Category: blog

Categories
blog works goliath-fallen comics

Making a Graphic Novel: 5 Lessons Learned from Failure

This entry is part [part not set] of 1 in the series Web­comics & Graph­ic Novels

My debut nov­el, GOLIATH FALLEN, has gone through sev­er­al phas­es dur­ing its long, long devel­op­ment his­to­ry. Per­haps the most promi­nent one was the time I ditched the book out­right and tried mak­ing a graph­ic nov­el instead. What trig­gered such a dras­tic mea­sure? Hon­est­ly, burnout was a big part of it. Writ­ing became a lone­ly and slow endeav­or, and I was grow­ing more and more des­per­ate to final­ly get the book published.

This fatigue appar­ent­ly led me to be open to new ideas. The idea of a graph­ic nov­el actu­al­ly stemmed from exter­nal feed­back. A com­mon refrain from my cri­tique part­ners was that my nar­ra­tive style was very “visu­al.” That was the true catalyst.

The idea was sim­ple: if my nar­ra­tive style is so visu­al, it should eas­i­ly trans­late to a graph­ic nov­el. Cre­at­ing it should also be eas­i­er, quick­er, and more seri­al­iz­able than an actu­al nov­el. Truth­ful­ly, I’m still strug­gling to com­pre­hend how such an idea sound­ed even remote­ly rea­son­able at some point.

Goliath Fall­en, Chap­ter One cover

Need­less to say, it failed spec­tac­u­lar­ly. I lacked the expe­ri­ence, man­pow­er, dis­ci­pline, and willpow­er to see it through. Sure, I did­n’t have to write thou­sands of words per chap­ter (I could just illus­trate things). But, I still had to write a script and assume oth­er roles like draw­ing, let­ter­ing, and for­mat­ting. I gave up on the endeav­or about two issues and six­ty pages in.

It was a long and wind­ing road of rub­ble I walked bare­foot through until final­ly real­iz­ing that the work­load would end up killing me. And that’s no joke—my health notably declined due to lack of sleep, poor nutri­tion, and a hor­ri­ble work-life bal­ance. If any­thing, this expe­ri­ence only cement­ed my respect for pro­fes­sion­al com­ic book artists. It amazes me that some­one can deliv­er 30-page issues (or even 120-page tomes in the case of man­ga) in the span of a mere month.

While gru­el­ing, the project wasn’t fruit­less. I learned a ton dur­ing that year, and I think some of my insights are worth shar­ing. So, here I bring you my top five lessons learned from try­ing (and fail­ing) at mak­ing a graph­ic novel.

1. Ensure the script is finished

Graph­ic nov­els (and com­ic books) fol­low a script. We don’t just sit down to draw pan­els with­out a clear guide of what’s going to hap­pen. Impro­vis­ing a graph­ic nov­el is buy­ing our­selves a tick­et to Pain City at a dis­count. And that’s if we’re work­ing alone. If we have an artist, they’ll prob­a­bly laugh in our face.

Goliath Fall­en Graph­ic Nov­el (Chap­ter One, The Juno Mission)

Like it or not, every good graph­ic nov­el starts with a fin­ished writ­ten script. And when I say “fin­ished,” I mean fin­ished. That includes edit­ing, revis­ing, proof­read­ing, and every­thing else involved in pub­lish­ing an actu­al book. This is crit­i­cal because if changes are made lat­er on, that means we’ll have to redraw entire pages. If we’re sev­er­al pages in, a change at the begin­ning of the script means we’ll have to throw the entire issue in the garbage and start over.

Trust me—you don’t want to be in that position.

I was but a rook­ie the first time I marked my script “ready to go.” In real­i­ty, it was far from it. Redraw­ing 30 pages is no joke. Plan to spend a rea­son­able amount of time on the script so that it’s air­tight once the draw­ing starts. I know this is espe­cial­ly hard as writ­ers tend to get stuck in edit­ing and rewrit­ing. Take your time, but just remem­ber: the draw­ing starts when the writ­ing stops. In terms of bud­get­ing, redraw­ing pages our­selves will only cost us time (and years off our life expectan­cy). If we’re work­ing with an artist for hire, how­ev­er, redraws will drain our bud­get in a snap.

2. Keep the art style simple

Whether we’re self-pub­lish­ing or work­ing with a tra­di­tion­al house, we’ll always be on a sched­ule. We might even be under a con­tract to meet cer­tain dead­lines. As for me, I was self-pub­lish­ing my nov­el as a web­com­ic and releas­ing pages twice a week.

Build­ing a sus­tained read­er­ship and attract­ing organ­ic traf­fic to a web­com­ic is a lot of work. And those eye­balls can be gone in a flash if the sched­ule isn’t close­ly fol­lowed. Inter­net read­ers in par­tic­u­lar take this very seri­ous­ly. If you’re not suf­fi­cient­ly feed­ing their con­tent diet when they expect it, they’ll move on to one of the thou­sands of oth­er web­comics. In the tra­di­tion­al world, miss­ing dead­lines could be even more con­se­quen­tial (and may even result in a breach of contract).

Com­plex, intri­cate art takes time. To opti­mize effi­cien­cy and meet dead­lines (self-imposed or oth­er­wise), it’s best to stick with a sim­ple art style. The style I employed in the graph­ic nov­el ver­sion of Goliath Fall­en was inspired by Dave Gib­bon’s Watch­men illus­tra­tions (and clas­sic Amer­i­can com­ic books in gen­er­al). And while I loved Gibbon’s style, I had­n’t count­ed on it doom­ing my project.

It was sim­ply too elab­o­rate, and my out­put was at most two six-to-eight-pan­el pages a week. Two pages a week! And it heav­i­ly depend­ed on the com­plex­i­ty of the scenes and back­grounds. Even if I released the pages as com­ic strips, I was still churn­ing out too lit­tle con­tent for a whole sev­en days. At that rate, I’d be lucky to fin­ish by my sev­en­ti­eth birth­day (not real­ly, but you get the idea).

Goliath Fall­en Graph­ic Nov­el (Chap­ter One, Intro)

Remem­ber, it does­n’t mat­ter if it takes a week to draw a page. No mat­ter how much detail or effort is put into it, it will be read in sec­onds by readers.

The truth of the mat­ter is that the art style of our graph­ic nov­el isn’t even that impor­tant. One Punch Man’s orig­i­nal web­com­ic looked like doo­dles on a nap­kin, and yet it still launched into the stratos­phere and gar­nered a seis­mic fol­low­ing. It was lat­er remas­tered into the man­ga we know and love today. The art style did­n’t have to be a mas­ter­piece of con­tem­po­rary art; it only had to be good enough to trans­mit the sto­ry effec­tive­ly. Mean­while, the graph­ic nov­el ver­sion of Goliath Fall­en had a kick­ass art style (if I do say so myself), but it was so hard to pro­duce that I could­n’t keep up. I was work­ing prac­ti­cal­ly 24/7 to pro­duce just two pages a week, which was sim­ply absurd. 

After I quit the project, I read Scott McCloud’s Mak­ing Comics (an essen­tial read), in which he cov­ers this exact issue in depth. If I had a time machine, I would go back and read that book before I even con­sid­ered the idea of a graph­ic nov­el in the first place.

3. Prepare a content buffer

Pos­si­bly the biggest mis­take I made when mak­ing a graph­ic nov­el was not hav­ing a con­tent buffer. I pub­lished pages as I fin­ished them. But, I was aver­ag­ing one or two pages a week, so that should be fine, right? Most def­i­nite­ly not. If life got in the way (and it always does), that meant that I did­n’t have any­thing to post, and I’d miss my upload days. Tak­ing a few days off when I was start­ing to feel burned out was com­plete­ly out of the ques­tion. My read­ers were count­ing on me, and they want­ed to know what was next in the story.

After miss­ing a dead­line, the only way to catch up is to sim­ply find the time and work the nights away. If we don’t make time, work will accu­mu­late until we don’t have a life any­more. We’ll remain pris­on­ers of our own cre­ation (as dra­mat­ic as that might sound).

Goliath Fall­en Graph­ic Nov­el (Chap­ter Two, The Fair)

The key take­away here is to always be ahead of sched­ule. Retain three months of con­tent as a  buffer if pos­si­ble. With that much of a buffer, we should be able to con­sis­tent­ly meet our update days even when life gets in the way. The amount of pre­pared con­tent we’ll need will always depend on the type of graph­ic nov­el we’re mak­ing. Just make sure you have enough con­tent to keep your sched­ule steady should the apoc­a­lypse come tomorrow.

4. Don’t go solo; work with a team

The graph­ic nov­el ver­sion of Goliath Fall­en was pro­duced by a team of one. I spent an entire year work­ing all by myself out­lin­ing, script­ing, pen­cil­ing, ink­ing, let­ter­ing, for­mat­ting, and who knows what else. It was an insur­mount­able amount of work, and, admit­ted­ly, I should­n’t have gone at it alone. This was the sec­ond key mis­take (along with my rather intri­cate art style) that end­ed up doom­ing my graph­ic novel.

If resources allow, nev­er go solo. While I can draw, I should’ve teamed up with an artist to do that part for me. That would’ve giv­en me col­lec­tive months of my time back to allow me to focus more on writ­ing. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. While that’s very cliché advice, it’s nonethe­less true.

For nat­ur­al-born illus­tra­tors, relin­quish­ing con­trol over the design process can be tough. There’s a cer­tain pride in see­ing our illus­tra­tions in the graph­ic nov­el that car­ries our name. So while out­sourc­ing may mean that we might not get the glo­ry all to our­selves, it at least gives us the con­fi­dence to know that we have the time to get the work done and fin­ish our graph­ic nov­el. The glo­ry will only come if the project is actu­al­ly fin­ished and released to the world.

Even just hav­ing anoth­er indi­vid­ual to pass ideas by is itself supreme­ly valu­able. We’re more like­ly to wind up with a bet­ter end prod­uct just by receiv­ing this feed­back ear­ly on in the process of writ­ing a graph­ic nov­el. My stub­born­ness, unfor­tu­nate­ly, got the best of me, and I just did every­thing myself. Don’t make the same mis­take I did.

If bud­get is a con­cern, there are some alter­na­tive approach­es you can try. Some graph­ic nov­el authors have found suc­cess in offer­ing to bring on illus­tra­tors as co-authors and share roy­al­ties if it ends up being a hit. Many com­ic book projects work this way. You could also just hire some­one to take your sketch­es and col­orize them (instead of pay­ing them to illus­trate from start to fin­ish). At the very least, a sol­id team should be com­prised of both a writer and an artist.

5. Master your tools

The tools we use to cre­ate our graph­ic nov­el (writ­ing, draw­ing, let­ter­ing, etc.) should be exact­ly that—tools. They’re meant to make our lives eas­i­er, not the oth­er way around. Sure, we can buy expen­sive pro­grams such as Adobe Cre­ative Cloud at a whop­ping $30–50 per month, but if we don’t know how to use them, they’ll only serve to hin­der our graph­ic nov­el process. It’s essen­tial that by the time we com­mit to a plan, we know our tools well. It’s worth­while to spend time learn­ing them.

I’m not say­ing that it’s imper­a­tive to know every sin­gle short­cut there is. That’s not rea­son­able. Aim for a skillset where you at least feel com­fort­able and in con­trol. Less time spent try­ing to con­fig­ure dig­i­tal inks means more time avail­able to actu­al­ly work on our graph­ic novels. 

Always choose a simple art style when making a graphic novel.

Before div­ing into online tuto­ri­als and cheat sheets, start by mak­ing a list of the tools you’ll need. These can include pro­grams for draw­ing, let­ter­ing, and pub­lish­ing. In my case, it was Clip Stu­dio Paint (draw­ing), Adobe Illus­tra­tor (let­ter­ing), and InDe­sign (pub­lish­ing). Once we have our suite estab­lished, then we can start the learn­ing process. There are a num­ber of use­ful pro­grams out there, includ­ing Skill­share and YouTube videos that are sur­pris­ing­ly com­pre­hen­sive. Don’t wait until you’re on a tight dead­line to start read­ing through forums on how to blur col­ors or resize an art­board (like I did). 

Final thoughts

My own year-long graph­ic nov­el jour­ney was one of the most frus­trat­ing peri­ods of my pro­fes­sion­al life. Over that time, I learned there’s a true art in mak­ing a graph­ic novel—and I’m not just refer­ring to the draw­ings inside. Draft­ing a script ahead of time, select­ing the right art style, prepar­ing a con­tent buffer, work­ing with a team, and mas­ter­ing the tools of the trade are just a few con­sid­er­a­tions to ensure a more seam­less and suc­cess­ful project.

Although the graph­ic nov­el ver­sion of Goliath Fall­en doesn’t exist in its entire­ty today, the process was insight­ful and reward­ing. It also forced me to reck­on with my per­son­al weak­ness­es as an author and illus­tra­tor. It is my hope that my unfil­tered per­spec­tive here does­n’t dis­cour­age you. I just want you to avoid the same mis­takes I did and start off your own graph­ic nov­el jour­ney on the right foot. I can attest to the joy of see­ing the fin­ished pages of my own graph­ic nov­el come together.

Giv­en that this project account­ed for a whole year of inten­sive work, I have quite a bit to talk about. I’m con­sid­er­ing writ­ing more about the expe­ri­ence. Let me know what you think. Would you like to hear the whole story?

Get Two Books for Free

Categories
blog writing publishing

Book Cover Design With Award-Winning Illustrator Alejandro Colucci

This entry is part [part not set] of 8 in the series Pub­lish­ing Goliath Fallen

This post is a fol­low-up to a pri­or post in my series about self-pub­lish­ing my debut nov­el, GOLIATH FALLEN, where I detailed the process of find­ing an artist to design the book’s cov­er. The process was both excit­ing and stress­ful as the cov­er is pos­si­bly the most crit­i­cal ele­ment of a book out­side of the descrip­tion. My nov­el must vis­i­bly shine over oth­ers pub­lished by big hous­es with hefty bud­gets and stun­ning, pro­fes­sion­al­ly designed covers.

To fur­ther fuel my anx­i­ety, this was my first expe­ri­ence work­ing with a free­lancer in any capac­i­ty. I did­n’t know the cost of such a ser­vice. Nei­ther how the process worked, or what would hap­pen if I ulti­mate­ly did­n’t like the design. Writ­ing this book has been a long and ardu­ous jour­ney, and I was intent to not screw it up this far in. The stakes (and my blood pres­sure) had nev­er been higher.

I spent untold hours brows­ing through free­lanc­ing sites until I final­ly stum­bled upon Ale­jan­dro Coluc­ci on Reedsy, an online plat­form that con­nects authors and pub­lish­ing free­lancers. It took my dumb self a while to real­ize I had found a leg­end in the world of book cov­er design. Sum­ma­riz­ing his impres­sive tra­jec­to­ry is not an easy task, so I’ll bor­row his bio from his web­site (and tweak it slightly). 

Ale­jan­dro Coluc­ci is an award-win­ning artist based in Lon­don, Unit­ed King­dom. He has illus­trat­ed hun­dreds of fan­ta­sy, crime, hor­ror, his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, and sci­ence fic­tion pub­li­ca­tions across the globe com­mis­sioned by major pub­lish­ers main­ly through­out Europe and the USA. Best-sell­ing authors includ­ing Anne Rice, Robin Hobb, Isaac Asi­mov, Mario Puzo, H.G. Wells, Ursu­la K. Le Guin, Andrzej Sap­kows­ki, William Gib­son, Steven Erik­son, Robert Louis Steven­son, and J.G. Bal­lard, to name a few, show­case Ale­jan­dro’s illus­tra­tions in their books. He’s also known for design­ing the orig­i­nal cov­ers of The Witch­er series.

With such a track record, you might guess that the quote for his design ser­vices was very much at the top end of my bud­get. And you’d be cor­rect. How­ev­er, after wit­ness­ing Ale­jan­dro’s stun­ning art, I was deter­mined to work with him. In the end, I signed him up, con­fi­dent my new cov­er would come out spec­tac­u­lar­ly and win over the eyes of prospec­tive read­ers. This post recounts my expe­ri­ence work­ing with this award-win­ning illustrator.

The project and preliminary discussions

Before I could work with Ale­jan­dro, Reedsy asked me for my book’s basic info: title, sub­ti­tle, genre, and char­ac­ters. I also attached the orig­i­nal, first-con­cept cov­er of GOLIATH FALLEN as a ref­er­ence in the brief. Once the project start­ed, the site allowed me to mes­sage Ale­jan­dro direct­ly in order to dis­cuss more specifics.

I had a vision for this cov­er from the get-go, which I detailed as much as pos­si­ble in order to give him bet­ter guid­ance. To be clear, this was­n’t under any cir­cum­stances an attempt to seize cre­ative con­trol from him; it would be ludi­crous to hire a stel­lar artist only to have them do it my way. I sim­ply want­ed to pro­vide an over­ar­ch­ing direc­tion to fol­low. We talked about my vision, but I also made it super clear to take many of my ideas with a big grain of salt.

Goliath Fal­l­en’s orig­i­nal, first-con­cept cov­er with art by @naked.monkey

My first idea was to design some­thing along the lines of my orig­i­nal cov­er. In my hum­ble opin­ion, it does a good job cap­tur­ing the mood of my sto­ry: iso­la­tion, destruc­tion, and chaos. How­ev­er, giv­en that I had a pro­fes­sion­al now, I was open to tak­ing the design in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. At this stage, design­ing some­thing sim­i­lar to the orig­i­nal cov­er would be a fruit­less endeav­or. I want­ed to see what was pos­si­ble to real­ly have GOLIATH FALLEN stand out on the shelves.

My sec­ond idea for the design was moti­vat­ed by feed­back from my beta read­ers. They often com­ment­ed that their favorite char­ac­ter from my book was Izzy Clarke, a tena­cious 12-year-old girl who dwells with her father in the wreck­age of the star­ship Goliath. At the begin­ning of the sec­ond act, Izzy con­fronts a howler, a vicious alien crea­ture resem­bling a tailed rep­til­ian bull. In imag­in­ing that scene, I always pic­tured some­thing akin to the “Fear­less Girl” and “Charg­ing Bull” sculp­tures near New York’s Wall Street. For the cov­er, I thought it would be a great visu­al to have Izzy and the howler stand­ing off in a sim­i­lar fash­ion with the post-apoc­a­lyp­tic inte­ri­or of the Goliath in the background.

Fear­less Girl and Charg­ing Bull sculp­tures near New York’s Wall Street

When I pre­sent­ed both ideas to Ale­jan­dro, he advised that we go with the sec­ond one since it’ll allow us to show­case the char­ac­ters more effec­tive­ly. At this stage, we were just start­ing pre­lim­i­nary dis­cus­sions before Ale­jan­dro got to work on the cov­er a month lat­er (at my request).

Sketching the general direction of the book cover design

Once we set­tled on a gen­er­al direc­tion, I decid­ed to devel­op a very rough sketch to ensure Ale­jan­dro and I had a com­plete mutu­al agree­ment on the path we were tak­ing with the design. I found it impor­tant to set this cre­ative direc­tion upfront because Alejandro’s design would­n’t com­prise a com­po­si­tion of stock assets or images but a dig­i­tal col­lage mix­ing pho­tos, tex­tures, and dig­i­tal paint­ing. All this to say that if changes were required once the art­work was done, he would have to redo the entire thing (or at least a good por­tion of it).

My rough, very bloat­ed cov­er sketch

In ret­ro­spect, I end­ed up com­plete­ly over­do­ing the sketch. I added the ele­ments that I con­sid­ered to be cen­tral to the sto­ry: the main char­ac­ters, the crea­tures, and the set­ting. In the fore­ground, we have Izzy con­fronting not one but two howlers (like the actu­al scene in the book). There’s fire and rub­ble on the sides and behind the sil­hou­ettes of lurk­ers, which are zom­bie-like crea­tures. Final­ly, in the back­ground, we have a clas­sic float­ing-heads arrange­ment fea­tur­ing the three main char­ac­ters: Izzy, her father, Nate, and sci­en­tist Lucas Sund­berg all in space­suits for some reason.

While Ale­jan­dro will ulti­mate­ly be the cre­ative direc­tor, these char­ac­ters, crea­tures, set­ting, and oth­er sto­ry ele­ments are described in a cer­tain way in the book that the final cov­er design will have to fol­low. For this rea­son, in addi­tion to the sketch, I wrote a brief con­tain­ing descrip­tions and ref­er­ence images. I uploaded every­thing to Reedsy and sent it over to him for com­ment. All along, I felt like maybe I was get­ting too much in the way of his cre­ative process. I didn’t want to sti­fle him. How­ev­er, once he replied, I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by how recep­tive he was.

Refining the book cover design

A pro­fes­sion­al artist with tons of expe­ri­ence doesn’t only pro­vide you with a high-qual­i­ty book cov­er. They can also chis­el your vision into some­thing that can tru­ly suc­ceed in the mar­ket. Ale­jan­dro has designed stun­ning cov­ers for dozens of suc­cess­ful books. Nat­u­ral­ly, he knows this indus­try far bet­ter than I do. His ver­dict on my sketch was that it was too busy and looked like a cliché movie poster. He is very polite and pro­fes­sion­al, so he did­n’t exact­ly use those words, but, in essence, that was his feed­back. And, hon­est­ly, I could­n’t agree more.

Amongst a dozen oth­er things, I had for­got­ten to leave space for the book title. And also, the sub­ti­tle, and my own name as the author. It would appear to me (and any­one half awake) that these are cru­cial ele­ments in a book cov­er. With my sketch, if we added any let­ter­ing at the top, it would have cov­ered the back­ground char­ac­ters entire­ly. What was I thinking?

Ale­jan­dro end­ed up sug­gest­ing a more sim­pli­fied com­po­si­tion with only Izzy fac­ing the howler. The scene itself is pret­ty pow­er­ful already and far more intrigu­ing than a bunch of float­ing heads. This would also be eas­i­er on the viewer’s eyes and leave plen­ty of room to play with lettering.

The book cover design reveal (and iterations)

Once we visu­al­ly com­mit­ted to the direc­tion, it was time for Ale­jan­dro to start the hard work of illus­trat­ing the book cov­er design. At this stage, my anx­i­ety was cer­tain­ly get­ting the best of me. I was con­fi­dent in Ale­jan­dro and his incred­i­ble skills, but I’d been work­ing on this book for six long years, and this was a big moment. On top of all that, Ale­jan­dro would have the cov­er ready in just one week. One week! My gosh… stop­ping to catch a breath is not an option in the self-pub­lish­ing world.

First iteration

As expect­ed, the fol­low­ing week flew by. Before I knew it, I had Ale­jan­dro back in my inbox with the first iter­a­tion of my book’s cov­er design. I had just wok­en up (Ale­jan­dro is sev­en hours ahead of me), and Reedsy’s noti­fi­ca­tion shot my heart rate up to a thou­sand. I couldn’t bring myself to open the attached image until lat­er in the day since I need­ed time to men­tal­ly pre­pare myself for this moment. But, at last, when I gath­ered the courage, I was final­ly able to fath­om the true mag­ni­tude of Alejandro’s talent.

Goliath Fal­l­en’s book cov­er (first version)

I sim­ply can­not describe what I felt when I first saw this book cov­er design (which doesn’t speak too well of me as a writer but bear with me here). It was as if Ale­jan­dro had reached into my brain and pulled Izzy out of it and put her on the page. Also, he was absolute­ly right; hav­ing only the scene of Izzy fac­ing the crea­ture makes the visu­al come alive. It’s a more sound, well-bal­anced, and provoca­tive design.

After get­ting over the ini­tial shock, I did the same thing I always do with a com­plet­ed man­u­script: I put the cov­er away for a bit with the inten­tion to revis­it it lat­er with a cool­er head. That way, I would see it with a fresh perspective.

The next day, I gave the cov­er a clos­er inspec­tion. I noticed a few minor details that need­ed some work, like the title font being a bit too thin and Izzy miss­ing her char­ac­ter­is­tic back­pack. But, what wor­ried me the most was the crea­ture design; it wasn’t accu­rate to how they’re described in the book. Howlers are sim­i­lar to the scream­ing bear from Anni­hi­la­tion but more mus­cu­lar and thin­ner for faster move­ment. My anx­i­ety kicked back in just at the thought of Ale­jan­dro hav­ing to redraw the crea­ture. I felt like that annoy­ing cus­tomer (and no one wants to be that guy).

Any­way, if I was going to ask Ale­jan­dro to rework the cov­er, I would do my best to com­mu­ni­cate the changes to avoid giv­ing him more work than nec­es­sary. In the end, it’s a col­lab­o­ra­tion. The eas­i­er I make his job, the bet­ter the final prod­uct will be and the more it will align clos­er to my vision. And so, I took the lib­er­ty to anno­tate his cover.

Goliath Fal­l­en’s book cov­er (first ver­sion, annotated)

In my response to Ale­jan­dro, I detailed the request­ed changes to the crea­ture as thor­ough­ly as I could. Feel­ing like the most annoy­ing per­son in the world, I uploaded every­thing and hit send.

He answered the next day, leav­ing me once again speech­less with how recep­tive he was. We dis­cussed the crea­ture design and the request­ed changes a bit more, and he asked for a few addi­tion­al days to com­plete the new design. That lev­el of qual­i­ty was worth wait­ing for. He could have tak­en the whole month for all I cared.

Second iteration

About a week went by before Ale­jan­dro returned an updat­ed design. For me, it felt like two days at most—he works fast, and I couldn’t even bear it. Again, I need­ed to take a few hours before view­ing the new design. If I was stoked with the first ver­sion, this new one had me twice as pumped.

Goliath Fal­l­en’s book cov­er (sec­ond version)

From my per­spec­tive, the addi­tion of the fire in this new design ben­e­fit­ed the over­all com­po­si­tion by revving up the sense of urgency. It also helped bet­ter ori­ent the viewer’s atten­tion. With the low­er por­tion now more strik­ing, Izzy becomes the pri­ma­ry focus. We then have the title and, last­ly, the crea­ture. Izzy’s back­pack is also in there, which is the rea­son she’s fac­ing that crea­ture in the first place. In the nov­el, she goes out on a sup­ply run where she found it and gets ambushed by howlers.

As for the let­ter­ing, the book title now looks more robust, and the sub­ti­tle font com­ple­ments the visu­al theme bet­ter. The over­all design looks more “sci-fi”. Before we start­ed the project, Ale­jan­dro point­ed out that although his spe­cial­ty was fan­ta­sy cov­ers, he would try his best to design a sci-fi one. How­ev­er, one of the main rea­sons I picked him for this job is that my book is full of crea­tures and oth­er “fan­tas­ti­cal” sci-fi ele­ments, so I need­ed some­one with expe­ri­ence ren­der­ing such onto a canvas.

At last, we have the howler in the back­ground, now com­plete­ly redesigned. I had request­ed Ale­jan­dro to leave the long tail, make the eyes brighter, and change the body from some­thing resem­bling an insect to a more bull-like crea­ture. How­ev­er, while I was as stoked for this book cov­er design as ever, some­thing still did­n’t feel right. The howler’s face was per­fect, but its pos­ture and body type still did­n’t resem­ble my idea of a howler. For starters, they’re not as bulky. They’re huge and heavy but also sneaky, prowl­ing in the dark­ness around their vic­tims. The rest of the cov­er was per­fect, but the crea­ture still need­ed work.

I real­ized I would have to request that Ale­jan­dro make addi­tion­al changes, and the dread start­ed to con­sume my soul. In any case, my inten­tion was to reach out to him, and if redo­ing the howler was too much work, then I would at least have this incred­i­ble cov­er that I could eas­i­ly use. Like the last time, I anno­tat­ed the cov­er design instead of just bom­bard­ing him with a list of changes. After all, that approach had worked well before.

Goliath Fal­l­en’s book cov­er (sec­ond ver­sion, annotated)

Once again, I felt like I was seiz­ing cre­ative con­trol, but there wasn’t real­ly a way around it as my howlers have a very spe­cif­ic look. I had to make my vision clear. I also thought that a prowl­ing lion pose would make the crea­ture appear more men­ac­ing. If I had to pick an icon­ic scene from my book, this would be it! I want­ed the cov­er to accu­rate­ly bring it to life.

And so, while Ale­jan­dro expressed that redraw­ing the crea­ture was a great deal of work, he was com­mit­ted to full cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. At this point, it felt more like he was chal­leng­ing him­self to nail down the howler design. With­out fur­ther com­ment, he reced­ed back into his stu­dio to redo the cov­er. This man seri­ous­ly is a god­send. For my first time work­ing with a free­lancer, this has been an exceed­ing­ly sat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ence. I was con­fi­dent in Alejandro’s skills and that the next iter­a­tion would be perfect.

Third (and final) iteration

Alejandro’s next deliv­ery was my def­i­n­i­tion of per­fec­tion. I hon­est­ly have no words to this day to describe how impressed I am with this cov­er. All I can say is that a big smile drew on my sil­ly face when I first laid eyes on it. Take a look for your­self at Goliath Fallen’s third and final cover:

Goliath Fal­l­en’s new book cover

One word comes to mind when I see this ver­sion of the howler: men­ac­ing. The long tail, the scaled skin, the heavy but nim­ble-look­ing body, the ter­ri­fy­ing four-eyed face with blood drip­ping down a mouth full of fangs—this is exact­ly what howlers look like. How the heck will Izzy be able to get out of this? That’s pre­cise­ly the ques­tion I want to evoke in the read­ers’ minds. 

Just look­ing at this cov­er, I com­plete­ly for­got about how much it cost. I was extreme­ly sat­is­fied, and, more­over, I was glad to know that Ale­jan­dro was as well. I’ll just quote him here:

This is one of my favourite sci fi book cov­ers I made this year, by the way.

I felt ter­ri­ble about mak­ing him redo the cov­er so many times, but this com­ment reas­sured me. We were a team, and we both need­ed to be sat­is­fied with the end prod­uct. That’s an impor­tant take­away I got from all of this (aside from a kick­ass cov­er I can’t wait to use everywhere).

Final thoughts

Design­ing the book cov­er for my debut nov­el, GOLIATH FALLEN, has been one of the most excit­ing expe­ri­ences I’ve had to date. Just imag­in­ing my book sit­ting there on shelves with this incred­i­ble cov­er sends chills down my spine. I was incred­i­bly lucky to get to work with some­body as tal­ent­ed, pro­fes­sion­al, and com­mit­ted as Ale­jan­dro Coluc­ci. I can’t thank him enough for all his hard work and end­less patience. Hope­ful­ly, this hum­ble piece serves as a spe­cial, very well-deserved “thank you.”

As a final note, if you’re look­ing for an incred­i­ble design­er to bring your fan­ta­sy or sci-fi book cov­er to life, don’t hes­i­tate to reach Ale­jan­dro over on Reedsy or on his web­site. Let my new, blaz­ing-hot cov­er be a tes­ti­mo­ny to his end­less tal­ent. If any­thing, Ale­jan­dro has left the bar impos­si­bly high, and I can’t imag­ine myself work­ing with any­body else for future writ­ing projects.

I hope you enjoyed read­ing through the process of work­ing with a free­lancer to design my book cov­er. For me, find­ing the right design­er to work with was imper­a­tive, and I’d be curi­ous to know if any oth­er authors out there found that to be true as well. Let me know in the com­ments below. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the new book cov­er design too. And, as always, if you have any spe­cif­ic ques­tions, please feel free to reach out.

Before we part, I’ll leave you with a ren­der­ing of how Goliath Fallen’s paper­back will appear in its full form. I’m gid­dy with excite­ment over it, and I just can’t not share it!

Get Two Books for Free

Categories
blog crypto NFTs

What Are NFTs and How Can Authors Use Them?

This entry is part [part not set] of 1 in the series A Writer’s Guide To Crypto

If you’ve spent more than 30 min­utes on the inter­net late­ly, you’ve prob­a­bly already heard about NFTs. Sto­ries abound of artists auc­tion­ing JPEGs for mil­lions of dol­lars in the ever-grow­ing com­mu­ni­ty of cryp­to enthu­si­asts. South Car­oli­na-based artist Beeple famous­ly sold his EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS piece (a col­lage of 5,000 dig­i­tal images from his col­lec­tion of the same name) for $69 mil­lion at Christie’s, a sum so mind-bog­gling that it earned a right­ful place in news­pa­per head­lines around the world. And, for all that cash, buy­er Vig­nesh Sun­dare­san got to call dibs on an image any­body can just down­load online.

If you’re con­fused, you have every right to be. I’m a soft­ware engi­neer in my ear­ly 30s, and I’ve nev­er felt so close to what my dad must’ve expe­ri­enced back in the 90s when he first heard about “the inter­net”. Even if it seems like tech­nol­o­gy is head­ing into bizarre places, we, as authors, can’t afford to fall behind. We should­n’t let the mag­ic com­put­er box intim­i­date us. Instead, we can open our minds, learn more about these insane trends, and make them work in our favor.

What are NFTs? Beeple's EVERYDAYS is a clear example.
EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS by Beeple

So, we arrive at the ques­tion we’re here to answer: what are NFTs, and how can authors lever­age this tech­no­log­i­cal mad­ness to take our work to the next level?

The ini­tial NFT craze left me lost and clue­less at first. But, after some in-depth research, I was able to descend the steep learn­ing curve to tru­ly under­stand NFTs, their val­ue, and how they can become the next great art form. Armed with this new knowl­edge, I decid­ed to write this arti­cle to help you nav­i­gate these strange waters and avoid the same per­ils I did.

The fundamentals

To use NFTs in our favor, it’s nec­es­sary to under­stand a few fun­da­men­tals first. If you’re already some­what knowl­edge­able about cryp­tocur­ren­cy and the blockchain, this might feel repet­i­tive. Feel free to skip this bit—it’s not like it took a lot of work to put togeth­er and my heart will break into a mil­lion pieces or any­thing (spoil­er: it will).

What are NFTs?

NFT stands for non-fun­gi­ble token. In plain Eng­lish, an NFT is some­thing unique and non-repro­ducible. For illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es, let’s say you have a dog. You’ve spent years togeth­er, and it has become your entire world. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, noth­ing lasts for­ev­er. One fate­ful day, your dog pass­es away. You hurt and grieve, and, after a few years go by, you final­ly bring your­self to get anoth­er one. But, despite how great this new dog is, it will nev­er fill the void your old friend left in your soul. That’s because your first dog is non-fun­gi­ble—there was no oth­er one like it and there nev­er will be. It can­not be replaced.

Some folks explain NFTs using an exam­ple of the Mona Lisa and how although we can make copies of it, they’ll nev­er be the same as the orig­i­nal. It’s a good exam­ple, but I thought some­thing more per­son­al would help you bet­ter grasp the con­cept. Sor­ry if I made you sad.

Fun­gi­ble Mona Lisa — Image by Wiki­me­dia Commons

So, we now know that some­thing that is non-fun­gi­ble can­not be repli­cat­ed. But, what does token mean in this con­text? A token is sim­ply a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of something.

There­fore, when put togeth­er, a non-fun­gi­ble token is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of some­thing unique and non-repro­ducible. We can also see it as a title of own­er­ship over a col­lectible. Going back to the Mona Lisa exam­ple, buy­ing the NFT is like buy­ing the title deed of the orig­i­nal work. It’s ours now. We might as well walk into the Lou­vre, grab the paint­ing under our arm, and ride the bus back home. The same goes for Beeple’s EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS. The buy­er did­n’t pay $69 mil­lion for a JPEG; he paid for the title of own­er­ship over the orig­i­nal art. He’s now free to sell it when­ev­er and to whomev­er he pleas­es (and prob­a­bly for a far high­er price). 

But, if we’ve had titles for ages, how are NFTs different? 

The answer is decen­tral­iza­tion and immutabil­i­ty. NFTs are stored in a spe­cial pub­lic data­base called the blockchain. We’ll dive deep­er into that next, but, long sto­ry short, nobody (human or machine) can tam­per with the data stored in the blockchain. While titles can be forged and peo­ple tricked into buy­ing some­thing they think is orig­i­nal, every trans­ac­tion asso­ci­at­ed with NFTs is pub­lic. Any­body can see who was the orig­i­nal author and who cur­rent­ly owns it. If that own­er isn’t us, we’ll only make a fool out of our­selves try­ing to sell that forgery.

What is the blockchain?

The blockchain is a con­cept often asso­ci­at­ed with cryp­tocur­ren­cies (e.g., Bit­coin). In sim­ple Eng­lish, the blockchain is just a type of data­base. For exam­ple, the trans­ac­tions that deter­mine the bal­ance of your sav­ings account are stored in a data­base owned by your bank. They have com­plete access to that data and can do what­ev­er they want with it; it’s owned by a sin­gle enti­ty. Although unlike­ly, what hap­pens if a hack­er gets access to it? They could make dras­tic, irrev­o­ca­ble changes. Such cen­tral­ized data­bas­es are vul­ner­a­ble if they’re not prop­er­ly secured.

On the oth­er hand, the blockchain is a dis­trib­uted data­base. Thou­sands of com­put­ers world­wide hold a copy of the entire data. To change that data, all of those com­put­ers need to agree. If some­one attempts to tam­per with the data in one loca­tion, it’ll be blocked as the major­i­ty won’t agree with the change. That hack­er will then be flagged as a dirty cheater and banned from ever par­tic­i­pat­ing in the blockchain again.

The blockchain stores the NFTs and their entire his­to­ry, includ­ing who orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed it, who has owned it, and who the cur­rent own­er is. And not only that, but all the infor­ma­tion is pub­lic and can be ver­i­fied by any­one. All this is to say that the data in the blockchain is immutable and incorruptible.

How are NFTs made?

There are sev­er­al ways to cre­ate NFTs, but the eas­i­est is through an NFT mar­ket­place. There, we can eas­i­ly “mint” (“cre­ate”), auc­tion, sell, trans­fer, and buy NFTs as well as NFT col­lec­tions. One of the most pop­u­lar mar­ket­places is OpenSea, which, by the way, car­ries Beeple’s EVERYDAYS col­lec­tion. 

It’s essen­tial to remem­ber that mar­ket­places are just store­fronts to the blockchain that stores the NFTs. All mar­ket­places share the same data­base. While OpenSea lists Beeple’s col­lec­tions, it does­n’t mean that they’re only avail­able there. Nifty Gate­way, anoth­er pop­u­lar mar­ket­place, also lists his pieces.

Galac­t­i­cApes­Ge­n­e­sis on OpenSea

How do artists use NFTs?

As you may have noticed, NFTs are com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with visu­al art. Mar­ket­places let artists asso­ciate their fresh­ly mint­ed NFTs to the orig­i­nal asset (a high-res­o­lu­tion image or video) and a set of attrib­ut­es. Dig­i­tal col­lectibles such as cards are a com­mon type of col­lec­tion where an image of a char­ac­ter is unique­ly repli­cat­ed with vary­ing attrib­ut­es (includ­ing hair col­or and style, age, gen­der, etc.). This can give a spe­cif­ic NFT rar­i­ty. For exam­ple, only one char­ac­ter in the col­lec­tion has hazel eyes. Famous col­lec­tions include Doo­dles, Cryp­toP­unks, and Galac­t­i­cApes.

CryptoPunks is another example of what are NFTs.
Cryp­toP­unks by Lar­vaL­abs

Oth­er col­lec­tions, such as Beeple’s, are clos­er to some­thing like pieces in a muse­um. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, some art col­lec­tors “con­vert” phys­i­cal art pieces into an NFT by destroy­ing the orig­i­nal work. One of the most promi­nent cas­es was the burn­ing of an orig­i­nal work by Banksy, which now lives for­ev­er in the blockchain as a dig­i­tized version.

Cryptocurrency

NFT mar­ket­places don’t use tra­di­tion­al cur­ren­cies (like the dol­lar) because the blockchain has its own mon­ey. The most pop­u­lar (and orig­i­nal) blockchain for NFTs is Ethereum. To trans­act on Ethereum, we’ll have to get our­selves some Ether, its native dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy. Just like how we need to use local cur­ren­cy to buy things in a for­eign coun­try, we’ll need to do the same for each blockchain. 

But, where can we exchange dol­lars for Ether? And, more impor­tant­ly, if we sell an NFT and get paid in Ether, how can we get dol­lars back in order to buy things in the “real world”? With­out delv­ing too far into the details of buy­ing and sell­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy, you can sim­ply sell your Ether through a cryp­to exchange like Coin­base. It’s the same as exchang­ing dol­lars for euros, for example.

How can authors use NFTs?

Now that we have the basics of NFTs down, it’s time to dis­cuss how to put them to work in the lit­er­ary world. While there are count­less col­lec­tions of visu­al art in NFT mar­ket­places, lit­er­ary NFT projects are a lit­tle more scarce as of now. Writer Anand Girid­haradas is an exam­ple of an ear­ly pio­neer with his Win­ners Take All col­lec­tion. As the descrip­tion declares, it’s “an exper­i­ment in apply­ing NFTs to the lit­er­ary world”. This is a cru­cial point: adapt­ing the NFT medi­um to lit­er­a­ture takes a good amount of exper­i­men­ta­tion and creativity. 

Oth­er cre­ative projects in this space include The Chain­tale by Ital­ian artist Brick­wall, which lets the buy­er of his lat­est NFT write the next install­ment in the series like an inter­ac­tive game. It might sound com­plex and involved. How­ev­er, if I’ve learned any­thing, it’s that the cryp­to com­mu­ni­ty is very much into the intri­cate and sophis­ti­cat­ed. If any­thing, it makes the project that much more unique and valuable.

There are sev­er­al ways authors can make their entrance into the NFT space, from cre­at­ing a lim­it­ed run of our lat­est book to turn­ing cen­tral pas­sages into an image or devel­op­ing trad­ing cards of pri­ma­ry char­ac­ters. Some pur­suits are eas­i­er than oth­ers, but, as I men­tioned ear­li­er, the NFT space is main­ly a visu­al one, so visu­al con­tent is pre­ferred. In the end, it’s the same as cre­at­ing merch for our works.

Before mov­ing on, let’s always remem­ber this gold­en rule: only pub­lish some­thing that we would see our­selves want­i­ng and pay­ing for. We would­n’t pay for a cheap GIF that offers no real val­ue, would we? Look to devel­op some­thing unique and spe­cial that your audi­ence will get excit­ed about. After all, for authors, expand­ing our reach into NFTs isn’t just about mak­ing mon­ey; it allows us to engage with exist­ing read­ers in a new fash­ion. It also lets us reach an untapped audi­ence for our work. A lit­tle bit of effort can go a long way.

Win­ners Take All NFT col­lec­tion by Anand Girid­haradas

The first copy of our book

There’s only one first copy. To me, that sounds like the per­fect use case for an NFT. For our next book, we can con­sid­er cre­at­ing an NFT giv­ing the buy­er own­er­ship of the very first dig­i­tal copy. We can prefer­ably cus­tomize that copy to make it as unique as pos­si­ble, like using a spe­cial cov­er (with cus­tom art, dif­fer­ent lay­out, let­ter col­or­ing, etc.), a signed cov­er, a per­son­al­ized thanks in the intro, or any oth­er extra con­tent to make it special.

Some com­pa­nies also offer ser­vices to cre­ate phys­i­cal NFTs, mean­ing that the first copy could be an actu­al, phys­i­cal hard copy. In that case, we can try out more ideas like a spe­cial hard­cov­er. What would we like to see from a tru­ly unique first copy if we were one of our readers?

A limited run of our book

In addi­tion to a unique, super spe­cial first copy of our book, we can also make a lim­it­ed run of the same—a spe­cial edi­tion, if you will. Our audi­ence might not see it as some­thing as spe­cial as a first copy, but it will be more acces­si­ble to a broad­er part of our audi­ence. Again, we should pri­mar­i­ly strive to bring our read­ers val­ue rather than mon­ey into our pock­ets; usu­al­ly, the for­mer results in the lat­ter anyway. 

For lim­it­ed runs, we can cre­ate a sep­a­rate, num­bered NFT per copy and list it on the mar­ket­place. There must be some­thing spe­cial about those copies though. For exam­ple, we can con­sid­er mak­ing a dif­fer­ent ver­sion of the cov­er fea­tur­ing the run num­ber, the name of the lim­it­ed edi­tion (if any), and a spe­cial note inside. What would make you want one of those copies as a reader?

Short stories with a hidden storyline

We can real­ly go the extra mile by cre­at­ing short sto­ries that exist as sep­a­rate branch­es off of the main sto­ry­lines of our nov­els. To make the NFT as visu­al as pos­si­ble, we can offer cus­tom cov­er art in addi­tion to the PDF file of the sto­ry. The more unique the sto­ry, the bet­ter. Also, con­sid­er throw­ing in spe­cial thanks and oth­er good­ies to make the own­er feel like they’re hold­ing some­thing one of a kind and unforgettable. 

Collectibles related to our book’s lore

As men­tioned before, if we can cre­ate phys­i­cal merch for our books, then it’s pos­si­ble to cre­ate NFTs as well. For exam­ple, we already have an idea of what our char­ac­ters look like and their attrib­ut­es. We can now lever­age that to mint a col­lec­tion of our char­ac­ters in the form of col­lectible cards. If we’re writ­ing fan­ta­sy, sci-fi, or oth­er sto­ries with rich lore, we can also have cards of arti­facts, loca­tions, mag­ic, etc. 

This might require work­ing with an artist or some­one who can pro­duce pro­fes­sion­al-qual­i­ty images wor­thy of an NFT. It does­n’t have to be super expen­sive either. Some artists may be even will­ing to con­sid­er tak­ing a cut of the NFT’s sales—many com­ic book projects work under this mod­el. Even if we end up pay­ing for design ser­vices upfront, if we’ve come up with some­thing tru­ly unique, there’s a strong pos­si­bil­i­ty we’ll make our mon­ey back (and then some).

Never-before-seen, unedited material

Last but not least, we have the good ol’ exclu­sive, unedit­ed mate­r­i­al. This can include ear­ly ver­sions of our drafts, pre­views of our cov­er art, delet­ed char­ac­ters or oth­er sto­ry ele­ments, and much more. That file sit­ting in the desk­top recy­cle bin might offer our most loy­al fans an exclu­sive look into our process. Con­sid­er just how valu­able that man­u­script some­one found tucked away in J.R.R Tolkien’s draw­er is today. 

I’ve talked with some of my read­ers, and, when I men­tion ear­ly ver­sions of my book cov­ers, they find them inter­est­ing and valu­able. As the author, it’s some­times hard to con­cep­tu­al­ize what’s best suit­ed for an NFT. If we’re strug­gling to come up with ideas, we can always ask our audi­ence what they would like to see released.

Final thoughts

In sum­ma­ry, NFTs rep­re­sent items that are unique and valu­able. They pro­vide a new, pow­er­ful medi­um of dis­tri­b­u­tion for our lit­er­ary work in a tru­ly exclu­sive, pre­mi­um, and per­son­al fash­ion to our loy­al read­er base. If we can cre­ate merch for our books, we can also cre­ate NFTs.

In order to catch on, how­ev­er, they should be our most valu­able and exclu­sive good­ies. We always have to strive for val­ue and think of what we would like to see (and pur­chase) as a read­er. If we wouldn’t buy it our­selves, it’s like­ly our read­ers won’t either. Lit­er­ary NFTs are still very new, but there’s plen­ty of poten­tial for us authors to take our work to the next lev­el. Now’s the time to exper­i­ment and explore this new form of media. 

In this arti­cle, we dis­cussed what NFTs are and how authors can put them to work for their own ben­e­fit. As the NFT space con­tin­ues to evolve, there will be ample oppor­tu­ni­ty to take advan­tage of new blockchain projects; we’ve real­ly only scratched the sur­face in terms of the val­ue of NFTs and digitization.

I hope this has helped reframe your think­ing of what’s pos­si­ble when pro­mot­ing your writ­ten work and engag­ing with your audi­ence. Let me know if you’d like to see a deep­er dive into NFTs and oth­er cryp­to top­ics for writ­ers. Per­haps this can become a new series.

Did you already know about NFTs? Have you tried exper­i­ment­ing with them?

Get Two Books for Free

Categories
publishing blog writing

Budgeting for my self-published book (update)

This entry is part [part not set] of 8 in the series Pub­lish­ing Goliath Fallen

Wel­come to anoth­er entry in my series on self-pub­lish­ing my debut nov­el, GOLIATH FALLEN! If you haven’t been fol­low­ing along, I pre­vi­ous­ly doc­u­ment­ed my ini­tial efforts to assem­ble the crew that will take my book from a mod­est draft to a best­seller list. This team includes the cov­er artist, book edi­tor, and book descrip­tion writer.

Truth be told, it’s turned out amaz­ing so far. I’ve got­ten to know these incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed indi­vid­u­als who I would­n’t have oth­er­wise met if I had tak­en the more tra­di­tion­al route. How­ev­er, it’s also been an insane amount of work (almost as much as writ­ing the book itself). I’ve read quite a bit about how tax­ing the self-pub­lish­ing process is, and I’m here to tell you it’s all true. The deep­er I dive into this process, the more it feels like writ­ing my nov­el is tru­ly only half the battle.

Up to this point, the hard­est part of self-pub­lish­ing was fig­ur­ing out exact­ly what I need­ed from my team and appro­pri­ate­ly deter­min­ing and allo­cat­ing the bud­get for my self-pub­lished book. Not only was this tough, but it was also crit­i­cal as my bud­get deter­mines whether I’ll spend all my resources (mon­ey and time in this case) effec­tive­ly or not.

At last, with my crew com­plete and now hard at work, it’s time to fol­low up on my pre­vi­ous post on budgeting.

Mon­ey on my mind, but not in my wallet

Revisiting the initial budget

While my first bud­get was quite con­ser­v­a­tive, I used price ranges for some ser­vices (like book edit­ing) to keep things some­what real­is­tic. After all, when you keep expec­ta­tions low, it’s like mon­ey in your pock­et when things work out in your favor. I’m look­ing to self-pub­lish a nov­el indis­tin­guish­able in qual­i­ty from one that’s tra­di­tion­al­ly pub­lished, and I can expect that to cost a pret­ty pen­ny. In devel­op­ing this bud­get, I feel like I’ll be burn­ing through the equiv­a­lent of an advance a pub­lish­er would give me…except the pub­lish­er is me.

Any­way, there’s no time to lick my wounds. With­out fur­ther ado, here was my ini­tial budget:

Ser­vice
Cost
Copy edit­ing
$2,750 – $5,500
Cov­er design
$350 – $800
Book descrip­tion writing
$350
Total
$3,900 – $6,300

I real­ize that bud­get­ing for my self-pub­lished book in the range of $3,900 – $6,300 may appear odd. It’s a very, very wide range, which might seem like cheat­ing. But, real­is­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, there’s no way in hell I can afford to pay $6,300 to self-pub­lish my book.

If that’s the price tag I would have to set­tle for, I would rather get myself stuck for a few years in the tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing cycle until some­body picks up my nov­el. Let me also clar­i­fy that while I have already decid­ed to self-pub­lish, this is a jour­ney, and noth­ing is set in stone. I might even get to the end of it and choose to not pub­lish my nov­el at all. If any­thing, that might be the biggest plot twist of this whole process (and per­haps an even more com­pelling one than the plot twist in my nov­el itself).

The revised budget

Thank­ful­ly, after some con­ster­na­tion over my ini­tial esti­mates, I’m glad to report that assem­bling my pub­lish­ing crew went a lot bet­ter than I expect­ed bud­get-wise. It only required patient and care­ful analy­sis of each option until I deter­mined the best one for the job.

The book cov­er design still went over my ini­tial esti­mate, but my mind was set on Ale­jan­dro Coluc­ci, and the more bud­get-friend­ly alter­na­tives sim­ply did­n’t seize my atten­tion the way his impres­sive art did. Speak­ing of which, I’d like to pro­vide a lit­tle dis­claimer before mov­ing on: Ale­jan­dro’s rate was­n’t pub­licly avail­able, which makes com­plete sense giv­en how the price of the cov­er art depends heav­i­ly on the com­plex­i­ty of what’s required. There­fore, out of respect for him and my read­ers, I’ll use an approx­i­ma­tion for the cov­er art design estimate.

Here’s the revised budget:

Ser­vice
Free­lancer
Cost
Copy edit­ing
Philip Athans
$2,750
Cov­er design
Ale­jan­dro Colucci
+$1,000
Book descrip­tion writing
Bryan Cohen
$297
Total
+$4,047

I have to admit, those fig­ures are look­ing a lot bet­ter than I ini­tial­ly thought! The revised bud­get is a tad over the low­er range of my esti­mate, but it’s not bad for what was such a loose range. Of course, $4,000 is still a decent chunk of change, but I’m work­ing with a stel­lar crew who could’ve eas­i­ly cost me a lot more than the upper range of my ini­tial budget.

As always, these fig­ures are still sub­ject to change as sit­u­a­tions out­side of my con­trol may arise (like some­one being unable to work, requir­ing a back­fill), or per­haps I’ll need to add more ser­vices along the way. If there’s one thing I can con­fi­dent­ly pre­dict, it’s that some­thing unpre­dictable is like­ly to hap­pen in this process.

Final thoughts

And that’s it for this update on bud­get­ing for my self-pub­lished book. While my ini­tial bud­get was pret­ty loose on the esti­mates, I’m thank­ful to be on firmer foot­ing now that my self-pub­lish­ing crew has start­ed work­ing. And although I’ll still end up shelling out a good num­ber of Ben­jamins, I’m sure it’ll all be worth it once I’m able to lay eyes on the fin­ished product.

I’m still fig­ur­ing out what my next post will be about—maybe my expe­ri­ence work­ing with these fine folks, which I sim­ply can­not look for­ward to enough over this journey.

Hope­ful­ly, this has been an inter­est­ing inside look into the self-pub­lish­ing process and all of its joys and per­ils. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the com­ments below; they’re very much appre­ci­at­ed! Have you ever had to deal with bud­get­ing for a self-pub­lished book? How was the expe­ri­ence for you?

Stay tuned for the next post in the series!

Get Two Books for Free

Categories
blog writing writing-tools

5 Best Writing Tools in 2021 to Perfect Your Work

This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series What Works For Me

Let’s face it—for most of us, writ­ing has nev­er been easy. And with the pan­dem­ic rag­ing over most of 2021 and our lives still upside down, becom­ing a pro­duc­tive writer has only got­ten hard­er. Whether you’re try­ing to churn out a short sto­ry, a sci-fi nov­el, or any­thing in between, the process typ­i­cal­ly involves hours of sit­ting at our desk while star­ing at a blank page until the next best­seller appears before us. And until that big moment final­ly arrives, we want to make sure we count on the right tools for the job. Whether you choose to use Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Win­dows Notepad, or even good ‘ol pen and paper, it’s crit­i­cal to uti­lize writ­ing tools that sup­port us in the process rather than get in the way.

As writ­ers, each of us approach­es our craft dif­fer­ent­ly and ben­e­fits from dif­fer­ent fea­tures in writ­ing tools; there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Per­son­al­ly, I have a very low tol­er­ance for user inter­faces. Even the most min­i­mal­ist word proces­sors like Google Docs prove dis­tract­ing to me. So, a dis­trac­tion-free mode and big font options are essen­tial when I sit down to write. It might sound high main­te­nance, but know­ing what works best for me helps me select the right tools to ensure pro­duc­tive writ­ing ses­sions. While I don’t have decades of writ­ing expe­ri­ence, I have per­son­al­ly tried dozens of apps and utilities.

This list is the result of all that tri­al and error. Hope­ful­ly, it will help save you time in find­ing the right tool for your next writ­ing project. There are no affil­i­ate links in this arti­cle, and I’m not get­ting paid to rec­om­mend any of these tools. I’ve sim­ply includ­ed them here because they have proved essen­tial to me over the years.

With that said, here are the five best writ­ing tools in 2021 to per­fect and safe­guard your work and up your game as a writer.

Grammarly

Grammarly is one of my best writing tools of 2021 to make sure your writing excels in all aspects.
Gram­marly’s main interface

Gram­marly is an all-in-one, AI-pow­ered writ­ing assis­tant that reviews spelling, gram­mar, punc­tu­a­tion, clar­i­ty, engage­ment, and deliv­ery mis­takes. It’s pos­si­bly as close as you can get to hire an actu­al edi­tor with­out actu­al­ly pay­ing for one. There are a ton of auto­mat­ed spell check­ers out there, but, in my opin­ion, Gram­marly has the most stream­lined user interface—so much so that it used to be my dai­ly dri­ver (I wrote half of my nov­el on its plat­form) before I found Scrivener.

There are also add-ons for Microsoft Word, macOS, iOS, and more to tend to your spell check­ing needs else­where if you so desire. The out-of-the-box solu­tion includes more than 400 checks, but the high­light for me is the non-native speak­er check, which warns you about awk­ward phras­ing and how to fix it. For writ­ers like me (my native lan­guage is Span­ish), such a fea­ture is priceless.

And speak­ing of price, a solu­tion of this cal­iber with all its fea­tures rarely comes free. I mean, yes, Gram­marly does have a free ver­sion with lim­it­ed fea­tures, but if you’re writ­ing a book or blog­ging often, you’ll grow out of the free ver­sion rather quick­ly. At the time of writ­ing, a pre­mi­um Gram­marly sub­scrip­tion goes for $30/month (or $12/month if you choose to pay for the year upfront).

Hon­est­ly, I feel the price is fair for the mas­sive amount of val­ue it has brought me. 

I’ve used Gram­marly for years, and there’s noth­ing I write that doesn’t go through it. In case you need proof, here’s my lat­est writ­ing report:

My writ­ing per­for­mance over the last four months

But hey, don’t take my word for it. Check out Grammarly’s fea­ture list and sub­scrip­tion plans if you feel like it. It doesn’t hurt to start with even the free ver­sion and then upgrade if you want to unlock more of its features.

ProWritingAid

ProWritin­gAid main interface

As anoth­er AI writ­ing check­er, ProWritin­gAid is sim­i­lar to Gram­marly and is often seen as one of its pri­ma­ry com­peti­tors. In my per­spec­tive, they’re more like soul­mates. While Gram­marly pro­vides read­abil­i­ty checks that high­light long and over­ly com­plex sen­tences, ProWritin­gAid takes it to the next lev­el. The plat­form also focus­es on overused words, sen­tence struc­ture, punc­tu­a­tion issues, repeat­ed phras­es, con­sis­ten­cy, dia­logue, and pac­ing. It even checks for allit­er­a­tion and rhythm if you’re into that.

There are also add-ons for a wide range of word proces­sors and appli­ca­tions, includ­ing, notably, Scriven­er. If you’ve been fol­low­ing my blog, you know how much I love Scriven­er. I’ve been patient­ly wait­ing for Gram­marly to bless me with an add-on for it.

ProWritin­gAid offers a free ver­sion to check up to 500 words at a time. If you need more than that, and there’s a good chance you will, sub­scrip­tion plans go for $20/month or $70/year. There’s also a $399 option that grants you life­time access.

In my day-to-day life, I use both Gram­marly and ProWritin­gAid to check my writ­ing to ensure I have a holis­tic point-of-view. How­ev­er, I only find this nec­es­sary because I’m a non-native speak­er. You might not need both. I’ll leave that deci­sion to you. Go ahead and try the free ver­sion or check out their plans if you’d like.

Scrivener

Scrivener is one of my best writing tools of 2021 and possibly ever.
Scriven­er’s main interface

Scriven­er has been my pre­ferred word proces­sor and dai­ly dri­ver for the last six years. If you’ve read my blog before, this won’t come as a surprise. 

Scriven­er is a word proces­sor specif­i­cal­ly designed for authors. It pro­vides tem­plates for fic­tion and non-fic­tion and includes a sto­ry out­lin­er, dis­trac­tion-free mode, progress track­ing, export­ing to sev­er­al for­mats (PDF, Word, ePub, etc.), screen­writ­ing mode, and more.

I’ve tried a bunch of word proces­sors, and so far, none have come close to what Scriven­er can do and for such a mod­est price tag. I appre­ci­ate that Lit­er­a­ture & Lat­te, its devel­op­ers, don’t rely on shady sub­scrip­tion mod­els. A life­time Scriven­er sub­scrip­tion can be yours for a one-time $49 pay­ment. There’s also a macOS and Win­dows bun­dle for $80 and an iOS (iPhone, iPad, etc.) ver­sion for $19 if you’re into writ­ing on your mobile devices. (I can’t do that, so props to you if you can.) 

If you’d like to try it first, the plat­form includes a 30-day free tri­al. You can down­load the app for free or check out the full pric­ing mod­el if you’re inter­est­ed in pur­chas­ing it. I’d be sur­prised if you weren’t!

Google Keep and Evernote

Google Keep­’s main interface

Two of the lead­ing note-tak­ing apps, Google Keep and Ever­note, let you quick­ly and eas­i­ly jot down and save your thoughts dig­i­tal­ly. When a new sto­ry con­cept, the solu­tion to a plot hole, or an excit­ing char­ac­ter idea pops into my head, I must write it down before I for­get. (I have an abysmal mem­o­ry.) To ensure I don’t for­get, I always imme­di­ate­ly open Google Keep and write down every­thing as it comes out. The thought doesn’t need to be ful­ly fleshed out; it just mat­ters that it’s writ­ten down. 

You nev­er know when that idea you just for­got would’ve turned you into a best­selling author. My entire writ­ing process starts with these two apps. Ideas even­tu­al­ly turn into text, and the sto­ry devel­ops from there.

Ever­note’s main interface

Like Gram­marly and ProWritin­gAid, I use Google Keep and Ever­note as a com­ple­ment to each oth­er. I start my sto­ry out­lines in Ever­note as free-form text and lists that rarely make sense. Once I’ve writ­ten enough to devel­op a start­ing point, I con­tin­ue on to Scriven­er. I also con­tin­u­ous­ly take notes through­out the entire writ­ing process, from keep­ing a back­log of ideas and changes to writ­ing down valu­able feed­back from beta read­ers. In both apps, every­thing is backed up to the cloud so that I can seam­less­ly switch between desk­top, web, or mobile and con­tin­ue from anywhere.

The good news is that Google Keep is free, and all you need to access it is a Google account. It should pro­vide almost every­thing you’d require for your note-tak­ing needs. If you’d like to try and pair it with the more fea­ture-rich Ever­note, you can try out the latter’s free ver­sion or upgrade for a fee depend­ing on your needs.

Dropbox

Last in this list of the best writ­ing tools for 2021 (but cer­tain­ly not least) is Drop­box, the world’s lead­ing cloud stor­age ser­vice. You can have all the best tools in the world and your next best­seller already writ­ten, but (unless you’re using Google Docs) all of that can be gone in an instant if your com­put­er sud­den­ly dies. We’re talk­ing about days, months, or even years of hard work van­ish­ing into thin air because we didn’t back it up.

As a soft­ware engi­neer, I can’t think of a more reli­able place to back up my work than in the cloud. Drop­box is my ser­vice of trust and hasn’t failed me once over the decade I’ve used them now. I have the desk­top exten­sion installed and save all my man­u­scripts to a fold­er that syncs auto­mat­i­cal­ly to the cloud each time I save my changes. The more auto­mat­ed every­thing is, the less I have to wor­ry about what might hap­pen. I can instead just focus on the writ­ing itself.

Dropbox is one of the best writing tools of 2021 to back up your writing in the cloud.
Drop­box’s main interface

Drop­box is free and comes with 2GB of stor­age, which might be enough for all your writ­ing needs as text doc­u­ments are among the small­est types of files there are in terms of size. If you’re a writer extra­or­di­naire and find your­self need­ing more capac­i­ty, the $9.99/month plan comes with a mind-numb­ing 2TB of space. In all hon­esty, I only upgrad­ed from the free ver­sion because I start­ed writ­ing a graph­ic nov­el, and the art files weighed in at about 300MB each. Feel free to try out Drop­box for your­self or check out their plans and fea­tures list.

As a final note, although I’m loy­al to Drop­box, there are dozens of oth­er options for cloud stor­age in this day and age. Maybe you’re a heavy Apple user and would pre­fer to use iCloud. There’s also Google Dri­ve, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, and count­less more. Whichev­er you choose is fine, but please, please always back up your work.

Final thoughts

And there you have it—my list of the five best writ­ing tools for 2021! I tried my best not to give you one of those gener­ic lists that are seem­ing­ly omnipresent across the web and chock full of pro­grams that the authors them­selves have nev­er even used. Instead, this list is actu­al­ly based on my own expe­ri­ence using these tools in my day-to-day writ­ing. I know how con­fus­ing it can get when putting togeth­er your tool­box. Hope­ful­ly these pro­grams will help make your writ­ing process just a bit eas­i­er, allow­ing you to both per­fect and safe­guard your work.

Final­ly, as I men­tioned ear­li­er, I’m not spon­sored by any of these apps. I only use them every day as part of my writ­ing process, and they have allowed me to focus on the only thing I should be spend­ing my time doing: writing.

So, how about you? Do you have any pre­ferred tools you could rec­om­mend to fel­low writ­ers? Have you tried any of the ones I list­ed here? As always, don’t hes­i­tate to reach out by email or share your thoughts in the com­ments below.

Get Two Books for Free

Categories
blog writing publishing works goliath-fallen

How Self-Publishing on a Budget Made Me Write a Better Book

This entry is part [part not set] of 8 in the series Pub­lish­ing Goliath Fallen

I recent­ly real­ized that my post about find­ing an edi­tor for my nov­el, GOLIATH FALLEN, had skipped a cru­cial ele­ment of the jour­ney: the fact that self-pub­lish­ing on a bud­get helped me cut a third of my man­u­script, which, unex­pect­ed­ly, result­ed in a bet­ter book. 

Edi­tors com­mon­ly charge by page or word count. As a result, total edit­ing costs will depend on the length of the man­u­script. With my book clock­ing in at a whop­ping 92,500 words, I’m fac­ing edit­ing costs of $2,700 at a mod­est $0.03 per word. How­ev­er, my nov­el was­n’t always that length. It used to be a mind-bog­gling 150,000+ words. The new­ly reduced length was the result of a four-month rewrite cam­paign after real­iz­ing that hir­ing an edi­tor would have cost me a kid­ney. The cheap­est quote I received based on the orig­i­nal draft was $4,500. And if I want­ed devel­op­men­tal edit­ing, that would’ve run a whop­ping $9,000, which is triple my ini­tial esti­mate and sev­er­al months’ worth of rent where I live (Cos­ta Rica.)

I was between a rock and a hard place, and the only way out was a painful one. After six years of writ­ing and declar­ing my draft com­plete, I had no choice but to dive back in and “make it shorter.”

Pictured: me editing my manuscript during "The Big Rewrite."
Pic­tured: me edit­ing my book dur­ing “The Big Rewrite.”

Finishing the book is only the beginning

“Make it short­er” sounds like a vague, unac­tion­able thing a pub­lish­er would tell you after review­ing the phone book you just wrote. It leaves you with absolute­ly no clue where to start. It’s a frus­trat­ing real­iza­tion to have after you fin­ish writ­ing your book. Real­is­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, how­ev­er, a debut nov­el of such dimen­sions also has an abysmal chance of get­ting pub­lished. I might also seem like I’m self-pub­lish­ing because no agents would take my nov­el. I haven’t seri­ous­ly queried this book yet, so I can’t say that’s the case.

Some fel­low writ­ers might relate to my plight here. I was forced to revis­it the beloved man­u­script I had been writ­ing for years and trim not only a few sen­tences but cut entire scenes, reor­ga­nize or remove chap­ters, or even take out char­ac­ters com­plete­ly. They said self-pub­lish­ing on a bud­get was hard, but this was sim­ply soul-crushing.

Pic­ture me sit­ting at my desk, hands on my head, look­ing down in despair, sweat­ing from this dread­ful real­iza­tion, and try­ing to find a way out of this inescapable abyss. Dra­mat­ic? Yes. Accu­rate? Also yes. I had been writ­ing for so long and was so excit­ed to get this book out. But now, how long would it be before it’s tru­ly ready?

Tough feedback is the best kind of feedback

One day, I shared this real­iza­tion that my book need­ed trim­ming with one of my most trust­ed beta read­ers. As it turns out, she already had the same con­sid­er­a­tion, but it was hard for her to put it into con­cise, action­able feed­back. One point she men­tioned was my overuse of char­ac­ter reac­tions between dia­logue. After some self-intro­spec­tion, I real­ized I do this uncon­scious­ly because I write as if I was watch­ing a movie. This beta read­er hint­ed that I could eas­i­ly remove all that fluff with­out alter­ing the end prod­uct. I re-read the first chap­ters to con­firm her real­iza­tion and found plen­ty of pas­sages like the following:

“Is… is that it?” Casper stut­tered.
Vik­tor could almost hear the rusty cogs of his brain crunch­ing, pro­cess­ing the sit­u­a­tion. A sen­tence left his mouth by its own will: “Go. Wake up the others.”

That pas­sage is way longer than it needs to be. It’s rid­dled with descrip­tions that don’t add enough to jus­ti­fy their exis­tence. Instead, it could be eas­i­ly rewrit­ten to some­thing like:

“Is—is that it?” Casper said.
Vik­tor froze, his mind rac­ing. “Go. Wake up the others.”

This revised pas­sage is clean­er, crisper, and about 20 words few­er. With a few sim­ple changes, it’s easy to see how I could work my way through my man­u­script to trim the edges with­out los­ing integrity.

Around the time my man­u­script was avail­able to beta read­ers, I also received crit­i­cal feed­back from my peers at the NYC Writ­ers Cri­tique Group. Specif­i­cal­ly, one mem­ber said, “I’m 30,000 words in, and not a lot has hap­pened”. I had­n’t under­stood what they meant ini­tial­ly, but they were right nonethe­less. This real­iza­tion was a big pill to swallow—a big pill of hard, cold truth. 

And so, with this fresh per­spec­tive, I sailed off into a long, long jour­ney. I start­ed by read­ing my entire man­u­script yet again. But this time, I read it not as a writer but as a read­er. My fel­low writ­ers know how hard it is to swap your frame of ref­er­ence like that. How do you detach from your cre­ation in order to objec­tive­ly read it like just anoth­er book? For me, it was a three-step process:

  1. Put the book away for a month.
  2. Re-read the entire book, but force myself not to edit a sin­gle word.
  3. Put the book away for anoth­er month.

The sec­ond step is the def­i­n­i­tion of tor­ture. If I had read my book right from the word edi­tor, I don’t think I could’ve resist­ed the temp­ta­tion to edit it. With this in mind, I export­ed it as a PDF so that I could­n’t edit it but could add com­ments in bouts of weakness.

How self-publishing on a budget improved my manuscript

On that last read-through of my book, my fresh eyes did­n’t only catch an exor­bi­tant amount of fluff but they also dis­cov­ered plen­ty of unnec­es­sary descrip­tions, triv­ial dia­logue, and scenes that need­ed to either be trimmed or cut out alto­geth­er. Not even two chap­ters in, I start­ed get­ting “writer’s itch,” or that uncon­trol­lable urge to get down to edit­ing. I cursed that pesky, read-only PDF more times than I could count. But once I was done read­ing, I stuck to the plan and put my book away before a mon­th’s long vaca­tion in order to detox.

When the time came to get back to work, that last edit­ing pass turned into a full rewrite as my hun­dreds of com­ments in the PDF had fore­cast­ed. It took three months to parse through the entire text, and by the end, my man­u­script was an entire­ly dif­fer­ent beast (and 58,000 words lean­er). The pac­ing of the nar­ra­tive ben­e­fit­ed the most from this, result­ing in bet­ter tran­si­tions between dia­logue and action scenes. My proud­est moment was prun­ing the intro­duc­to­ry arc to four chap­ters instead of five, or 8,600 words instead of 18,000. It’s sup­posed to be an intro­duc­to­ry arc, not a novella.

Final thoughts

After star­ing down the bar­rel of thou­sands of dol­lars in poten­tial edit­ing costs, I was forced to take a sec­ond look at my debut nov­el. Armed with crit­i­cal feed­back from read­ers and fel­low writ­ers, I embarked on a four-month-long jour­ney deep into my char­ac­ters, plot­line, and chap­ters. Despite the ini­tial despair and frus­tra­tion, every­thing turned out well in the end. The fact that my lim­it­ed bud­get helped me not only save on the costs of an edi­tor, but I also was able to shave unnec­es­sary fluff from begin­ning to end, result­ing in an over­all clean­er, stream­lined nov­el. I could­n’t help but chuck­le at the irony that self-pub­lish­ing on a bud­get actu­al­ly led me to write a bet­ter book.

If you’re a writer, I hope my per­ils made you feel a lit­tle less alone in the mis­ery that can some­times accom­pa­ny edit­ing your own self-pub­lished book. If you’re just a read­er, well, per­haps you enjoyed a lit­tle bit of schaden­freude after read­ing my experience.

Please feel free to share your own self-edit­ing expe­ri­ences in the com­ments below. Have you ever had a real­iza­tion in the late stages of edit­ing that almost made you quit writ­ing? How did you over­come it?

Get Two Books for Free

Categories
writing blog

Worldbuilding Tips: Creating Immersive Worlds with a Wiki

This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series What Works For Me

World­build­ing refers to the intri­cate art of con­struct­ing the world where our sto­ry will unfold. The more fleshed out it is, the more believ­able our sto­ries will be. This is the key to cre­at­ing some­thing tru­ly immersive. 

Some­times, writ­ers cre­ate the plot first and then devel­op the rest of the sto­ry ele­ments (char­ac­ters, set­ting, etc.) around it. How­ev­er, this approach can com­pro­mise believ­abil­i­ty and immer­sion as the read­er can often dis­cern these ele­ments exist sim­ply to sat­is­fy the plot. Even worse, for read­ers, com­mu­ni­cat­ing this feed­back is dif­fi­cult because it might not be con­scious­ly iden­ti­fi­able but rather just an odd feel­ing as they advance through the sto­ry. This can lead to us writ­ers end­ing up with a big bag of unac­tion­able feed­back as a result. If you haven’t been there before, trust me, it’s not a nice place. It’s the quick­est way I can think of to get frus­trat­ed with your own story.

Writ­ers are like crafts­men. It takes pre­ci­sion, a keen eye, and hard work to build some­thing great.

Worldbuilding and real life 

How does the plot-first approach com­pro­mise believ­abil­i­ty and immer­sion? For starters, real life just does­n’t work that way. Look­ing at our own lives, our per­son­al sto­ries (our “plots”) are prod­ucts of the set­tings we grew up in, not the oth­er way around. This works exact­ly the same way in fic­tion writ­ing. The plot is the prod­uct of the set­ting and the char­ac­ters that live in it. If the plot feels dis­con­nect­ed from the set­ting, the issue is not the set­ting but the plot.

I’m a strong believ­er in the world-first approach, which involves build­ing a ful­ly fleshed-out uni­verse and then throw­ing our char­ac­ters in and writ­ing about what unfolds. Although world­build­ing is usu­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy, its core ele­ments are applic­a­ble to vir­tu­al­ly any genre. Whether you’re writ­ing a polit­i­cal thriller or a piece of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, this approach is a great way to ensure your nar­ra­tive is immer­sive and well constructed.

The wiki approach to worldbuilding

So, how do we build our fic­tion­al world? First, we become his­to­ri­ans and doc­u­ment every­thing we know about it, every­thing we’ve craft­ed in our imag­i­na­tion. When some­one asks about our world, we should be able to describe it like talk­ing about real life. Imag­ine it’s a Wikipedia arti­cle we recent­ly read, only that such an arti­cle does­n’t exist yet. And that’s a good place to start: cre­ate a wiki.

In this day and age, Wikipedia has become a pri­ma­ry ref­er­ence tool to source infor­ma­tion for any giv­en sub­ject in the real world. Why not do the same for our fic­tion­al world too? By def­i­n­i­tion, a wiki is a com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven knowl­edge base. But, if nobody except us is writ­ing and con­tribut­ing to it, would it still be con­sid­ered a wiki? Well, to be hon­est, I haven’t thought about that too much. I sim­ply pre­fer to use “wiki” because it’s catch­i­er than “knowl­edge base.” Also, it’s a short­er word and eas­i­er to write.

Regard­less of what you call it, the end goal is to have our world as fleshed out as pos­si­ble by the time we sit down to begin writ­ing our sto­ry. In oth­er words, it will be like we’re writ­ing fan­fic­tion of our own world. If we need to add some­thing lat­er, it will have to fit into the estab­lished lore, which will keep things believ­able and immersive.

While I’m par­tial to world­build­ing with a wiki, I rec­og­nize that it isn’t the best approach for every­one. Before decid­ing what works for you, let’s exam­ine some pros and cons.

Pros

  • Lim­it­less sto­ry poten­tial — instead of craft­ing one sto­ry­line, we’re build­ing a world in which end­less sto­ries can take place. All it takes is ask­ing “what if?” Just look at how the cre­ators of Dun­geons & Drag­ons devel­oped a ful­ly real­ized world that has pro­duced count­less books, games, mer­chan­dise, and more.
  • Fool­proof believ­abil­i­ty and immer­sion — throw­ing a read­er off would take some seri­ous effort. When we know the laws gov­ern­ing our world, we can tell when some­thing feels off or stretch­es “real­i­ty.” By under­stand­ing what tru­ly fits into our world, we can cre­ate an over­all clear­er nar­ra­tive that our read­ers will not only believe but enjoy.
  • Less expos­i­to­ry and stronger dia­logue — when we have a clear­er pic­ture of our char­ac­ters and the set­ting, dia­logue devel­op­ment flows more nat­u­ral­ly. Dia­logue is also a pow­er­ful expos­i­to­ry device when done right, allow­ing us to bet­ter explain the sto­ry through our char­ac­ters rather than fluff.
  • Slim chance of writ­ing our­selves into a cor­ner — knowl­edge is pow­er. How would we, if we were our char­ac­ters, han­dle a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion if we lived in this fic­tion­al uni­verse? Spend­ing less time stuck fig­ur­ing out a prob­lem means the book will flow more eas­i­ly from our key­board. Devel­op­ing our world ahead of time gives us that knowledge.
  • Hype build­ing and fan­dom — if we decide to make the wiki pub­lic, we can use it to cre­ate hype among our poten­tial fan­base. Releas­ing the wiki before launch or even dur­ing the writ­ing process can also allow for ear­ly feed­back from inter­est­ed readers.

Cons

  • The slow­est way to start — we have to start by cre­at­ing an entire world. It’s eas­i­er said than done, and it takes some seri­ous time, espe­cial­ly when we’re eager to get to writing.
  • Lone­li­ness (maybe?) — if we decide to keep the wiki pri­vate, we’ll be writ­ing a world that nobody will read about until the first book launches. 
  • Requires strict orga­ni­za­tion — a wiki is, at its core, a data­base. If we’re not dili­gent in orga­niz­ing its var­i­ous ele­ments, it can get very messy very quickly.

The easy way to create a wiki for worldbuilding

It’s under­stand­able that cre­at­ing a web­site like Wikipedia for our world­build­ing can feel like a daunt­ing and expen­sive endeav­or. But, in the sim­plest of terms, Wikipedia can be thought of as just a bunch of linked pages. There’s no need to go crazy (unless you want to) and pay for a domain and host­ing and install Medi­aWi­ki to start our wiki. Instead, we can lever­age Google Docs, which is free. All we need is a Google account and basic word pro­cess­ing skills, which most writ­ers already have.

In devel­op­ing our wiki, here are some key things we’ll want to cover:

  • Places — the loca­tions with­in our world like cities, coun­tries, con­ti­nents, his­tor­i­cal sites, etc.
  • Peo­ple — pro­tag­o­nists and rel­e­vant char­ac­ters like pub­lic fig­ures, artists, his­tor­i­cal fig­ures, etc.
  • Events — his­tor­i­cal events, events rel­e­vant to lore (like reli­gion or pol­i­tics), etc.
  • Objects — food, weapons, tools, relics, etc.

Of course, this is a very basic list. We can per­son­al­ize it as much as need­ed just like how Wikipedia has almost an infi­nite num­ber of categories.

Creating a blank document

Start by cre­at­ing a new Google doc­u­ment. Head to Google Docs and click on the blank doc­u­ment template.

Creating a wiki in Google Docs for worldbuilding.

I like the blank tem­plate because by start­ing sim­ple, it will be eas­i­er to keep up as we add new pages and con­tent. It’s also cru­cial to stick to basic for­mat­ting prin­ci­ples (like using head­ings) so we can nav­i­gate our wiki with the doc­u­ment out­line fea­ture of Google Docs. Unlike Wikipedia, we don’t have a search fea­ture oth­er than the nor­mal text search, so it’s best to stay orga­nized for the sake of our own sanity.

Creating pages

As writ­ers, we’re prob­a­bly already famil­iar with fact sheets that include char­ac­ters, loca­tions, and oth­er crit­i­cal nar­ra­tive ele­ments. We can think of the pages with­in our Wiki as cus­tom-fla­vored ver­sions of these fact sheets. We fill them with attrib­ut­es, back­sto­ry, and oth­er rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. How­ev­er, the tone should be dif­fer­ent; they should be writ­ten as actu­al bio­graph­i­cal pieces. In fact, we can use actu­al Wikipedia pages as a reference—see Carl Sagan’s page for an example.

We don’t need an advanced tem­plate to mim­ic this struc­ture eas­i­ly. Sim­ply adding some head­ings and a bul­let­ed list is more than enough. Remem­ber to pri­or­i­tize writ­ing over style unless it becomes a dis­trac­tion for you.

Writing a character wiki page in Google Docs for worldbuilding.
Exam­ple wiki page in Google Docs.

I’m using a real per­son as an exam­ple instead of a sam­ple char­ac­ter because this is how our world­build­ing wiki pages should be writ­ten: like they’re about the real world.

Linking pages

Once we have mul­ti­ple pages writ­ten, we’ll want to ensure they’re con­nect­ed to each oth­er, just as char­ac­ters are con­nect­ed to peo­ple and places in our sto­ry. Hyper­links are the sta­ple of Wikipedi­a’s charm­ing per­son­al­i­ty, and there’s a good rea­son for them: they enable read­ers to nav­i­gate the con­tent eas­i­ly and keep things in con­text. If a page men­tions a loca­tion, it might be good to link to it. Links are what turn our bor­ing text doc­u­ment into a liv­ing wiki.

My rule of thumb is to link as much as need­ed. We also might find out along the way that there’s a top­ic that should have its own arti­cle. This is how we flesh out our world. By build­ing it first, we open our minds to its pos­si­bil­i­ties and how our sto­ry exists with­in it.

Mov­ing along, let’s cre­ate a new sec­tion for Carl Sagan’s place of birth.

Writing a location wiki page in Google Docs for worldbuilding.
Brook­lyn’s wiki page in Google Docs look­ing bor­ing with­out any links.

Once writ­ten, we can now link to this sec­tion from else­where in the wiki text. To link, sim­ply high­light the text we want to link and select Com­mand + K (or Ctrl + K on a PC). In the pop-up, select Head­ings and book­marks and pick the rel­e­vant head­ing cor­re­spond­ing to the infor­ma­tion we want to link to.

Linking a character and location wiki pages for worldbuilding.

We can now click on the head­ing and appro­pri­ate­ly link to the rel­e­vant sec­tion on the page. This is why I empha­sized using head­ings; with­out them, we can’t link our pages in Google Docs.

Navigating the wiki

As our wiki grows, the doc­u­ment out­line side­bar will start fill­ing up. This out­line not only gives us a high-lev­el view of our doc­u­ment but also allows us to nav­i­gate our wiki pages. We can click on any ele­ment in the list to reach the cor­re­spond­ing page.

If you can’t see the doc­u­ment out­line, it can be dis­played by nav­i­gat­ing to View > Show doc­u­ment out­line in the main menu.

Feeling silly

By now, you might be think­ing this is very sil­ly. Maybe you were expect­ing some­thing more sophis­ti­cat­ed and are ask­ing your­self, “Why is this dude teach­ing me to use Google Docs?” Well, I don’t blame you. I felt the same way when I start­ed using this approach. How­ev­er, once my wiki con­tin­ued to grow and I looked at my world sum­ma­rized in an out­line, I start­ed see­ing its val­ue. Once I began writ­ing my sto­ry, I had an odd feel­ing that I was writ­ing a fan­f­ic of my own world. That’s how I could deter­mine my fic­tion­al uni­verse was fleshed out. 

For years, I strug­gled with cre­at­ing char­ac­ters that did­n’t feel like card­board cutouts, and this approach real­ly helped me over­come that bur­den, as my beta read­ers and cri­tique part­ners let me know. Although world­build­ing might be com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy, it real­ly does­n’t mat­ter which genre we’re writ­ing. It can be applied all the same with the same effect and benefits.

Not-so-easy alternatives to creating a wiki for worldbuilding

There are sev­er­al rea­sons why we might want to use some­thing less rudi­men­ta­ry for our wiki. Per­haps our world grew past the capa­bil­i­ties of a Google Doc, or we’ve come to miss the search fea­ture too much. Luck­i­ly, there are plen­ty of options that will allow us to cre­ate a more sophis­ti­cat­ed wiki for our worldbuilding.

Scrivener

Scriven­er is the Swiss Army Knife of writ­ing. We can cre­ate a project for our wiki in the same fash­ion as our Google Doc, except this plat­form also pro­vides tem­plates, ver­sion­ing, word-count tar­gets, and oth­er handy tools. It’s not free, how­ev­er. As for tem­plates, my rec­om­men­da­tion is to use cus­tom ones instead of the built-in Scriven­er tem­plates as they more close­ly resem­ble reg­u­lar fact sheets.

Scrivener's built-in character sheets.
Scrivener’s built-in char­ac­ter sheets.

Fandom

Fan­dom (pre­vi­ous­ly known as Wikia) is a web­site that allows any­one to cre­ate a wiki for free. It’s com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven and hosts thou­sands of wikis for dif­fer­ent fan­doms such as TV shows, movies, comics, and more. The only down­side is that all the con­tent is pub­lic, includ­ing any wikis we create.

The Dune wiki at Fandom.com

MediaWiki

Medi­aWi­ki is the open-source soft­ware that pow­ers Wikipedia and hun­dreds of oth­er sites. We can install it on any host­ing provider that sup­ports PHP (Host­ga­tor, Blue­host, Site­ground, etc.). This allows us to cre­ate our own Wikipedia with the same look and feel. How­ev­er, it also means there’s a steep learn­ing curve, and we require some tech­ni­cal knowl­edge to set it up. 

Medi­aWik­i’s wiki cre­at­ed with Medi­aWi­ki… what?

Final thoughts

Per­son­al­ly, I haven’t found a more effec­tive approach to cre­at­ing an immer­sive, believ­able world than cre­at­ing a wiki. Sure, it entails more upfront work before get­ting down to the nit­ty-grit­ty task of actu­al­ly writ­ing the book, but I can guar­an­tee read­ers will be able to tell the difference.

I’ve had more encoun­ters than I’d like with my most frus­trat­ing, unac­tion­able piece of feed­back from read­ers: “This char­ac­ter (or loca­tion, event, etc.) could be fleshed out more.” Where do we even start with that? The wiki approach to world­build­ing is how I man­aged to active­ly pre­vent this kind of feed­back while writ­ing my debut nov­el. Instead of hav­ing to spec­u­late lat­er on what exact­ly needs chang­ing, the wiki gives me the abil­i­ty to ful­ly form my char­ac­ters and set­ting at the onset. Need to flesh out some­thing? We can look at indi­vid­ual wiki pages and add more detail. Now that’s action­able. This helped me great­ly, and I real­ly hope it helps you too.

If you have any thoughts and com­ments, don’t hes­i­tate to reach out to me by email, or drop a com­ment below.

Get Two Books for Free

Categories
blog writing writing-tools

Using Scrivener Progress Tracking to Finish Your Novel

This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series What Works For Me

When I asked more expe­ri­enced authors for advice, the most fre­quent tid­bit I received was: focus on fin­ish­ing your book. Writ­ing a book, like every project, requires being con­sis­tent, keep­ing up a sched­ule, and pro­gress­ing lit­tle by lit­tle every day. It’s about dili­gence and hold­ing your­self account­able. But, how do you keep up the pace in the face of some­thing so seem­ing­ly daunt­ing? Set­ting dai­ly reminders, track­ing progress in an Excel sheet, or using oth­er hard and fast meth­ods does­n’t work well for me as it’s just more to keep up with. As a trained soft­ware engi­neer, I believe in automat­ing as much as pos­si­ble so that I can focus on what matters—writing. This is where Scriven­er, pos­si­bly the most impor­tant tool in my kit, comes into play.

Pictured: My life before Scrivener.
Pic­tured: My life before Scrivener.

I start­ed using Scriven­er eight years ago. To this day, no oth­er writ­ing soft­ware comes close (and believe me, I’ve tried many of them). Aside from plot out­lin­ing, dis­trac­tion-free mode, and man­u­script com­pi­la­tion into sev­er­al for­mats (eBook, PDF, Word, etc.), Scriven­er also includes sev­er­al tools you can use to set goals and track progress. You can see the entire his­to­ry of your draft and rem­i­nisce on its ear­li­est begin­nings. So, in the hopes that oth­er writ­ers will find this as use­ful as it was for me, here are the Scriven­er fea­tures that helped me fin­ish my book once and for all.

Project targets

Project tar­gets allow us to set a tar­get word count for our draft and a dead­line to fin­ish it. Once in Scriven­er, head to Project > Show project tar­gets… in the main menu to open this pop-up:

Project targets pop-up in Scrivener.

There are two types of tar­gets here:

  1. Man­u­script Tar­get — this is the tar­get word count of our entire manuscript.
  2. Ses­sion Tar­get — input the tar­get for each writ­ing ses­sion. How much are we tar­get­ing to write per day? 800 words? 3,000?

As you can see in the pop-up, I have already set my man­u­script tar­get to 92,000 words, but you can click on the num­ber to set your own tar­get for your book. The green progress bar will fill in as you write towards your goal. We can cus­tomize even more by click­ing the Options… button.

Draft target customization in Scrivener.
  1. Dead­line — when are we plan­ning to fin­ish our book? The most effec­tive way to com­plete a man­u­script is to set a deadline.

Next, we can click on the Ses­sion Tar­get tab to con­fig­ure our dai­ly writ­ing sessions.

Session target customization in Scrivener.
  1. Reset ses­sion count — when should the word count of our cur­rent ses­sion reset? We can reset it based on the time of day, when we close the doc­u­ment, etc. This will help us plan for con­tin­u­al writ­ing goals.
  2. Writ­ing days — which days are we plan­ning to write?

Once set, we can check the progress of our man­u­script in Scriven­er by hov­er­ing over the search bar to start real­ly feel­ing the pressure.

Draft progress bar in Scrivener.

Document snapshots and targets

We can man­age goals at a more gran­u­lar lev­el by set­ting spe­cif­ic tar­gets per doc­u­ment. For exam­ple, if we have an idea of how long chap­ters should be, that tar­get can be not­ed and tracked. This is a great way to bet­ter plan the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the man­u­script con­tent. While edit­ing a doc­u­ment, the tar­gets pop-up can be launched by click­ing on the small progress bar at the bot­tom-right cor­ner of the Scriven­er window.

Document word count target in Scrivener.
  1. Doc­u­ment progress — the green bar at the bot­tom of the screen shows how much we’ve writ­ten. Dou­ble-click it to set targets.
  2. Doc­u­ment tar­get word count — what’s our word count goal for this document?

Aside from progress track­ing, Scriven­er also con­tains draft his­to­ry and ver­sion­ing fea­tures. We can take snap­shots of doc­u­ments to man­age mul­ti­ple ver­sions and set a sta­tus (draft, revised draft, final, etc.).

The snap­shot pan­el is in the inspec­tor (usu­al­ly locat­ed on the right side of the edi­tor) and lists our snap­shots along with their date and sta­tus. We can also take new snap­shots from this window.

Document snapshots in Scrivener.
  1. Snap­shots tab — click to see snapshots.
  2. Com­pare — com­pare the select­ed snap­shot with the cur­rent version.
  3. Roll back — revert to a pre­vi­ous snapshot.
  4. Snap­shots list — view pre­vi­ous snapshots.
  5. Doc­u­ment sta­tus — set the sta­tus of the cur­rent document.

Per­son­al­ly, I find the snap­shots fea­ture to be a very effec­tive nos­tal­gia induc­er. I rec­om­mend tak­ing snap­shots fre­quent­ly to save pri­or work and review it lat­er if you need a hint of inspi­ra­tion or a con­fi­dence boost to see how far you’ve come.

Writing history tracking

The Writ­ing His­to­ry fea­ture is Scriven­er’s equiv­a­lent to peer pres­sure, and it’s by far the application’s best unin­tend­ed hid­den secret. By default, Scriven­er keeps a log of how many words we’ve writ­ten per day, and it’s avail­able for us to check how con­sis­tent we’ve real­ly been. Few writ­ers know of this fea­ture. For me, it was as big a rev­e­la­tion as Pro­cre­ate’s replay fea­ture, which keeps track of all your actions while draw­ing and lets you export a time-lapse video of your art. In Scriven­er, head to Project > Writ­ing his­to­ry… to check your stats.

Writing history pop-up in Scrivener.
  1. Writ­ing days — the total days we’ve writ­ten in Scriven­er since the begin­ning of time.
  2. Aver­age words writ­ten per day — words writ­ten per day in drafts and oth­er documents.
  3. Time peri­od selec­tion — see his­to­ry by day, month, or year.
  4. His­to­ry table — the actu­al writ­ing his­to­ry summary.

I did­n’t real­ize this fea­ture exist­ed until lat­er on in the process of writ­ing Goliath Fall­en, dur­ing The Big Rewrite of 2021 when I had cut about a third of my man­u­script. The writ­ing his­to­ry track­er helped me visu­al­ize how much con­tent I had removed per day.

Conclusion

And there you have it! These are the Scriven­er fea­tures I have found most use­ful for hold­ing myself account­able to write con­sis­tent­ly and even­tu­al­ly fin­ish my nov­el. I hope this has helped you real­ize the val­ue of Scriven­er and bet­ter nav­i­gate its many use­ful fea­tures. If you run into any trou­ble or have any ques­tions or com­ments on Scriven­er, please let me know in the com­ment sec­tion below or via email. I’m hap­py to help!

One last thing before I go—as a writer and a soft­ware engi­neer, I’d like to send a big shout-out to the folks at Lit­er­a­ture & Lat­te, Scriven­er’s devel­op­ers. You’ve pro­duced an incred­i­ble prod­uct, and I would­n’t have been able to fin­ish my book with­out you. Keep up the great work!

Get Two Books for Free

Categories
blog writing publishing works goliath-fallen

The Final Frontier: Finding the Right Book Description Writer

This entry is part [part not set] of 8 in the series Pub­lish­ing Goliath Fallen

Now that I’ve found a great edi­tor for my self-pub­lished nov­el, GOLIATH FALLEN, the next step is to find a book descrip­tion writer. Back when I start­ed out­lin­ing the steps in my self-pub­lish­ing jour­ney, hir­ing a book descrip­tion (aka book blurb) writer did­n’t even slight­ly cross my mind. How­ev­er, this indi­vid­ual, who­ev­er they end up being, is as cru­cial as the edi­tor and cov­er artist. Writ­ing a sol­id blurb is no easy feat, and I have tried it before. How the heck had­n’t I thought of hir­ing an expert on that until now?

Realizing my needs

The book descrip­tion includes just enough about what is going to hap­pen in the book, to make the read­er yearn for answers to all the ques­tions flit­ting through his or her mind…if the author has suc­ceed­ed in writ­ing a cap­ti­vat­ing description.

Excerpt from “How to Write a Book Descrip­tion that Attracts Read­ers” on SelfPublishing.com

It’s the book descrip­tion that’s print­ed on the back cov­er and in the ebook list­ing. And, not to be an alarmist, but it can make or break a book launch. You can have a killer cov­er, but if the descrip­tion sucks, your book will sink down into the abyss of the mil­lions of oth­ers com­pet­ing for the reader’s attention.

Since I had shared Goliath Fall­en with beta read­ers on sites like Wattpad, I had already tried writ­ing my own descrip­tion and real­ized how freak­ing hard it is. Only but a few authors have that gift of sum­ma­riz­ing their intri­cate, fleshed-out plot full of twists and turns and com­plex, mul­ti-dimen­sion­al char­ac­ters into a few para­graphs that can entice a prospec­tive read­er. Writ­ing a good book descrip­tion is an art in itself, and I was deter­mined to find the right pro­fes­sion­al for the job. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Reedsy was­n’t so help­ful this time around. I received a total of only four results when I searched the site for free­lancers spe­cial­iz­ing in “meta­da­ta and blurb opti­miza­tion,” as it’s called. Not great, but they did offer a com­pre­hen­sive arti­cle on writ­ing a book descrip­tion your­self. But, again, I had already tried that and spec­tac­u­lar­ly failed (at least in my opinion).

Finding my book description writer

While I was brows­ing the web for book edi­tor rec­om­men­da­tions (and what to look for in find­ing the right edi­tor), I stum­bled upon “My favorite 21 peo­ple in self-pub­lish­ing,” an arti­cle by Derek Mur­phy from Cre­ativin­die. It’s full of great rec­om­men­da­tions on inspi­ra­tional authors, mar­keters, book edi­tors, cov­er artists, and… book descrip­tion writ­ers! It was there where I dis­cov­ered Bryan Cohen from Best Page For­ward. 

Bryan sure sounds like he can sell stuff, and from what I’ve read, his book descrip­tions deliv­er results. I usu­al­ly approach ser­vices that sound too good to be true with cau­tion, so I ran a quick Google search on him.

After some dig­ging, I stum­bled upon this interview/workshop video on YouTube where Bryan com­ments on the indus­try, the process of writ­ing an effec­tive book descrip­tion, and book mar­ket­ing. From hear­ing him talk, it was clear to me that he knows his stuff very well. I fig­ured it couldn’t hurt to at least reach out to him for more information.

At the time of writ­ing, Bryan’s price tag is $297. This includes one book descrip­tion and an addi­tion­al ten descrip­tions I can use for ads. Com­pared to edit­ing and cov­er design costs, this amount seems rea­son­able for such an impor­tant element.

Making up my mind

I could spend more time look­ing for oth­er book descrip­tion writ­ers, but:

  • I haven’t found any­thing but good com­ments on Bryan, and I know he can do the job well.
  • It’s been a long road get­ting to this point, and I’m eager to final­ly see my book on the shelves.

With that said, I’m plan­ning to book Bryan in the com­ing days and come back to share our results!

With my book descrip­tion writer in place, I’ve final­ly round­ed out my self-pub­lish­ing crew. I’m hop­ing for the best as back­fill­ing any of these roles (the book edi­tor, the cov­er artist, and the book descrip­tion writer) would be painful. Any­ways, I’m off to update my ini­tial, very opti­mistic budget.

Stay tuned for the next entry in this series on self-pub­lish­ing my novel!

Get Two Books for Free

Categories
works goliath-fallen blog writing publishing

Finding a Book Editor for a (Potential) Bestseller

This entry is part [part not set] of 8 in the series Pub­lish­ing Goliath Fallen

So far in my series on pub­lish­ing GOLIATH FALLEN, I’ve cov­ered my bud­get­ing process and how I plan to get my book cov­er designed. Now, the time has come to find my bat­tle buddy—the book edi­tor. Find­ing an artist for my cov­er was­n’t an easy task; it required me to hone my vision and fig­ure out exact­ly what I need­ed. After fum­bling my way through Reedsy and talk­ing with lots of peo­ple for days on end, I final­ly found a great design­er to move for­ward with. As expect­ed, find­ing an edi­tor did­n’t get one bit eas­i­er. This is the per­son who will dis­sect my draft and help me (hope­ful­ly) craft a best­seller, so it was crit­i­cal I find the right person.

The writer and the book editor, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
“There is no book so bad… that it does not have some­thing good in it.” — uniron­i­cal­ly, Don Quixote

I have a few things to con­sid­er before set­tling on a book editor:

  • I suf­fer from impos­tor syn­drome — My man­u­script has its flaws, but it has received praise from its beta read­ers. Still, it’s irra­tional­ly hard for me to con­vince myself that it’s good enough in its cur­rent form. 
  • I’m a non-native Eng­lish speak­er writ­ing a sci­ence-fic­tion epic in Eng­lish — My beta read­ers have point­ed out plen­ty of pas­sages that either read awk­ward­ly or just out right don’t make sense. I need to ensure these kinks are ironed out. 
  • I’m writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion — My man­u­script leans a bit heavy into physics, engi­neer­ing, mea­sure­ments, and oth­er sub­jects that are spe­cif­ic to the genre. I want to make sure this lan­guage is acces­si­ble to casu­al readers.
  • I’m a per­fec­tion­ist — It’s cliché for an author, but it’s true. I have a high stan­dard for qual­i­ty, and I refuse to set­tle for less.

These are the chal­lenges I’m look­ing to over­come with the aid of a tal­ent­ed book edi­tor. I need some­one to help me set­tle my inse­cu­ri­ties, tight­en up my writ­ing, and erase the awk­ward­ness. How­ev­er, such a thor­ough, pre­mi­um book edit­ing ser­vice sounds like it will sure­ly drain my bank account (insert cash reg­is­ter sound effects here).

Figuring out my needs (again)

Book edit­ing involves mul­ti­ple phas­es, each with its own spe­cif­ic set of tasks. I turned to Google to fig­ure out what a typ­i­cal edit­ing process entails, which helped me under­stand what I actu­al­ly need from a book edi­tor (to the best of my knowledge):

  • Devel­op­men­tal edit­ing — Dur­ing this phase, the edi­tor reads the entire book address­ing struc­tur­al ele­ments like plot, nar­ra­tive, char­ac­ters, pace, etc. They dis­sect the sto­ry, break it down, and put it back togeth­er into some­thing that actu­al­ly makes sense. Devel­op­men­tal edit­ing is rec­om­mend­ed if you’re not entire­ly sure of your sto­ry or if you haven’t received enough feed­back yet.
  • Copy edit­ing — The edi­tor goes through the book revis­ing sen­tences, vocab­u­lary, syn­tax, and gram­mar to ensure every­thing is styl­is­ti­cal­ly sound. This is the awk­ward­ness eraser.
  • Proof­read­ing — Once every­thing is said and done, the edi­tor reads the whole thing one last time to check that noth­ing has been left out and that it’s ready for publishing.

Whether each of these phas­es is required or not depends on the project. Con­sid­er­ing the list of chal­lenges and needs men­tioned above, GOLIATH FALLEN requires the whole she­bang, which means I can expect to spend around $0.06 per word. Giv­en that Goliath Fall­en is 92,500 words, that would trans­late to $5,500 in edit­ing costs.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that’s way out of my bud­get. Not los­ing hope, I paid anoth­er vis­it to Reedsy, a free­lanc­ing plat­form for self-pub­lished authors.  I found the tal­ent­ed Ale­jan­dro Coluc­ci there for my book cov­er, and I thought I would try my luck again to find a qual­i­fied book edi­tor as well. Quotes for a nov­el of my length ranged between $600 and $1,200, and, in some cas­es, includ­ed devel­op­men­tal feed­back in the form of inline com­ments. This price was bet­ter than I expect­ed, but I wasn’t real­ly feel­ing it. Also, I real­ized it’s cru­cial to search for an edi­tor who spe­cial­izes in the genre of my book. This is espe­cial­ly true in sci­ence fic­tion, where the edi­tor should be able to com­ment on any incon­sis­ten­cies in world­build­ing and the sci­ence itself. With this in mind, I nar­rowed my search to only sci­ence-fic­tion editors.

Finding my book editor

I found some real­ly good options on Reedsy and oth­er free­lancer plat­forms, but it was Philip Athans who real­ly caught my atten­tion. His track record as an edi­tor and writer is impres­sive, from work­ing with sci-fi heavy­weights like R.A Sal­va­tore as man­ag­ing edi­tor at Wiz­ards of the Coast to writ­ing a best­seller nov­el that’s set in the D&D uni­verse. Need­less to say, a new­bie like me could ben­e­fit from his spe­cif­ic experience.

His edit­ing process sound­ed very col­lab­o­ra­tive and includes devel­op­men­tal edit­ing, copy edit­ing, a Skype call, help with a query let­ter (if required), and oth­er addi­tion­al materials—all for only $0.03 a word. Quite a bar­gain if you ask me!

I’m a strong believ­er that things need to “feel right,” and since I first con­tact­ed Philip, it has indeed felt right. He was very nice, pro­fes­sion­al, and patient, and he took the time to answer all my ques­tions (like with my cov­er artist). I request­ed a sam­ple edit, and it was very thor­ough with all his sug­ges­tions hit­ting on the spot. I took some time to con­sid­er his offer, since, after all, it’s a good chunk of cash. But, in the end, it “felt right,” so I end­ed up hir­ing him. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, his sched­ule was pret­ty jam-packed until the end of 2021, but hey, Goliath Fall­en has been in the works for over six years; it can wait a few more months. And actu­al­ly, the tim­ing will work out bet­ter that way. I’m still wait­ing for feed­back from my cri­tique part­ners at New York City Writer’s Cri­tique Group, and I will need time to incor­po­rate their sug­ges­tions and give my draft one last pass before it’s ready for my editor.

Alright, so that’s one less thing to wor­ry about. Next up, I need to find a stel­lar blurb writer. Stay tuned for updates on the book edit­ing process as it unfolds.

Get Two Books for Free