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All -- great thread, from what I've read (first few pages and then the latest ten or so, since the market changed so much from the time of the OP). It gives me hope that 2-3 randos might actually read my book someday. My situation is this. I'm halfway through the second pass on my first novel, currently a 113K word fantasy work that I'm sure will come to redefine the genre, assuming anyone makes it past the second chapter. All joking aside, when I do publish, it'll be a high-quality work, however long and however much work that takes. But because I have no name recognition and it's only the first book, it's not likely to move many units, so I want to keep the cost for the cover reasonable. I also want to get a head start on the cover as I know that may take some time if I go down a custom route. I know Goonread is the bargain basement option, and actually had a couple of good, fitting, and catchy covers that have been taken  Damonza doesn't have any budget covers that'll work, but I'll keep checking that page. Am I stuck at paying $400 for the cheap Damonza design option or is there a more reasonable option for me? I wouldn't know where to start finding a freelance artist, especially one who would come in under $400 while delivering quality work. Any suggestions would be welcome.
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Sep 27, 2022 18:11
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e: ^^ Thanks. Actually just remembered I have a graphic designer contact who's an artist back in Chicago. I'll reach out and see if they're interested but I'm not sure if they'll meet my budget-- but they may know someone who is.DropTheAnvil posted:Fiver, or goonwrite is great for covers. Sorry, meant goonwrite when I typed goonread. Any specific fiverr recommendations that goons want to promote? Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Sep 27, 2022 |
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Sep 27, 2022 18:25
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The first alpha reader has finished my book  , has come back with a lot of comments, said it was "engaging and enjoyable," and I'm just waiting for her to fill out the post-reading form. It's my wife, but fortunately she's blunt when I ask her to be, so I trust that she'll be honest. Still, I haven't been able to look at her comments yet. My perfectional rational presumption of what her assessment will be:  Now just waiting on the rest of my first wave of alphas, who are at varying places in the book.I finished another chapter in book two today, close to done with the first draft, but I can't write any more this morning. Maybe later today. Thought I'd do something else. I know it's a little early to do this but I wanted to float my blurb out there and see what people thought. I've been revising this incrementally for a couple of weeks now. All comments welcome. I'm not fond of "It's derailing his plans!" but I want somehow to get across the frustration he feels in his perfect pre-planned life being upended by these unexpected events. Maybe just strike it? quote:The Mountain’s Call (The Melting of Magic: Book 1)
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Oct 16, 2022 18:36
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Thanks for all the comments! You three have given me a lot of homework!Icon-Cat posted:^ I feel like I know what you're going for here, conjuring up a sort of hobbity, cozy fellow as your wizard, and I have a fondness for that stuff, so I've made an attempt. rohan posted:First: the book sounds lovely and definitely something I’d pick up. Happy to be a beta reader in the next round Leng posted:You're gonna kill it when you get to self-publishing; I wish I had been as forward thinking as this. It is never too early to draft the blurb! Thanks again, you delightful goons!
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Oct 17, 2022 02:30
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Leng posted:If you want a good resource for blurbs, I'd recommend Robert J. Ryan's Blurbs Unleashed... Asking this question here instead of the Fiction Writing Thread as I figure that more people here will be (a) writing novels and (b) writing sequels to publish on Amazon. How much recap do you folks generally like to include in (e.g.) book 2 of a series?
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Oct 18, 2022 21:35
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I like it. It's short and punchy. Has good setting in the first paragraph, tension in "until tonight," and stakes are stated and then raised in the last two paragraphs Quick notes: 1. Because it is short and you have the space for it, consider a brief, bolded tagline to kick it off. 2. If you're going to call out the play on words with "living it up," change "dead-set" to something else. 3. What sort of turf does Eddy have if he's been ignoring the supernatural world for so long? 4. Will your audience know what a Vampire House is? (Honest question; I don't read that much urban fantasy; I know it through osmosis with RPGs. You might consider changing it to something like "vampire bloodline" if it won't be obvious to almost all of your readers.) Also, unless you really feel the need to keep the caps, decapitalize it. FInally, if you capitalize it in your text or talk about vampire houses in your text, that doesn't mean you have to follow the same rules in your blurb. 5. What do you think about rearranging the turf/beck & call sentence? You state the stakes, but then they're sort of lost in the paragraph by the tension of her power at the end, which is a weaker construction, I believe. I think it would read better if you established her power with the beasties and then wham! stakes! (No pun intended.) 6. I took a crack at minor edits, mostly commas and a hyphen, with one change in your second full paragraph where there was some confusion around number. Didn't make any of the above changes. I'm on mobile, otherwise I'd have bolded them. eta: about whether short is good, according to Blurbs Unleashed, you want to keep it under 225 words, and preferably around 150. (On mobile so can't count.) For my personal opinion, as to how long a blurb should be, it's like that old joke about a man's legs: long enough to reach the ground, or in the case of blurbs, long enough to grab the prospective reader's eye without turning them off. If I were into urban fantasy, I imagine that this blurb would grab me pretty firmly, and I'm not sure adding much to it would improve that. But I'm not your target audience, so I can't say that definitively. quote:Vampire playboy Eddy Fry has spent years living it up, so to speak, in Las Vegas. In all those decades, not once has he met another of his kind. Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Oct 26, 2022 |
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Oct 26, 2022 22:44
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Goons, I want to thank all of you who gave me advice and guidance along the way. Just a little bit earlier today, my first novel, Blessed with Power Unwanted, hit Amazon as an ebook (also available on Kindle Unlimited). From general encouragement to blurb editing, this thread has been a boon to me. I hope no one minds if I throw in a pitch for it! Though it's book one in the series, (a) book two is already written and being edited, and I hope to have it out by the end of February, and (b) most everything is resolved in book one rather than leaving everything on a lazy cliffhanger. I hope some goons check it out and enjoy it!  Blessed with Power Unwanted (The Thawing of Magic: Book 1) Breaking the rules of magic was never part of the plan… Serious-minded Durndan Shrivester is a wizard with a blueprint for his life: a steady job, a beautiful fiancée in his village, and a safe, stable future. Then he starts exhibiting new powers – powers that break the rules of magic. With the help of his friends, he tries to keep everything on track. But a mysterious series of prophetic elf-dreams begins, pulling his whole life further away from his plan. Finally, a botched spell and a disgraceful scandal force Durndan to flee his comfortable existence. He must journey far, alongside companions old and new, while fending off the king’s wizard, who would seize these incredible new powers for himself by taking Durndan apart, piece by piece. Can Durndan make it all the way to the Top of the World, where the elf-dreams say his answers await? Or will he fall before the sinister minions and overwhelming might of the king’s wizard? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPF5DVB...ps%2C132&sr=8-1
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Dec 8, 2022 01:45
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Book cover chat: I can't remember if I saw the reference for this company given in this thread or somewhere else on the internet, but I wanted to call out https://getcovers.com/book-cover-design/ as giving me excellent value for my  . They're a Ukrainian company, which I always love supporting in this day and age. They also offer higher-end design, but for someone writing a book that won't sell/KU many copies on its own (making the bulk of its sales/reads later in life when the trilogy is completed), I decided to go with their lower-end offering.The way it works is you pick one of their packages and pay for it: $10 (1 licensed image), $20 (2 licensed images), or $35 (3-5 licensed images). (Print covers only are available at $20 or $35.) Then you go to their stock images website and find pix you would like them to use. (You can also use your own pix if you like; I imagine each one of those counts as a licensed image for cost purposes.) You describe your desired cover, link them your preferred stock images, let them know the genre, give them the text (title, author, back cover text, etc.) and other key info, and they put together a cover for you. At the $20 level, I got back a .jpg of the front cover, a .jpg mockup of a hardcover of my book sitting on a bench, and both a .jpg and a .pdf of a full paperback cover. If you don't like it, or there are problems with it, you can go back to them and have them revise it, which they will do within a day. (I had to do this twice, once for a text error on my part, once for coming back with paperback page count/cover size -- first time author; didn't realize I could calculate this in advance on Amazon -- and both times it was done promptly.) I only had one issue: the turnaround is four days, but they were delayed and asked me in advance for 2-3 extra days due to technical issues. If you're in a real hurry, they'll turn your cover around in a day for a $10 surcharge. Is my cover perfect? No. Is it $20 worth of perfect? Hell yeah. My cover's below (click to embiggen; eta to add it because even though it was in the last post I sniped the page). They have a portfolio of other covers as well as examples of how they put together a cover from stock images on their site.
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Dec 13, 2022 19:03
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newts posted:I thought about moving the series name up, and ‘Bones’ down, but it just didn’t look right. I might still try it again. My $0.02: Don't change the title. It would lose some punch with the additional word. Can you inch the author name and the first title line down a smidge each, and Bones up a little? Then maybe just raise "Raven & Crane" up a tad? The text looks vertically "clumped" to me. I'm not saying put everything at equal spacing from the next line or anything, just small adjustments. (You might be able to get away with leaving the author name where it is and moving the first title line down, as the color might prevent it from getting lost in the border.)
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Mar 16, 2023 21:31
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