Blog – Page 21 – Kelly I. Hitchcock

2011 in Writer Review

Published by Kelly on January 1, 2012

I just got done reading my 2010 review, and now I’m ready to do the same for 2011. It’s been quite a year, and was way different from 2010.

I had two manuscripts published in 2011. It was less than 2010, but I’ll still call it a win because I spent more energy on getting The Redheaded Stepchild published and writing my next novel. I also spent more time writing new manuscripts in general than I did in 2010.
2011 came and went, and the two poems that were accepted for publication in February 2010 are still waiting to go to print. And people wonder why print is dead…
I forwent the book deal and decided to publish The Redheaded Stepchild myself. I’m still experimenting to figure out what works as far as sales and marketing go, but I’m not in this for the money. I’m in it because I love it and I want to try new things.
I tripled my Twitter followers.
I once again pimped my writing at South by Southwest. I also submitted a panel proposal for SXSW 2012 which is still under review. Fingers crossed!
I used my Kindle to check out works by other Kindle authors. I’m hoping that it’ll be great for you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours kind of sales.
I joined a writer’s group, and I’m now leading that group. I look forward to Weird Austin Writers meetings every single time.
I began volunteering at my local library. I’m hoping this will help me reach out to readers once I get more established.

Goals for 2012

Sell 1,000 copies of The Redheaded Stepchild. I’ll have to figure out what works marketing-wise to make that happen, but it’d be nice to know that my book is in 1,000 new hands!
Publish my next novel. I’ve got a lot of rewriting and editing to do, but I’m really excited about the project and I think it’ll be my best work yet. Now if I can just think of a title…
Build relationships with readers and other authors. This means I need to keep up with my other author blogs all year round. (Compound goal.)
Publish The Other Dentenia Zickafoose. I’ve been shopping this guy around for almost 2 years now. It’s time.
Become a contributor on other author blogs. Guest posting, book reviews, whatever I can do. I need to put myself out there.
Write 15 new manuscripts. I’ll have the new novel, but I also want to write 10 poems and 5 short stories to add to my repertiore. Can’t be myopic with my manuscripts.

On the whole, I’ll call 2011 a win. I think 2012 is gonna rock.

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Long time no see! The holidays did a number on me; don’t worry, you’ll get to hear all about it in next week’s Wednesday Wrant. Lately, though, I’ve been busy preparing The Redheaded Stepchild for paperback format on CreateSpace. CreateSpace, for those who are unfamiliar, is an Amazon affiliate authors can use to create print-on-demand standard size paperback editions of their books. The Kindle edition is, of course, my bread and butter, but we all have those friends and family who refuse to get with the program and want to know “when can I order my paperback?” I’m doing this for them 🙂

CreateSpace makes it all pretty easy, but it has its share of drawbacks, too. I thought I’d write this post to share my thoughts on the good, the bad, and the ugly of creating a paperback on CreateSpace.

THE GOOD

It’s free. I like free. Free is good. Free takes more work, but free is worth it. They have a pay option, too, starting around $300 for interior design and $300 for cover design. No, thanks. I’m not afraid of hard work.

It’s procedural. They keep a running checklist on what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you need to do next. If you get tripped up at any phase in the process, you can go right back to it after you correct any issues.

It calculates production costs. CreateSpace automatically calculates how much each copy will cost to print and distribute, and stubs it in as the minimum price you can set for each copy. This takes the guess work out of pricing the paperback.

The preview tools are easy to use. The Interior Reviewer lets you easily check the swankiness of the inside of your book, and the Cover Creator lets you easily design and preview the front cover, back cover, and spine. With the Cover Creator, you can select one of their predefined themes, which are pretty slick if you don’t already have a good cover image, or use your own if you do (which I of course did). You can also add an author photo, back cover text, and pre-place a barcode.

Distribution to CreateSpace and Amazon. I can have my book on Amazon (for a lower royalty share) and CreateSpace just like that.

They provide Word templates. Their downloadable templates keep you from having to manually define the right and left page margins, headers, footers, copyright pages, dedication pages, etc.

THE BAD

The Cover Creator is limited. You don’t get to customize the font set for the spine text or back cover text or set the location of the author photo. You can set the background and text color for the back cover and spine cover, but the palette is pretty limited. I know, I know, you get what you pay for.

The templates are pretty imperfect. The downloadable templates they distribute contain font sets that aren’t supported by CreateSpace (Myriad Pro in the chapter footers) and they can’t interpret blank pages between chapters. So if you want to insert a blank page between chapters, so that each chapter starts on a right page for example, your blank page will still use a header and footer.

The pay services are expensive. I hate formatting in Microsoft Word just as much as the next guy, but I’m not going to pay over $300 for someone else to do it. I suppose if you know nothing about how to use templates and styles in Word it would be worth it, but I’ll do the work myself, thanks.

THE UGLY

The front cover. I had to modify my cover image in PhotoShop several times to get it to meet their standards. They don’t like any text too close to the margin, and to get it to look normal with the 6×9 cover I had to do some layer adjustment that took much longer than I would’ve liked.

Copy and paste. To get the template to play nice, and to not lose my spot in the manuscript, I had to copy and paste each chapter into the template, change the text styles, and modify each footer since it used a font style that wasn’t supported. Nothing feels more like a waste of time to me than copying and pasting, lather-rinse-repeat fashion.

So all in all, the goods outweighed the bad and the ugly, and it was certainly worth the time it took to format the interior and the cover. I’ll be getting my proof soon, and I’m ridiculously excited to hold an actual copy of my book in my hands!

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Six Sentence Sunday 12/8/2012

Published by Kelly on December 11, 2011

This is my first Six Sentence Sunday submission, from one of the chapters of The Redheaded Stepchild. Be sure to check out the other Six Sentence Sunday submissions at http://www.sixsunday.com!

“It’s a phase,” Leesha said after several minutes. “It’ll pass.” She continued working through the knots. She was determined to eventually kill the tender-headedness I’d had since I was a kid. Once all the knots were out, she put the comb back into the barbicide and went back to the store room my siblings and I took turns scrubbing to over-sterility to retrieve a ponytail holder.

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Wednesday Wrant – Your ads are showing…

Published by Kelly on December 7, 2011

I had a hard time decided which of the things I’m currently pissed off about to be pissed off enough to write about…

I finally landed on ad-stuffed blogs. I recently started back up with Google Reader so I can have a good list of self-publishing and author blogs to check out. It’s part of being an author, building relationships with others to help advance you books. The beauty of Google Reader is that I can just view the plain text of the posts – no fancy script, no colorful backgrounds, and most importantly, no ads.

Just reading isn’t enough, though. You have to comment on posts to build those relationships (plus it’s another avenue of exposure), which requires me to leave the relative comfort of Google Reader and go to the blog page, where I am immediately inundated with sidebar ads that go on for forever. I understand that people want to leverage their blogs to make a little extra cash on the side. I also know that building a website isn’t cheap. I begrudgingly renew my domain every year and pay the chunk of change to keep it going.

Let me just share a little bit of my own opinion here – if you’re writing an author blog to make money from ads, you’re doing it wrong. Your author site exists for the benefit of your readers and for you to spread the word about your books. Ads make your site look cheap and unprofessional, especially when you’re using a free site framework like Blogger or WordPress. And some of your ads are *really* egregious. Some of your ads aren’t even for things your readers and fellow authors would be interested in, at all. And you put ads in every single place one could possibly put an ad – in the banner, in the footer, in the left sidebar, in the right sidebar. This cheapens your content, which is what your readers are visiting your site to see.

Lucky for me, there’s AdBlock Plus 🙂

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The Art of Reviewing as Learned from Charles Dickens

Published by Kelly on December 4, 2011

This past week, I received my first reviews for The Redheaded Stepchild since I finished publishing it. (You can read the reviews here.) As part of my advertising strategy to be as non-invasive and un-icky as possible, I am using reviews heavily. What does that mean? Everything I read, I review. On Goodreads, or on the site of purchase (Amazon or Goodreads for me, usually). I try to keep my reviews as positive as possible, and when giving criticism, being as matter-of-fact as possible, offering something that could actually be helpful to the author.

I also make it a point to go through the other reviews posted and Like, Mark Helpful, or whatever the site has available. I find it gratifying for two reasons:

Some of these reviews are just plain hilarious. I just finished Oliver Twist and one of the Goodreads reviews was “Please, sir, may I have less?” Yeah, it’s pretty gorram wordy book. Thank you, pay-by-the word olde English publishers.
It makes me feel like I am in good company. If the great Charles Dickens, a household name known by everyone who’s ever read a book, ever, can get a bjillion negative reviews, I can get my first bad one and not feel like a total failure.

Luckily, my reviews thus far have been very positive, but they were both from friends, so they kinda have to be nice to me. When strangers who aren’t so keen on my writing style start buying it by the bushel (positive thinking, people… positive thinking), I’m sure I’ll get a scathing review or two. And that’s okay. I don’t expect everyone on the planet to dig my writing style, just as there are plenty of people out there who didn’t, and still don’t, like Charles Dickens’ writing style, the wordy bastard. Not to compare myself to Charles Dickens, but hey…

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NaNoWriMo, how’d I do?

Published by Kelly on December 2, 2011

National Novel Writing Month is now over. Those of you following my Twitter feed know that I didn’t “win” according to the NaNoWriMo rules, but I did exceed my personal goal. As I enter this NaNoWriMo refractory period after banging away at it hard and fast, I am definitely not going to get down on myself for not making 50,000 words, especially since it took me 3 years to write my first novel, and 4 more years of querying and editing to get it published.

So, I thought I would analyze my executive-friendly burndown chart and assess my performance…

This first week, I had a new client to write dating profiles for every single day. I guess no one likes being single during the holidays. Still, I got a good, steady start and got plenty of research done, too. Oh yeah, and I also was finishing editing and publishing The Redheaded Stepchild this week. That was kind of a priority…

This scary series of flatness was the long weekend that we had a houseguest so that we could tailgate and watch my Kansas State Wildcats beat the 4th Texas team in the Big 12 (why can’t they make NaNoWriMo not fall in the middle of college football season?) so I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done. As you can see, there was a nice spike the day I drove our guest to the airport.

I sprinted pretty fiercely this last week. It helped that we didn’t have to go to three different Thanksgiving dinners this year. These lines should actually be a little smoother, but since I logged a lot of my word counts after midnight, they’re a bit choppy.

So, why was NaNoWriMo good for me?

This writing project (which you can read about in this previous post) required that I actually talk to people to research a little bit. Like a lot of writers, I despise talking on the phone, and typically put off phone calls as long as I can. But because I was on a timeline, I didn’t have the luxury of putting it off. I had to pick up the phone, shoot off an email, or (for certain people) send a Facebook message (seriously folks? this is your primary form of communication now?). And keep in mind, I was asking some of them to tell me deeply personal stories of theirs and then getting their permission, as it were, to mass produce and bastardize these memories.

It did exactly what it’s designed to do – got me to just sit down and write. My typical day is writing tech manuals for 8 hours, doing my freelance writing job for a few more hours, so often the last thing I want to do after all that is write more. Not to mention I have to ship my ass to the gym so I don’t degrade into a complete slob and I have to take care of my family (okay, so it’s just my boyfriend and my dog, but this sounds more like an actual task). So having the looming deadline staring me in the face kicked me in the ass enough to just sit down and write, which is what I need.

Why was NaNoWriMo bad for me?

I’m guilty of edit-as-I-go writing. That’s not to say I don’t typically have an extended editing period once the draft is done (I’m not a complete idiot), but NaNoWriMo doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for polishing. Writing that first paragraph and moving on to the next without re-reading the first one twelve times – that’s a challenge for me. It took me out of my comfort zone a bit and forced me to limit the amount of polishing I could do on what I had already written.

Because life got in the way. I know, me and everyone else who signed up. Boo fucking hoo.

All in all, I’m glad I did it and will probably do it again. The stuff that I’ve managed to punch out in this month is pretty kick-ass, even if it’s not as polished as I’d like it to be. It just means my drafts are really just that – drafts.

I still need to actually fill out my NaNoWriMo page, but was too busy actually writing to do it. As a last note, The Redheaded Stepchild is featured in the Women’s Literary Cafe December promotion this week, so please give this a share to help me get more exposure. Gotta pay down those student loans…

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“The Redheaded Stepchild” featured in WLC New Release event

Published by Kelly on December 1, 2011

I do believe I am setting a personal record for earliest morning blog post. I’m usually not even up for another few minutes. Part of that, I think, is the excitement of being part of the December New Release book event by the Women’s Literary Cafe. I’m not exactly expecting people to line up at the bookstore for it, especially since there is no physical form to be had in bookstores, but I am hoping that I can see some traffic and get my name out there for my first novel.

This event is for independent authors, such as myself, who have recently released new books, so feel free to support any other independent authors with new releases that sound interesting to you.

Here’s a link to the event: WoMen’s Literary Cafe December New Release. Happy Holiday ebook shopping 🙂

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Wednesday Wrant: Coffee machines are polished turds

Published by Kelly on November 30, 2011

I use Twitter pretty prolifically for expressing my distaste for things, people, and events, but sometimes 140 characters just doesn’t cut it. It occurred to me that I really have no designated place to get my rant on from time to time, and having seen other author blogs do this week, I am adding a new feature to my site… Wednesday Wrant. The twist is, at some point, I plan to turn these rants into a manuscript of some kind, so stay tuned!

So, as the title might imply, my rant this week is about coffee pots. My fingerprints are, apparently rife with some kind of crazy Kryptonite for coffee machines. This is a fairly recent development, about the last four years or so. Before that, I always just kind of bought a cheap-o coffee pot because, hey, coffee is coffee, right? But a few years ago, when my boyfriend and I were dating, and lived in separate apartments, we each had our own cheap-o coffee pots. His was a little 4-cupper that he’d had for about eighty years, and the little on/off switch (yes, the kind you actually switch, not the button) finally stuck in the off position, meaning it was time for a new one.

He had some gift cardage to use up, so he decided to get a fancy-ish coffee pot to replace it. When we moved in together, I still had the coffee pot from my apartment, which we kept as a backup. The entire time we had the backup, nothing went wrong with our fancy-ish coffee pot. Fast forward to the time we move to Texas, where I still have the backup coffee pot at our old place while my boyfriend gets things ready at our place in Texas. There’s only so much stuff we can take, so I relinquish the backup coffee maker.

As soon as we finish moving me to Texas, our fancy coffee pot decides that it, too, prefers the power button in the off position, and it decides to stay there, as if it knows we have no backup coffee pot anymore. So our solution, naturally, is to go out and get a more expensive, fancier coffee maker. Fast forward four months, and the thing is now stuck on “clean”. I Googled the problem, which is apparently in our coffee pot’s model. Lots of people have had it, but no one has solved it. I tried running a few pots of water through it and unplugging it for a few hours, and the clean button finally went off, and it didn’t beep incessantly. I did a happy dance around the kitchen and did an Aaron Rodgers touchdown dance (or discount double-check, whichever you prefer), displaying my amazing human triumph over machine.

Until the next morning, when I went to brew a pot of coffee and the Clean button came back on. I pressed, and pressed it, trying to get it to go away. It just beeped at me. Thank you, fancy expensive coffee pot. I am just going to tell myself that you’re making nice, clean coffee for me, and buy your cheaper cousin when I inevitably break this one.

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Support Four Debut Authors and Snag $125!

Published by Kelly on November 27, 2011

I am working with a handful of other writers on a promotion for four debut authors I follow. Scratch your back, you scratch mine, you know how it is 🙂 If any of these books floats your boat, pick up a copy.

Four books. Two Days. Great Prizes.

With this contest, there is something for everyone and it’s SO simple to be in on the winning!

On November 28 and/or 29, purchase 1 or all 4 of the debut author’s books listed here. Then forward proof of purchase (the receipt Amazon sends you will do just fine) to : motionsrider@yahoo.ca and get up to 4 entries into a draw for a $100 Amazon gift card!

It’s that easy, no reviews, no hoops to jump through. Just a great .99 book or two. Or three or four. AND, if the person who wins the $100 Amazon Gift Card has purchased all 4 books, an additional $25 Amazon Gift Card will be awarded to the winner!

On top of that, 2 random commenter’s picked from 2 of our participating blogs will receive $5 gift Amazon gift cards. So, be sure to leave a comment and let us know what you think of the promo, the books, or the authors.

Winners will be chosen randomly, one entry per person, per book.

All winners will be announced on December 7^th on Wringing Out Words

“Between” by Cyndi Tefft

It just figures that the love of Lindsey Water’s life isn’t alive at all, but the grim reaper, complete with a dimpled smile, and Scottish accent.

After transporting souls to heaven for the last 300 years, Aiden MacRae has all but given up on finding the one whose love will redeem him and allow him entry through the pearly gates.

Torn between her growing attraction to Aiden and heaven’s siren song, Lindsey must learn the hard way whether love really can transcend all boundaries.

“Until Dawn: Last Light” by Jennifer Simas

When darkness falls, whose side will you be on?

For the past six years, Zoë has been anything but “normal.” Struggling to accept her immortality and thrown into a war that’s been waging in the shadows for over a thousand years, Zoë must now become who she was meant to be, joining the other Chosen to save what’s left of humanity. When the endless night falls over the Earth, will she be able to save the one man who reminds her of what it is to be human, or will it be too late?

Until Dawn: Last Light is a story of death and despair, love and longing, hope and hopelessness, and the ability to survive and keep going even when it seems impossible – when you want nothing more than to give up.

“The Kayson Cycle” by Jonathan D. Allen

A stranger enters a dying town and makes a desperate plea…

The Kayson Cycle introduces the Kayson Brothers, a pair of faith healers who once wowed crowds in a traveling show but went their separate ways after a night in which a healing took a dark turn. Jeffrey Kayson disappeared into the wilderness and William Kayson, wracked by guilt, moved to the failing mining town of Calico Hills to build a nice, quiet life – one that has lasted for over ten years.

His quiet, predictable life crumbles when a mysterious stranger walks into his tavern bearing a proposal to find his long-lost brother and do the one thing that William has sworn to never do again – have his brother heal a woman. William soon learns that he can’t escape his family – or his destiny.

Includes an exclusive sample chapter of The Corridors of the Dead. Please note that this is a Kindle Single, and around 6,000 words in length.

“Sundered” by Shannon Mayer

A miracle drug, Nevermore, spreads like wildfire throughout the world allowing people to eat what they want, and still lose weight. It is everything the human population has ever dreamed of and Mara is no different. Only a simple twist of fate stops her from taking Nevermore.

As the weeks roll by, it becomes apparent that Nevermore is not the miracle it claimed. A true to life nightmare, the drug steals the very essence that makes up humanity and unleashes a new and deadly species on the world that is bent on filling its belly. Locked down within their small farm home, Mara and her husband Sebastian struggle against increasingly bad odds, fighting off marauders and monsters alike.

But Sebastian carries a dark secret, one that more than threatens to tear them apart, it threatens to destroy them both and the love they have for each other.

Now Mara must make the ultimate choice. Will she live for love, or will she live to survive…

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Why you should write about Thanksgiving

Published by Kelly on November 26, 2011

I’ve been working on my second novel for a couple months now – a short story collection about women and their tattoos. The first chapter I wrote was about a tattoo done on Thanksgiving. I think it’s one of my stronger chapters, and it was also one of the easiest to write. Last night while I was trying (and failing) to fall back asleep, it occurred to me that the reason for that is because Thanksgiving is such a rich topic to write about. If you’re a writer looking for something to get the creative juices flowing, I suggest writing something about Thanksgiving. Why?

Great material for sensory images. You’ve got the visual, the gustatory, the olfactory, even the auditory and the tactile. I can’t even begin to think about Thanksgiving without smelling deep fried turkey.
Built-in conflict. Sometimes as writers we struggle to create conflict out of nothing. When it comes to Thanksgiving, there isn’t a single one I’ve had where there wasn’t some kind of drama floating about.
Opportunity for dialogue. People will talk about just about anything at Thanksgiving, to just about anybody.

So if you’ve never written about a Thanksgiving event, I challenge you to crank out a little flash fiction piece to get the juices flowing. Mmm… that makes me think of turkey.

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