David T. Allen's Blog, page 7

Robot Wars

Frank cleared his throat before he turned on the mic. This battle would be the defining moment of his career as a BattleBot announcer. He had to get it right.

“It is going to be a doozy here in Dining Room Arena,” his voice rang out, rich and deep. “While this illustrious hall has held countless ruthless battles, surely today’s match will go down in the annuls of history as the most shocking, the most brutal, the most,” he paused for dramatic effect, “deadly. That’s right folks, today is the...

Sprint 4: April Edition

The majority of this week is in April, so it’s time for a new sprint! Despite a bottleneck in March, we accomplished a lot and had fun doing it. Either the weather’s getting better or we’re starting to figure out this work-life balance thing.

Sprint 3 Retrospective

The week dividers we implemented last month created mini goals that kept us motivated and focused. Our perspective changed from “I have twenty things left this month” to “I only have two things left this week.”

Having Fun...

Mailman Delivers Dave a Magazine During Haircut

I’ve been complaining about how I needed a haircut since I played board games with Mike in December. You see, Leslie and I don’t like meetings very much, and scheduling a haircut is sort of like a meeting. Leslie finally decided to give me a haircut. She’s never given a haircut before, and I was fine with shaving my head if it didn’t come out right.

I always shave outside because I hate cleaning whiskers from out of the sink. Normally it’s on a Saturday, so I often exchange awkward c...

Dave Gets a Haircut

I’ve been complaining about how I needed a haircut since I played board games with Mike in December. You see, Leslie and I don’t like meetings very much, and scheduling a haircut is sort of like a meeting. Leslie finally decided to give me a haircut. She’s never given a haircut before, and I was fine with shaving my head if it didn’t come out right.

I always shave outside because I hate cleaning whiskers from out of the sink. Normally it’s on a Saturday, so I often exchange awkward c...

Working With Artists: Torch Goose Press Logo

Since we purchased ISBNs from Bowker and were able to associate them with a publishing company, we debated using Torch Goose Press or 150 Degree Books (after the temperature I prepare my matcha at). We asked around, and Torch Goose Press was preferred. (Also, Leslie preferred 195 Degree Books since that’s the temperature she uses for her black tea.) I wanted to add a logo, so I turned to our friend, Lana Hayes.

I thought to ask Lana because she had posted some of her recent work online and it caught my eye.

 

 

You can find Lana’s other work on instagram @meltbot.

I started by sending her an email explaining what we were looking for. I took pictures of existing logos for comparison and to show how small it could be. The size matters, because finer details will be lost when you scale a large image down.

 

 

It’s important to provide an idea of what you’re looking for when working with an artist, web designer, etc. Try to make it as easy as possible for them to get started. After all, they can’t read your mind.

I also made a few sketches to demonstrate an idea of what we were going for. Please don’t laugh :-)

 

 

Lana responded:

I love your drawings! The one made me laugh because it kind of looks like a goose who had a long night at the bar and walked to the back alley to puke real quick before heading back in to continue his night. I'm not mocking, I just liked the image it planted in my mind. Change your name to vomiting goose.

We went through a few iterations, and this is what Lana sent us over the next week:

 

 

She converted it to a vector so we can easily scale it:

 

 

And we couldn’t be happier.

I’ll end the article with some of Lana’s other works:

 

 

Kindle Formatting: Huge Image in Preview

With confidence, I pushed the publish button on Amazon. I knew I had worked out the formatting bugs in Dream Eater’s Carnival. Everything looked great in the official Kindle Previewer app. A few hours later, I previewed my book on Amazon to find a giant middle finger in the shape of a fleuron.

 

 

Before you get too far, I should warn you that this article is about me experimenting with images in epubs and publishing to Kindle for the first time. I do not recommend anything I did here, but I hope you learn something about how Kindle works or how to troubleshoot formatting issues.

At first, I used the hedera’s utf-8 character (❧). But that didn’t work when I converted my epub to a mobi file using calibre, so I was worried this character would be incompatible with certain e-readers. I didn’t want a different epub file for Kindle, Nook, iBook, Kobo, and at the time, I was committed to releasing on all major e-readers. I decided to use a transparent image for the fleuron since I thought that was the best path for being supported on all major e-readers.

The image caused a few problems, most notably transparency issues. I was worried that anti-aliasing would look bad for people who liked reading with a black or sepia background.

 

 

I wanted to deal with only two colors: black and transparent. But this could cause jagged edges.

So I had an idea: make an image that was only black and transparent, but make it big and scale it down using image attributes. I was hoping the device would apply anti-aliasing to make the edges smooth but still respect a sepia or black background.

Here was my image:

 

 

I used attributes to scale the image down in the epub:

 

 

I then previewed it in calibre with a gray background:

 

 

The image was the size I had hoped for and the edges seemed smooth, so I published it to Kindle.

When I clicked preview on Amazon, I saw this:

 

 

… it did not respect my attributes.

An older version of the book was already downloaded to all of my Kindle apps, and I didn’t know how to refresh it at the time. (If you’re curious, you have to ask Amazon support to refresh it).

My solution was to make the fleuron image smaller, but not as small as I wanted it to render in the epub. I hoped the device would still anti-alias my image and it would look fine in the preview. Here is how I created the image, using a mixture of software on Windows 8 and Linux Mint:

 

 

I imported it into Sigil:

 

 

… and I left the height/width attributes intact.

[image error]

Now, the fleuron isn’t huge in the preview. The height and width attributes are ignored by the preview, but the actual image isn’t much bigger, so it shouldn’t be noticeable.

 

 

But I’m not sure that the edges are being properly anti-aliased on all devices.

In the future, I might experiment more with the hedera utf-8 character or with vectors (svg). But at the time, I had spent days tweaking the formatting. After each upload, you have to wait twelve hours before you can upload a new file. I settled on this solution as “good enough,” because I didn’t think investing more time would’ve added noticeable value.

Lessons learned:

Don’t make mobi files with Calibre to upload to Amazon.

Aside from the cover, include images that are around the size you want to render them as.

Sprint 3: March Edition

It’s March 1st, and you know what that means: Sprint Planning Day! We learned a lot in February and are making a few adjustments this month.

The day started like many Sundays: getting brunch with our friends. But first, we had to let out Leslie’s brother’s dogs.

 

 

Garett and Lauren will be leaving for their second farming internship, so it was important to send them off with omelets and mimosas. It was a pleasure to dine with Travis and Jeff – we haven’t seen them much since winter started.

 

 

Let’s look at what happened in February.

Sprint 2 Retrospective

We decided against publishing Dream Eater’s Carnival in sprint 1 since all beta readers pointed out similar issues. The plan for sprint 2 was for Leslie to continue submitting Echo Chamber Heist chapters to our critiquing group while Dave focused on publishing Dream Eater’s Carnival.

In short, it worked! Dream Eater’s Carnival was published February 21, 2015 on Kindle.

 

 

It was a hard month because we were essentially managing three projects: the website, publishing Dream Eater’s Carnival, and progressing with Echo Chamber Heist.

Leslie

Leslie was a bit too ambitious on February 1. She did incredibly well, but there were a few obstacles.

First, she joined an intense critique group that required her to critique about 18,000 words and to post 6,000 words a week. We discovered that hard deadlines actually demotivated her. The group was a six week commitment and is over soon.

Additionally, the chapters she worked on were much rougher than the ones she edited in January. All of the Echo Chamber Heist chapters were set aside over a year ago when we took a break from them to write Dream Eater’s Carnival, so she hadn’t realized how much harder they would be to fix.

Finally, she helped me finish beta reader and proofreading edits, which we hadn’t originally planned for.

Dave

With the help of Leslie, I was able to publish Dream Eater’s Carnival to Kindle at the end of February. I would have liked to finish more but we faced a lot of issues with ebook formatting. Work also took a lot of time, and I injured my wrists. I began using Windows 8’s speech recognition software to type. I desperately need a better microphone.

 

 

We decided to not focus on publishing on other stores, such as Kobo, iBooks, and Barnes and Noble. From what I read, Kindle is the friendliest to new indie authors, and many of their best features aren’t available to authors who publish on other platforms.

 

 

I also updated the styling of our website, which was unplanned.

Takeaways

Do not enter entangling alliances. Leslie and I are incompatible with rigid schedules. Twice now we’ve entered strict critique groups and both times we were less productive.

Leslie and I are a little too focused on the cork board. We need to schedule time for cleaning the house, cooking, and having fun. Once we realized this, Leslie bought groupons for a burlesque show and paragliding.

 

 

Kindle publishing tools have inconsistent formatting. I’ll write articles about the difficulties we faced later, and maybe I’ll published a sample ebook to compare how it renders across their apps.

Finishing things feels good. Real good. Publishing Dream Eater’s Carnival has lifted a huge weight off of our shoulders.

March’s Board

This month, Leslie will focus on polishing the chapters we’ve written over the past five years.

I will research marketing. From what I’ve read, marketing isn’t that helpful when you only have one book, but I want to experiment, and that takes time.

I should have enough flexibility to edit a few chapters for Echo Chamber Heist and outline the later chapters. As a stretch goal, I’d like to release a book of short stories in the next year or two. I brainstormed a short story over coffee with Leslie and will try to finish a draft of it this month.

Let’s look at March’s board:

 

 

We pinned thread to divide our goals into weeks. This should help us focus on the most important goals instead of just the things we want to do, and also give us feedback on our progress at the end of each week.

Leslie also scheduled four “No Book” days. It may seem counterintuitive but we think this will increase happiness and productivity. Also, it should force us to do new things.

We added our finished tasks to the work complete jar. Zug-zug.

 

 

Bloopers

 

 

Sprint 3 - March Edition

It’s March 1st, and you know what that means: Sprint Planning Day! We learned a lot in February and are making a few adjustments this month.

The day started like many Sundays: getting brunch with our friends. But first, we had to let out Leslie’s brother’s dogs.

 

 

Garett and Lauren will be leaving for their second farming internship, so it was important to send them off with omelets and mimosas. It was a pleasure to dine with Travis and Jeff – we haven’t seen them much since winter started.

 

 

Let’s look at what happened in February.

Sprint 2 Retrospective

We decided against publishing Dream Eater’s Carnival in sprint 1 since all beta readers pointed out similar issues. The plan for sprint 2 was for Leslie to continue submitting Echo Chamber Heist chapters to our critiquing group while Dave focused on publishing Dream Eater’s Carnival.

In short, it worked! Dream Eater’s Carnival was published February 21, 2015 on Kindle.

 

 

It was a hard month because we were essentially managing three projects: the website, publishing Dream Eater’s Carnival, and progressing with Echo Chamber Heist.

Leslie

Leslie was a bit too ambitious on February 1. She did incredibly well, but there were a few obstacles.

First, she joined an intense critique group that required her to critique about 18,000 words and to post 6,000 words a week. We discovered that hard deadlines actually demotivated her. The group was a six week commitment and is over soon.

Additionally, the chapters she worked on were much rougher than the ones she edited in January. All of the Echo Chamber Heist chapters were set aside over a year ago when we took a break from them to write Dream Eater’s Carnival, so she hadn’t realized how much harder they would be to fix.

Finally, she helped me finish beta reader and proofreading edits, which we hadn’t originally planned for.

Dave

With the help of Leslie, I was able to publish Dream Eater’s Carnival to Kindle at the end of February. I would have liked to finish more but we faced a lot of issues with ebook formatting. Work also took a lot of time, and I injured my wrists. I began using Windows 8’s speech recognition software to type. I desperately need a better microphone.

 

 

We decided to not focus on publishing on other stores, such as Kobo, iBooks, and Barnes and Noble. From what I read, Kindle is the friendliest to new indie authors, and many of their best features aren’t available to authors who publish on other platforms.

 

 

I also updated the styling of our website, which was unplanned.

Takeaways

Do not enter entangling alliances. Leslie and I are incompatible with rigid schedules. Twice now we’ve entered strict critique groups and both times we were less productive.

Leslie and I are a little too focused on the cork board. We need to schedule time for cleaning the house, cooking, and having fun. Once we realized this, Leslie bought groupons for a burlesque show and paragliding.

 

 

Kindle publishing tools have inconsistent formatting. I’ll write articles about the difficulties we faced later, and maybe I’ll published a sample ebook to compare how it renders across their apps.

Finishing things feels good. Real good. Publishing Dream Eater’s Carnival has lifted a huge weight off of our shoulders.

March’s Board

This month, Leslie will focus on polishing the chapters we’ve written over the past five years.

I will research marketing. From what I’ve read, marketing isn’t that helpful when you only have one book, but I want to experiment, and that takes time.

I should have enough flexibility to edit a few chapters for Echo Chamber Heist and outline the later chapters. As a stretch goal, I’d like to release a book of short stories in the next year or two. I brainstormed a short story over coffee with Leslie and will try to finish a draft of it this month.

Let’s look at March’s board:

 

 

We pinned thread to divide our goals into weeks. This should help us focus on the most important goals instead of just the things we want to do, and also give us feedback on our progress at the end of each week.

Leslie also scheduled four “No Book” days. It may seem counterintuitive but we think this will increase happiness and productivity. Also, it should force us to do new things.

We added our finished tasks to the work complete jar. Zug-zug.

 

 

Bloopers

 

 

Dream Eater’s Carnival on Kindle

Our debut novella Dream Eater’s Carnival was published this week to Amazon Kindle!

 

 

I started outlining the Bitlather Chronicles series five years ago while living in Japan. Leslie joined me a year later. After nine combined years of effort, we finally have something to show for it.

A lot of people helped make this possible. We collected over a hundred critiques from dozens of people before we felt confident publishing. I can’t show my thanks enough, because really, it was their input that helped shape the Bitlather Chronicles into what it is today.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Tom Banwell Designs. His Ichabod mask inspired the cover art.

We’ve been incredibly lucky to have enthusiastic friends and family to share our story with.

Leslie’s brother, Jacob Anderson, helped us from beginning to end. He read anything we put before him, often several times, and wasn’t afraid to tell us where we missed the mark. Even if it was something we really didn’t want to hear, the day before we intended to push the publish button. Twice.

Karen Rubin and Joseph Hagerty were among the first willing to read anything we had written, and their early feedback helped shape the rest of the story. Though Dave still kind of misses the name Faust and struggled with toward vs towards until the bitter end.

Amanda Connery, Rebekah Rodriguez, Kyle Liebert, and Zadi Green provided us with early beta-reads and their comments and critiques helped bolster our nerve and whittle away at our shortcomings.

Kelli Seaman’s resolute hatred of the monkey gave us the energy to keep working even when we just wanted to be done with it.

Our dear friend Lauren Brush for showing continued interest and for reading a late revision. Fresh eyes are always appreciated.

Lana Hayes designed our adorable Torch Goose Press logo, and we couldn’t be happier with it.

Dave’s father, Richard Allen, for showing continued interest in beta reading.

Linda Weidemann, Lyric Bowser, Patrick Neville, Kyle Washkau, Chris Klamut, Dave Foran, Jeff Drengler, and Jonathan Applebury provided critiques of the cover art that were invaluable. Thanks, Linda, for verifying that there was only one Dream Eater in the story, since apostrophes can spell disaster.

And finally, Clark Magnan, Kristen Kooistra, Angela Castillo, Chloe Rivers, Melanie Brooke, Cayenne Michaels, D.D. Merette, Kayleen Eggert, L.E. Deedy, Eric A. Schweitz, Sierra Kummings, Feath Pym, Sofia St. John, and Helena Eveningfall are all simply the best. They each spent countless hours providing in-depth feedback on everything from word choice to story arc.

Blog Redesign

I just tweaked the design a few days ago, but I had some ideas while on the treadmill. Remember, I’m not a designer and I want to invest most of my time on writing.

 

 

I added a touch of color. Picking colors is very difficult. Basically, I found a color I liked then slid the hue around to find a primary and secondary color. The primary color was hard to read on regular sized links, so I had to choose a darker secondary color.

I also moved the title, Bitlather Chronicles, to the navigation bar. This saved some vertical space and looks less empty when viewed on a cell phone.

Also notice I inverted serifs. Header tags now use serifs, and just about everything else uses sans-serif. I like keeping both because it helps headers stand out.

 

 

I changed the styling on tags at the bottom of the article.

While falling asleep one night, I realized we could show pictures from the articles in list of blog articles. I thought this would make articles more appealing, and it was the major reason I updated the design again in such a short time.

I also like having an article summary with the blog title, so I updated related articles and random articles.

 

 

I made blog filters stand out more. I also cleaned up the paginator.

 

 

Not much has changed on the books page that I haven’t already discussed.

 

 

Reskinning the site was easy because I originally built it with a focus on functionality and content.

I’d like the design to fit the steampunk aesthetic better some day, but that’s beyond my skill level right now.