Cyndy Aleo's Blog, page 5

So business cards... Moo vs. Vistaprint

I really, really, really hate business cards. With a passion. I hate giving them out. I hate getting them. I especially hate designing them.

It probably doesn't help that every time I've had to get business cards for a job, I'm either laid off or move on to another job.

And am subsequently stuck with 250 or so business cards for a job I no longer have.

Sure, they are great for luggage tags, and let's face it; they really are the easiest way to give people your information, but I fear them, and fear the cost.

And yet, with RT Booklover's Convention rapidly approaching, I knew I needed -- you guessed it -- business cards.

On top of THAT, I didn't want to try to cram everything on one card. So I decided I needed one card for the book writing, and the other card for the freelancing, making it even more hellacious than one might think.

And... I wanted to go as cheap as I could manage and not have them look like crap.

Enter Moo.com and Vistaprint.

I'm sure you've seen ads for them both everywhere online. I've used Vistaprint before to crank out the super-cheap Christmas photo cards of the kids, but never for anything I was really worried about, and I've never used Moo before, but I've seen their cards at various cons.

So for the purposes of my experiment, I used Moo for the book cards (since I could order minicards with more than one book image) and Vistaprint for the "business cards."

First up, Price:

Moo seems super-expensive, and Vistaprint super-cheap. I was ordering the Moo minicards, since I think they are adorable and stand out a little more. I was able to find a coupon after signing up for their mailing list, so that helped on the cost.

Vistaprint's basic cards are dirt-cheap, but I did want to look professional. Extra charges come in for metallic finish and front-and-back design, so when it came down to price, they ended up being practically the same for the same number of cards. Moo gets the bonus of having more than one design per order, while Vistaprint has the bonus of belonging to most of those cash-back sites.

Speed

There is absolutely ZERO contest for speed: Moo wins hands-down. I ordered both sets of cards the same day, and I received the Moo cards in my mailbox before I'd even gotten word that Vistaprint was shipping my order. Moo also has an adorable little bot mailer that keeps you up-to-date with your order status.

Shipping

Again, Moo wins hands-down. My cards came in an adorable little package with a white cardboard box (heavyweight) for transporting the cards. My Vistaprint cards came in super-thin cardstock boxes I don't expect to survive my flight.

Quality

Here's where I goofed a little bit. Moo warned me to convert to CMYK and I completely forgot, so the colors are a tad bit off from what I wanted. It's not noticeable if you've never done print stuff, but I can see it, and it's irksome, but again, my fault.

Vistaprint, meanwhile, does a really nice job when you pay for the upgrades.

Design

Vistaprint won this round. I was dreading having to design business cards on TOP of the book cards (keep in mind: broke freelancer here), but Vistaprint has been at this a while and has a TON of templates, including one that dovetailed so nicely with my business name you'd think I designed the cards myself. 

Moo, on the other hand? ARG ARG ARG. I am not a professional designer, and when I do things like DOWNLOAD A TEMPLATE I expect them to work flawlessly. I used the Minicard template as a transparent layer so I could check my dimensions, but learned after trial and error that you HAVE TO DESIGN CARDS WITH VERTICAL DESIGNS SIDEWAYS.

That's right; if you try to rotate the template, create your design and rotate it using Moo's edit tool? It horks all over the place.

Even once I got the hang of doing my design sideways, the "safe" area came out smaller than I'd anticipated. 

Overall

I'm going to call this one a tie. Both were comparable on price. Moo obviously wins if you're in a hurry for cards to arrive, while Vistaprint was easier for this non-artist type to design. Definitely look for coupons/sales for either, and proofread, proofread, proofread!

Wish me luck.. this is the first time I've ever had business cards for my freelance business, and I've been at this for 14 years. Hopefully I won't be stuck with a mess of useless cards!

Teaser Tuesday: The Forest's Son

My upcoming New Adult folk mythology romance is coming next month (and try saying THAT categorization ten times fast!

Today, read a teaser... the opening of the first part of this serialized novel is up on Wattpad for you to read (for free!): Prologue: Jakub

Let me know (here in the comments, on Wattpad, via carrier pigeon, whatever) and let me know what you think!

Professor Anne and her lovely YA Lit class

Yesterday I had the privilege of doing something I've done before: talk to a college class about fan fiction.

I can tell you it's a lot more fun than trying to explain to a college class about how I make a living with an English degree. ;)

The class had read Rainbow Rowell's FANGIRL, and I was talking about how much of the book mirrored reality, and the levels of meta that fans might see that casual readers would not. 

And, well, sex in fan fiction.

I completely blame Lauren of Christina Lauren (you may know their BEAUTIFUL BASTARD series?) for how far south the next part of the conversation went. Keep in mind, I'm me. Talking to college students. At the University of Utah.

Yeah.

So I'm explaining how I was determined to break the mold of fan fiction when it came to writing romance (and sex) and started with oral sex.

Now how do I say "ejaculate is NOT TASTY" in a polite and refined manner?

I reverted to Lauren's comment once that she liked writing canon Edward, because she could pretend that vampire jizz tasted like milkshakes.

I think we all know it is NOT MILKSHAKES.

So I ran with the milkshake analogy in as professional a manner as I could (not very) and managed to avoid actually referencing the line I used in my fic to say how VERY NOT TASTY it was: "like rancid tapioca that never set up right."

I'm amazed I get invited back myself. 

The Forest's Son: LOOK AT MY GORGEOUS COVER!

A couple of NaNoWriMos ago, I started a book I thought would be young adult sci-fi. I had the opening scene, a few scattered things in the middle, and this idea sparked by a rogue eBay listing.

What that book turned into is THE FOREST'S SON, a new adult folk-mythology romance. 

I know. I don't know how that happened, either.

Vance is a college student with a really, really odd life, and when he wakes up in the morning with no idea who he is (or where he is), he has a sense that this has all happened before. When his best friend Donovan shows up, he finds out it has happened like this before: a lot.

Why Vance forgets -- and what he ends up doing about it -- isn't your typical amnesia story. It involves a little-known Polish myth of forest dwellers, and how Vance may be associated with that world.

A little about the cover: the original photograph is by AMAZING Polish photographer Slevin Aaron, and the cover design is by my dear friend (and amazing author) Eden Barber.

I'm doing something a little different with this book; as it's told in five parts, it lends itself very well to serialization. As many of you know, I spent a lot of time in fan fiction, and love that sense of tension in waiting for the next part to be released. There will also be a special deal for early downloading, so keep an eye out for the book's release in May!

Enough rambling, though... here's the cover of the first piece of THE FOREST'S SON: UNKNOWING.

 

Why do I review books?

I'm working on so many things right now I feel like I have no time to finish any of them! And in the meantime, as always, I'm still reading, reading, reading, and naturally, reviewing.

I review books I read for pleasure, and for the past -- OMG! almost two! -- years, I've been reviewing for RT Book Reviews.

I'm sure a lot of people think it's great to get all these free books -- I read over 150 books a year, and the majority of them are review copies -- but as any reviewer will tell you, they aren't all great, and they aren't all something you'd necessarily pick up on your own. So why do it, since it definitely doesn't pay well enough to do full-time?

Nothing makes me happier than finding a book I know people will love. Friends have benefitted from my book recommendations over the years, but I love going through a pile of books and finding that special something that might not have been chosen as lead title at the publisher, and might not be getting much publicity.

I love getting those books out to readers. I love recommending something and having someone say, "Hey, I bought that book you recommended, and I'm loving it." I love turning people on to new authors and new series.

I'm super-careful about what I recommend. Some might say picky. But even if I love a book, I don't necessarily think it's right for everyone. I've recommended Tiffany Reisz's Original Sinners books far and wide, but I've never once suggested my devout Catholic mother read them. I've recommended Lindsey Piper's Dragon Kings series, but not to people who like straight contemporary romance. There are always books that I rave about and then say, "But I don't think it's right for you."

Still, there is nothing better than sharing a book with someone and having them love it. To know that you connect and see something the same. Fall in love with the same characters. Feel something powerful about the same words. And while I hope that someday the things *I* write will do the same thing for people, it's still the reviews -- and the reading and sharing -- that come first.

Why I don't fear Amazon in the slightest

Twice today, within an hour, I saw (or was part of) two discussions on WHY AMAZON IS THE BIG BAD WOLF AND WE ARE ALL LIVING IN STRAW HOUSES.

You'll have to pardon me if I yawn.

Yes, I've heard all the arguments. "Amazon has ruined book pricing due to self-publishing." 

(Actually, that was Amanda Hocking with her $0.99 BS as the Pied Piper, but I don't see anyone going after her with the torches and pitchforks.)

"Amazon is taking money away. See what they did with ACX self-pubbing?"

Again, I'm making that Obama face when asked about nuclear war with Russia. Of course they are going to drop their royalties. And they'll drop them for KDP as well. It's a business decision. I'll take advantage of it as long as I can, and then when it's not there, I'll accept that Amazon is doing the smart thing for their business.

"Amazon is ruining the bookstores."

No. Amazon is not ruining the bookstores. Amazon is changing the landscape. 

I've said this before, and I'll probably say it 10,000 more times before I die: Everything changes. When Barnes & Noble and Borders moved in and killed most of the indie bookstores, where was this huge group decrying what was happening? 

They were crowing that the books were cheaper. 

And so I watched my indie bookstore die. The one where I'd gone since I was a pre-teen. The one that had staff to direct me to new books and searched high and low for out-of-print books I just had to have. 

Now everyone is watching Barnes & Noble crash and burn, after watching Borders slowly implode, and it's All Amazon's Fault.

But the thing is, all things are temporary. Kodak once owned everything photography, and where are they now? Woolworth's was once the store where everyone shopped. And some day, there'll be someone who takes over Amazon's market space. Who does something bigger and different, and like so many of these companies of the past, Amazon will be too big and too set in its ways to move quickly enough to keep up. 

Change is natural. And your best bet is to keep moving along with it rather than bemoaning "the way things used to be." And not get too attached to the change-makers, because they, too, will eventually be replaced.

Wired talks GEEK LOVE

So I've been reading the Wired piece on Katherine Dunn's GEEK LOVE this morning, in bits and pieces around other things. Beyond the piece being a really interesting piece on a very odd book that's somehow managed to work its way into the collective consciousness, there's a sense of nostalgia that surrounds the book, and if you read between the lines, it describes a book industry I'm still mourning.

GEEK LOVE is a test of me, of a sort. If you are a writer, and you've read it, and you've loved it, and you've maybe read it again and talk about it with this sort of reverence, I am more likely to trust your writing, unseen. It's the reason I took a day's vacation from work the day Erin Morgenstern's THE NIGHT CIRCUS was released; I knew she got GEEK LOVE the same way I did, and I knew that because of that understanding, her book was going to be something special and momentous, and that reading it would be a sort of event for me. 

I wasn't wrong.

But about two-thirds through the article, you can see a rare convergence of publishing talent you don't see anymore. You see a group of unknowns who took a chance on an author who wrote a book that should have been unsellable by anyone's definition. And yet here we are, 25 years later, still talking about this book, and just about everyone involved in its publication has become an industry star.

Why don't we see that anymore? Why don't we see publishers taking chances on books that you'd think people would never want to read? Why do we see overbuying of a trend to such a point that the public rebels and stops buying it? (::cough:: vampires. ::cough:: dystopian) Why is everyone looking for things like platform and established audiences (like fan fiction with huge readerships) instead of the next GEEK LOVE?

As a reader, I want the GEEK LOVEs. I want the quirky, strange books that make me think about life and art and ethics. I want books that push boundaries and make people question everything they know. And that's not a YA dystopian with a copied cover created by a ghostwriter who probably has had no luck getting their own work published and so has to sit at the feet of the Kardashians' "ideas."

For every BELLMAN & BLACK (and let's face it, if Setterfield's previous book hadn't been such a smash, would even B&B seen the light of day?), there are 100 books that copy another book. But like photocopies of old, with each successive iteration, it blurs and the quality becomes harder to read, until soon you wonder why they bothered.

And when they original was not all that original, that degradation happens even sooner.

So tell me; where are the GEEK LOVEs? Probably self-published, or in a drawer, but how do we find them? How can we sort through this giant wave of Things We Do Not Want to find a book that's going to be so different and memorable they can write about it 25 years later, and it's still amazing and astonishing?

The negativity about self-publishing

I have no idea what it is this week. It may be something in the water. It may be the lousy weather all over the country, trapping folks in their houses and making everyone crabby. But there's been a trend of those in publishing bashing self-publishing again on social media.

Yawn. I file this under SSDD (same shit, different day).

For every time an agent tweets about "writing a better book instead of self-publishing," I roll my eyes. Hard. For the following reasons:

Please. It's not because a book isn't GOOD that it doesn't get a traditional publishing contract. Let's just stop with that fallacy right there. Great books fall through the cracks all the time. Oh, sure, there are some people who self-publish who definitely aren't ready for primetime, but please tell me agents, can you sell a young adult vampire book right now? Are you looking for some to rep? The reality is that it has nothing to do with "good" and everything to do with "trend." We've all seen truly terrible books become bestsellers. By "write a better book" what an agent is actually saying is "write a book that is the next thing that's going to trend and we really don't know what that is, so throw stuff at the wall until I get excited." 

Sorry. I have better things to do.
 Agents. And traditional publishers. And yes, even traditionally published authors. ALL HAVE A VESTED MONETARY INTEREST IN SEEING TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING CONTINUE. Let's be realistic here. An agent makes usually 15% of a client's take from a book contract. How much does an agent get when you self-publish your book on Smashwords? Exactly zero. So why on EARTH would an agent suggest you self-publish instead of querying? And don't get me wrong; I think a lot of you know I have a lot of friends who are traditionally published -- and even big-deal NYT bestseller type of traditionally published -- but their deals are based on a continuation of the same thing: books going into bookstores after advances and advertising dollars, etc. And it has to be annoying as hell (I don't ask) to see people skipping the steps of making an agent happy and making an editor happy and then hoping you make the audience happy.
 Traditional publishing is not fond of the longtail.

If you don't know what that is, it's the idea that you can make money by continually adding things and making money based on small, regular sales over a long period of time. Traditional publishing likes the huge splash with big bestsellers. The problem is, that only allows an elite level of authors who somehow hit the magic combination of everything going right to have a long career. How many of you know midlist authors who had two-and-out or three-and-out contracts not renewed for books? I NEVER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT A CONTRACT BEING RENEWED. I NEVER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT GOING BACK OUT ON SUB. I can put out books from now until the day I die and if it sells 3 copies or 300 millions, the only thing that will impact is how much money I have in my bank account. It will never impact my next book.

Don't get me wrong; I still don't think self-publishing is for everyone. You have to be committed to putting out the best possible product. You have to be ready to accept terrible reviews. You have to be okay with never making a bestseller list (which was never my goal, and frankly, doesn't interest me).

What self-publishing DOES allow is you to write a fantastic book. And hire your own editor who understands YOUR vision for your book. It allows you to change your cover if it doesn't work. Or shake up how you're marketing midstream. It allows you to publish books without worrying about whether your book will sell enough for a publisher to option  your second book.

For me? It's freed me from the insanity of trying to put a square peg in a round hole. I don't write things that will probably appeal to a giant audience of tens of millions of people. I have no interest in making a bestseller list. Or being famous or walking a red carpet for a movie of my book that would likely not match my vision of my characters or how they look or how they speak. I'm perfectly content with having a handful of people who love what I write and a few who absolutely hate it. And all I have to do is make ME happy. Instead of a host of staff at a publisher or agency.

Good news and bad news...

Some of you may have already noticed there's been a price increase on the print version of Undying.

And yeah, that sucks. 

I promised when I published it that I would keep my books as inexpensive as I possibly could, i.e. keep the print prices at a point where I could at least break even.

That's the good news! The increase was due to new distribution channels! You can now ask your local bookstore (or library) to order Undying and it's available. The bad news is that the price increase was required by CreateSpace to do that, but the good news is that there are now more ways to buy the book for the people who don't want to buy through Amazon.

As always, thank you so much for your support! Watch for an announcement of my next book (no, not the sequel to Undying just yet; I want to take my time with that one so it's perfect!) coming soon in the new year.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season!

Self-publishing and the negative review

I've actually been meaning to write this post for a while now (and been too busy to do it), but something really funny happened to me that spurred me to finish the post: 

I got a revenge rating.

Now, admittedly, I probably have a thicker skin than a lot of people do. I'm actually a person who enjoys negative reviews, for a few reasons. Here's why I think you should, too.

There are generally a number of reasons someone will give you a negative review for your book:

1. The reviewer really did find a problem with your book.

No author is perfect. No one. EVERYONE can improve. I BEG my beta readers to rip my novel apart, because that's the only way to get better at writing. Some of you may have noticed I acknowledged an agent in UNDYING; that's because that agent ripped the book to shreds. Sure, I cried my head off when I first read it (I AM human), but in the long run, that was someone who was really invested in my book, and felt really strongly about it. That kind of criticism is hard to come by when everyone is afraid of hurting everyone's feelings (or getting revenge ratings later).

2. The reviewer wasn't the right audience.

It happens. You can't write a book that will please everyone. It's impossible, and even if it were possible, would you really want to write that book? It would probably be boring as hell. There will be people who won't understand the point you were trying to make, or who'll want you to have written a different book with the "same basic idea." You can't change that, unless you really wanted to write a different book. 

These you can look at, and toss some, keep others. Does the review suggest something that might have made sense? Keep that in mind for the next book. Does it seems completely contrary to what you were trying to get across? Ignore it. Move on. This reader is probably never going to like what you write.

3. The reviewer hates you.

I'm not going to lie; this kind of review absolutely delights me. This is what I look like when I get one:

Seriously. That's what I sound like. And probably look like. Come to think of it, I need a cape.

These people are hating your stuff irrationally. In my case today, it's because I gave this author a negative review... two years ago. 

I'm not the only person who's given this book a 1-star review. Over 100 other people have as well. But for two years, this author has been thinking about this review. To the point where the author tracked down my book to give it a 1-star review.

(I'd like to point out that at least I bought and read the author's book. I'm pretty sure the same wasn't done in reverse).

Can you imagine spending TWO YEARS obsessing about a negative review? Instead of taking that review and applying what might have been constructive criticism and tossing out everything else, this author has been THINKING ABOUT ME.

When you look at those two years, and think about that time, can you imagine the things the author could have done with all that negative energy? It amuses me, because I'm not worth it; my review wasn't worth it; and yet, this author obviously thinks those negative reviews are something to spend two years on.

Don't be that author. Take the good, leave the bad, and you'll find yourself a much happier person in the long run.