self-publishing

(Part One) (Part Two)

Last time, I was left with the final draft of my next book, Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time, in its completed state, all ready for the actual publication process.

The next step was to update my web site. I’m about to make a bunch of e-books with links leading back to it, and I need to make sure I have someplace for those links to go. First, a page for the book itself. I use a plug-in called MyBookTable which generates a page for each book. Here’s the link to the page for this book, if you want to check it out – as I write this, some of the links on it are active (and by the time you read this, all of them may be), but when I first made it, instead of the price it said, “Coming soon!” and there were no vendor links at all. Otherwise, it looked like it does now.

Next I needed to make a landing page for people who have finished the book. For each of my books there’s a hidden “thank you for reading” page, not accessible through the web site’s navigation menu. At the end of each book I ask the reader to leave me a review, and provide a link back to the page on the appropriate site – if you bought the book from Amazon, for example, it’ll send you back to the book’s Amazon page. That means for each and every vendor, I need to make a completely distinct e-book with unique links. That’s a lot of e-books! So I actually do this just for the major vendors – the rest get sent to this “thank you” page on my site, where they can then click the link for their appropriate store. (Yes, it would save a lot of work to have the generic link in every book, but the fewer times you make a reader click, the better.) Also, the first time I upload, I won’t have the link to the book’s pages at the vendor sites yet, so the generic link serves as a placeholder until I do. Here’s the “thank you” page, if you’re curious.

One last thing – wherever Dakota Bell is mentioned on my site, it says “Coming 2015!” Time to delete that, at long last!

Now I’m ready to make the epub files. Epub files are used by everybody except Amazon, which uses its own file format called mobi. Even though Amazon will be the first site I upload to, I’m leaving the mobi file for later. You can’t crack open and get inside a mobi file as easily as you can with an epub, so the epub is better at this stage, where I’m trying to find potential formatting issues. As I said, I’ll need an epub file for any vendor for which I think it’s worthwhile to provide direct links. At this point that’s Barnes and Noble, Kobo, iTunes, and Google Play. (But that might change – more on that later.) There are a few smaller vendors I distribute to through Draft2Digital, an e-book distribution platform, either because it’s not worth the effort to go to them directly, or because they don’t accept self-published authors directly. They get a general epub with all the links going to my website. That’s the one I’ll make first, for testing, because it’s the most generic. The body of the book is the same from version to version, so if this one is all right, I’ll only need to check the backmatter for the other versions.

I write my books in a program called Scrivener. I love, love, love Scrivener and recommend it for anybody who does any serious writing. It’s got a million features, most of which I ignore, but the most useful is its “Compile” function. It takes the book and turns it into whatever kind of file I need. I use it to make a Word file to send to my beta readers, and now I’ll use it to make all the epubs. It even generates a table of contents based on the chapter titles I created.

Once I’ve got the epub file, I open it in a free program called Adobe Digital Editions, which is an epub reader for your desktop. I go through it page by page, looking for anything weird. I was very lucky this time through – there were no formatting problems in the body of the book. When I did this for Mark Park and the Flume of Destiny, I discovered this bizarre issue where punctuation was not staying married to italicized words. So if, for example, I had somebody saying  a sentence with the last word emphasized, like:

“Can you believe that guy? What a jerk!”

and it came too close to the end of the line, it would display as:

“Can you believe that guy? What a jerk

!”

which is not attractive. It took me an entire day to figure out what was happening. Scrivener doesn’t allow you to look at the raw html of your document (something I really hope they fix in a future update), so I used another free program called Sigil to figure out that the html tags for the italics were creating a space between the italicized word and the non-italicized punctuation. I wound up having to put all the trailing punctuation in italics too – that was a bit of a process. (I could have fixed it in Sigil and re-saved the epub there, but then I’d have to use that as my source forever and ever rather than Scrivener any time I wanted to make changes – no dice.) Since I knew about that issue from the start this time, though, it was smooth sailing. (But if you find any orphaned punctuation in my books, do let me know, would you? Thanks.)

I did find one mistake, though – the links to the individual pages for the books on my website were wrong. They were pointing to the old links, before I used MyBookTable. So that had to be fixed, not just in Dakota, but in the three prior books as well.

One more check. Just because I think the epub’s code is fine and dandy doesn’t mean it is – there may be some invisible glitch in the html that will cause the vendors sites to reject it. Luckily there is a free epub validation website that does just what it says on the tin – you upload your book and in a few seconds it tells you if the code is good. Isn’t it nice to feel validated?

I made the epubs for all the other vendor sites (Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes and Google Play), checked the links, and verified them. They all checked out, so I sideloaded them onto the various reader apps on my phone for a closer look at how they’ll actually display on devices. (I don’t have a Kindle or a Nook or a Kobo or a…whatever the hell you read Google books on, so this is the closest I can get. At least it’s an iPhone, so I’ve sort of got one of the five.) I checked Google first – it’s my second-best selling site, after Amazon. And while it displayed just fine and dandy, I realized I had made a mistake.

I have a short story out called This Is What He Should Have Said, and after rather dismal sales on other vendors I made it exclusive to Amazon so I could take advantage of their Kindle Unlimited program. Unfortunately, I apparently forgot to remove the links to it in the “Also by Brian Olsen” section at the back of all the non-Amazon books. Whoops! I need to delete that from each of the ebooks, and go back and do it for the first three books in the series too. Even small changes to an epub file can have unexpected consequences, and deleting a whole page isn’t all that small of a change. So I need to decide if I’m going to go forward and review all the epubs as they are, or go back, remake, reverify, and resideload them. But that’s been quite enough work for one day, so I’ll have to sleep on that and figure it out tomorrow.

Ooh, a cliffhanger! Seems like a good place to leave off, until next time…

(Part One)

I’m kind of wishing I had come up with a better title for this series of posts. Ah, well.

I left off last time with a relatively clean draft in Scrivener. All my edits and notes from my beta readers were in, and I had made a sweep for common errors and for general clean-up. I was ready for my final editing pass before publication.

After I put up that blog post, I got back to work. I used Scrivener to make a .mobi file, which is the type of file used by Amazon for the Kindle. I’ll get into the specifics of that in my next post – there’s a lot more e-book creation to come – but I made a .mobi because I want to read the book on the Kindle app on my phone. I don’t own any actual e-readers, but my phone has got the Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iBooks apps, so I can approximate how my books will look on other devices reasonably well. I’m going with the Kindle for now because the Amazon store is far and away where I make most of my sales, so it takes top priority when it comes to book formatting.

Once I sideloaded the book onto my phone via iTunes, I started to read. I read the book aloud to myself because it’s a great way to catch typos. I only started doing this with my last book, Mark Park and the Flume of Destiny, but I’ll be doing it with all of them going forward. When you read words on a page or screen, especially when you read the same thing for the umpteenth time, your mind tends to fill in the blanks if something is missing – your eyes just dart right past that missing period or preposition. When you read aloud, you’re forced to pay closer attention. Even if my mouth is moving on automatic, it’ll trip over a typo almost every time.

I’m not making many significant changes at this point. I’m correcting obvious errors, and occasionally altering some word choices. If a non-trivial word is repeated within a paragraph, I’ll change or delete one of the instances to something else.  For example, I came across this sentence: She spun around, gesturing to the city around them. Two “around”s in one sentence is awkward and redundant, so the second became “surrounding,” which sounds a little better. (Although now I’m thinking they still sound too similar. Ah, well. Books are never finished, only abandoned, as da Vinci sort of said.)

Very occasionally I’ll catch something more crucial. The major continuity errors have all been fixed (fingers crossed), but some minor ones have slipped through. There’s a character from earlier in the series re-introduced in this book (no spoilers!). A new character asks the protagonists how they know that re-introduced character, but just two chapters earlier they had already discussed him, and she had been present for that conversation. Whoops! Fixed. I didn’t catch it before, because there had always been several days between editing those two chapters and every time I just plumb forgot she had already been told who he was. This time I’m reading the book so quickly that mistakes like that jump right out.

Another example – in chapter twenty-two, Tayisha can’t fit an important object in the pocket of her jeans. This time through, I remembered that back in chapter twelve she had fit the object into her pocket with no problem at all. The object not fitting is more important, so back to chapter twelve I went to figure out another way for Tayisha to carry the object around.

I’m a pretty fast reader, so this editing pass moved right along. I can get through about three chapters in an hour – that’s an approximation, because the length of the chapters varies quite a bit. The shortest is 1,290 (chapter nineteen) and the longest is 10, 503 (chapter twenty-eight – the big climax), but those are outliers, so let’s average. Right now the book is 124,565 words. (Thanks, Scrivener! You make counting easy.) At 29 chapters, that’s about 4,300 words per chapter (sounds about right for most of them), so about 13,000 words an hour.  I got through six chapters that first Saturday, but almost every day since then I’ve had either a fetish festival or work. (One of those was way more fun than the other.) I’ve only had about an hour in the evening to edit, but that’s still three chapters a day, sometimes more. And this past Saturday, while resting between Pride celebrations (of which I took many pictures that you can see here), I went on a binge – I got eight chapters done, and finished the book.

So that’s it! A clean fifth draft of Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time, all ready for you to read, right? Well, not quite. Now the fun really starts, as I get ready to format. More next time…

I’m in the final steps before publication of my fourth book, Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time. If you’re curious about the nuts and bolts of self-publishing (and why exactly it takes so damn long between the time I trumpet on Facebook that I’ve finished the last draft and the actual time you can get the book), over the next few weeks I’m going to write some posts going through the final stages of the pre-publishing process. (My stages, that is – other writers have their own processes, but this is what works for me.)

Yesterday I finished the fourth draft of the book. The first draft is, obviously, the first time putting everything down on paper, working from a chapter-by-chapter outline I already prepared. (In this case, I wrote the outlines for the second, third and fourth books in this series immediately after I published the first book). My second draft consists of major revisions – during the first draft I don’t go back and make major changes, I just take notes of what to look at later (so if I find halfway through the first draft that I still need a character I killed off earlier, for example, I don’t go back and fix it then and there, I just keep moving forward. He gets un-killed in the second draft). When I finish the second draft, I load it onto the Kindle app on my phone. I read it through while sitting in front of my computer – looking at it in a different format helps me catch typos and errors I missed before. That’s how I create the third draft.

This third draft is then sent to my beta readers – I’ve got five for this book, and they all go far above and beyond what would be expected of a typical beta reader. I don’t hire a professional editor, so my beta readers serve that function. (Most of them are writers or editors in their own right, so they do a pretty great job.) When I get the notes back from them, I go back through the book incorporating the notes I want to keep (which is most of them). This is also the fastest I’ll go through a draft, which is good – it helps me catch plot, continuity, or stylistic problems I might otherwise have missed. (It’s easy to relate a bit of exposition more than once, for example, just because I forgot I already went through it earlier in the book.) (In this book, one of my beta readers pointed out that the main characters are very pleased with themselves in chapter twenty-seven for figuring out a plot point that was flat-out explained to them back in chapter three. Whoopsie!)

So that’s the story so far. I finished the fourth draft yesterday, and today I begin the fifth and final draft, the draft that will actually see publication. Today was basic maintenance – I have a sort of style guide for myself of problematic words and phrases that pop up in my books. Some of them can be spelled in more than one way and I want to be sure I pick one and stick with it, or they’re words that are easy to get wrong so I want to do one final check for them.

Here’s my list:

• log in, logged in, log out, logged out as a verb; log-in as a noun
• backup as a noun or adjective; back up as a verb; never back-up
• online, not on-line
• workstation, not work station
• okay, not ok
• blonde for a woman, blond for a man
• board of directors, not Board of Directors, unless used formally: “the Amalgamated Synergy Board of Directors,” but “Jack sat on the board of directors.”
• Wi-Fi, not wifi or Wifi or WiFi
• Thirty-third Street, not Thirty-Third Street (I have gone back and forth on this one a million times)
• geez, not jeez
• email, not e-mail
• leaped, not leapt
• make-up, not make up
• park-goers, not parkgoers or park goers
• park employee, not parks employee
• smartphone, not smart phone
• charcoal-gray, not charcoal gray
• St. Mark’s Place, not Saint Mark’s Place
• trapdoor, not trap door

Then there are those characters of my own creation whose names I’m constantly getting wrong:

• AmSyn, not AmSym
• Tamsin, not Tasmin
• Leelee, not Lelee
• McAuley, not MacAuley

After I’ve done that, I’ve got one final sweep:

• Convert all double spaces to single spaces. This happens a lot after punctuation. Easy to fix with find and replace.
• Remove all dangling spaces before or after paragraph marks. This is one place where Scrivener, the program I write in which I otherwise adore, fails me – it can’t find paragraph marks. I have to convert to Word, find them there, then manually delete the spaces in Scrivener.
• Convert all hyphens being used as dashes into proper dashes. ( – to – )

Then there may be random things I have to fix that can vary per book. When I made invisible characters (like spaces) visible, I saw that in this book for some reason after every chapter number (”Chapter Two”) there was an unnecessary tab. Delete and repeat.

Now, in theory, I have a clean draft with no errors. (Hah! Ah, hah hah. Sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight face there.) The next step will be to make an epub file and load it onto my Kindle app for one last pass through. But I’ll get into all of that next time…