Delle Jacobs's Blog, page 6

So you probably think I'm not doing anything. Not so. In ...

So you probably think I'm not doing anything. Not so. In fact, working on books and covers has kept me pretty darn busy, and then there have been some personal things come up that have been a bit-- well, let's just say, emotionally and physically demanding. And I hate the way Face Book has suddenly cut me off from all my friends and fans, and now I have to go back and re-configure to find them again. I'm not very good at that, but I'll figure it out.

But I did have time for another  whimsical cover design (hey a person needs to have a little fun now and then). It doesn't belong to any book. But when I saw this lovely lady, originally dressed in white, I thought what a wonderful cover she'd make. And this is what came out. My mind connected it with the Wisps of Summer cover I did back in August (see earlier post). What a great series this would make, based on seasons. It sounds sort of like a Victorian women's fiction, don't you think? Maybe Rumors of Autumn, and Remembrance of Winter. Does anyone want these, maybe with your own title and author name? I'll make you a deal: $25 per cover but not to me. Paid as a donation to Mercy Corps, which is ranked as one of the best world-wide charitable organizations operating in the US. Over 90% of the funds donated make it to the people who need the help. And their programs are aimed not only at emergency relief but at helping people become self-sufficient.

CELEBRATORY GUNFIRE CONTEST!

Well, one of those "secret projects" I've been working on has reached fruition. It's a promotion for Lady Wicked with a sharply reduced price.
99 CENTS!
This won't last long- but I don't know how long. The publisher, The wild Rose Press is evaluating the promotion and if it's successful in generating lots of sales, might continue using these 99 cent promos to help readers discover TWRP books. Some of my favorite authors are on their list, so I'm hoping for great success. For myself, I just want my Lady to find all the readers I feel she needs and deserves.

So to help encourage buyers, and reward the readers who have already bought the book at the much higher list price ($7! They deserve to be rewarded), I want to throw a big contest. The big celebratory gunfire contest type. What shall it be? Give me your best ideas by noon tomorrow (Pacific Daylight Time) and I'll reward the top five with a $5 Amazon Gift Certificate.  This means it HAS to be something I can launch immediately, before the price goes back up.

News in BRIEF!

So you've noticed I'm not posting much these days. The reasons for my dereliction of duty are below.

(Incidentally, this design for Wisps of Summer is just a mock cover, posted just for fun to show you that I often rebel against deadlines and obligations. And because I thought you might like it. There is no book planned for it, so I guess I might work it up for someone else who likes it.)

I have to get BELOVED STRANGER to an editor by August 14th. It's supposed to be 25,000 words or less. It's 32,000 and I haven'd reached The End.

An editor called, having read LOKI'S DAUGHTERS (which is not for sale as it's doing quite well where it is) and wants to know what else I have. Wow, that always feels good, and I'm very interested in this publisher, whereas traditional publishing is not where I want to go right now. So can I finish FAERIE and get it to her really really soon? No matter that I really had wanted to release it earlier this year, it is just not ready. And the idea of releasing a book before it's ready just appals me. So I'm working hard on that.

I have another project proposal which I can't discuss yet, but it's quite exciting. Right now it's at the "either sit and wait or go do something else" stage. I'd say it's a long shot.

And although  I've completed four consignment book covers, I still have five more due this month. September is full, and I have some scheduled here and there throughout the fall. It's a good thing some people are willing to wait, having books that won't be released until later this year or early next year.

And I didn't mention the new wood flooring going in upstairs to replace our really ancient carpet that is probably a major cause of my constant sinus and runny nose problem. That's where I work. I need a cleaner work environment, so somehow I have to sacrifice my work space plus numerous hours of packing, carrying out, moving and then returning my possessions to their rightful places once the job is done. I've dreamed of this for years. But I sure wish someone else would do it for me!

LOKI'S DAUGHTERS is an Amazon Best Seller!

So, an update on the last post, when LOKI'S DAUGHTERS was free on Amazon. By the time it was finally removed from the Free Reads list, it had downloads just shy of 50,000 copies, in about 13 days. And then it moved to the Amazon and Kindle top Sellers list!

Its first re-listing, or the first I saw since I was out with the guys to see Harry Potter, was at #10,072. Really disappointing. But I should have realized that was just a starting point. It quickly moved to #1472, then #375, then up to #271. The next morning it started at #171 and moved rapidly up to #103, and then onto the Top 100 Sellers, getting as high as #90. Since then it's been lurking in the mid 100s range and gained some this morning to be at #140. But I'm pretty sure a lot of its potential market was sapped by staying on the Free Reads for so long,

All in all, that's fine. It's a book I always loved and so I love it when new readers find it and love it. And even more so when they let me know it caused them to go looking for my other books.

Right now, yes I'm still being a bad blogger (almost wrote blooger, which seems oddly fitting). There  's not enough time in the day. I barely make it to Face Book and forget Twitter regularly. It seem so me when I'm being very productive with writing and cover work, that's an inward thinking process, and it's hard to shift back out to the outer, more social networking process.

Here's what's happening:
1. Amazon kicked back The Mudlark for bad formatting. Duh, didn't we have it fixed exactly right yet again? I saw it and even read through on the Kindle again. It was fine. Then suddenly it has all those crazy double indents again. This time we got some hexa-digital software and went through it line by line, and there are NO hidden codes, no thing that could possibly be triggering those ugly nasty double indents. The book looks just perfect with every other format except Amazon's Kindle.

But this time someone wised me up, and pointed to html format. At first I gagged- you know, the whole eye-rollling head-pounding "No! Don't make me learn it!" thing. But it's easy to just save as an html web page. In Word, it's called "Web Page", and you do it exactly like saving in rtf format. Then you put it into the Kindle Generator in exactly the same way you would a Word doc file. You just choose the file from your computer files with an extension of .htm


I hope this works. It looks great in the preview, and I went through the whole thing. This isn't totally adequate, and now I'm finding that in spite of my desire to avoid learning html, it's what I'm going to have to learn next if I want my books to be really professional. Funny thing, that the tool I really needed was right there all along. But it took the really good explanations of Guido Henkel  for me to understand why and how to do it.  I DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS! My brain says it hurts, just thinking about it! But I'm telling you, if you want a really professional book that looks great in any ebook format, this is what you have to do. Go check him out. I'll blog more about my learning experience as I go along.

2. I'm still not finished getting FAERIE in publishable state. I'm disappointed but I can't put it out until the last problems are resolved. While all books have problems, I've found those are the places where I have real opportunities to make a book great instead of just good. So it's best to keep looking for the things a book needs to be unique instead of taking the first reasonable way to finish it. I hate putting it down again, but other things now must be done first.

3. I have to finish BELOVED STRANGER (was IN THE ARMS OF A STRANGER), which is aimed at an invitation-only series of novellas through a publisher. I may still self-publish it instead if I think it would work better for me, but I'm still aiming to get this book done and sent off by August 14.

4. And cover art is really keeping me hopping. I'm going to have to cut back on that, even though I love doing it. I've been getting a lot of multiple requests from authors, and often they want to bring out several books at once. Sometimes I can't accommodate them. But it is fun to develop a series style for their books.

LOKI'S DAUGHTERS is FREE!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0033WSKA4Okay, you probably know by now I'm utterly indiscriminate when it comes to giving away books. Sure I want you to buy them. But I want you to read them too, and because (if) you love them, go buy the others. So when a book is FREE, I think it's a good thing. Right now- and not for long- LOKI'S DAUGHTERS is free on Amazon Kindle, and on Smashwords.

Since last night it's already had over 6,000 downloads and is ranked #10 in the Kindle Store Free Reads. Its the #2 Historical Romance and #7 Romance Yesterday its ranking was #1626 Kindle Store, so that's a long way up. Free Reads are really a different list from the general Kindle Store list. But the value to me will actually show when the book is no longer free and will appear (I hope) on the regular lists.

But I have no idea how long it will be free. So be my guest! Go get it!

Hugs to you all!

The Elegance of Simplicity

(WARNING: No, I haven't written this book. Yes, I might.)
The cover is the first page of your book. All authors know that, and they all want a title that will grab attention, hold it, intrigue- grasp the reader so hard she can't let go. They want the cover to somehow convey to the reader every emotion the author feels about her story. And sometimes they mis-understand that the cover should NOT tell the story.
Think about it. If you look at a cover and you quickly spin in your mind how the story will go, where it's set, how the characters will feel and change, then what will you do next? You'll put it down. You're satisfied. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, and maybe in the case of a book cover, a hundred thousand words. And if your cover tells your whole story, the reader's done. No, a cover should be the first page, not the whole thing.
But it's hard. Authors who self-publish in digital form are really vulnerable to this "perfect cover" flaw. Artists, too, or I, at least, keep wanting to crowd in yet one more little element to make the cover so perfect. And the reality is, simplicity can be a far better seller. Simplicity can be incredibly elegant. Or stark. Or simply simple. The way ebook covers are viewed, in long, scrolling lists of small thumbnail images, or on pages crammed with other covers, means  covers have a hard time being the one cover the reader glimpses in a rapid scroll downward. But simple, in its many forms, usually does the job most authors crave. It stops the reader in her fast-paced scrolling tracks. 
I did this cover design for one reason. To demonstrate how compelling just a face can be. I've hinted that the story is medieval. But I could have put in a verbal hint that it was contemporary, and truly her heavily made up face suggests that. But that's a side issue because there is no story. The very simplicity, the stark sharpness of her makeup and the flowing folds of the dark purple scarf (chiffon, I can tell in close-up) meld into the background. If anything is fanciful, it's the lettering. But since the photo compelled me to call her Amethyste, a name I made up just for her, I felt it demanded to come out looking like a carved jewel. There's room for that because it has so little competition.
Not that I will do all covers in this fashion from now on- I'm incapable of doing that. But I think this will remind me, and perhaps other authors, that when it comes to ebook covers, simplicity is the best elegance.

A Design for an Upcoming Release

Just thought you'd like to see this. The book is not quite finished and I haven't really decided how I will publish it. I will actually probably submit it to a more traditional e-publisher since I have an invitation to submit a story that this one fits.



It's a novella length story told partially by letters, set in England, Portugal and Spain during the Peninsular War between Napoleon's French Empire and the British-Portuguese-Spanish Allies. It's a story that's roamed around my mind for years, but I've always been told it "would never sell".



Well, now what will sell depends on the readers, not the publishing industry, and I'm finding the readers want a much broader range of romances than legacy publishers can afford to give them. I understand that. If a story might sell well, but another one will likely sell extremely well, which one should a publisher, who is in business to make a profit, buy? And maybe they're right, maybe a story that's not entirely set in Regency England, especially one that takes the reader to the brink of the battlefield, won't have a good market.



but this story is too dear to my heart to leave un-published. I'll leave it to the readers to decide how valuable it is to them.



Hugs to all my wonderful readers, who share my tastes in love stories!



Delle

FAERIE will release July 20! (Updated to September-Sorry!)

Release delayed to September, 2011
for technical reasons
Blogger says it's having upload problems so I'm just dropping by right now to give you some updates. Oh hey, it worked! Never mind.

FAERIE will be releasing July 20. Yes, I know some of you have waited a long time for it, but that's one reason I decided I would bring it out myself. The wait for a regular pub date would be a year or more away. So now it's  going through a professional edit, and the cover is done. And I'm starting the process of finding reviewers and setting up promotions. No one can buy a book if they can't find it! You can  find out more about it in my "Books and WIPs" section.

And don't worry, historical romance lovers, I'm not abandoning my Regency Historicals. I'm finishing up two right now. One, I'll be submitting to a more traditional publisher, but I think I'll bring out the other myself. Why one and not the other? One is an invitation to  submit for a specific subject novella, and I just happened to have it already half written, so why not give it a shot? The other I think will suit my needs more if I produce it myself. I'll probably bring it out in the mid fall. (Another trip to Hawaii intervenes in September.)

So you're asking, is there really some kind of advantage in publishing my stories myself? Isn't that the horrible monster, Vanity Publishing? Well it could be, but you can be sure what I'm doing is a LOT OF HARD WORK, aimed at providing the best stories I can at a price the readers can easily afford, and that I've studied the situation carefully, and have about 18 months' very successful experience in independent publishing. In my traditionally published books you'll find a lot of excellent professional work, by wonderful editors and cover artists, along with technical people who know how to format a published book and have the means to distribute the books. But all that comes at a price, and sometimes readers have a hard time justifying buying a book that costs more than a few bucks.

But the thing is, I know how to do all of that, too. Yes, I do know better than to publish a book that only I have edited. Good grief, if you know me, you know my eyes are horrible anyway, and even the best sighted authors who viciously attack their books word by word will miss things. So yes, all my books will always go through at least one professional editor, not to mention eagle-eyed critique partners. I'll do a final edit on other authors' books, and it will be professional. But not my own. And of course, yes, I do my own covers.

So none of my indie-published books will ever be priced for more than $2.99. Most will be free, or 99 cents. And you get a book you'll love at a price that lets yo go buy another book too. And I, believe it or not, make a bit more money myself because so many more people can afford my books.

Hugs to all. And in the meantime, don't forget SIREN, a brand new story, not a re-tread, is now available. Only 99 cents. If you honestly can't afford it, email me. We'll work something out.

FAERIE will release July 20!

Coming July 20, 2011 to Amazon
Blogger says it's having upload problems so I'm just dropping by right now to give you some updates. Oh hey, it worked! Never mind.

FAERIE will be releasing July 20. Yes, I know some of you have waited a long time for it, but that's one reason I decided I would bring it out myself. The wait for a regular pub date would be a year or more away. So now it's  going through a professional edit, and the cover is done. And I'm starting the process of finding reviewers and setting up promotions. No one can buy a book if they can't find it! You can  find out more about it in my "Books and WIPs" section.

And don't worry, historical romance lovers, I'm not abandoning my Regency Historicals. I'm finishing up two right now. One, I'll be submitting to a more traditional publisher, but I think I'll bring out the other myself. Why one and not the other? One is an invitation to  submit for a specific subject novella, and I just happened to have it already half written, so why not give it a shot? The other I think will suit my needs more if I produce it myself. I'll probably bring it out in the mid fall. (Another trip to Hawaii intervenes in September.)

So you're asking, is there really some kind of advantage in publishing my stories myself? Isn't that the horrible monster, Vanity Publishing? Well it could be, but you can be sure what I'm doing is a LOT OF HARD WORK, aimed at providing the best stories I can at a price the readers can easily afford, and that I've studied the situation carefully, and have about 18 months' very successful experience in independent publishing. In my traditionally published books you'll find a lot of excellent professional work, by wonderful editors and cover artists, along with technical people who know how to format a published book and have the means to distribute the books. But all that comes at a price, and sometimes readers have a hard time justifying buying a book that costs more than a few bucks.

But the thing is, I know how to do all of that, too. Yes, I do know better than to publish a book that only I have edited. Good grief, if you know me, you know my eyes are horrible anyway, and even the best sighted authors who viciously attack their books word by word will miss things. So yes, all my books will always go through at least one professional editor, not to mention eagle-eyed critique partners. I'll do a final edit on other authors' books, and it will be professional. But not my own. And of course, yes, I do my own covers.

So none of my indie-published books will ever be priced for more than $2.99. Most will be free, or 99 cents. And you get a book you'll love at a price that lets yo go buy another book too. And I, believe it or not, make a bit more money myself because so many more people can afford my books.

Hugs to all. And in the meantime, don't forget SIREN, a brand new story, not a re-tread, is now available. Only 99 cents. If you honestly can't afford it, email me. We'll work something out.

AND THE CONTEST WINNER IS...

1st, the $25 Amazon gift certificate: Samantha Fury. Because: she sent that luscious photo of one of my favorite models, making it the most helpful suggestion. At first I thought it was the one I'd already tried unsuccessfully, but this photo is a little different. The one I already had is black & white, which would be hard to color, but also the head positioning in the older one is straight forward, which wouldn't work. But this one is perfect, with his head turned as if he is listening to the Siren's song.2nd, the $10 Amazon gift certificate: Amber Autry-Munnerlyn.
I will give a $1 Amazon gift certificate OR a coupon for a free download of Siren (99 cent value) to each of the other entrants. But since I don't have email addresses for all of you, I'll be contacting you through Face Book to ask your choice. The Amazon certificate requires an email address, but the Smashwords coupon is something I can simply give to you directly for you to use.
SIREN is now up and available on Smashwords, where the first copy sold within an hour. It's also up on Amazon UK, where at least one copy has sold within minutes. You can see the page for it on Amazon US already but I don't know if it can be bought yet since my bookshelf page says it isn't available yet. All the same, it'll be available sometime this evening, and here's the link:SIREN ON AMAZON