The Next three months.

 Another re-edit/new cover complete!

This is quite an experiment to see if covers and titles really do make a difference. I am following stats and reports keenly, and all I can say is this has been the nest month this year which kind of proves something.

The next three months will be interesting.

 I don't know what I'm going to do now. I think everything has been done that needs doing. 

However this coming week will be busy. I have  a hair appointment on the same day my dog is booked in for an ultrasound scan. That's Wednesday and we are having lunch at the Black Sheep in Masham on Saturday. Bill has a lunch date on Tuesday but I stay at home or walk the dog while is out enjoying himself. 

I shall have to think about writing a totally new story soon, but so far nothing is consolidating in my brain. 

Taking a Risk

 Poised on the cliff edge about to take the leap!

No thoughts of suicide - oh no!

Or perhaps only in terms of covers for my e-books. I am about to change three of them.

And I'm changing them to something quite different. to what has gone before. Because I do them myself, I can chop and change as I like  and at no cost to me except in time. And perhaps frustration! Photoshop is not the easiest thing in the world to use.

With earlier attempts at covers I tried to be truthful to the period of the story, and accurate in terms of dress and hair style. Now I am venturing into a more romantic look for my covers. Accuracy will have to take a back seat for a while was I conduct this experiment. If the new covers sell better than the old ones, then a point will have been proved  - to me, at least. 

I am aware that criticism comes from cover artists  but I think have a different POV. This is their business, their profession and they will look for errors in style and execution, of course they will. I would too, in their place. 

But I enjoy doing covers. It gives me hours of pleasure trying things out and lately people have begun sending "Likes "and pleasant comments as the new covers appear. Now if only those comments would turn into sales I should be delighted!

New Cover facts

 Been working hard  these last few weeks. 

I've been trying Amazon Ads and so far, I'm making a profit. 

Not a great profit, but  definitely in my favour.  In following the course I learned that my approach to marketing was dismal, and so I've been uprating my book descriptions, dreaming up hooks and renovating all my covers. They may not be perfect now but they are an improvement and may still change in the future 

It takes a lot of time and effort to do all this, because I have to find out where I'm going wrong  before I can try to put it right. I've lost count of how many videos on compositing and graphics in general I've watched - not to mention the talks I've listened to on the best way to use Ads. It has meant that I've been absent from Facebook and Twitter but then - would anyone notice my absence? 

It has also meant I've done no writing of fresh material though I have

 revised Alba is Mine. In doing so I discovered how much my writing

 has improved since 2005, which was a bit of a surprise.

I have put the new cover for Far After Gold up today as a comparison. It isn't that old, as my covers go, but I learned that a linked series of books ought to have the same font and cover treatment. If you check the pages for my books at the top of this blog, you will find that all my "Viking" books are now using the same fonts for the title, sub-title and author. (I've just noticed that the newest cover  I've put up here does not have a capital letter for Viking. I'll have to rectify that very soon.) So: Far After Gold, Viking Summer, Viking Bride and Magician's Bride are now "linked."

I'm happy. Now it is time to get back to planning a new book.

If you've ever wonder about the title I chose its an old saying that "Man will travel far after gold."

Out with the Old

My old photo slides are now in the wastepaper bin. They've been waiting in the attic for a good many years.

Now they have been digitally copied, run through Photoshop and the pictures are now safely on my computer. If anyone wants the now redundant film scanner, do let me know. It has now done its job for me. 

The clarity of the digital pic is not as good as the original but since there is no way I will ever get all the old gear from the attic and set up a projector and screen in the living room, this is as good as it gets. 

I have also been busy on another new cover. Taking to heart the advice offered by Bryan Cohen's webcasts, I "saw" that some of my covers were not "genre relevant". So I am on a mission to rectify that. 

He means that a romance ought to be recognised as a romance within the first seconds of seeing the cover. That's genre recognition in action. Subconsciously we recognise a thriller from the cover style, and some  - like the Jack Reacher covers - have become almost a brand. Another thing I learned from Cathy Helms and Tamian Wood is that choice (and use) of font is as important as the picture. And finally ~ I managed to use a layer mask successfully! 

Revamping book covers

 

Most authors would prefer that 1 in every 10 potential customers bought their book. The thought of the ratio being 1 in 10,000 gives them the shivers.

So how can they help themselves? The cover is the first hook to get that customer to buy.

Did you know a book title can be a hook? I didn’t, so I listed the main hooks to remind myself next time I am busy revamping some of my own covers:

1) a catchy title

2) the genre must be explicit

3) keywords in the title, subtitle, or series should be *genre* relevant. (that word was transposed into gender by my pc, but I caught it in time!)

4) Always remember that in fiction, shorter titles sell better.

The cover offers opportunity for more hooks than you might think. Perhaps the most important is being able to tell in a 3 second glance what the book is about. Colours, font and making keywords stand out in a thumbnail ~ it all matters. I shall never look at a cover in such a simple way ever again.

That Cover!

 

What thoughts run through your head when you look at a book cover?

 

Some covers you like, some you don’t. But do you ever stop to analyse why? Probably not. I know my first cover was a blurry photograph of a beautiful beach.

It could be that it was a nice picture, but it didn’t tell you what the book was about.

Maybe the image was inappropriate for the story.

 

Nowadays I think much more carefully about a cover. You could say I am eagle-eyed now!

If a model is used, I ask ifs the expression implies the right mood? Is the costume correct for the time period of the novel?

Does it look amateurish?

 

Some things look plain wrong. The perspective might be incorrect, with sunlight coming from the wrong place or, worse, two places at once. Red-eye can easily be corrected these days, but not blurriness - better to choose another image.

 

I try to avoid a run-of-the-mill image that bores the observer.

Too many competing images are distracting for the reader and there may be technical issues due to untrained use of software that are spoiling the result.

Sometimes the image may become skewed or distorted.

A cover can be too sexy for its target audience, colours may clash and there may be too much text on the cover. A spelling mistake is a disaster. Fortunately, I never made the mistake of using the word “by” followed by the author’s name. If I have, my memory has air-brushed it out of my mind!

 

I try to remember its always easier when one main image with a clear message is used.

Show don't Tell

These days we are encouraged, as writers, to show and not tell.  I don't dislike it as a writing method; I use it myself, and I enjoy reading it. It involves finding lots of ways to "show" emotions as well as actions, and that can sometimes prove difficult. (As I was writing that sentence I thought if I exchanged "describe" for "show" what would the difference be? Ponder that one for a while!)

Showing involves investing in the feelings of the POV character: how do they feel at any given point in the story? Why do they do what they do? It also involves the POV character noticing how other people react to them, which really becomes the POV character telling what they see. See what I mean?

These thoughts were provoked by something I saw on Pinterest, but I don't think I should copy it here; instead let me give you the link, and you can seek it out yourself. I hope it will help you past those sticky moments when you simply cannot think how to describe your characters feelings.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/279293614364130262/?lp=true

Essentially what you will see is many lists of how to "show" emotion. I think I shall be coming back to it from time to time!

PS I decided to change the cover of The Craigsmuir Affair as I wasn't happy with the last one. It looked very Victorian, true; but not very appealing and that was borne out by the fact that not one person has bought it since I put that cover up! So here we are, with a new vibrant cover for Spring! I hope you like it!

Improving covers

Some of my books have new covers. I'm doing them myself. 
I know  the word is that a professional cover is 
an absolute necessity, but all I can say is the covers I've had done for me have sold less than the covers I've done myself. One I paid quite a hefty sum, too. The other thing that is an absolute must these days for indie authors is editing. One must be edited. 
  
All this is is fine if the graphic artist and the editor comes courtesy of a traditional publisher. There are so many choices these days. Editors and covers artists  spring up on the internet in their hundreds, and who knows what their track record is like? 

I gather from a little ferreting around that the average price for editing a decent length novel by a reputable person is around £5 or £600. Add another £100 for a cover, and you have a £700 deficit against your book before you try and sell it. How many indie authors make that back in a year? In two years? Not many, is my guess.

So until I have an L J Ross type hit on my hands, which isn't likely since I don't write crime, I'll keep on trying to improve my own skills. Some of my first efforts were lame, I am the first to admit it; but I think I'm improving. 

Covers

Holidays are over and it is back to the usual preoccupations. I've actually lost count of the number of edits I've done on the wip. Possibly the fourth? I'm printing it out for the second time as I complete each chapter, because I am still making changes to the storyline, which makes me think this may be the third edit rther than the fourth. There was such a long gap between writing the first chunk of itan, then abdoning it and coming back to it a couple of years later that I can see where changes are needed, particularly at the latter end of the story.

I have lots of plans for the autumn season. Finish the wip,  of course, but also to renew the covers on my earlier stories, and to do a lot more promotion of them. I was surprised to notice that KENP figures are showing up for the weeks I have been away - and I have done not a jot of PR to earn them! The  Amazon Conference I attended in Newcastle  a few days before going to France made me think about it more closely, and e-mails  received from Mark Dawson have inspired me to try different methods. I can't bring myself to pay his price for the course, though I might have done if I were in my twenties, in full time employment and hoping to make writing my future career, but his ideas are wrth trying.

I spent nearly the whole day yesterday attempting to download a free trial of Adobe Premier Elements yesterday and got so frustrated with it that in the end I uninstalled it. It was a sstruggle to register, took fifteen minutes or so to download and then refused to "play." Kept reverting to passwords time after time. It did not encourage me to buy the product, I must say! So I kept my old software and managed to produce a cover - a supposedly ghost Viking ship to represent the Viking magician who pursues a young girl because her power, aligned to his, will make him enornmously powerful.

Puzzling PR

Like a book, I suppose the first words of a blog post need to catch the attention of passing readers. Is it the words, or the picture that grabs attention?  Who knows? Different things for different folks.

Today I decided I need to be more professional in my approach to promoting books. So I'm exploring the dizzy world of graphic artists, with a view to (gulp!) purchasing a cover picture. When I have time I intend to do a few courses on learning more about doing covers, but for now I'll see what a bought cover can do for me.

Promotion has not been high on my agenda for ages, and though it might not be the only one, it is probably one reason why sales are going down. (Personally I blame Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, but that's something I cannot prove!) When I went back and visited a lot of my old haunts, I found that the state of yahoo groups has changed while I haven't been looking. Some have changed their slant and no longer take selling posts, others just seem to have dropped way down in popularity, others have vanished or gone into limbo. Some are still there, but I get the feeling that they're struggling.

It's a puzzle. Something must have taken their place, but I don't know what it might be. Paid advertising? Possibly. Other social media have sprung up recently and though I recognise the names, I've never joined or even looked to see what they offer. Perhaps it is time I rectified that. Some research is required.

While I do this research, my work on the second draft of Matho's Story is coming along nicely. I have a working title at last - The QUEEN'S COURIER, and only fifty pages to go before I reach the end for the second time. I've taken out a chunk of the middle section, diverted the story line to a better trail, and wrote one whole new chapter as well as cutting and pasting three others, juggling placements and characters as necessary. The result is pleasing - definitely a job worth doing. I finished a chapter this morning, and these were the last lines I wrote today:

When her shoulders rounded in dejection, Matho saw something inexpressibly tender and youthful in the gentle curve of her spine.

‘No,’ she said in a tired voice. ‘She wouldna want to be moved.’ She left his knee and bent over the cauldron. Dipping a wooden ladle, she filled a bowl and brought it to him. ‘Eat. Ah didna make it to waste it.’

Cover Issues

This the third cover I've put up for Viking Magic. For some reason this book is lagging behind the others and isn't attracting attention. There may be 101 reasons why from a poor cover to a whiny heroine, but since I've nothing to lose I thought I'd experiment.
The first cover was dramatic, perhaps, with the prow-beast head but maybe the pink background didn't gell very well with Vikings. First mistake. Secondly I went for a purchased photograph and thought the girl looked like the heroine of the story. It was only some time later that I saw John Locke had a cover using the self same portrait. Maybe that went against me.
So I decided on a third attempt. This one conveys the darkness and use of magic in the story of a girl fearful for her soul as well as her life. She is too desperate to be kind-hearted, but uses everything she can to avoid entrapment by the wicked magician.

Let's see if this cover makes any difference. If nothing else, it is an interesting experiment in use of covers.

Write for a living?

This blog - link below - is one I shall revisit very soon.
Elle Casey

It's all about what to do if you want to make a living writing books. She is a great advocate of having similar covers for similar types of books, so that readers can latch onto them quickly. I didn't do that with Viking Magic. I went  on a very different  path, and maybe that was a mistake. She also advocates having professional covers done. Quite the opposite to what I was thinking in my last post. (but very much what Catherine's blog was saying, now I come to think of it.) The thing is, am I going to bow down to the perceived wisdom of these two ladies, or am I going to go my own way? We'll see.

The weather has been roastingly hot today, so instead of working, I sat in the garden with friends and drank kirs accompanied by strawberries, pistachios and crisps. A good way to spend a summer afternoon. I hope the good weather lasts until Sunday, as we're invited to a neighbour's garden "do" on Saturday night. It seems to be the season for it. I think I'm getting the feeling  that not a lot of work will get done in the next few days.

Self published covers

Several things get in the way of producing a good cover for a self-published book, according to a blog I've just discovered. The main culprits are Laziness, Lack of skills and/or imagination, Delusion, and Distorted perspective.

Catherine (http://catherineryanhoward.com/about-catherine/) writes wittily about the traps of self-delusion we can fall into, and she's right on many points. I don't want to be bothered hunting down cover designers and paying out shedloads of money for a cover I probably won't like. I say this because I cringe at many covers leering at me from the shelves these days. Mostly the digital shelves, I am happy to add. Bookshop shelves here in the the north of England sport some bare-chested warriors who could benefit from a bra, but many publishers still produce delightful covers. I also have delusions that I can produce an attractive cover because I enjoy photography, was deemed good at art in my youth (I know, I know - I'm admitting to the delusion) and enjoy the process of struggling with Adobe Photoshop. I also really like the sense of achievment the finished article gives me.
 I admit covers are important. But I read books that have what I think are unremarkable covers (Burial Rites by Hannah Kent comes to mind. I had to pull it from my shelves because I could not remember what was on the cover. The answer? Almost nothing. A fluffy sort of feather disappearing right off the plain white cover. Some of Lee Child's covers are less than gripping. I enjoyed reading Ian Rankin's Black and Blue and the paperback copy has what I call a non-cover - a plaque bearing the words Oxford Bar. You know my thoughts on the racy romance covers. It occurs to me that cover designers are probably - but not always -  under the age of thirty. It stands to reason that their choice is not going to match my... er, well, more senior perspective.

So what do we do? Stick to our guns or give in and here a cover designer and then argue endlessly.....?

let me know what you think of what might potentially be the cover of my next publication!

Blood Feud

Happy to report that Blood Feud is well on in the editing stakes. Chapter Nine is currently getting the treatment! This is after it has been through a sharp-eyed critique group, and first read through by me, a rest of several weeks and then a second read through. Now I'm printing out a chapter at a time, reading it, making corrections....Maybe then I'll consider it OK to self-publish. OTOH, I'll need to check chapter headings are all the same, that the font doesn't vary, all those sort of technical little things that catch you out. Well, they catch me out, especially when I put something on Facebook.

I'm working on a cover, too. Not entirely happy with what I have. May start again.

The story is set in 1046  AD and these are the opening lines:

‘Thor’s teeth!’ Flane hammered his fist on the mast and gazed at the sky. Above the thatched roofs and smoking fires of Dyflin’s thousand-strong Viking community, the sky was so blue it hurt the eyes. Good sailing weather going to waste. If Oli didn’t move faster than a sick snail, they’d have to wait half a day for the next high tide to take them safely over the sand bars in the estuary. That meant yet another night in Dyflin, and more opportunity for the crew to get into trouble.

A blur of colour and movement caught his eye. Curious, he squinted through the tracery of masts and ropes that blocked his view. A small figure ran heedlessly fast along the wharf. Her fists hiked her skirt out from beneath her feet as she dodged loaded carts and leapt over creels and coils of rope in her path. Long hair, glinting gold in the sunlight, streamed out behind her. She darted towards a ship, veered away and ran toward the end of the wharf where he stood on the Sea Bird.

‘Oh, Christ, no!’ Flane swore under his breath. He was not mistaken; the girl headed straight for him.

The first cover is maybe not clear enough, though I like it. I have just this minute realised that the second cover reminds me of that iconic photo of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster done around 1933, so maybe that would work against it. What do you think?   

Covers

They say covers are vital for selling books. Any books, anywhere, in whatever format. I suppose if you hit on a good one by accident that's great, but since it's such a subjective thing, how do we know what makes a good cover? And is a good cover a cover that will sell numbers of books? Well, in this case, let's say yes.

Those people in the know say that the average person in a bookshop will decide to buy the book within 10-20 seconds. (I can't say I'm one of them, but I don't disbelieve what they claim) It means the cover has a lot to do with it, and the blurb backs it up. So the cover must be eye-catching, and resonate with something within the average reader to get them to pick it up in the first place. Then the blurb must be short and punchy and relevant - ie give a snapshot idea of what the book is about. (And that is so much easier to say than to achieve!)

Publishers, it is claimed, are appealing to something aspirational in readers, too. They want to be identified with the contents of the book, or to be more precise, what they think the contents might be. They say a good cover alone can sell a book. Indeed the reverse might be true - that readers would buy a book in brown paper if they wanted the story enough. I don't suppose the Potter fans would have refused to buy the latest installment because they didn't like the cover.

I had a look at 50 supposedly iconic book covers today, and found only two that really caught my eye. Would these have been the ones I picked up in the bookshop? Who knows! I loaded the French cover inadvertantly because it was paired with the cover I was aiming for, but the longer I look at it, the more I like it, even though I'm not sure how the title translates. "The men who would not love women?" Anyway, I thought the Dragon Tattoo cover, and the old, classic Clockwork Orange cover, both excellent. and at least one of them has stood the test of time.