Moving on

Can't believe January's gone already. But things are happening re memoir. The manuscript is with an assessor, Patti Miller. A turn around time of 6 weeks gets me to the end of February or the beginning of March. Can't wait for a professional eye's opinion.

I mocked up a few cover designs to show my writing pals at a beautiful weekend we had together in Milton. The general consensus is to have something that shows movement eg a plane in the beautiful cloud pictures I've found. One of these pictures is by an artist (it was on a card my friend Valerie sent me). I've emailed for permission to use it. So far I have heard nothing. It may be easier to go with my own. Here are some pictures I took early Saturday morning in Milton.

Sunrise from Little Forest Road

Mist in the Valley

Early morning in Milton

DIY publishing

This week I attended a seminar by Geoff Bartlett at the Sydney Writers' Centre on self publishing. I learned heaps about preparation:

. pick out at least six possible cover designs for your book and tote them round to discerning people to see what they think. (Glad I've got people in the printing industry in my family, not to mention my WD pals!)

. make a website relating to the book alone, and direct people to it via email, facebook, twitter etc.

. come up with twelve different titles and make sure no one else has used it. It's not a copyright problem but may confuse people looking for your book if there's more than one.

. think of places you can market your book (funnily enough I'd written a long list of these while waiting for the course to begin.)

Geoff's handout lists many practical things related to printing, design and layout, budgeting, publicity and marketing. As I've slowly come to realise, marketing is ongoing and starts well before the book is published, and carries on until the last one is sold. Geoff claims it's not too hard once you get in the habit of doing a little something every day.

I have lots to do over the holidays, the first one being to throw out all my old health-related files to make room for my brand new self publishing ones in the filing cabinet.

E-Publishing

I attended an excellent presentation by Steven Lewis at the Sydney Writers' Centre (link on the web page)   about publishing with Amazon. (Amazon is the largest provider of E-books so he concentrated on them.

Main things I learned were:

. you must have an Amazon account first. (very easy to do)

. the importance of formatting your manuscript correctly before submitting to Amazon (The most frequent complaint in E-books is about the inconsistent formatting) Naturally I went straight to my memoir the next day and realised it is not in one document so have opened a file in a set format and am adding chapters after proof reading them.

.  don't fill the front of your book with dedications etc because Amazon lets readers download a 10% sample of your book and you don't want five pages of title, acknowledgements and dedications etc, before the possible buyer gets to the meat of the thing.

.  learn how to convert your document using HTML/KF8 (soon to come here) so you can save it as a web page.

. the cheaper your book is the more likely you are to make money even if you opt for the lesser of the two royalties. i.e. 35% versus 70%

. Amazon will only start paying when you have earned $100.00, and then they keep 30% against possible taxes. The paper work to redeeem that 30% is horrendous, especially if you are a private individual. This last bit put me right off!

There was a lot more of course but some of it is too technical for me to explain. I'll continue exploring this option but find myself leaning to self publishing, doing it all myself. More on that in the next blog.

Varuna

Thirteen people in a room doing nothing but talk writing: such bliss, such stimulation. In the front room of Varuna House, Patti Miller took us to the edge at times, forcing us to reveal parts of our lives we'd rather not confront!

As usually happens, there was a variety of people and projects with differing rates of completion.We fed off each other like starving sharks.

Patti is the kind of instructor I like, always finding the good in what people write and very encouraging. I'm probably going to send the complete manuscript to her in January. In the meantime copy editing will continue.

Yvonne and I shared a room at the youth hostel, a bunk bed no less! Double on the bottom, single on the top. She very kindly took the top bunk. We swapped synopses and 'market potential' pages of each of our works and gave each other valuable feedback.

In the evening we met a mother/ daughter writing team (each on different projects) in the bar of the Carrington Hotel and had dinner with them, swapping life stories over beer and wine.

Ever the entrepreneur, Yvonne spruiked Better than Chocolate and we sold all the copies we had between us (eight), so more money for the WD account. Well done Yvonne!

The weather was serene and warm both days, and to top it all off, my beautiful daughter in law offered me dinner on the way home, a much better proposition than the tin of beans waiting in my cupboard. She is also going to take some BTC books to work to sell them for Christmas presents.

I have a wonderful life surrounded by wonderful people, family, old friends, writing buddies and aqua gals.

Now there's laundry and vacuuming. I'd better get going.

Happy Turkey Day

Yes it's the American Holiday time. Today, I'll be making pumkin pulp for the pies on Saturday, buying broccoli for the souffle and packing them all up to take to my daughter's house later today. But before then I've completed the review for Readers Favorite, a very funny book called Stairlfit to Heaven about one man's experience of retirement.

Yesterday I proofread the first six chapters of the memoir, couldn't believe all the mistakes I found and of course I managed to re-word some sentences and move a few things around.Only nineteen more chapters to go but they'll have to wait until after the Master Class next week.

So no more writing business until then. In the meantime Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Book design

This morning after more email correspondence I downloaded the book design software. It's a thrill to see my book in 'book' form. However, after reading the second page of the first chapter I saw a typo, a reminder to seriously proof read the thing. It's a rainy day, perfect for sitting in the recliner with red pen and a mug of coffee trawling through the pages word by word to get it as near perfect as I can.

After my sluggish start yesterday, I finished Synopsis Mark 4, tried to make it snappier, and re-worked the Marketing Potential. I've printed both off to give to Patti Miller next week if I get the chance. Not only that, I did a purge of old photos. I'm looking for snaps of a certain family member who is coming up on a significant birthday so I can make a film. Even started putting the film together with what I have so far. Now I must await further archival material.

Makes me tired just writing about all I did yesterday. Time for that coffee.

Angel at My Table

Yesterday, I bought a book design program as a download, which I cannot find on my computer. I've sent 2 emails to the company, Jera Publishing, so far to no avail. Have I been had? I hope not. In the meantime I wrote a back page blurb for the memoir.

Today, having decided it's too cold to do aqua aerobics (it's outside for the next 2 weeks) I looked forward to a day of doing something creative. Over a cup of tea  I turned on Stvdio. Angel at My Table was playing in its entirety. I saw it so long ago it was as if I was seeing it for the first time. I couldn't tear myself away, even through all the credits. I'd forgotten Jane Campion directed it. She and Kerry Fox who played Janet produced a masterpeice.

I looked at it more through (dare I say it) a writer's eyes this time. I doubt that Janet Frame ever had an inbuilt editor (like I do) when she wrote. I need to find that state of grace where words on the page are all that matters, not whether the spelling is right or if it is grammatically correct. That can come later. NANO is good for that and I found Jan Cornall's meditation sessions hlepful in achieving that. But I don't do it at home. Maybe I should resort to sitting in cemetaries or on a windswept hill with my notebbok and pen like Janet did.

It's not surprising that Janet Frame was also a poet. I find the poets in our writing group are able to tap into the inner beauty or sadness of something so well. Is there room for an organised, practical beast like me in the world of literature I wonder.

Maybe I'll tackle that pesky synopsis and re-work the marketing plan today.