In Today’s Journal
* Writing Better Fiction, 2nd Edition
* Revamping and Republishing
Writing Better Fiction, Second Edition
The second ebook edition of Writing Better Fiction is available now.
If you bought a copy earlier, email me to let me know that and I’ll send you the 2nd edition in PDF. If you’d rather have an .epub or .mobi file, let me know that in your email.
In other news, I should be able to release the paper version of the 2nd edition of WBF on July 1. I’ll announce the release here when that happens. Sorry, no freebies on that one, but my interior (and paper cover) designer and I will price it as gently as we can.
I hope to also publish the much shorter Quiet the Critical Voice… and Author Intrusion books to paper in a combined volume in the next month or two.
Revamping and Republishing
Over the past few days—head to the ground, butt in the air, and plowing through—I’ve redesigned and rebranded the covers of all 22 books of the Wes Crowley saga.
I constructed all of those covers on my Serif PagePlus X9 application, which is no longer available for sale or supported. Serif discontinued the PagePlus program when they stood up the Affinity suite: Publisher, Photo, and Designer. The suite is similar to the Adobe suite but more user friendly, plus you buy it and own it. No monthly subscription.
Before too much longer I hope to learn the ins and outs of at least creating covers with Affinity Publisher. I’ve owned the program since it first came out and have yet to learn it. (Yes, Atticus lovers, I also have that program but have yet to learn how to use it either. I was too busy writing new stories and novels.)
Because I wrote and published the novels that eventually became the Wes Crowley saga over several years (2014 to 2021), I also revised my sales copy (description) on all of them as well as revising the back matter on the Word document for each story. (Then reconstructing the new PDF file for each of them, etc.) It was a whole big bag of worms.
Note: If you don’t have it yet, I still strongly recommend Dean Wesley Smith’s How to Write Fiction Sales Copy. You can get it at Amazon or elsewhere. I also recommend buying the paper edition. Mine is dogeared.
In the near future, I hope to update and republish the paper editions of the ten books of the Wes Crowley saga that are already in paper, and then publish to paper (for the first time) the other eleven books in the saga.
Of course, the same friend who’s putting together the paper editions of my nonfiction books will also help with the Crowley saga trade paperbacks. I’m a one-man show, and I don’t mind admitting my limitations. Publishing to paper is a big one.
A note on platforms—
I’ve always touted using Draft2Digital as an ebook aggregator. I still do. D2D’s user interface is very similar to Amazon’s but it’s less clunky, more streamlined, and more user friendly. For your initial publishing experience with any work, I stand by that statement.
However, updating already published books is a different matter.
While updating all the manuscripts, covers, and sales copy for the Wes Crowley saga on both D2D and my online discount store (on Tuesday) and Amazon (on Wednesday), I found the Amazon platform much easier and quicker to use.
I was able to update and republish all 22 books to D2D over a period of about 3.5 hours. Doing the same over at Amazon—uploading the new manuscript, the new cover, and the new sales copy—took only 2 hours.
My goal is always to be as efficient as possible, so the ease of use at Amazon was a welcome development.
Of course, the key to all of this is to bear branding in mind from the beginning so you won’t have to eventually rebrand an entire series. Duh.
Today, I begin revamping the StoneThread Publishing website. It’s a huge undertaking. I’ll be back tomorrow or the next day to offer details about that.
Talk with you again then.