Jason K. Lewis's Blog, page 3

Paradise is free! Pick up my ebook now…

Hi All,

Just a note to let you know that my novelette ‘Paradise’ is free from the 2nd July to the 5th of July on Amazon. If you haven’t bought it yet why not give it a try? Hope you enjoy it!

This is my first attempt at a free promotion and I will report the results over the next couple of weeks…

Best wishes

Jason

Three free tools for DIY book cover design (‘The Bloody King’ cover reveal)

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed I mentioned recently that I was close to completing a short(ish) story called ‘The Bloody King’. Whilst the story isn’t quite ready yet (it should be released before the end of next week), the cover is. It is a real departure from my ‘comfort zone’ genres of science fiction and fantasy. I would guess you could say that it’s a crime thriller (you could also say that it is a terrible story, I will leave you to be the judge of that!).

I am not sure where the story came from really. It just popped into my head one day as I was waiting for a train and a distinguished looking old man walked by…

‘The Bloody King’ is quite a lot darker than my other work and, quite frankly, one of the scenes was very difficult to write and made me feel a little uncomfortable. The main character is a man called ‘David May’ and I guess you could call him an anti-hero. David May certainly is not a good man (I think I will leave it at that really, no need for spoilers).

The cover for the short story is at the top of this blog and I would love to know what people think of it. I have written about book cover design before and I have a good relationship with an excellent group of designers called ‘Deranged Doctor Design’ (who I cannot recommend highly enough). The cover for book two of the ‘Adarna Chronicles’ has just arrived and I should be doing the cover reveal in a week or so (I think it is stunning, but then I am a little biased).

With ‘The Bloody King’ I decided that, as it is only a short story and will be priced at under a pound (or dollar if you’re American), I really couldn’t afford to pay for a cover, so I designed it myself (which is kinda why I want to know what people think of it).

I used three tools to design the cover:-

1) A rather brilliant piece of software calls ‘GIMP’, which is a completely free program that does nearly everything that Adobe photoshop can do but without the hefty price tag. If you haven’t heard of GIMP, I would recommend that you google it and, if you are considering trying a little design work of your own then you might even want to download it.

It has to be said that I have been playing with GIMP for about six months now and I still don’t understand how to use a tenth of its features. There is quite a steep learning curve and it takes a long time to get the hang of it (so not for the faint hearted).

2) A website called ‘Fontsquirrel’. Getting good fonts is essential if you want your work to look professional. The problem is that many fonts are covered by copyright licences and cannot be freely used without a (sometimes rather hefty) price tag. The great thing about Fontsquirrel is that the site lists many fonts that are completely free to use in any medium (you have to check the exact conditions of use though, so be careful).

The other great thing about Fontsquirrel is that it allows you to ‘test drive’ the font before you download it. So you can literally type in your book title and it will appear instantly. This is very handy indeed as you never know how your title is going to look in a particular font.

3) The other tool that I used was ‘Morguefile’, which, to be honest, isn’t a tool at all really. Morguefile is a website that offers completely ‘licence free’ stock photo’s for download.

So, ‘The Bloody King’ is out soon and I created the cover for nothing. Was it worth the time? Does it look even slightly professional? You tell me.

For my part, I don’t think it’s as good as what my usual designers could have come up with, but sometimes you just have to economise!

I am still working hard on book two of the ‘Adarna chronicles’ (Phoenix rising) and it is still on schedule for release before the end of July. So back to work for me :-)

If you like this post why not ‘like’ it below? Or follow the blog (top right) or do something else social networky? :-)

Goodreads giveaway for ‘Empire under siege’

Hi All,

Just a note to let you know that there is a Goodreads giveaway on at this very moment for ‘Empire under siege’. Please feel free to enter… What the heck, tell your friends as well. I am giving away a signed copy to the lucky winner.

I’m busy working on ‘Phoenix rising’, book two in the ‘Adarna chronicles’. Still doing the structural edit and think I wrote some OK stuff to add in today (as well as taking out some not so OK stuff). Should have a cover reveal in the next few days. The guys at Deranged doctor design have blown me away (again!) and are just putting the finishing touches to it :-)

I also appear to have written a short story in a completely different genre (kind of a crime/thriller). Just got it back from the editor (he improved it beyond my wildest dreams), who has made some very pertinent comments, and reminded me through them, that I have a lot to learn… More on that in the next couple of days as I am hoping to release it soon.

Have a good one

Jason

My experience with Goodreads giveaways and some handy tips for posting your own…

If you are an author and you want to get your book noticed then there are many ways that you can do it. There are thousands of articles populating the internet telling you how you should ‘build a platform’ and get yourself a ‘tribe’ in order that they can shout out about your book so that you can generate sales.

I can tell you now that all of the above is very hard work. I work (this is not my day job) for about fifty hours a week, I have a baby son and I have a life to lead. What this means is that I have one hour a night in which to write. Since I started trying to publish books this hour has been split between writing, editing, marketing and, perhaps most importantly, learning…

Of course many of you know this story (Oh woe is me, it’s so difficult to find the time, blah blah, etc). To be honest, I love the writing, but I also want people to actually read my books (because everyone needs feedback on their work, you know?).

Anyway, I decided that I should do a thing called a ‘Goodreads giveaway’. If you love books and you haven’t checked out Goodreads then I would highly recommend that you pop over and have a look. It’s a great tool for finding what we all want (that’s more good books to read, not piles of gold or Jennifer Lopez in a bikini by the way…).

The thing about Goodreads is that they will only allow you to do a giveaway with a paperback book, you just can’t do it with an ebook. This presents a problem to many self published authors as they cannot or will not produce paperback versions of their work. This was a stumbling block for me too and it took me the best part of a year to pluck up the courage- and figure out how- to format and publish a book through Createspace (the alternative is to use Lulu or Lightning-source or Ingram-spark, but I chose Createspace because it seemed the easiest and was free to use).

It took me a while but using Scrivener (a truly wonderful piece of software) I was able to put together the files for a paperback and upload them to Createspace.

Anyway, I digress, I am going to post a blog about my Createspace experience soon, so you can read all about that process then :-)

When I had my paperback version of ‘Empire under siege’, the first book in my epic fantasy series ‘The Adarna chronicles’, I posted a giveaway on Goodreads.

The process itself is quite straightforward, you fill in some fields detailing when you want the giveaway to start and finish, how many books you want to giveaway etc, and then you link it to your book (you must have uploaded it to Goodreads already to do this).

I posted my first giveaway for two days and gave away one book. During the two days 779 (forgive the use of numbers, it’s just so much blooming easier that writing out longhand, although actually by the time I’ve explained it all it’s probably about the same… ho hum…) people ‘requested’ it (they entered the competition). This means that at least this number actually saw the cover and blurb and liked it enough to enter the competition. In addition 314 people added ‘Empire under siege’ to their ‘to-read’ bookshelf (basically saying that they wanted to read it at some stage).

I was totally over the moon! Wow, I thought, there will be over 300 sales from this one little giveaway!

Well, actually, no… The fact is that in the last week or so since the giveaway ended I have sold about the same number of books as I sold before. I do think that about seven people from Goodreads have bought the book (as the number with the book on their ‘to-read’ shelf is now 307) which means that I have just about broken even on the giveaway. I could be wrong of course and seven people might have removed it from their shelves…

There may be more people over the coming weeks and months that buy ‘Empire under siege’ because of the giveaway, but I don’t think that it will be that many. You see, when you examine the statistics for the people who have put the book on their to-read shelf it turns out that most of them have several thousand books marked to read. Clearly the chance of most people getting around to reading ‘Empire under siege’ when it is one of thousands to choose from is virtually zero.

Am I worried? Well, no, actually. You see the thing is that the book got some exposure, and in my mind that has to be a good thing as it increases the discoverability of my work. I actually did another giveaway for my other work ‘Paradise’ with even more people adding it to their shelves (although bizarrely, even though it is only 99c, no one has actually bought it following the giveaway).

Meanwhile ‘Empire under siege’ has another giveaway scheduled for the 24th to the 29th June with the hope that more people will add it to their shelves.

So, in order to try to be helpful, I have added my top tips (using my absolutely vast experience ;-) – that’s a joke by the way, just in case you didn’t get it) for Goodreads giveaways below:-

1) Make sure you have a good cover. If you haven’t, then less people are going to stop and read your blurb…

2) Make sure that your blurb is good. Don’t just cut and paste your book cover blurb, you need to be more creative. I put extracts of reviews for my work and also offered the books as autographed copies.

3) Make sure that you spend some time working on the ‘tags’ as there are hundreds to search through and many of them may be relevant to your work.

4) Don’t expect to sell loads of books, it’s more about exposure. Unless you just wrote the next fifty shades of grey (which apparently took off because of a Goodreads giveaway) you ain’t going to make a profit.

5) Consider only offering one book. I don’t think offering more does anything other than cost you more. Although it should be noted that some people use giveaways to get reviews and if so, more books equal more reviews (potentially).

6) Try out different lengths of time for your giveaways to find out what time span works best (my first was two days and the next was three, the one about to start is five).

7) Perhaps most importantly, it takes a couple of days at least for the Goodreads team to approve your giveaway, make sure you start yours in the future so that it doesn’t finish before it has started (if you know what I mean).

Hope this was useful (wow, long post!). If you like it why not ‘like’ it below, or follow my blog (top right for the button) or tweet me or facebook me or do some other social networky thing. Cheers.

Goodreads giveaway

Just a note to let you know that I have listed my first ‘Goodreads giveaway’. For those of you who haven’t heard about them, they are supposed to be a good way of getting exposure for your book. I am giving away a signed paperback copy of my novella ‘Empire under siege’, the first book in the ‘Adarna chronicles’ series.

Essentially what you do with a Goodreads giveaway is provide a copy of your paperback book for free as a prize (In my case it is one copy, you can list more if you wish). People enter your contest for the chance to win the book. The hope is that some of them might add your book to their ‘to-read’ shelf on Goodreads (which means that they may eventually purchase the book to read).

The results so far are quite interesting. The giveaway has been running for almost three hours and fifty two people have entered the competition. Meanwhile, twenty two new people have added ‘Empire under siege’ to their ‘to-read’ shelf.

Is this progress? Time will tell. ‘Empire under siege’ is doing OK on Amazon at the moment and is in the top 100 in a few categories (which, sadly, does not mean that it is selling like hot cakes!), but it cannot hurt to get more exposure.

A lot of work went in to the giveaway itself, not least of which was the production of the paperback edition through createspace (something I will be blogging about at a later date) and the design of a full paperback cover.

Why not enter the competition here for a chance to win? The copy on offer will be posted when the paperback is released on the 1st of July :-)

If you are an author and you haven’t plugged in to the power of Goodreads yet (I have to admit that I still haven’t started to fully understand many of its parts, but I am sure there are lots of other benefits), then I would recommend that you high tail it to their website and register now!

If you like this post, well, why no like it below? Or follow my blog or like me on Facebook, or do something else social networky? :-)

‘Empire under siege’ is out!

Hi All,

Just a short one today. I finally did it, after over a year of writing, the first part of ‘The Adarna chronicles’ is out and you can buy it now on Amazon!

I really hope that people (and by that I mean you!) like it :-)

Anyway, back to work now on part two (Phoenix rising), which should be out in July….

Help me with my book cover ‘blurb’ for ‘Empire under siege’

I have been putting this off for a while, and now that the time has come I am bizarrely terrified of writing the book cover ‘blurb’ for my new novella ‘Empire under siege’. I have a cover that I am very happy with (see picture), but for some reason I have been delaying addressing the rather major issue of the blurb.

So, basically, this post is a cry for help. ‘Empire under siege’ is a fantasy set in the ‘Adarnan empire’. The empire itself has many similarities to the Roman empire. There are legions and an emperor and even a senate of sorts. But for every similarity there is a notable difference.

The book itself is an action/ political intrigue/ war story and it is the first in a series that will follow the world-changing events that kick off in this book with a barbarian nation invading the empire. The book itself has been written to appeal to fans of authors like David Gemmell, George R.R. Martin and Stephen Donaldson (if you haven’t read any of these authors, you really should check them out) and whilst I can’t pretend to have a tenth of the skill of any of them I should also make it clear that I have deliberately avoided referencing their style or stories. ‘Empire under siege’ and the ‘Adarna chronicles’ that it forms part of are not cheap imitations of other works (oh dear, that does sound a little pompous!), but are stand alone tales set in a completely new and different world.

Anyway, I am rambling as usual. Back to the point. Please see my attempt at some back cover ‘blurb’ below. Be mean, be harsh, criticise the heck out of it. Please do all of these things, because I want it to end up being as good as possible. Thanks in advance for your help, I really appreciate it :-)

Back cover ‘blurb’ for ‘Empire under siege’

The Empire of Adarna has stood for a thousand years. A beacon of civilisation shining out to the world. Its glory is undimmed, but of late there are rumours…

A horde of savage warriors has invaded and overrun the south, destroying a legion with ease. Now, the very heartlands of the empire are under threat.

The emperor is young, new to his power and enamoured of it.

Republic… There are whispers in the bars and taverns of the capital and the name that is whispered is always the same… Martius.

General Felix Martius has been charged with ending the threat from the horde, but the emperor’s orders have come late and there has been little time to gather an army. The legions are outnumbered ten to one.

Conlan Danson, a young officer in the Third legion, will stand on the front line, unaware that his actions may influence the fate of humanity.

Empire under siege is the first book in the Adarna chronicles, set in a world of epic grandeur and political intrigue it follows the fate of the Empire through the eyes of the men who could ultimately save it, or doom it to destruction.

What do you think? (personally I think it is a bit cringe worthy!). The lesson I learned today? It’s really difficult to write some ‘blurb’….

 

 

 

Book cover reveal for ‘Empire under siege’

Hi there,

Just a brief blog today, but a very important one for me. See the book cover reveal for my new novella ‘Empire under siege’ above. The book is the first in a series entitled ‘Adarna chronicles’ (the project used to be called ‘Hope’ but I didn’t think it was catchy enough. Just a little too abstract…).

Would be really grateful for your thoughts on it. What do you think?

The book itself is out in the next week on Amazon. Those who purchase ‘Empire under siege’ in the month of June 2014 will receive a copy of my upcoming short story ‘The hunger’ for free when it is released as a thank you. All they have to do is sign up to my newsletter using the link at the end of ‘Empire under siege’.

I hope you like the cover, I am truly chuffed to bits with it. I used the guys over at Deranged Doctor Design (the same people who did my cover for ‘Paradise’) and they delivered the goods as usual :-)

Why I no longer use Evernote for my writing (How to find your lost Evernote notes in Android)

I had an issue the other day that frightened the hell out of me. I spend a lot of time on the train these days and when I am not on official ‘work’ business (i.e. earning a crust), I like to write on the train journeys.

*NOTE* If you have found this post through a search engine and you want to know how to get your lost ‘Evernote’ note back, please feel free to skip my ramblings and go to the end of the post, where hopefully the solution awaits you :-)

In a previous post I have outlined my writing tools and I thought it was important to provide an update. You see the other day on the train I decided I wanted a break from writing and editing the ‘Adarna chronicles’. To be fair I was getting a little tired of the first novella ‘Empire under siege’ (for those who have read previous posts, the project used to be called ‘Hope’, but I realised that the name meant nothing to anyone…. Now I know some of you will think ‘What the hell, if Hugh Howey can sell a book called ‘Wool’ then why not have an abstract name that has little meaning until you have read the book?’ But I just wasn’t convinced, so the name has changed).

Anyway, back to the point. I was a little tired of ‘Empire under siege’ and when this happens I tend to work on a short story (which is how my first published work ‘Paradise’ came in to existence) to get over the writer’s block. I have a long list of short story synopses that I hold as ‘Evernote’ ‘notes’, and I will continue to use Evernote for this purpose. The mistake I made was to use ‘Evernote’ as a cut down word processor.

You see I started writing a short story called ‘The hunger’ on the train in Evernote as it seemed easier than trying to use a word processor on my Android tablet. I’ve done this before with great success.

On the day I hit a seam of inspiration that enabled me to polish off the first draft of the story (5,000 words or so) on the journey to London and back. I was ecstatic. Rarely have I been able to finish something in a day, and although there are many rewrites ahead for the story before it goes to the editor, I have to say that I was very, very pleased with it (which, to be fair, probably means it is the worst thing I have ever written!).

I finished the story just as the train got in to my home station and I didn’t have time to sync ‘Evernote’ to the cloud, so I closed my Android tablet and went home, secure in the knowledge that the work would be preserved (I had pressed ‘save’ quite a few times) until I got home and could sync to the cloud and transfer the story to ‘Scrivener’ (which is my writing platform of choice).

Sadly, when I got home and opened Evernote on my iMac, only the first half of the story was there. I didn’t panic, going instead to the Android tablet and checking the ‘note’ on it (surely, I thought, it must still be on the tablet?). Sadly, only half of the story was on the tablet too.

Any writer, I think, will sympathise with my plight. I had been hit by a moment of inspiration and hurled words onto the page in a frenzy. There was no way that I could recapture the lost words. I knew the story, sure, but it would never be the same (plus it would be a pain in the arse to write it all down again). I was utterly, completely, dejected.

I scoured the internet for a solution (after moping around for an hour or so), but couldn’t find anything. To make matters worse, the Evernote website help section was about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

After much head scratching (and cursing), I reasoned that because I had pressed ‘save’ in Evernote the file must be on my Android somewhere. It turns out, thankfully, that I was right.

Here’s what I did:-

1) I opened up my Android tablet and went to the file manager app.

2) In the file manager app (there are many available, all you need is something that will let you browse the files on your Android) I located the ‘Android’ folder (if you have an SD card or similar inserted you will have to search this too).

3) Within the ‘Android’ folder I opened ‘data’ and scrolled down until I found a folder called ‘com.evernote’ and within this a folder called ‘files’

4) Within files I opened a folder called ‘unsaved notes’ (be aware that the structure of the file system in Evernote is such that you may have folders with these names on any storage device connected to your Android and they may have different content. So make sure you look through them all). It did strike me as a little bizarre that my saved files would be in a folder called ‘unsaved notes’ but I found them, so who really cares?

5) I found some ‘.enml’ files that had a date and time stamp that coincided with my train journey.

6) I emailed one of the .enml files (the latest) to my iMac.

7) I tried to open the .enml file. It opened but was mostly nonsense.

8) I did a search on the internet and found out that if you rename a .enml file to .html then it can be opened. So I did this and then opened the .html file in my browser.

9) Hey presto! My entire story popped up in my browser. I copied and pasted it into ‘Scrivener’ and the job was done! I slept soundly that night.

So that, dear reader, is why I will never write anything (other than notes) in Evernote again. I have to state that  there is a function on their website that allows you to ask for support. I did send them a request for help but by the time they got back to me I had solved the problem myself.  I should also note (pardon the pun…) that Evernote is an extremely handy and powerful tool if used correctly and I will continue to use it in the future for many other things.

So, that’s the end of a rather different blog post for me. I hope that someone out there finds it useful at some stage. At the very least, I hope that it will help others avoid the mistakes that I made.

If you like this post why not ‘like’ it below? If you want to you can follow my blog on the link at the top right too.

Extract from ‘Empire under siege’

Hi All,

Please see below an extract from volume one of my ‘Adarna’ fantasy series ‘Empire under siege’, which should be out before the end of the month (well, volume 1, that is). ‘Hope’ is pretty much meant to be a ‘sword and sandal’ epic fantasy. Would really welcome your thoughts (trembles in fear of negative feedback…). Is it engaging enough? (not to mention well enough written?). Please bear in mind that this is still in draft format, it has not, as yet, been professionally edited….

Extract from ‘Empire under siege’ (The Adarna series, volume 1):-

“There is no hope!” the shout carried on the wind, ragged, high pitched and broken.

Conlan glanced toward the noise, his concentration interrupted. He saw the world in perfect focus – a world filled with madness, blood and death. There is no hope. Conlan’s stomach churned as thoughts of death and defeat overtook him. A shadow, a jarring crunch, and his vision blurred, vertigo and darkness overwhelming him, enfolding him in a velvet embrace.

Hearing returned first, clashing iron, the cracking thump of clubs on shields, the rhythmic chant of the legion; fight, fight for the Empire! Screams, jagged and terrible… grunting and groaning intermingled with the choking gasps of the dying.

Conlan envisaged the scene as he lay in darkness – men, shields locked on the front line to hold back the horde, short swords stabbing and hacking rhythmically, perfectly drilled, the finest soldiers in the world. It seemed a distant and terrifying dream.

“Conlan!” someone shouted.

He opened his eyes, squinting into the bright afternoon sun until a silhouetted figure blocked the light.

“Conlan, you have to get up.”

Conlan struggled to stand as hands grasped his arms, dragging him up in grips of iron. His legs wobbled unsteadily as the world snapped into focus.

“Conlan, look at me.” It was Jonas, his shield brother, blue eyes earnest and bright. “Can you speak?”

“What happened?” His voice did not sound like his own, the words caught painfully in his throat, tongue rasping in a parchment dry mouth.

“You dropped your guard, one of the bastards caught you hard, thought you were dead.”

“But…?” dizziness threatened to overwhelm Conlan, crashing in waves against his consciousness.

Jonas grunted. “He overbalanced. Lucus gutted him, then fat Tev took his throat out.”

Conlan looked towards the front. The battle line was five deep, spread too thin to contain the horde – already starting to bulge inward. The fate of the Empire stood on a knife edge.

 

And there you have it, short and sweet. It isn’t all action, but there is a lot going on. If you liked this post (or if you want to know when ‘Empire under siege’ is released), why not follow my blog? Or like me on Facebook? Or maybe even follow on Twitter or Goodreads? (Blimey, that’s a lot of social media choices!) There’s a link to all of them on the right….

Alternatively you could sign up for the ‘Adarna series’ specific newsletter here.