Archive | December, 2011

Goodbye 2011… Hello 2012!

31 Dec

And so, the obligatory end-of-one-year, start-of-a-new-year post.

I’ve blogged about my writing resolutions for 2012 over on Writing.ie. so I’m not going to repeat them here. Instead you can skip on over there and read about why, for the first time in ten years, “get published” will not be one of my goals for 2012.

New Year Eve’s can feel like a bit of a downer sometimes, when you think back to the goals you set yourself 12 months ago and how some or all of them didn’t get achieved. I think a good way to avoid this is to focus less on what you wanted to happen and more on what actually happened. The things that, however unexpected, made you feel like you’d accomplished something. These are mine:

I got a BBC security pass (because I was on BBC Radio Ulster in their Belfast studio).

I was featured in Woman’s Way magazine…

… and in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times.

Mousetrapped sold its 10,000th copy, and Backpacked sold its 1,000th.

I finally got to see two places that, thanks to Formula 1, had been on my To Visit list for a long, long time: the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia…

…and pretty much all of Monaco, including lunch at Café du Paris.

I saw The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch in the Prado Museum in Madrid, a painting that plays a big part in my favorite book by my favorite author, A Darkness More Than Night by Michael Connelly.

I was on the Marian Finucane Show on RTÉ Radio 1, which with an audience of 400,000 is the second most listened to radio show in Ireland.

I got to see Jurassic Park in a cinema when I was old enough to appreciate it (i.e. 29).

I got to spend 6 weeks in a beautiful little apartment in France, just writing. And that apartment was ten minutes walk from the promenade. And the promenade was five minutes walk from a picturesque Old Town where all anyone wanted to do was sit around drinking coffee and people-watching, i.e. MY IDEA OF HEAVEN.

I sat at a table signing books with a very long queue in front of me. (And no one in it was a friend or relative.) At Mousemeets in Birmingham. Photo credit: Laura Pearson Smith.

I giggled through a Pecha Kucha presentation during the Dublin Book Festival, and used the above photo in my accompanying slideshow to demonstrate what used to be every writer’s ultimate promotional dream. It got a big laugh.

I was asked to deliver the self-publishing section of Faber Academy’s first ever self-publishing and social media workshop in February 2012.

I got an idea for a novel—the novel whose first draft I’m nearly finished now—that I’m really, really excited about.

And even though it’s only 11.42 am as I type this, it’s already been a good news New Year’s Eve. First of all, Results Not Typical has made it into Trashionista.com’s Top 10 Reads of 2011! Woo-hoo, etc. I’m so delighted, especially since Mousetrapped made it into their Top 10 Reads of 2010. Thank you Elle, for all your support, and thanks to everyone who voted for their favorite read!

Secondly if you live in Ireland, you can catch me in the Irish Times magazine today. Remember a few weeks ago when I said I’d had a photo-shoot where I’d had to stand against a wall with books on my head? Well, that was why. But I quite like the photo, I have to say. Even if seeing that much white in my eyes makes me look a bit scary and my left arm is sticking out a weird way. But bonus: the books went some way to hiding my roots…

UPDATE: You can read the Irish Times article online here.

So that’s all folks—for 2011, anyway. Happy New Year!

Click here to read my 2012 writing resolutions on Writing.ie.

Special Guest Stars of 2011

29 Dec

While we’re all still on our holiday break and eating turkey leftovers, I thought I’d remind you of some of the fantastic guest posts I’ve been lucky enough to host over the last twelve months. There’s some fascinating insights, inspiring stories and hard-earned advice in there. Thanks to everyone who guest posted on Catherine, Caffeinated this year!

March:

Proof Social Media Sells Books by Talli Roland. The blogging queen shares her tips and tricks.

April:

A week of e-book authors sharing their e-publishing experiences:

May:

Far to Go blog tour. Alison Pick, author of one of my favorite books of the year, stops by.

June:

Shifting Expectations by Marshall Buckey. Why it’s a good idea to keep amending your writerly dreams.

July:

Happy 4th July! A USA-themed guest post from self-published author Michael Harling.

The Anxiety of the Debut Author by Emma Newman. The worries of an about-to-be published author.

August:

The Social Network by Gillian Duffy. A debut author gets to grips with all things social media.

Why I’m Self-Publishing by Roz Morris. Why Roz of Nail Your Novel fame self-published her book.

September:

The Memory of Trees Blog Tour. An interview with Mick Rooney on the launch of his book.

Tweet Treats Blog Tour. Jane Travers stops by to tell us about her Twittertastic idea.

October:

21st Century Dodos Blog Tour. Steve Stack brings a video of the adorable Martha reading from his book.

Mining Yourself by Victoria Mixon. Why writers should take advantage of their uniqueness.

November:

My New Life—Being an Author by Mariam Kobras. Does life change after signing on that magic dotted line?

The Devil’s in the Debut by Nicola Morgan. Why a debut novel has to have that extra something special.

REPLAY 2011: A New and Improved, Even Easier Way to Format Your E-book

27 Dec

I’ve been using Tuesdays and Thursdays to replay some popular posts from 2011, in case some of the people who’ve discovered my blog in the meantime missed it first time round. Think of it as a “year in review” kind of thing. (Or a “I’m trying to finish the first draft of a new book and so I don’t have time to write five new blog posts a week” kind of thing…) On Thursday I’ll be revisiting some of the guest posts I hosted this year, so this is my final replay post. It was first published in September and it’s the way I format my own e-books. Since I posted it, I’ve discovered that Mac users get even better results if instead of “Normal” style, they use “Plain Text.” If publishing an e-book is in your To Do for 2012, I think this is the easiest way to do your own formatting without learning computer code… 

Last week the dreaded day came to turn Backpacked into an e-book.

I did everything I usually do (as I outlined in my How To Format Your E-book the Non-Migraine Inducing Way post) and while it converted fine for Amazon KDP, Smashwords was just not happy with it – the .epub format, i.e. most important format outside of .mobi for Kindle, was alternating fonts every other paragraph. Thinking that maybe I’d done something wrong, I started again.

And again.

And again.

And then because I knew that sometimes using MS Word for Mac can screw up things a little bit, I even tried using the archaic monster from the pre-Stone Age that is our family PC, the machine that makes the Commodore 64 look like a Cray-SV1 (I’ve been reading about super computers this weekend – long story…). But it still didn’t work.

I couldn’t understand where things had gone wrong – I’d followed all the instructions, done everything I was told to do and had pulled out everything that didn’t need to be there, even page breaks. Finally I tried pulling out enough of my hair to leave unsightly bald patches and saying bad, sweary things about Smashwords, but – surprisingly – that didn’t work either.

Which left just one, unattractive option: going nuclear.

The Smashwords Style Guide says that if things aren’t working out, there is one very extreme option – the nuclear option – that strips everything out of your text except the letters, the words they make up and the spaces and lines between them. I didn’t want to do this because I use a lot of italics, and that would mean that I’d have to go back and insert 77,000 words’ worth of them. That wasn’t going to help with the this-book-is-driving-me-crazy thing. But I really wanted to conquer this thing, so I did it.

And it worked brilliantly.

The thing is, Smashwords is not the problem. Smashwords was never the problem (and in fact, their free Style Guide is a godsend). Microsoft Word, which was invented by the devil himself and then evidently coded by horned demons, is the problem. That’s why I work with Pages, but you can’t upload anything but .doc files for e-books. Even though my paragraph style was set to Normal and was in size 10 Times New Roman on screen, it wasn’t really set to Normal and in size 10 Times New Roman. Word was just jesting. It was letting me think it was, while hiding in the corner trying to stifle its own sniggering and chucking everything but the kitchen sink into the code.

I had to go through my book again but, while I did, I was able to pick out a few more errors, clean up a few sentences and generally improve it a bit. So instead of thinking of it as formatting, I just thought of it as another go-through, another revision. Once I was done I copied and pasted that text into my CreateSpace template, which then took only half an hour to format back into a POD interior, so both editions were the same. Then I was so happy with the result I went and re-did Mousetrapped the same way and when I’ve time, I’m going to do Self-Printed as well. I also used it for a formatting client’s e-book that had images and it worked out a dream.

Better yet, once I had scrubbed the formatting from my e-book file, it was so much easier to go back and put in what was needed than the way I’ve formatted in the past. It actually simplified the process. And you can even use your POD interior file if you like – because you’re taking out all of the formatting anyway, it doesn’t matter how much has been done to your document to begin with. I’m never going to format an e-book any other way again.

So here is my new and improved, Even Easier Way to Format Your E-book the Non-Migraine Inducing Way!

Do you need reminding about how in e-books there’s no such thing as a page? Read about that on this post. Or just remember, THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A PAGE in e-books. Got it? Good.

Let’s begin.

Start by making one of these. Or five.

Step 1: Prepare Your Manuscript

Open your manuscript file, whether it be the plain old Word document you and your editor have been working from or the interior of your POD paperback, all laid out nice and stuff, and eliminate anything that just doesn’t work in an e-book. You can either let them go, or leave the pure text in there to do a little work around with it later on, e.g. take the text out of a text box, delete the text box and put the text in a paragraph in all italics instead.

The following are e-books no-nos:

  • Automatic footnotes
  • Text boxes
  • Headers and footers
  • Columns
  • Tables
  • Any other fancy word-processing stuff.

Then click Edit -> Select All -> Copy.

Use a simple text editor program, like TextEdit. 

Step 2: Go Nuclear

Now open a simple text editing program. If you have a PC, this will probably be NotePad; on Mac, it’s TextEdit. Paste your work into here. (On Mac, select “Paste and Match Style” so it matches the style of TextEdit, not the style of the text you’re pasting in as that defeats the purpose.) This will strip your work of all formatting and images. Once you’ve done that, click Edit -> Select All -> Copy. Then open a brand new MS Word document, save it as .doc (not .docx) and turn off Auto-Formatting and Auto-Correct by un-checking the boxes in Preferences. Paste the stripped text in and save.

Turn off Auto-Correct and Auto-Format by un-checking the relevant boxes in Preferences.

Step 3: Style It Up

Working now in this new, start-from-scratch MS Word document, again with all text selected, go to Format -> Style. Your style will be set to Normal, but chances are that normal won’t be what you want. (It’s that damn horned demon again.) So click Modify and make Normal Times New Roman, point 10, left-aligned and single spaced. Click Okay to modify that style and then Apply.

Modifying your Normal style in MS Word.

Keeping all the text selected, then go to Format -> Paragraph and make the settings single line spacing with no extra space before or after, left-aligned with first line indent to 0.3″. So that it looks like this:

Save your document. Switch to Draft View (View -> Draft View) and make your paragraph returns visible (click the little paragraph return symbol in the toolbar that looks like a backwards P). Your book should now be looking like this to you:

Step 4: Put What You Need Back In

Now go through your document and put back in what you need in terms of formatting. Here’s what I do as I go through the book:

  • Insert e-book appropriate front matter including license notes, centered (tip: create a new, modified style where text is not first line indented but is centered – this will keep our formatting pristine all the way through). If you don’t know what that should be, I included an example in my original how to format an e-book post.

If you need some centered text, for example for titles, don’t just click “Center.” Instead, go back to Format -> Style and create a New Style for this purpose.

  • Insert page breaks between chapters (non-fiction/not a lot of chapters) or between parts (fiction/20+ chapters). Because some formats ignore page breaks, always have a paragraph return above and below the break so that if this does happen, the text doesn’t get all squashed up. To insert a page break, select Insert –> Break -> Page Break.
  • Insert bookmarks at chapter headings (non-fiction/not a lot of chapters) or at the beginnings of sections or parts (fiction/20+ chapters) so you can create a working table of contents later, i.e. readers can click on the table of contents and be taken straight to a certain point in the book. Insert a bookmark by clicking Insert -> Bookmark and call it what it is, e.g. Chapter One, Part II, etc.

Inserting bookmarks. You can also see in this image that to start a new chapter, I simply skip a line and make my heading bold. Keep it simple!

  • Format headings. For chapter headings I just use bold + italics and for section headings I switch the text to all caps and make them bold.
  • Put back in italics and/or bold where you need them in the body text.
  • Remove the first line indent where necessary, e.g. the first lines of chapters, chapter headings, etc. (The quickest way to do this is by moving the slide rule at the top of the page, I think. Just be careful to only move the first line and not the whole paragraph.)
  • Make all URLS live, i.e. Insert -> Hyperlink.

  • Insert e-book appropriate end matter, such as links to your blog, the titles of your other books, etc. Your last line in the e-book document should be “###END###’ centered, so that the reader knows they have come to the end of the e-book.

DO NOT:

  • Change your font size. All my e-books are now 10 point right the way through. I make text look different using only bold, italics and all capital letters.
  • Have more than four paragraph returns anywhere in your book. E-book reading devices allow readers to change their font sizes considerably and if you put too many paragraph returns, your readers will end up with blank pages at some font size settings. You really should never have more than one except for the pairs on either side of a page break, which technically aren’t together anyway.
  • Justify your paragraphs. Left-align is the only thing that really works properly across all formats.
  • Refer to retailers. Do you think Barnes and Noble is going to want a link to Amazon in your book? Hardly. I normally do two files, one for KDP (Amazon) and one for Smashwords. I keep the Smashwords file clean because it goes to so many different people, but in the KDP file I say things like, “Look out for [TITLE] in the Kindle store.”

Step 5: The Bells and Whistles

You can stop right here and skip to step 6, Upload and Check Your E-books, if you’re happy with your book as it is, or you can add in some bells and whistles, like:

The live table of contents in the e-book version of Backpacked. The links under the copyright notice/license notes link to the web, i.. my blog, Twitter account etc., but the links in the table of contents link to bookmarks, i.e. locations within the document.

A live table of contents. These are very helpful for non-fiction and reference books. The idea is that you insert a bookmark at the start of each chapter or section, go back to the start and type a table of contents and then make each entry in the table a live, working hyperlink that if clicked, will take the reader to the bookmarked location. To insert a link to a bookmark, click Insert -> Hyperlink and then in the window that appears, click “Document” for in-document links and select the appropriate bookmark.

Inserting images in e-books. 

Images. Yes, I’m talking about adding images to your e-books. Have I ingested some crazy pills? Didn’t I always say you shouldn’t put images in e-books? Didn’t I claim that trying to do it was just bringing on a world of pain? Well, when you use the nuclear option, images are easier to work with just because the body text is already behaving well. To insert an image, you must Insert -> Picture -> From File. (You cannot copy and paste.) You must ensure that the image’s layout is set to “in line with text.” To check, right-click the image and select Format Picture -> Layout. Keep the image small; I make sure mine don’t stretch further than 3 inches across the screen. Centre them for cohesiveness, and for safety, leave a page break before and after. In the image above, I created yet another style for the image caption. Don’t forget that for now, at least, most people read their e-books in black and white.

Work arounds. Everything that’s in your paperback can go in your e-book – you just have to use your imagination. Text boxes are easy: just take the text out and either give it its own paragraph with a return above and below, or just insert it like any other paragraph but in bold and/or italic. A formatting client of mine had a worksheet in her physical book – you can’t put that in an e-book (and there’s no point in doing it, anyway), so I advised her to make a PDF of it, and tell her e-book readers to go to her website to pick it up. They still get the worksheet and she gets a website visit. For footnotes, I went to the text where the footnote appeared in the physical book, went to the next paragraph return and then inserted it using square brackets (see highlighted section in the image below).

Adding footnotes manually (see highlighted section).

The only limit, really, is your imagination. For instance in my novel that’s out next month, Results Not Typical, there are several sections that are supposed to be branded literature from the company at the heart of the plot. They’re in a different font to the main text. In the paperback, those sections look like this:

But how to accomplish that in the e-book? Well, this was a true work around. I took a screen shot of the header as it appears in the MS Word document that forms the interior of my paperback book. Then I inserted that as an image into the e-book. The rest of the text, i.e. the rest of the text in each of those literature sections, will remain the same, but at least those image headers will alert readers to the fact that they’re different. So in the e-book, it looks like this:

Step 6: Upload and Check Your E-books

Checking your e-book is really easy and can be done with your Smashwords converted files. (When you upload to KDP you get to see an on-screen Kindle preview which is great but not ideal and anyway if it’s working at Smashwords, it’s definitely working over at KDP.)

Pre-nuclear: Ugh. It’s all, bad and stuff. Yuck!

Upload your file to Smashwords and while it’s converting, download Adobe Digital Editions and Amazon’s Kindle reading application (both free) to your computer. Then when your book goes live, download the .epub and .mobi (Kindle) versions from your book’s page and check them using the programs you just downloaded. If you followed the instructions above, they’ll look great. If they look anything other than great, immediately unpublish your books (click “Unpublish” on your Smashwords dashboard) and try again.

If you’re having problems, download the Smashwords Style Guide. Honestly, you don’t need anything else – if you follow its instructions, your book will look great on Smashwords and Amazon KDP. It’s where I found out everything I know about formatting, along with trial and error. And caffeine-induced epiphanies after a very long day of e-book formatting.

Post-nuclear: Oooh, look how pretty and correctly formatted and stuff! 

So that’s it, folks. If you want to have this post to hand while you format your e-book, click here to download a printable PDF. I know, I know – I’m just too, too kind. If you want to express your gratefulness, buy a copy of one of these or, alternatively, tell everyone you know about them. Every single last one. I’ll know if you leave a few people out, you know. I have ways.

Click here to find out more about Backpacked. 

Results Not Typical: Now FREE on Kindle!

26 Dec

I can assure you that I’m nowhere near my blog today; St. Stephen’s Day (what we Irish call the Day After Christmas) is just as major a day as the one before. So all going to plan, I am currently still asleep/unconscious in a post-carb coma, but gearing up for an evening of turkey and ham sandwiches, TV specials and From The Sky Down, the documentary film about U2 making Achtung Baby that I bought my brother for Christmas that I conveniently wanted to see myself too.

The reason I’ve scheduled this post is to let you know that my novel, Results Not Typical, is now FREE on Kindle.

And it has a beautiful new, sparkly cover designed (as always) by the talented Andrew Brown of Design for Writers. You can read about why I changed this cover and why I changed it to something like this in last Friday’s blog post.

If you’re not familiar, Results Not Typical is the story of an evil weight loss company called Slimmit, infamous for their “Where the Fat IS Your Fault!” slogan and Ultimate Weight Loss Diet Solution Zone System diet, and what happens to them when the master formula for their latest revolutionary product, Lipid Loser, is stolen. It’s The Devil Wears Prada meets Weightwatchers and chick-lit meets corporate satire, and based on my professional status as a yo-yo dieter. You can find out more about it here, see it on Amazon.com here or see it on Amazon.co.uk here.

Results Not Typical is one of the 20 books longlisted for Trashionista’s Favorite Books of 2011. The top 10 will be decided by public vote so if you’ve already read it and liked it (or you read it before December 31st and like it!), please pop over there to cast yours. Some friends of this blog, including Talli Roland and Maria Duffy, are also nominated, so do take a second to take a look.

If you’re a new (or upgraded) Kindle owner looking for something to read, I also have two travel memoirs:

and I can highly recommend the following self-published or small press e-books by friends of this blog:

All links go to Amazon.com, but you’ll find these titles in all Kindle stores.

Nicola Morgan has also assembled a list of great titles for teenagers who found Kindles under the tree.

Results Not Typical will be free to download in all Kindle stores until midnight on December 28th. New cover, free price—it’ll all be explained in a later post. Until then, rest assured that it is, as ever, all part of a dastardly plan…

Another part of my dastardly plan: pointing out that using the “E-mail” share button below, you could e-mail this post to any new Kindle owners you know, you know…

*evil grin*

See you in the New Year!

Happy Christmas!

24 Dec

Christmas Eve is probably my favorite day of the year, because Christmas is practically here and all the excitement, presents, food, food comas and Christmas TV specials are still ahead of us. I’m writing this post ahead of time but if I’d to guess I’d say that right about now—Christmas Eve morning—I’m knee-deep in red velvet cupcake making, half way through my first pot of coffee, looking forward to the annual Christmas Eve re-watch of the Father Ted Christmas special later and just bursting to give my gifts because I’ve really outdone myself on the great ideas for presents front this year.

*smug*

Today is as good a day as any to thank all of you, lovely blog readers, for hanging around here this year and for not only reading my ramblings, but sharing them and commenting on them. I’m certain you’re all on the Nice list.

Have a very Merry Christmas! x

Judge a Book By Its Cover? RESULTS Gets a New One

23 Dec

You all know how much I love my Results Not Typical cover, and if you don’t it’s a lot. Green is associated with health and dieting, and that exact green is the color that Slimmit (the fictional company in the book) use in their branding – in my imagination, at least. The title font captures the spirit of the book perfectly and is big enough to survive in an e-book cover, and we managed to get across the subject matter of the book without resorting to putting any photographs of skinny women on there. It’s a cover that can be easily changed enough to go on the next book in the series while still maintaining a cohesive brand.

It’s a cover that stands out, especially since we avoided the whole pastel pink, cartoon, swirly writing chick-lit cover extravaganza that always makes me think of too-sweet candy floss and Pepto-Bismol.

That sentence right there encapsulates why I began to let my personal feelings cloud my judgement and override the facts, which ultimately led to me making a decision about my cover that involved just one person (me) when it should’ve involved millions of people, i.e. the women who might like to read Results Not Typical.

I had a thing against pinky-pink chick-lit covers. In my defense, this was because whenever my eye fell on a stack of them in a bookshop, they all seemed utterly indiscernible from one another. Most of them could’ve swapped covers and still been okay. Many of them could also have swapped titles. Neither the cover design nor the title seemed in any way specific to any book, and it turned me right off the thought of ever reading any of them.

I also resented the fact that as a woman, I was expected to be attracted to pink. But my resentment was as ironic as that Alanis Morrisette song was not (which, perhaps, is the irony…? *brain ache*), because I love, love, LOVE pink. I really do. Half the clothes in my wardrobe are somewhere near it, my first iPod was a gorgeous shade of dusty pink and my bedroom is decorated in shades of pink and purple. I even have a pink leather laptop bag.

And have you seen my blog?

So why was I getting my (pink?) knickers in a twist over pink book covers? (And I should say here that I’m of course not just talking about chick-lit covers that are literally pink, but all those that have swirly-writing, a cartoon woman and a color that suggests something girly and fun.) I really don’t know. But I started to change my mind about it a few months back when I started coming across some book covers that ticked all the chick-lit boxes, but yet really appealed to me. Beautiful covers like these:

What information about the book inside do you get from these covers? I see hints that the novels inside are going to be entertaining, possibly funny, a good few hours of escapism, about hopes, dreams and love, and fun. Fun, fun, fun. FUN! And the reason they have elements in common is because if you read and liked From Notting Hill With Love Actually (which I did; I reviewed it here), then chances are The Night Before Christmas will float your boat too, or at least be in with a chance of doing so. These covers aren’t saying anything about women – they’re only saying things about what’s in the book. And by their visual similarity, however small, they help each other out by letting readers know if you liked x, you’ll probably like this.

Plus they’d all look gorgeous on my purple book shelf in my pink room.

(Yes, my book shelves are purple. Jealous?)

The number one message about Results Not Typical that I want to get across to potential readers of it was: this book is fun. The number two message I want to get across is: this book is for women, and the third is this book is about something most of us can relate to: dieting. But yet instead of choosing a type of cover that would instantly convey these three vital points, I chose something that I liked, that I felt conveyed what the book was about. But you know what? I know what the book is about – I wrote it! So am I really the best judge of whether or not the cover conveys what’s inside? Possibly not. Probably not. Therefore instead of indulging myself, I should have been guided by the same principles that guided the designers of the covers of the books – the bestselling books – above. I should’ve put a girly-girl, swirly-writing cartoon cover on it, because I am a girly-girl, and I like swirly writing and cartoons. And I wrote the book I wanted to read, so surely the other women out there who would like this book like those things too?

This wasn’t all hypothetical: the sales of Results reflected that I’d made a mistake. They do reflect this. I promised, back when I started chronicling my self-publishing adventures on this blog, that I’d share both the successes and failures, and so I’ll be blogging about this in detail in the New Year. But in the meantime, I’ve decided to change the cover of Results‘ e-book edition. Something isn’t working, and I think it’s the green cover. My Amazon product listing is as good as it can be—clear and enticing blurb, three glowing and qualified endorsements, links to my other books—and the price is sofa change, i.e. 99c.

When I first thought of changing the cover, I toyed with the idea of an original illustration. I found out the name of the illustrator who did one of the traditionally-published covers above, and daydreamed about commissioning from her a new, girly-girl, fun – FUN! –  Results Not Typical cover. But at the time I’d just put two books to bed and owed hundreds in editing and cover design fees. Who knows how much an original illustration from such an in-demand, talented artist would cost, but I was guessing it would be more than I had, and more than I, at that point, wanted to sink into a book that I wasn’t even making bus fare off of. And what, if after all that, the problem wasn’t the cover? What if the book just didn’t appeal? What if I had no chance of ever getting that money back?

I decided to conduct a little experiment. Test the waters, so to speak. I would try changing the cover into something more affordable—something girly, fun and cartoony (i.e. not photos), but affordable—and see if it made any difference. I e-mailed my cover designer extraordinaire, Andrew Brown of Design for Writers, and explained the situation. I sent him some of the covers above and a bit of a brief, and here’s what he came up with:

Isn’t it pretty? Isn’t it just adorable? Look at that font! Do you see the little sparkles?

And do you see how well it goes with my blog? You know how I love me some color co-ordination.

I love it. Love it, love it, LOVE it.

What do you think?

I’ve uploaded it to Amazon and have a couple of other tricks up my sleeve for Results, which again, I’ll be blogging about in the New Year. But I’m calling this Operation Booster Rocket, and my mission is to get Results selling at a level near or at least closer to that of my other books.

Wish me luck!

(I’ve just uploaded it, so if you go to Amazon the old cover might still be there, and the paperback will still have the green one, for now anyway.)

10 Books I Read in 2011 That I Want You To Read Too

23 Dec

This time last year I blogged about my 2010 in books, awarding titles to some of the books I’d read during the year like Most Surprising, Most Disappointing, Most Recommended, etc. This year I’ve decided to do things a little differently. First of all—and for the first time ever—I kept a list of all the books I read in the last twelve months, to help with this post. Second of all, I asked myself why do we write these kinds of posts? Why do people make these Books of the Year lists? Why am I making one?

Well, it’s because I want you to read these books. I want you to read them because I think that if you do, you’ll really, really enjoy them. So instead of My 2011 in Books or My Books of the Year 2011, here’s my list of 10 Books I Read in 2011* That I Would Recommend To You If You Asked Me to Recommend a Good Book For You To Read Right Now. I know it doesn’t have quite the same snappiness as “Books of the Year” or whatever, but let’s just go with it.

(Click the images to go to the book’s Amazon listing.)

Fiction:

Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson

Cuckoo by Julia Crouch

Darkside by Belinda Bauer

The Snowman by Jo Nesbo

Far to Go by Alison Pick

Snowdrops by A.D. Miller

Non-Fiction:

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Bossypants by Tina Fey

The Upgrade by Paul Carr

Have you read any of them? Any you’d add? (Or replace?!)

*I read them in 2011. They may have been published before. 

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