Oct 20, 2021
Tales from Vlaydor, Installment One: “Brigitte” is available to pre-order on Amazon.com. Just follow this link and purchase your copy today!
If you wish to become a patron and receive an electronic copy of these shorter works when they are released, go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse today to sign up.
Also, visit www.littlesyllables.com to get ahold of Krissy Barton to get your current work in progress edited!
The following is a transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the podcast’s website.
[00:00:00] Today, it's all about DIY books. And just like cooking, dIY can be the very best way to go, but sometimes you really need to know how to do it right, today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello. Hello. Hello, and welcome to Writing in the Tiny house. Welcome back to the show. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy living in a tiny house, giving you all the tips and tricks as to how it is to write a book and to show you that whatever you have bubbling around in your brain, that work of fiction, is completely possible to do no matter how busy you believe that you are. So today we are going to break down a little bit about DIY books, sometimes referred to as self-published just as a way to pay attention to some very technical things that will get your book judged unfairly right out of the gate.
[00:01:24] So just some quick announcements, you know, that my collection of short stories Tales from Vlaydor, the first installment has been completed. The first installment is called Brigitte, and it is currently available for pre-order. So, if you follow the link in the show notes, it will take you to the Amazon page where you can pre-order your own digital copy of Brigitte, which is installment one of Tales from Vlaydor.
[00:01:56] And that is super exciting because it has been a while since I released anything. And I know that you guys are interested in seeing how I write. With this podcast, it is easy for me to share all of the advice and give all of the tips and tricks, like I said, but sometimes it is really valuable to see a person practice what they preach.
[00:02:21] And so it's important to me to share this. So that is what we're doing. That is what Brigitte and this Tales from Vlaydor collection of short stories and novelettes is all about. It is about me showing you the things that I can do so that you can see that these steps and these different things that I suggest actually work.
[00:02:44] And that matters. So as you remember, this entire Tales from Vlaydor project is a big undertaking. It's something that I'm going to be releasing every two months, a new installment every two months. And I've actually been brainstorming with one of my dear friends to get the next installment underway already.
[00:03:06] And it's so fun. However, I cannot do any of this without an editor. The editor for my Tales from Vlaydor collection is Krissy Barton from Little Syllables editing and she's wonderful, friends. She is fast. She is always in communication with the authors of the things that she is editing.
[00:03:25] And she's great. She did the line edits and the copy edits, and then the final proofread of Brigitte, and she was so fast to get it back to me. So if you have a work in progress and you need to find your own editor, go ahead and reach out to Krissy Barton at Little Syllables editing. And I have her websites in the show notes as well.
[00:03:54] She does free consultations. She does a free sample edit. And then you can see if you guys will make a good fit. So let's dive right in to picking apart a DIY book. Just some technical things to pay attention to that are easy to see, easy to fix, some things that are easy to monitor if you choose to go the self-published route. It is 100% possible nowadays to crank out self published content that is as good as if not better than some traditionally published stuff.
[00:04:34] However, The thing about the traditionally published works is they have a publishing house backing them up. And a publishing house has been doing this for a very long time. It is how they have been making money. It's how they've been providing jobs. And so they know how to do it. They know how to do the marketing, they know how to follow trends and they know what is currently selling.
[00:04:58] That is why traditional publishing is still a big thing. And that's why it is going to stick around for such a long time. However, for those of us who want to self-publish, there are still some things that we can do so that we can have quality that is equivalent to that. Equivalent, if not better. All of the resources are available to us.
[00:05:23] We just need to know what they are and how to employ them. So with a self published book. And if you are hoping to write to make money, which means if you are writing things, hoping to sell those things in exchange for money. There are some guidelines and there are some expectations that you need to be aware of before you even get started.
[00:05:51] If you are a hobbyist writer writing just for yourself and you never expect anybody else to read what you're writing, or at least maybe not more than a group of friends or your close family, and you're not expecting to sell bunches and bunches of copies of some of the things that you're doing. Then what I'm about to say, doesn't really apply.
[00:06:14] However, if you are hoping to sell your stuff, you are writing to market, which means you always get to be towing the line between being creative and new. And fitting in with what is already working, and that is in every single aspect of your book. You need to find a way to be creative and new while at the same time, be understood for what you are.
[00:06:46] The first example that I have to illustrate this is your book cover. If your book cover. Looks really homemade. Let's say that you did a fantasy novel and the book cover is just a fun gradient with white text on it. That kind of looks like a technical book. That kind of looks like a manual for a computer. That kind of looks like those different types of books.
[00:07:15] And so if someone were to see your book, your fantasy book with this white text against a solid color background, they will not fit it in with what they perceive fantasy books to be. I ran into this problem. I already had a consultation with one of the books that I've been writing with The Paper Witch. I had a consultation with a designer already, and I had some really fun ideas.
[00:07:47] So the whole thing takes place in a Victorian era equivalent. I mean, it's a different world, but, it's that feeling. So it's bustled dresses. It's three-piece suits. It's those different things that we tie into what the Victorian era is. And I was thinking that maybe the cover could be one of those prints that you see in an old magazine, like one color, maybe one or two colors, one of those prints that would have been stamped or etched onto the paper during printing. Just because that would fit in perfectly with the time period. And my designer had a very good point that regardless of what we're doing, a potential reader needs to be able to see the cover and first be interested by the cover, but then associate it with the genre it belongs in. And so the ideas that I had didn't really work for that. They were fun, ideas, fun, original ideas.
[00:08:57] They're probably just going to be my ideas and they're not going to be what we're going to do for those books. And we're going to go a different direction once I have those books finished. That is the whole thing about all of this. If you are writing to sell, it means that you are going to be exchanging your work to someone for money.
[00:09:22] And that means that you get to be aware that they have certain ideas and expectations of what your work is, so that they will be satisfied with that exchange. With the content of your book. So we're not going to touch on content in this episode of Writing in the Tiny House, content will be another day.
[00:09:44] I've I have talked about content a lot already. We're just going to talk about technical things. So with the cover of your book, it needs to catch their attention. At the same time it needs to identify with the genre that it belongs in. All of that is subjective. And if you need additional opinions on if your book cover works, be sure to gather those opinions. Be sure to pay the money, to have a consultation with a designer so that they can give you good professional feedback on what is working and what is not working.
[00:10:25] Another thing is it needs to be readable. So if it's a thing where it's a part of a larger series and there's going to be a lot of text on that book cover, the text needs to make sense. And so if you have titles and subtitles and the title of the series that it belongs to and whatever else and your name and perhaps your character's names.
[00:10:52] And I don't know. I saw the cover of a self published book that had about four or five different titles on it. Or at least five different lines of texts that represented different things on the cover. And so it was the author's name. It was the author like who the author, I guess is, it was the title of the book.
[00:11:20] It was the title of the series. And then it was the grouping of the series or something. It was way too much text. Make sure that what you have there is readable. With my first book, As Magic Shifts, the artist who did the art, also wanted to do the book cover, and he did at first the entire title of the book As Magic Shifts in this super unique original art work. He changed the text into like magical smoke and it was beautiful to see, it was bright in colors. It was a fun idea. It had really good energy, but it was hard to read As Magic Shifts wasn't really readable as a title. And so while I was consulting with my book producer with that, we had him instead just keep the word magic as this stylized artwork.
[00:12:29] And then with a more traditional font did as and shifts. So it read a lot better. So pay attention to that with your book cover. Moving onto the body of your text. I will say it every single episode. You need to have an editor, but here's the thing. When we're writing a story, we start with really big ideas and refining those ideas is called the developmental edits. And then getting down to the more fine tooth comb stuff, we get down to line edits, which is the flow of the sentence. We get down to copy edits, which is word usage and such. And then when we are done with everything and the book is laid out, we do the final proofread, which is misspellings, commas, formatting errors, different stuff like that. So as an author, we start really big picture and we get down to the really small technical stuff at the end. With reading a book like this, oftentimes it starts with the really small, simple things that get in the way of the bigger things.
[00:13:41] It's like the smaller technical things unfold to reveal the bigger picture. And if the smaller technical things are not in place to begin with that unfolding doesn't happen as well. So that means, when we're reading. If we see a misspelled word, we can often forgive that. If we see a couple of misspelled words, we can probably get past it.
[00:14:06] If we see, you know, comma mistakes, or if there is a paragraph of a quotation and the quotation marks at the end are missing. Or some little things like that. And they only happen once. Most of the time we can get by. If there are repeated words, just the, just the little things or they forgot to italicize the title of a book.
[00:14:31] Or whatever. Your reader can forgive some of those things, if they happen only once that does not mean that you get to be lazy and think that, you know, oh, I saw the one misspelling. So this is okay. If you saw one misspelling odds are, there's like five more. With the little things, if there are so many mistakes, the reader cannot appreciate the words that you use. The reader cannot appreciate the flow of your sentences. Odds are the flow of your sentences will be hindered by those mistakes. And if the reader cannot appreciate the flow of your sentences, they can't appreciate the flow of the structure of the book itself.
[00:15:15] And then they can't come to appreciate the larger idea. And so the content will be missed if these smaller things don't happen. So as far as misspelled words go, there are plenty of resources in this world to deal with misspelled words. One of them that I used and I used with Brigitte and I will use again with the next installment of Tales from Vlaydor is Pro Writing Aid.
[00:15:42] It's a tool that does word correction. It does misspellings. It also does some grammar and some style stuff. It does not replace an editor. And at the end of it all, you need to have an editor. I have read some self published books that went through pro writing aid and nothing else. And it shows.
[00:16:02] Also you need a professional layout, which means that your book gets to resemble the quality of a professional book. You get to have indented paragraphs, you are not writing a blog. You get to have the chapter headings and the chapters and the different things be laid out to make sense if they aren't, your reader will pick up on it and they'll be bugged by it, even if they don't fully understand what makes them bugged.
[00:16:35] And with the self-published things sometimes to websites like amazon.com, it's possible to upload a book that is not an EPUB book. Sometimes you can upload a PDF. And the reason why I bring this up is because many of us read on e-readers now or on programs on our phones or on our computers that allow us to access EPUB books.
[00:17:05] And if you upload a PDF version of your book, these programs will be able to display your book. But they won't be as easy to read. The thing is an EPUB book fits better into an E reader into an E reader program than a PDF does. It allows you to adjust the text size and the font. If you upload a PDF, you can't do that.
[00:17:38] And so your e-reader or your e-reader program, won't be fun to use, and it might be a bother to read the manuscript. So just pay attention to those things. As far as a formatting program goes, it is possible to get a good ePUB format thing from various different programs, probably even from word. I recommend something that you know, how to do, and I always recommend flipping through what you just compiled into an EPUB to make sure that it all makes sense and to make sure that it worked just because sometimes the formatting isn't very intuitive and the program isn't very friendly.
[00:18:24] And it's possible to just make mistakes. And so it's best to go through and flip through what you've done. If you are laying out a novel, I recommend something more like Vellum, Which is better at laying out the larger projects. If you are writing short stories in Scrivener, and you want to use Scrivener to compile them into an E pub, then Scrivener can certainly handle it and can do a very good job. I wouldn't however, compile an entire novel of a hundred thousand words from Scrivener.
[00:19:05] I would import it into Velum first, or I would hire someone to do it for me. Just because readers see the mistakes. And if there are enough mistakes, even if the reader doesn't fully understand what they are getting hung up on, they're not going to purchase from you again. If what you have provided for them in exchange for money is hard to read,
[00:19:31] they won't understand the point of your writing. They won't fall in love with, with your imagination and with the vision that you have behind your fiction. And they likely won't read your future works again. However, if all of these tiles are in place, then the stuff you publish now will sell the stuff you publish tomorrow.
[00:20:00] That means that if somebody reads your stuff now and has a great experience, they will very likely read your next work and have a good experience there too. It also means that a reader down the road, for instance, if a reader stumbles upon my name next year, and I have six of these short stories released to amazon.com and they stumble upon the final installment of the short stories and they read it and they love it,
[00:20:31] it means that the new stuff will also sell the old stuff so long as you have all of those tiles in place technically. We're going to talk about content later. You don't just get to publish garbage.
[00:20:45] So that's it for today. Thank you so much for joining me. Just a brief reminder, the first installment of my Tales from Vlaydor collection, which is entitled Brigitte is now available for pre-order. Please follow the link in the show notes because it can be hard to find on Amazon if you don't follow the link that I will provide in the show notes. A big thank you to my patrons, without your generous donations this show may not be possible. And if you wish to become a patron, go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse and at no additional cost to your generous donations, you will receive a free electronic copy of the short stories that I am providing in these upcoming months, including Installment one, Brigitte.
[00:21:38] So thank you so much for all of this. Be sure to tune in to my social media accounts, my instagram handle is@authordevindavis. And my Twitter handle is @authordevind. Thank you so much for your time, guys. Be sure to tune in next week and have fun writing.