheating

4. Tag 7 authors

5. Let them know

My 7 lines from page 77 of DISTANT HORIZON:

Lance glared at me. Too bad, he knew I wasn’t the most reserved person around here.

            Crush rubbed the back of his neck, tossing the welder’s mask under a desk. The mask crashed into a cardboard box and a small bolt rolled out, clattering to the floor on the other side of the room. “It has to do with my power; I don’t really– stop– well. My real name’s John, but no one calls me that.”

            “The name stuck,” Pops admitted.

            “Powers?” Lance asked. “What powers?”

Might help to know that the MC is getting introduced to her new teammates… and to the concept of super powers. Crush, of course, has momentum. Anyways, just a quick taste of my YA novel I’m working on with my fiance. 🙂

Tag, You’re It!

These are the people I’m tagging. Only had a couple I could think of right off hand, but anyways, I found this to be entertaining. No obligation to continue if you don’t want to, just thought you might be interested. 🙂

Jordan: http://kissedbyliterature.blogspot.com/

Becki: http://themusingwriter.blogspot.com/

1 Comment

Filed under Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

March 14, 2012 · 3:43 am

Photo Illustration – Volcanic Ash Mock Book Cover

After attempting to create the background for another manip, I discovered it just didn’t want to work. So I stripped out the people from the image, and reworked it. Did some tweaking, added the hooded figure from a different manip that needed to be reworked, then added the book cover elements. Flipped the actual background.

Added an illustrated look to it.

Now I’m much happier with it. 🙂

SBibb - Volcanic Ash Mock Book Cover

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Writing

Tagged as , ,

March 7, 2012 · 12:07 pm

Self-Publishing 1000 Words – Snow Witch is on Smashwords

SBibb - Snow Witch Cover

I have completed the cover for Snow Witch and finished formatting the short story for Smashwords. (Next up will be a Kindle edition). It is now up on Smashwords. The process felt surprisingly easy, and I only had one issue (had to change it from .docx to .doc), but the solution was easily remedied. I’m currently reading through and getting the hang of sales versus downloads, but hopefully it will work out well. I’m not sure if downloads also includes downloads of the sample.

Since Smashwords currently has a sitewide promotion going on this month for downloading an ebook, I choose to give “Snow Witch” the option to be downloaded for free. I’m hoping to entice people to download and review it, but we’ll see if anything comes of it. I missed the first half of the promotion, though, so it will only be free for three days, until March 10th. I would be curious to know how many people are interested in it because of the cover, and how many people are interested in the story due to the short description.

I also posted a note about it on my photo illustration Facebook page, made an announcement via Absolute Write’s announcements forum, and posted it here to my WordPress blog. I currently have two sales, one with the Smashwords coupon, and one an actual purchase. I’m not sure if the actual purchase was intentional or not. I’ll be curious to see how it tracks for the next few days (and will probably have to tell myself not to keep checking Smashwords’ dashboard for updates).

Next up is to create the Kindle edition, and then I need to edit and write the next short stories to be published. One down, nine to go.

2 Comments

Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Photo Illustration, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March 5, 2012 · 11:36 am

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” Project – A Collection of Short Stories

For my capstone honors college project, I elected to merge both my major and minor together. I’m a photography major with a creative writing minor, and for my photography I have a special interest in book cover design and photomanipulation.

Therefore, I decided to create a project consisting of ten short stories, each approximately 1000 words long, which would each be illustrated with a book cover. The title of the project, 1000 Words, comes from the phrase, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.”

While I will be creating a print, photobook version of all ten stories as the completion point, I realized I needed some sort of motivation to write, edit, and illustrate each individual short story.

Enter self-publishing.

I’ve long had an interest in self-publishing, but I also want to try the traditional route, and intend to start off trying traditional for my novels. Now, with the advent of ebooks, I want to try selling the short stories as a side project. Part of this is because I will be using my own first printing rights for the project, and the other part is to help me get a feel for the process and book cover design in order to aid future clients.

So I decided that I will create an e-version of each short story, and self-publish them as I complete them through Smashwords and Kindle. I’ll start off using Smashwords so that I can learn the formatting, then create a Kindle version afterwards.

I am currently planning to price each one at .99 cents, then once all of them are written, compile them into the final anthology called 1000 Words. I have not yet decided on its price, though I’m considering $2.99 and $3.99 at this point in time.

I honestly don’t expect to make any money off of this, especially since I have little in the way of marketing planned. I do intend to announce on my facebook page when I release a story, but seeing as how I have few followers on the business page, I’m not sure how effective that will be.

Also, I am hoping to offer a promotion of a couple day free downloading period (or give coupons to those who ask) for friends or people who might be interested in reviewing the short stories. I have considered leaving one story free once I get multiple stories uploaded.

In the meantime, my first short story slated to be published (hopefully by the end of this week), is “Snow Witch.” A young witch ventures outside of her town for the first time in hopes of transferring her brother’s illness to a willing creature.

I’m in the process of reviewing the short story (which I posted in AW’s Share Your Work forums) and I’m also currently editing the book cover to make it the best I can. 🙂

Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts. I’m hoping that sharing the process will be helpful to multiple people. 🙂

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Covers, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,