Lauralynn Elliott's Blog, page 63

ROW80 Check In 7/27/11

I took a day off from writing yesterday. I didn't feel well last night and only felt like lying on the couch. I didn't even play a Big Fish computer game. Anyway, so far, I'm about 6500 words ahead of my goal. That's 13 days ahead. I still have this horrible fear of running out of steam. But, so far, so good.

G.I.T. progress? I walked on the treadmill for 20 minutes while watching Angel on my little DVD player. Hey, it's a start! I'm in horrible shape, so I have to start small. Thanks to Kait Nolan for sharing her G.I.T progress with us and letting us use the term, too.

How are the rest of you doing?

ROW80 Check In 7/24/11

Hello, fellow ROW80ers! How is everyone doing?

As of last night, I was 5,332 words over my goal of 500 words per day. I should be at 10,000, but am at 15,332. I haven't written yet today, since I always write in the evenings. I should get even more ahead because I have some ideas for the next scene that will be more than 500 words worth.

I'm a little concerned about in what direction this story is going. There was some violence in the last scene that I didn't know was going to happen. Some of it was close to being a little "unusual", and I don't know where that came from. I haven't written anything like that since I wrote Starfane. But the story will go where it goes. I usually let my characters do what they want to do. But it's going way beyond a PG rating at this point, at least in my opinion.

ROW80 Check In 7/20 and Other Stuff

Well, so far so good. I still seem to be on a roll here. I'm 3500 words over my cumulative goal. I don't know where this is coming from because I'm usually taking days off when I get ahead, so that I end up about right on target. I've actually taken three days off since this challenge began and still am way ahead. Keep your fingers crossed for me that I don't stray. LOL

My husband parked in the garage yesterday, so when I left for work this morning I had to actually go outside. It felt like I was in a rain forest or something. It was hot and muggy already at 7:30. But I got to thinking how pretty it is at my house. I live kind of back in the woods where everything is green. I wonder if all the green is what makes it really muggy at my house. I had never thought about that.

Also, when I got to work this morning, I realized our air conditioner wasn't working. We are supposed to have highs in the mid 90′s and who knows what the heat index might be. And this is why I love my boss…he told me to go back home and work. So I gathered all of the stuff I needed to work from home and came back here where it's so much cooler. I love working from home because it involves shorts, t-shirt, and bare feet.

So how is everyone else doing?

Another Shoe Post

Back on April 20, I wrote a post about some new shoes I had bought and included a picture. Well, I'm going to do that again. I love shoes, but I have very sensitive feet and can't always wear the ones I really want. I was shopping with my mom Saturday and there were these shoes with ridiculously high heels that I fell in love with. I tried them on, and my feet felt fine. But I was afraid my calves were going to cramp up. LOL. And my Achilles tendon felt like it was being stretched. So I passed on them. But I thought about those shoes for two days and couldn't get them out of my mind. I went back today at lunch, tried them on again, and bought them. :0) So here is the picture:

ROW80 Check In and Book Cover Thoughts

As of last night, I was 1831 words ahead of my cumulative goal. At one point, I was 2331 words ahead, but I opted for lying on the couch instead of writing due to a sore throat and a migraine. I plan on writing a little more than my word count goal tonight.

On another note…it's very true that book covers can make a difference in book sales. My cover artist and I recently decided to change the cover on my novel, Starfane. This novel is her favorite and my mom's favorite (it's definitely the steamiest). It never has sold as well as I hoped, but when we changed the cover recently, sales definitely picked up. When Anya first started doing my covers, I couldn't afford to pay her, and she didn't have a good program to work from. Now I can pay her and she has a good design program. This book is about three men (and the heroine), but it also takes place in a magical world which I think the new cover depicts. What do you think about the difference in the covers? The old one looks very amateurist. (Anya thinks the old cover might lead people to believe it's a male menage a trois, LOL)

Old cover

New Cover

ROW80 Check In 7/13

As of last night, I was more than 2,000 words over my cumulative goal of 500 words per day. That means I could goof off for four days and not be behind. :0) But I'm not going to do that, I promise. But it does allow me to take a day off here and there in case I need to. I like to get ahead so that I won't be behind if things happen that are beyond my control.

Also, as I stated in my last post, I put three of my books on All Romance Ebooks website (I hope to get the rest of them on this week). As of last night, I had already sold three copies. If you are thinking about doing this, you might want to check out yesterday's post to see the mistakes I made so you won't repeat them. LOL

I have Haunted Lake pretty much formatted the way I want it for print. I just need to change the font on the chapter headings. I found a nice little "cabin on the lake" graphic to put on the title page, so that was cool. Mostly, all I lack now is printing it out to see how it will look and going over it again to make sure there are no errors. And I'm also waiting on my cover designer, Anya Kelleye, to do the cover. She's really busy with something else right now, but when she gets started, she's quick. And good. :0)

How are the rest of you doing?

All Romance Ebooks

I FINALLY got 3 out of my 7 titles on allromanceebooks.com. This was quite a learning curve, so I wanted to relate some of the problems I ran into. Maybe it will help someone along the line.

First, some of you may remember I was frustrated because my quotes and apostrophes were turning into weird stuff. Well, that was because in Calibre, I was converting from a pdf file. When I converted from an html file, everything looked okay except on pdb. I still had those weird black retangles, and all my formatting was shot. So I chose not to publish a pdb file until I could figure it out. Right now I have pdf, html, mobi, epub, lit, and rb.

Some other things. You have to add yourself as an author in their database before you can add books. Then when you do a search for your author name while adding books, you have to make sure you click "add" after it finds you. I messed up on that the first time. And your file names for html and pdf cannot have spaces in them (I have no idea why). I had to rename those two file types and reload them. And one big thing…when they say your cover has to be 200 x 300, they mean exactly! Some of mine turned out to be 201 x 300 when I re-sized them from the normal 600 x 900 size. It would not take the cover because of that little "1″. So save yourself some time and aggravation and make sure the cover is EXACTLY 200 x 300.

This was harder (or at least more time consuming) than either Amazon or Smashwords, but I think it was well worth it. Smashwords converts your book to all the formats, but you have to do it yourself before uploadng to All Romance. I'm going to put my other four books on soon, but I didn't have any more time during my lunch hour. LOL. Plus a couple of the books need some formatting fixes. I love the way the All Romance website looks. It almost makes you WANT to buy something from them. That is, if you're into romance. Anyway, this is my page in case you wanted to know what it looks like. I think many of you need to give it a shot. I'll be glad to help in any way I can. :0) Lauralynn Elliott

ROW80 Check In 7/10

My goal is to average 500 words per day and to work on a short story when I can. As of yesterday, I was 432 words ahead of my cumulative goal. So I'm pretty happy about that. I haven't worked on the short story yet, but that's secondary and not a big deal. It's going to be a freeby anyway. I've also gotten Haunted Lake very close to being formatted for print. The page numbers were kicking my butt, but I finally got them to cooperate. That should be out in paperback in a couple of weeks.

I got Jonathan Eli's book, The Last Cabbandeum, on CreateSpace in paperback and it should be on Amazon soon. Anya Kelleye did a great job with the cover. When I got the proof copy, it was awesome!

I'll check on the rest of you this afternoon after church and lunch.

Total Frustration!

I decided I wanted to put my books up on All Romance Ebooks. So I downloaded calibre so I could convert to as many formats as possible. It looked like everything was going great, but when I opened up the epub file, all my apostrophes were black rectangles. Not to mention, the first page was my cover and it was all stretched out (that might just be a viewing problem…will have to look into it further). The mobi format did the same thing with my apostrophes and it lost my page breaks. The pdb format changed my double quotes to rectangles and my apostrophes to question marks. All the formats lost my chapter heading centering. Ditto with the RB format.

This is one more reason why it's so hard and frustrating to have a full time job and try to write. I tried to do all of this during my lunch hour, and that's just not enough time to figure out all the problems. At this point, I'm almost tempted to forget about All Romance. But, on the other hand, an author should try to get her/his books in as many venues as possible. I thought calibre was the answer to book formatting. The easiest route would be to download the different formats of my books from Smashwords. But that's against their terms of service, and I don't blame them for that. They spent lots of money to get our books in all those formats. And my conscience won't let me violate those terms that I agreed to.

So I have seven books to try to convert to several different formats, and I just don't know when I'll have time to do it. Not to mention, where will I find time to figure out why they aren't converting properly? I don't usually let things get to me. I'm a very laid back, calm person who rolls with the punches. But I feel like I've been punched too hard this time.

Nora Roberts (My Mother Loves Me)

I had a very interesting conversation with my mom last night. She's, of course, my biggest fan. She was talking about the Nora Roberts series she was currently reading. This is kind of how the conversation went.

Mom: "I'm reading this Nora Roberts series, and it's really good."

Me: "I don't really like her books that well. Not my thing. But she's a good writer."

Mom: "Yes, she is. But she's no better than you."

Me: "What?" Much laughter from me.

Mom: "Your books are just as good. They're just different from hers."

Me: "But she's a much better writer than I am."

Mom: "What makes her a better writer?"

Me: "She just is."

Mom: "She's not better than you. I like your books just as much as hers."

Big grin from me. My mother loves me.