Delle Jacobs's Blog, page 3

Trouble in Paradise

Jeff and Delle in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, 2006Things are not going well at home. Sorry I have not been posting much. We have some serious medical crises going and they're taking my time and energy right now. Very, very sick hubby. I'm putting up one of my favorite photos here for you all to see. this must seem like an odd mix of images, but that's me right now, an odd mix of emotions. And I think it's good to say there's nothing I've done in the way of writing and art that hasn't been influenced by Jeff.

I'm also making an effort to be doing what would, I hope, please you the most, writing more stories. It keeps me sane, but keeping my concentration is hard. I'll do my best to finish The Secret Heroine, a Regency in the more traditional vein which was previously published in 2004 as Lady Valiant.. To give you a little book cover eye candy, I'm posting the cover here. Also working on Beloved Stranger and hope it can be out soon.

Thanks to all of you for your support. It's good to know I don't always have to be smiling to have people care.

Mudlark Illustrated is FREE

Tuesday 11/27 through Thursday night 11/29, midnight. THE MUDLARK ILLUSTRATED is free, for its Kindle debut. I'm very curious to know how people feel about illustrated ebooks, especially romances, and historical romances. This one has about 35 illustrations made from engravings and photos, but I would guess most fiction if illustrated wouldn't have more than just a few illustrations.

So if you want to check it out, and let me know what you think, or just have fun with it, here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mudlark-Illustrated-ebook/dp/B00AB7WHKI/ref=zg_bs_158566011_f_70

 Right now it's the #12 Historical Romance on the Kindle Free list.

Illustrating for THE MUDLARK

Things sure get busy this time of year! Now that my three new Montlake books have been launched, I've been catching up with other projects. And night I finally finished and posted one of my most ambitious projects, THE MUDLARK, ILLUSTRATED. It went live on Kindle this morning and is available on the Kindle Prime Lending Library.

I lost track of exactly how many illustrations I have in the final version-somewhere around 35, and I was sad that I couldn't keep all of the ones I had designed. But I think I'll put up a page on my web-blog for all of them. I had about 70 total. Or maybe I'll find more uses for them in other books. I originally put up many of the illustrations in a running blog about 2 years ago, published at one chapter a day. It was fun, but I took it down because I needed to do a more professional job. Not all of those illustrations could be used, and I had some new ones I wanted to add.


I didn't make any strong attempt to stick to one style of illustrating because I was having a grand time finding old engravings and paintings and re-imagining them with modern photography and my own art to illustrate this particular story. I used the couple you see on the cover (Yuri Arcurs, photographer) in several illustrations partly because there are so many photos available and usually with their wonderfully brilliant smiles, but even more because they look to me just like I think Izzy and Tristan would look. But to place a modern photo against a 19th century engraving or watercolor means both images have to be stylistically manipulated to make them seem to fit together. This cover design, for instance. has the couple rendered int a sketch-like look, using the original photo to color it. But Izzy also is wearing a dress and shawl taken from a fashion plate in 1812 (and altered to fit). In the background, you see a re-rendering of a watercolor, Cascade at Rydal Water, by one of my favorite 19th century artists, Francis Nicholson.
Cartoon Tristan and Izzy against Berkeley Square engraving
On the other hand, I didn't mind at all using other photographic images to portray my characters, or to use engravings or paintings from different eras it they portrayed the story. Since there are sort of allegorical allusions to knights in shining armor and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, it was fun to use those pictorially too. For this story, a bad joke is every bit as useful as a good one.

So far, the main thing I can say is that I LEARNED A LOT. I didn't really have anyone who could tell me important things like how big illustrations could be, or what the resolution size should be. I'd seen a few books with a few photos in them, but nothing like what I wanted to do. I wanted the illustrations to be major contributors to the book's humor. This is not something I intend to do for every book I put out, and I'm sure not very many authors would want to try such a project. But many might want to add at least a few illustrations.

I'd gotten some guesses on maximum size for an ebook at "maybe 5 megabytes", but the reality is, nobody seems to know, and it probably has changed a lot. Since images take up so much more "room" in a file than text does, I thought the images would have to be very small, or low resolution, or if a decent size, limited in number. So my first mistake was starting off too small. The images had no real impact. And the little text banners I'd put on each one were so small, they couldn't be read. That defeated the whole purpose. So I "un-published" and went back to the original images which were much larger, and reduced to a "medium" size. They still weren't big enough. I had to publish and re-publish three times so far before I got it right, each time re-building the size I wanted from the original images. In some cases I was stuck with just enlarging an image that was pretty small in the first place, and those are just a bit fuzzy. But it can't be helped.
Cruikshank's Dandies Dressing
Another thing I learned in the second round of publishing was that the images didn't enlarge on the Kindle when I enlarged the text. They stay exactly the same. Darn. And they wouldn't center properly. Well, some would and others didn't, in spite of all the settings and positions being exactly the same.

Part of this is the difference between an ereader and a print book. The print book has no flexibility other than to re-print in a different edition. At least the ereader lets us have larger text if we need it. But it functions much like a computer when it comes to the screen. With a print book, an image needs to be high quality (sharp, high resolution). But for the ereader, getting the size large enough is more important. Somehow, my brain locked into the notion that the resolution needed to be high. I ended up setting most of the images at 100 dpi resolution, only about 1/3 of the original, but setting the maximum dimension in inches, at around 5 inches.

much better too smallThis resolution works just fine on most photos on a computer, and it's slightly better than what we commonly see on the internet, but think is just fine. But if I had used the full 300 dpi resolution for each image, the entire project would have been impossibly big, much too big to download. That's because each image would be 3 times as large in height, and also 3 times as wide, or a total of 9 times as big in terms of the amount of data in it.

Placing the images is different too. When I'm doing a blog, I often want the text to run alongside the images. And in books, we often see the type set to allow room for image placement alongside the text. But this doesn't work well on an ereader. In fact, I wonder if this problem can be worked out without making the text always a fixed size, something I don't want to see happen. Another problem is that text can break for the next "page" at any line. But you want any image to appear on the "page" all at once. You don't want to see only part of the image and then have to refresh the screen to see the rest.

So in setting up the document with images, I did a Page Break (Control + Enter on the PC) at the top of each image. For really large images, I did another Page Break at the bottom. But I found out that most of the time I had better flow if I allowed the text to immediately follow on the screen, so I omitted the bottom Page Break. By setting the maximum size of the image at 5 inches, I'm assured that whether the reader uses his Kindle Fire in landscape or portrait mode, the image will display on the screen all at one time.

Sometimes there are the oddest sort of errors that just won't go away. When I downloaded the book the third time, I saw that the image at the beginning of Chapter 5 was still duplicated at the end of Chapter 4, and overlaying some of the text in a very odd way. But it wasn't visible on the original document. No mark or anything to indicate an image was there. I'd already tried deleting the correct image and replacing it, thinking it might be some kind of ghost or mirror of that one. I'd seen something like this happen in blog entries and the only way to fix it for someone like me who doesn't know code is to delete the section and replace it with a clean one. It's darn hard to delete something you can't see!

So this time, using the Kindle Fire to show me this mirage image, I went back to the original and deleted from a few sentences before to a few after the image. I pasted this to a new document blank page, meaning to go back to the original for clean replacement copy. But as soon as I pasted, the "ghost image" re-appeared. I just deleted it and then re-copied the section to put back into the final document. It looks like it worked.

SUPER RELEASE DAY CONTEST!Read Excerpt HereFaerie release...

SUPER RELEASE DAY CONTEST! Read Excerpt Here
Faerie releases Oct. 9, 2012 and to celebrate, I'm running a SUPER contest.
1st Prize is winners choice between:
a mint condition Barbie and Ken Collectors set of Jude Devereaux's The Raider OR a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate
(Sorry, the dolls are limited to USA residents due to shipping problems. Gift certificates sent outside USA might be limited by usage outside USA. Some sort of substitution will be worked out if so.)
Ten 2nd Prizes of a $10 Amazon Gift Certificate 
Contest ends Tuesday midnight PST, Oct. 16, 2012.
No purchase necessary but it is always appreciated. And "liking" the book is good too.

To enter: Go to website http://dellejacobs.blogspot.com to find the question you must answer (IT'S EASY!), which will be posted prominently on the main page. Then find the answer on the Amazon book page for Faerie .Email your answer to me at delle@dellejacobs.com


One entry per person for this site, but I will give each contestant a chance to earn two more entries for the same prizes by finding answers for my other two Montlake books. Just give me a little bit to come up with details like what those questions and answers will be.

SUPER RELEASE DAY CONTEST!Faerie releases Oct. 9, 2012&nb...

SUPER RELEASE DAY CONTEST!
Faerie releases Oct. 9, 2012 and to celebrate, I'm running a SUPER contest.
1st Prize is winners choice between:
a mint condition Barbie and Ken Collectors set of Jude Devereaux's The Raider OR a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate
(Sorry, the dolls are limited to USA residents due to shipping problems. Gift certificates sent outside USA might be limited by usage outside USA. Some sort of substitution will be worked out if so.)
Ten 2nd Prizes of a $10 Amazon Gift Certificate 
Contest ends Tuesday midnight PST, Oct. 16, 2012.
No purchase necessary but it is always appreciated. And "liking" the book is good too.
To enter:Go to website http://dellejacobs.blogspot.com to find the question you must answer (IT'S EASY!), which will be posted prominently on the main page. Then find the answer on the Amazon book page for Faerie .Email your answer to me at delle@dellejacobs.com
One entry per person for this site, but I will give each contestant a chance to earn two more entries for the same prizes by finding answers for my other two Montlake books. Just give me a little bit to come up with details like what those questions and answers will be.

FAERIE Release Coming Up Fast!

Look at this wonderful quote from Delilah Marvelle!

"Beautiful and mesmerising, history and magic collide in this incredible, sweeping romance youwon't ever forget.  Faerie is absolutely enchanting!"

Delilah Marvelle, http://delilahmarvelle.com 

 Winner of RT's Best Sensual Historical Romance of the Year
I'm so tickled with this wonderful e-flyer Montlake sent out. Not only does it focus on FAERIE, but it also spotlights some of my other books.

The Pre-Orders are going fast, and already the book is moving up high in the rankings.
Pre-Orders are really important because they help position the book advantageously on the day of release. And that's great. But that's not all. Because it's drawing attention, but isn't available yet, it is leading readers to find my other books, and some of those are climbing rapidly in ranking. LADY WICKED, THE MUDLARK and HIS MAJESTY, THE PRINCE OF TOADS are all selling wildly, in addition to the two previous Montlake releases, LOKI'S DAUGHTERS and FIRE DANCE.

This is one thing I love about ebooks. They all have their cycles that rise and fall. But ebooks
aren't limited to just one cycle. They can be found again by a whole new group of readers over
and over again.. 

Celebrate with me! Giveaway!

Won't bore you with the details of success for my newest releases, so instead I'm doing a giveaway to celebrate and encourage you to give them a boost into the Best Seller ranks. (LOKI'S DAUGHTERS is just a few sales short of making the Historical Romance list.)

PLEASE READ INSTRUCTIONS! DON'T POST YOUR EMAIL ADDRESSES HERE-THAT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY. INSTEAD, SEND ME A MESSAGE ON FACEBOOK EMAIL OR TO: delle@dellejacobs.com

This giveaway is good until tonight at 10:00 pm. It will be repeated several times in the next week so you can have lots of chances. You can enter only once per day, please.

1. FREE five copies of either LOKI'S DAUGHTERS OR FIRE DANCE to the first five people who send me a valid email address to send it. Or if they've already got both and don't want a copy to give to someone else, they can have a free copy of FAERIE when it releases on Oct. 9 (not sure if it's possible to give FAERIE away before its release date).
2. I'll give away TEN $1 Amazon gift certificates to the first ten people who ask for those.
3. Any names received after these will go into a drawing pool for more books and more options.
4. ONLY IF YOU WANT, I will also sign you up for my newsletter. Or you can sign up on your own by checking out the newsletter link on my blog, http://dellejacobs.blogspot.com/

Many thanks to all of you for your friendship and support!

Watching the Numbers

One thing I love about being an independent author as well as an Amazon Montlake author is the way I can watch the numbers pretty much as they happen. With my Indie books, I can see both their rankings and their sales numbers, although with the Montlake books I don't have the exact sales counts. But with the two combined, I can get a strong concept of sales as well as compare with what's happening in promotion and other influences.

In the long run, three days of statistics don't seem to say very much. But watching the movements for different books at the point when some new books have come out tells me a lot about how books sell, what might influence that, and what reader prefer.

Here's what intrigues me right now:

Yesterday: FIRE DANCE and LOKI'S DAUGHTERS were released. They started out a bit slow, but that didn't surprise me since each of those books has a long history and over 130,000 books in circulation. The sale started to mount, but didn't jump off the charts.This is kind of normal for my books, which usually start catching on once word of mouth gets going. There had been some sales the night before, too. But I don't know if those were pre-orders or if the book was already being delivered.

By the end of yesterday, LOKI was doing very well, with FIRE DANCE not quite keeping up. But interestingly, my other books were picking up steam. I did put up a new cover for HIS MAJESTY, THE PRINCE OF TOADS, which might account for some of the gain. And more surprising was the rise of FAERIE in the rankings, even though it hasn't been released yet.

Today: Rankings started the morning a little lower than they were the night before, but then started picking up steam again. FIRE DANCE started catching up with LOKI. But then I started watching the others. The last I looked, FAERIE pre-orders were moving into the range of my already released books, and all of those older releases except one were continuing to climb. Books that had been out several years and had dwindled to maybe a few sales a month were suddenly back in the ranks of real competitors. Will they stay there long?

I hadn't done much with those older books in the last few months, being so busy with the upcoming releases. And we all know that book sales almost always follow a standard bell curve, that varies in both length and height, according to the success of the book. So I mostly figured those books had done their jobs and would continue to sell mildly as people looked for the back list.

BUT: has that changed? I saw last year that four of my books, each in their turn, took off rapidly, reached a peak, then dropped off, only to repeat this pattern one to three times. Will there be yet another rise and fall? Just how much does the introduction of one new book affect the older ones?

Well, I don't know. But maybe we're about to find out.

Conflict in Our Fiction, Conflict in Our World

When I first learned two of my Montlake books would release on September 11, all kinds of emotions zinged through me. A very strange time for the excitement of releasing books. But I didn't ask to have my release date changed. Why? Wouldn't a less somber day be better? Maybe. But I think perhaps I have something to say. And fiction often gives us a safe way to explore painful things.

It's a day that will always bring me to my knees on its anniversary. It was a pivotal day that changed our world forever. Nearly three thousand people died as a result of those attacks.We've had eleven years of war, of vengeance, of sorrow, of pain. And we're not done yet. We will never be done.

I was still doing social work when I wrote these two books, and Social Workers deal with a lot of painful, ugly stuff. We might start doing the job because we feel we have a lot of answers, but it isn't long before we realize we don't know much after all. But when I started writing fiction, I discovered that in making myself go inside the heads, becoming the characters I wrote,  I was gaining insight into people. I was learning in a different way why people do the things they do.

While LOKI'S DAUGHTERS began in the idle, silly musings of a stormy Sunday afternoon with two of my grown kids, I realized the world of a thousand years ago was a harsh one, full of violence, superstition, anger, death-not a funny place. Yet one thing I'd learned about people is that they don't just quit because life isn't fun. And somehow,even if only in the little moments, they find joy. They can turn the oddest things into humor. Gallows humor, it's often called.

I also realized I had two opposing groups of people, both groups (I was thinking originally of races) don't know much about the other, and don't think of their opponents as worthy of being called humans.  In a college course on Culture Clash, I had been told that when cultures meet, they clash. Both cultures have their belief systems, their world views, and it's not just a simple matter of talking things over and agreeing to disagree. A group that has different beliefs and actions is a threat to the other's way of life- to their life as a culture. And things can be pretty calm initially but later on as the cultures come closer together, the conflict usually increases. These days, the most obvious conflict is with the increasing numbers of Hispanics in the USA. However we choose to look at it, there's an aspect and a feeling of threat on both sides.



When I first published FIRE DANCE, I sent a copy to a friend in England, who read it. It deals with one of the most impacting events in English history, the Norman Conquest and settlement. She had a lot of comments, but the one that stuck with me was that she had a hard time sympathizing with the Norman hero because she was a direct descendant of Hereward the Wake, a famous leader of resistance against the Normans. (Read about him-he's fascinating.) Nine hundred years after the Conquest, people in England are still taking sides. But in their time, what the Normans did wasn't all that unusual. They saw, they conquered.  

Culture clash was as real a thousand years ago as it is today. Muslims and Christians don't do things the same way. As groups, each feels threats from the beliefs and actions of the other. The term Infidel  means far more than "unbeliever", and it's been around since the Crusades. Yet despite this seemingly impossible to surmount conflict, somehow people did begin to blend, meet, marry, get along. Not all of them, not all the time. But that's just as true today in most rather ordinary families.

How could the Celts, Angles and Saxons of the Dark Ages possibly have looked on the invaders from Norway, Sweden, Denmark as human when they saw their kin hacked to pieces or carried off to slavery? But if they'd had a good grasp on their own history, they might have known that their ancestors invaded the British Isles in pretty much the same way. They hadn't just pushed the original inhabitants into boats and said, "Go find someplace else to live". In fact, DNA testing shows that not many of those earliest people survive in today's gene pool.

Even not knowing that, probably the ordinary people of 9th century Britain were just farmers, gatherers and herders, and they weren't well-equipped to fight or resist attack. They just wanted to survive. And the invaders? Why did they think taking from the inhabitants was acceptable? One thing we're sure of is that the Northern people who came to the British Isle wouldn't have had much influence if they'd just raided and left. Their dramatic influence on everything from language and customs to genetics of the British people says they came to stay, not just raid. And in the end, they were really more like the Celts, Angles, Saxons and others than they were different.

So who's human and who's not? Why do our cultures enforce our beliefs that "we" are the good people and "they" are not worthy? In thousands of years, we have not solved this problem. Will we ever?

I don't know. Do you? What do you think? When will we all be human? I do believe, though, that through all their turmoil and pain, people as a group keep on being people. They do fall in love. They do learn to love. They do care about and help each other. Whatever happens around them, they don't stop living.

My Big Promo Ad!

I was going to post something else today, but this is what I got from Montlake, so I had to show it off!
Links don't work-it's for release tomorrow.