All about blogging and social media for authors – Ep19 FREE podcast for writers

How can authors use blogging and social media effectively? How should they get started? How much time does it take to build an audience? Will you like it?!

That’s what we’re talking about this episode.

A caveat! These shows are a few years old now. We recorded this episode in 2015. Some of the platforms might not be so fashionable or useful for authors now. On the other hand, Facebook and Twitter are still going strong and are still the main places I meet readers and writers I want to know better. And blogs? We must have been through several periods where everyone declared blogging was dead – but you are here and I am here and this is a blog and none of it is dead at all.

Moreover, social media have been the entire mechanism by which I built a career as a writer under my own name, without a publisher (in case you don’t know, I have a big secret career writing books under other names). The finer points might have changed – and might well change again. But the methods and principles will still be the same. So I’m hoping this show will still be a useful primer.

Asking the questions is independent bookseller Peter Snell. Answering them is me!

Stream from the widget below or go to our Mixcloud page and binge the whole lot.

PS If you’d like more concentrated writing advice, try my Nail Your Novel books. If you’re curious about my own creative writing, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, find my latest newsletter here and subscribe to future updates here.

Checklist for redesigning your book cover – and maximising the marketing opportunities

I recently changed the covers of my Nail Your Novels … and got myself a nice long to-do list as a result. But as well as refreshing the look of the books, a redesign is also a chance to smarten up the covers’ marketing potential. Here’s how.

Don’t miss the opportunity to tweak your sales wording

I’ve already blogged about changing the cover design to target readers effectively (the last time I changed the cover of book 1, as it happens). But revising the book doesn’t have to stop at the visuals. Since you published the title, have you had any standout reviews? Work them into the redesign – on the front as a teaser or the back as part of the sales blurb.

Indeed, could you add punch to the back cover copy?  Sometimes reviewers sum up our books much better than we can ourselves. A reader who really got the book might have written you a brilliant logline. Search your reviews in case.

If you have an ‘about the author’ paragraph on the back, should you update it? Perhaps you’ve published more books, or won a prestigious award.

What about your author photo? My Nail Your Novels had three different author photos according to the years they were published (and the hue of my hair), but with this reboot I decided to use a new image to make them look more current and uniform.

I also found I had room on the back for miniatures of the other books in the series – a good visual way to let readers know they’re part of a set.

Read all the copy!

Even if you change only the fonts, you should proof-read all the cover material anew. Any time a change has been made, even if it’s just cosmetic (fonts etc) there’s a possibility for a letter to be deleted or a copy-and-paste to go wrong. If the new font doesn’t behave like the old one, you might find the copy doesn’t fit – check that the final sentence of your blurb or author description hasn’t disappeared into a mysterious limbo.

Read the spine too. Mistakes can happen anywhere. Especially there.

If you’re upgrading an entire series, be alert for copy-and-paste mistakes between the books! A designer who is working on several covers at once might paste an element in from another cover as a placeholder or to copy the style, and forget to type the correct wording. Check each book has its correct title and description, and not a pasted bit from another book in the series.

Picture and artwork credits

If you’ve credited the designer on the cover, you might need to update this. And if you’ve used photo library artwork, the T&Cs might require you to credit the originator – either inside the book or in a convenient place on the artwork. Sometimes, font originators need a credit (if they do, it’ll be in the T&Cs when you acquire the font). Don’t forget to credit your author image photographer as well. So: remove outdated credits and add new ones as necessary.

Inside the print book

I’ve already mentioned updating credits for the cover images and design. What about the design of the title page? My title pages continue the design from the cover font, so I updated those too.

If you have images of your books in the back matter, they’ll need updating.

In the ebooks

If you have image and design credits in the ebooks, don’t forget to update these. Or images of your other covers.

Other admin

My books’ facelift also generated a number of other itty bits of admin

• Website headers
• Blog badges
• The books’ pages on my website(s) (why did I have so many sites?!)
• Excerpts on preview services (I use Bookbuzzr)
• Headers on Facebook, Twitter, my newsletter sign-up, G+ …. Everywhere, really. I don’t think I’ve found all mine yet. (If you spot one, let me know!)
• Business cards, bookmarks, postcards, posters for events

And if you smartened up the back cover copy or logline, don’t forget to update your sales descriptions on Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, Ingram … everywhere. But you don’t have to worry about your Amazon author page or the Look Inside feature – those update automatically but you have to allow a week or so for the changes to filter through.

Is there anything I’ve missed? I’m sure there is. Tell me here!

How should you credit your editor? Advice from a former publisher

Should your editor be credited as a contributor to your book? What about your proof reader, copy editor? And where should you credit them?

Long ago, I ran an editorial department in a small publisher, so I thought it might help to give some guidelines.

Here’s my post about front matter, which explains all the fiddly stuff like title pages, half-titles, contents pages and so on. Today, I’ll concentrate on those editorial people you’d like to thank. And indeed, whether they would be better not mentioned at all.

Collections

If the book is a collection of curated material, eg short stories, poems or essays, it’s usual to credit the person who put it all together. Put it on the main title page, the cover and the spine – eg ‘edited by Roz Morris’. That would also go in the ‘main contributor’ section of the book’s official listing on KDP, Smashwords, CreateSpace, Ingram etc.

Non-fiction with many contributors

The rules are the same as for a collection. When I was a publisher, I had a number of titles that I conceptualised, outlined, found contributors for, edited and shaped. Individual authors were credited in their own sections, but I was the guiding force behind the work. So my name went on the cover, spine and title page.

Does it seem like I’m labouring this? That’s because I want to make the point about who is in charge of the final book.

Let’s talk about editors of novels, memoirs and single-author non-fiction.

Novels, memoirs and non-fiction – credit the editor or not?
No.

Some indies put the editor in the front credits along with the author, or as an additional contributor. Do not do this.

If you’d like to mention them as a significant influence or supporter, a better place is the dedication or acknowledgements, according to how strongly you feel about them, obviously. The same goes for your proof reader or copy editor. But … and it’s a very big but.

Like this: BUT.

Please ask them first. Many editors have a policy that they do not want to be mentioned.

Now that might seem harsh. And they would surely find the exposure helpful, wouldn’t they? A mention in the credits would surely do them nothing but good.

Well no; it’s not as simple as that. The developmental editor, copy editor and proof reader are merely giving guidance. The final text of the book is down to you, the author.

This especially holds for developmental editors, who might give extensive notes for reworking. Some books leave my desk needing considerable revising, and I might not see them again. That’s fine; that’s my role. But I shouldn’t be credited in the published book if I didn’t see the final version. I’ve had editing clients who have added reams of extra material they didn’t let me see – and then wanted to publish the book with my credit. This is an extreme example, and most writers wouldn’t do that, but that credit might harm my reputation.

Equally, I see a lot of authors whose editors are very happy to be namechecked, and their supportive partnership warms everyone’s creative cockles. The bottom line is this: please ask.

Do we need a group hug? Here’s a post about why your editor admires you.

If the editor is happy to be named, where’s the best place?

The dedication before the book begins
Remember the reader has limited interest in your cheerleaders at this stage. Also remember, they have a blipvert attention span for your sample, and you should be getting them ensnared in the guts of your book.

If you want to explain at greater length what everyone did, the place for that is in ….

A longer acknowledgements section at the back
As the reader takes leave of you and your words, they’ll be happy to let you list your influences and influential people.

And check how your various folks would like to be described. A developmental editor from the book’s formative years might be described as ‘guidance and support’. Someone who had more direct control over the final book might be named by role – for instance your copy editor and proof reader.

But don’t feel obliged to mention us. It’s not compulsory. The bulk of the work, by far, was yours. Not ours.

Thoughts, theories? Have you named editors in your published books, and how did you handle it? Editors, copy editors, proof readers – what do you think?

Indie authors: are you making these mistakes with your print books? How to look professional on the page

Contents pages can go very wrong. See below

This Friday, around 50 indie authors (including yours truly) will gather in Foyles bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road to showcase their books as part of the Indie Author Fringe Festival. We’ll see some swish productions from experienced selfpublishers – but not all indie paperbacks look quite so slick.

Peter Snell, my bookseller friend and co-host of So You Want To Be A Writer at Surrey Hills Radio, is a staunch supporter of indie authors – but he often shows me paperbacks with rookie mistakes that scream ‘amateur’. So here’s our checklist of goofs and gaffes – and how to make sure your book passes muster.

Front matter
Some indie books launch straight into the text, which looks rather underdressed. Why?

Look at the opening pages of any print book and you’ll see the following:

• a half-title page – this shows the title on its own, or the title and author name in the text font, or a brief (one-paragraph) introduction to the author and the book
• a copyright page
• a full title, maybe echoing the cover typography, with author name and the publisher imprint
  a page that lists other works by the author
• contents page
• start of text

Half-title page of Lifeform Three, showing a teaser for the novel’s content and a reviewer’s reaction. This is the first page the reader sees, so a good position for endorsements and a tantalising summary.

You might also have a dedication page before the text starts or a foreword (which is an introduction not written by the author).

On the other hand, some indie books dither around too much before the text, with pages of acknowledgements and biographical material.
The reader wants to get on with the book. So front matter should be concise and useful – eg contents pages, of which more in a minute. Contents pages go very wrong.

Right or left?
Certain pages have to be on the right, others on the left. Here’s that order again:

• half-title – right
• copyright page – left
• full title – right
• other works, dedication etc – left
• contents – right
• start of text – right

Yes, that’s two rights. If necessary, insert a blank page so that the text starts on the right. After chapter 1, though, you can start new chapters on a left. You’d have to go through mad contortions otherwise. But if your book is divided into sections (like My Memories of a Future Life) you want those to start on a right.

A well-designed and useful contents page

Contents pages
You don’t usually need a contents page in a novel. Does the reader need to know that chapter 11 starts on page 49? I draw your attention to Exhibit A at the start of this post.

If your chapters have titles of their own, you might list them to whet the reader’s appetite. But it’s not compulsory, and novels, memoir and narrative non-fiction don’t usually need contents pages.

Instructional and reference non-fiction, on the other hand, definitely needs a list of contents. Here’s an example of one that is helpful to the reader and also a good appetiser for the book. (It’s Reports from Coastal Stations by Geoff Saunders.)

Who’s the author?
Some indie books fail to give any information about the author. Readers like this context – who the author is, where they live, how many books they’ve written. If the book is set in a special world (eg the circus), this is where you reveal you were the offspring of trapeze artists before you ran away to study accountancy. If you’re writing non-fiction, readers need to know why you have the temerity to bother them with your opinions.

Biographical details on the back cover of Lifeform Three

You might put this in the front matter, if you can keep it brief. Or it might be on the back cover. But don’t miss it out.

Speaking of back covers…
Back covers need to look properly furnished. Make sure you have

• a punchy summary
• an enticing quote, if possible
• author details, and preferably a picture

Other sundry howlers that stop your book being taken seriously:

•  white paper stock for fiction, memoir or narrative non-fiction (better to choose the cream-coloured paper)
• squashed typesetting and tiny print – authors do this to reduce the pagecount and save costs, but it makes the book a chore to read (there’s more here on formatting your book for print)
• narrow margins, either around the edges or in the gutters (the central margin). Again these decrease readability, and if the gutter is too narrow, you have to break the spine to read the book.
• amateurish or unnecessary artwork. Tables and charts might be necessary in non-fiction, but probably aren’t in adult fiction. Maps and family trees might be helpful for certain genres of fiction, and facsimiles of handwritten notes or other ephemera might funk up a YA novel. But you might not need your aunt’s watercolours, unless a lot of your straight-talking friends agree they add to the book’s charm. (They usually don’t.) And covers are a whole subject by themselves. (More about covers here.)
• lack of an ISBN – CreateSpace and Lightning Source require an ISBN, and CS will issue you with one if necessary. But Lulu or local printers will let you print without them. Most readers probably wouldn’t notice if your book lacks an ISBN, but it really, really annoys Peter, who is still reeling at the author who had regained the rights to her work and printed 1000 copies without obtaining an ISBN. (There’s more here about ISBNs.)
• Peter also grumbles about books that are in a big or unusual format that won’t fit on his shelves. And cut-outs or holes in the jackets, because they catch on other books and get torn. (They probably also cost you more.) He does, however, approve of French flaps, which make a book more solid, though they’re not standard issue and most people won’t mind if you don’t have them.

So, to sum up. The well-dressed print book:

• has a complete set of front matter that is concise and helpful
•  follows the conventions of right and left
• has a contents page only if necessary
• gives information about the author
• has an informative (and enticing) back cover
• doesn’t cram the page with type

Have I missed anything out? Or do you have any questions? Head for the comments!
If you’re in or around London next Friday, come and say hello at the Indie Author Fair, which is part of the Indie Author Fringe Festival in association with the London Book Fair. Entry is free, though you need to register and print out a ticket. More here. If you’re further flung (and even if you’re not) you can take part in Indie ReCon, from April 15 to April 17 – an online festival of indie movers, shakers, experts, veterans, trailblazers, and the odd person who was surprised to find themselves volunteered. You’ll find seminars, live chats and roundtables and …. oh just click this link. http://indierecon.org/indierecon-events/ To wet your appetite, here’s a video discussion from last year in which a few authorly types talk about how we tame our creative muse.

How to make a print book using Word – first of a series at Writers & Artists

Gosh, this is grown-up. After I gently pointed out to Writers & Artists that some self-publishers are as adept in print as in e-publishing, we got chatting. They were interested in my background (running an editorial department, writing, editing, book production and this blog!) and the result is I’m doing a series at Bloomsbury’s Writers & Artists site on fundamentals for good self-publishing.

This first piece is on turning an ebook file into a print edition. It’s an expanded version of a pair of posts I wrote when I released the paperback of My Memories of a Future Life, and hopefully a little more simplified for first-timers. If you want to know more about how to make lovely-looking books, come on over.

Eezer goode… but print is proper – post at Authors Electric

(If you’re not a Shamen fan, that headline will make no sense. Try saying it out loud. And admire your instant cockney accent.) Making the special print edition of my novel made me think how we still like a book we can get our hands around. Come over to Authors Electric where I’m trying to pinpoint what we love about dead tree books…

How to prepare your Kindle text for a print edition – Part 2: chapter head styles and cleaning up the text

Yesterday I discussed how to choose the size of your book and the typeface. Today, we finish your book’s interior  

Fancy stuff like chapter heads

You can leave the chapter title in the same font as your body copy, or you might want something eye catching to draw the reader to the first line – maybe a motif or a drop capital. (Designing this deserves whole posts by itself; there are trillions of ways to do it, but the short answer is to find a book you like the look of in a similar genre and copy that). You might want a different font (not too fancy, please). I used Copperplate Goth BT.

Unless you have a fantastically good artistic reason, don’t use more than one heading font besides your body copy. Books look better if typefaces are inconspicuous and style is uniform. A little contrast is allowable in chapter headings, but if you have more than two typefaces it looks like it was made by someone under a responsible age.

Chapter titles don’t usually begin at the very top of the page. You’ll want to add line spaces, both above the chapter heading and afterwards, before the actual text starts. Experiment until you find an arrangement you like. Then write down exactly what it is – eg 3 carriage returns above and 2 below. You need to do it exactly the same in all the chapters. Properly typeset books are consistent about everything.

Similarly between sections that aren’t chapter breaks you’ll need a gap. How many lines do you want them to be? Do you want a little motif in the middle to delineate them? What about the paragraphs? Do you want them full out after a section break? Full out (ie not indented) is the usual option but I have seen indents work nicely as well. Make your decision, write it down – and do the same thing every time.

Then go through the manuscript and put them in.

If you formatted for Kindle you probably put page breaks in for chapter endings. If you formatted for other strains of epub you probably didn’t use page breaks. Go and put page breaks in for chapter endings now. If you try to split the book with carriage returns instead of page breaks, the next stage will do your head in. And make you resort to far more flabbergasted language.

Blank pages and front matter

Use page breaks to make blank pages too. And strip off the folio on blank pages if your program allows, or change the text colour to white so it doesn’t print.

Where do you want blank pages? Certain parts of your book must begin on right-hand pages, so you might have to put blanks in to achieve this – especially at the front.

Before you get to the text proper you need a few bits of set-up copy, known as front matter. Look in any published book and you’ll see. Usually these are:

• half title (right-hand page) – where you can put biographical info too
• copyright notice and ISBN etc (left-hand page)
• full title (right-hand)
• either blank or acknowledgements (left-hand page)
• start of book (right-hand page) or part 1/section 1 title page (right-hand page, then blank, then text proper on right-hand page)

Widows, orphans – the mysterious faffing I was leaving until last

Now you have the biggest, dreariest task of all. You have to look for bad breaks at the tops of pages – widows, orphans and stumps.

Widows and orphans are short lines in places you don’t want them – at the very bottom of a page or the very top. Stumps are words broken by a hyphen so that the first half of the word is on one page and the second half is on the next. All these can look ugly, although sometimes you can get away with one if there’s enough text on the rest of the page – it’s very much a matter of personal taste what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

Get this line back or make it longer…

… but this is okay

All on their own… take these lines back or push a few more over…

… like this

You also have to look for section breaks in awkward places. If you have a section break, you want more than one line below it or it looks weird. And you don’t want a page with just 1 or 2 lines hanging in mid air and then the chapter end.

NB – most word processing programs have auto settings to get rid of these pesky widows and orphans. Turn it off. It results in short pages, which in a text-heavy book like a novel looks dreadful. Yes, you have to do this bit by hand.

How?

NOT by squeezing the fonts together – that looks awful. NOT by sneakily changing the point size or the leading – it shows. You have to alter the text itself.

Remember when I said this isn’t about the text any more, it’s about how it looks? That’s what I mean.

Close up paragraphs, make new ones, cut out extraneous words to pull a line back, add a few to push one over. If you have sub-headings (weird in novels but de rigeur in non-fiction) put one in or take one out. If there’s no scope to edit on the page you’re on, go back a page and see if you can do it there. Sometimes you may have to go back a few. And keep checking the results.

This is the drudge. You have to do this for every single page. It’s fiddly. And this is why you want to have established all your other design decisions before you get here. Because you don’t want to have to do it all over again. And this is why you need to separate your chapters with page breaks, so that any change you make is confined to just a few pages. If you use carriage returns instead of page breaks, every change you make will affect the rest of the entire book.

You might wonder how you spot all these things. I do it automatically because I’ve done it for years. I can read the text and see all these things at the same time. (Hell, I scan for them when I’m reading other people’s books.) I can adjust the text so that it’s true to what I want to say and also looks typographically acceptable. In fact, because I knew I’d have to do this, I made my last major edits of My Memories of a Future Life in PagePlus so that the text would be identical to the Kindle version.

If you’re not practised at this it’s best to do several passes through the book, looking for one problem each time, until you get your eye in. And this exhaustive level of nit-picking might be one of the reasons you decide to hand this part of the project over to someone who can do it much faster than you can, and more thoroughly.

Once each of your pages looks typographically beautiful, proof-read it one last time, remembering to check that your chapter breaks are consistent – and your text is ready to go.

If you have a Kindle book you’ll have a front cover but you won’t yet have a back one. And you’ve probably got quite enough to do for now – so I’ll tell you how I designed mine in a future post.

Have you released one of your books in print form? Did you do the production yourself? If you have any tips to add or nightmares to share, I’d love to hear them!

HELP IS AT HAND… If reading all this has given you an intolerable migraine, I can format your book for you! Email me on RozMorrisWriter at gmail dotcom.

My Memories of a Future Life: episodes 1 and 2 available now. Episode 3 on 12th September. Print edition end September. Do you like podcasts? You can listen to or download, free, the first 4 chapters

How to prepare your Kindle text for a print edition – Part 1: book size and typeface

While making an ebook is pretty straightforward, putting it into print is a pain. In traditional publishing houses, it’s an entire department’s job – because there’s a lot of invisible fiddling you need to do. (It used to be my job too, which is why I know.)

But it is possible to do it well, given the right instructions. I’ll walk you through what I did to get the text of My Memories of a Future Life ready for print. Be prepared – this will get pathologically nitpicky. And this stage is not about how the text reads – it’s about how it looks. Yes, to writers that’s the tail wagging the dog. Get over it now.

It’s quite a big job so I’ll split it in two posts. Today: choosing the size of the book and the typeface.

What size do you want the book to be?

Choose this first, because that governs how much you get on a page. Nail Your Novel is a short book at 40,000 words, and the first time I put it out was at 6×9. That made it look flimsy, so when I redesigned the interior I sized it down to 5×8 where the thickness and size feel just right.

My Memories of a Future Life, on the other hand, is a whopping 103,000 words. It would be rather chunky at 5×8 and expensive to produce because of the weight – which means I would have had to charge a lot more and everyone would think I was being greedy. Many literary novels are now being produced in 6×9 size, or even bigger – so it fits nicely with the genre.

If you use CreateSpace you can download a Word template for the interior. It sets up page sizes and margins so that everything looks right and you can do your fiddling in Word. Catherine Ryan Howard’s book Self-Printed has a detailed section on how to do this. There are other POD companies besides CreateSpace, but they’re not as easy to use. I used CreateSpace but with a design program, PagePlus, because it’s what I do my covers in and because my version of Word doesn’t make PDFs. (For CreateSpace and Lulu you submit your book on a PDF.)

PagePlus sets automatic margins as well, but the default ones are too narrow so I customise them. If you’re using anything other than CreateSpace’s template I suggest you check your margins too. They may have been set up for leaflets, not paperback books.

Before you finalise your margins, whack some dummy text onto the page, print it out and put it over an existing book of the same size to check it looks okay.

Important: get your margins right now. If you change them later you’ll have to redo a lot of tedious checking.

Text

When you formatted the Kindle or ebook edition you probably established a style for the book…. didn’t you? You’re consistent about when you use single or double quotes, proper em dashes and so on? You checked you had curly quotes and not ticks, including on the apostrophes? You’ve never thought about it? Go and fix them now. They’ll make your book look a lot more professional.

Typeface

Choose this next. And make your decision final. Every typeface is a slightly different width, even if it’s the same height.

Don’t use Times, it makes a book page look like a business proposal.

Obviously don’t use any of the fancy curly things that seem to have been supplied to design party invitations.

Get down a few novels in your genre (tastes in typefaces may vary between genres) and choose typefaces that look like them. I used Century Schoolbook BT for My Memories of a Future Life.

Italics: flat feet bad

Check what the font’s italics look like. A lot of computers come with the Roman version of fonts but not the italics, and when you hit the little I icon it slants them. True italics have curled serifs (the little feet), and slanted feet look wrong. If you haven’t got the italic version of your font there are free places to download it – I found my itals here.  Do this now too, for the mysterious tedium-avoidance reason I will explain.

Italics: curly feet good

Typesize and spacing

Most books are set in 12pt, or 11.5pt. Again, compare with other published books in your genre (for instance, literary can afford to go slightly smaller than YA).

If your book is 6×9 the page is quite wide, so you might want a bigger typeface or wider leading (space between the lines) to make it more readable. You can fine-tune this by editing the paragraph style – I set the leading as a percentage of the pointsize. So I had 11.5pt type on a leading that was a niftily precise 14.375pt – or 125% of the point size.

And each typeface has different properties. Some have tall ascenders and descenders (vertical strokes). So if you change from one font at 11.5pt it might look much smaller and less readable than another, so you might need to use it bigger. Before you finalise, print a page out and fold it around a book of the same size to see how it looks in the flesh.

When you’ve decided, run your text in and typeset it.

Part 2 tomorrow: chapter heads… and the really nitpicky stage

Have you released one of your books in print form? Did you do the production yourself? If you have any tips to add for this stage, I’d love to hear them!

HELP IS AT HAND… If reading all this has given you an intolerable migraine, I can format your book for you! Email me on RozMorrisWriter at gmail dotcom.

 My Memories of a Future Life: episodes 1 and 2 available now. Episode 3 on 12th September. Print edition end September. Do you like podcasts? You can listen to or download, free, the first 4 chapters