Zoe L. Banks's Blog, page 23
April 23, 2015
April 19, 2015
Meet Nani Flores
April 18, 2015
“Brushing his lips over hers Jackson took her lower lip in his...
“Brushing his lips over hers Jackson took her lower lip in his mouth and softly pulled gently sucking. She made a small sound and let him tease her mouth open wider while he pulled her body into his.”
~ Nani was a stripper yesterday and today she’s fighting for her life. Luckily a pretty boy control freak vampire is there to help her, but she’s no ordinary human, she’s a de novo and can take care of herself.
April 16, 2015
How Kindle made me a paranormal romance fan
So there I was immersed in a new book that Kindle’s recommendation algorithm had determined I would enjoy: J.T. Geissenger’s Shadows Edge (Book One of Night Prowler Series) when BOOM! all of a sudden the two main characters love scene was getting a bit graphic. While the last thing that anyone would call me is a prude, I’m a rabid fantasy fan and love scenes are usually glossed over with few details so it was a bit exhilarating to find myself reading about throbbing…well this blog is PG-13 so you get the drift. Shadows Edge was a good read in itself so of course I ran through the whole series in no time and chomped at the bit for the next Kindle recommendation which is how I discovered Lindsay Prior’s Blackthorn Series Book One Black Shadows. It went on and on for the last year where I discovered Dannika Darks Seven Series then read a paranormal romances that weren’t so great until I found K.F. Breene’s Darkness Series. Of course I read so many paranormal romance novels that I eventually was inspired to write my own Firefly, Book One of the De Novo Chronicles which is a series mixing science and fantasy and of course a bit of sex.
April 13, 2015
Superwoman
So some of my friends asked me how I managed to write a book when holding down a full time job amongst other responsibilities (like being a mom to a 13 year old!) Well, the gist of it is this: I’m not superwoman, but I sure am persistent. A lot of days I only had around a half hour to write in between a 3hr daily commute, working out, helping with homework, and oh yeah - that job thing. But, it took me around seven months to write my first book Firefly by simply working on it when I had the time. Everyone has time to fit in their passions into busy schedules, you just have to do it even if it’s only ten minutes a day!
March 31, 2015
Inspiration for Jacques Larouche
Inspiration for Jacques Larouche
Inspiration for Jacques Larouche aka Jackson
For my first book Firefly, Book One of the De Novo Chronicles I had a hard time imagining the hero Jackson Larouche. I knew I wanted him to be a regal classic pretty boy and after hours of searching I found my muse!
Dreamy Jackson with his perfect wavy black hair and his glacier blue eyes was inspired by none other than model Francis Cadieux
March 29, 2015
Self-publishing gotchas
So I finally got around to fulfilling my childhood dream of becoming an author. I plugged away in the evenings after my day job and spent a good amount of my weekends focused on: world building, character development and getting in touch with the emotions and motivations of Nani Flores and Jacques Larouche my two main characters (and lets not forget dreaming up steamy love scenes). Around seven months later I had a finished product. Not perfect, but something I was happy with.
I’ve read about the rejections that new authors have faced in trying to get a deal with a publisher and though that wasn’t exactly daunting I got an overwhelming amount of suggestions to self-publish. So, I decided for my first book to swing it myself and it was both easier and harder than I imagined. I’m going to share some of the pitfalls I fell in that will hopefully help another noob author trying to self-publish their first book.
1. Get someone to read your book that is a teacher, editor, or anyone in the business of correcting grammar because even if you have a degree in writing or are confident in your ability to self-edit, think again. YOU WILL MISS SOMETHING. And sometimes that something is important.
2. Amazon Kindle formatting will sometimes not be compatible with your word processing software formatting. So, double check all your chapter formatting, table of contents, etc and make sure it looks good in the Kindle preview and works as expected.
3. If you published and found a mistake note that if you contact Kindle help in the self-publishing department in order to ask them to contact the customers who already bought your book they will review your book and if they find something else (like ill-formatted table of contents for example) then they will pull your title down until you fix it to their satisfaction, regardless of what you originally asked them to do.
4. Don’t use preformatted book formatting in Word - I can’t say this for sure but it might be why I had an issue with properly formatting my table of contents. I’ve had so much trouble with getting my table of contents to work on Kindle, for now I’ve given up and removed it. Yes, I followed the directions on how to accomplish this for both Windows and Mac versions of Word, but while it works fine in the Word doc once I upload it the table of contents redirects to the wrong page. If you have run into this issue and figured out the problem please let me know what it was.
5. Ask people to review your book! I haven’t done this yet and I plan to make it my next step, but I’ve seen authors have sign ups for reading a pre-released version of their book in exchange for a Goodreads or Kindle review and I will definitely be doing this for the De Novo Chronicles, book two: Atomizer!
Hope these tips help someone else on their journey to self-publishing!
March 25, 2015
Paranormal Romance Recomendations
Here’s a link to a new page on my blog that recommends my favorite paranormal romance authors!
