I love writing.
I also love National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).
Correspondingly, I love the non-profit that hosts NaNoWriMo, The Office of Letters and Light. Please read more about the fabulous programs they provide for young writers, teachers, and grown-up writers here, here, and here.
As such, I'm making a pledge for the month of November:
1) All royalties from sales of my book, On Her Own Two Wheels, in the month of November, shall go to the programs hosted by The Office of Letters and Light. You can purchase my book either from CreateSpace at this link or from Amazon at this link.
2) I have 25 promotional copies of my book that I special-ordered for NaNoWriMo. If you make a $10 donation, I will give/send you a copy of my book as a donor gift. I can collect the donation and send it for you, or you can show me your donor receipt via email if you donate directly at this link. First 25 donors only. U.S. shipping, 48 contiguous states only. You can send me your donor receipt via email at stacyxavier7 at gmail dot com.
3) If you don't want my book, fine! I see how it is. :-) But you can still feel really good about yourself and do something nice for the holidays by either donating directly at the link above or through the secure StayClassy Page at this link.
However you do it, please consider donating to this wonderful organization so they can continue offering their programming to thousands of children, and even a few of us adults, around the world.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Monday, November 5, 2012
Oh Yeah! I Published a Book!
I'm doing this all kinds of backwards. I mean, really, I didn't have months of anticipatory build-up before my release date. I mainly just told people I know - "Hey! I'm releasing a book in a few weeks!" (that was back in August; it's now November; gosh am I glad I didn't post an official release date way back then). And last night, after going over my most recent proof, I was half-delerious from exhaustion, half-giddy from FINALLY being ready to pull the trigger, that I hit "Publish My Book" on CreateSpace... and then collapsed into bed.
I'm certain I'll do this right next time around. I will do a blog tour and host other writers on my blog that I manage to network with so I can be a good member of my community. I'll set an official "Release Date." I'll hire a real editor. I'll do some other awesome promotional stuff.
But this time around - I learned the Process. And it was really good. I feel about 75% smarter than I was in January and the bulk of that I learned since July. I have a realistic idea of time frames; I have a realistic idea of how much time I have to designate to this project myself. I see what it takes; and I can't wait to take it on again. Bigger, better, and unplugged. (or something)
That said - I'm still insanely excited about this book. I'm excited that I've dipped my toe in the water; I'm excited to learn what I can do better next time - writing-wise, cover-design wise, everything-wise. But I'm also just excited that this fun little story has a place to go other than on my hard drive. I hope it is good for a smile, a relaxing little foray into another person's world for a few hours, and maybe even a little bit of inspiration.
I'm certain I'll do this right next time around. I will do a blog tour and host other writers on my blog that I manage to network with so I can be a good member of my community. I'll set an official "Release Date." I'll hire a real editor. I'll do some other awesome promotional stuff.
But this time around - I learned the Process. And it was really good. I feel about 75% smarter than I was in January and the bulk of that I learned since July. I have a realistic idea of time frames; I have a realistic idea of how much time I have to designate to this project myself. I see what it takes; and I can't wait to take it on again. Bigger, better, and unplugged. (or something)
That said - I'm still insanely excited about this book. I'm excited that I've dipped my toe in the water; I'm excited to learn what I can do better next time - writing-wise, cover-design wise, everything-wise. But I'm also just excited that this fun little story has a place to go other than on my hard drive. I hope it is good for a smile, a relaxing little foray into another person's world for a few hours, and maybe even a little bit of inspiration.
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| Purchase Now on CreateSpace |
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
What it's like to get a physical copy of your book
Today marks another milestone: I received my physical review copy of my novel via CreateSpace.
It was a rough day today overall for reasons I can't really get into. Suffice to say I got home from work a little before 8pm, and I think that will be the norm for the rest of this month.
Husband lectures on Tuesday and Wednesday nights for his online courses, so getting home this late was a bit of a problem - we live in a small condo and he lectures in the dining room, so I have to tread softly around the kitchen to get dinner for myself before hiding in the study or the bedroom. But he held off on starting his lecture right on time today to show me what was waiting for me at the bottom of a tall stack of junk mail: a slim package from CreateSpace.
I used my fingernails to break through the tape holding the cardboard pieces together, and there it was. My book, in print. With my name on it and everything.
Wow.
So I know what I'll be doing with the 15 minutes per day I'll have after work and before bed for the rest of this week: picking over this review copy with a fine tooth comb. It's my last shot to make it as perfect as I can get it. I already know a few things thanks to my dad's keen eye taking a last-minute look over everything.
Then, finally, it will be go-time.
It's so close I can almost feel it!
It was a rough day today overall for reasons I can't really get into. Suffice to say I got home from work a little before 8pm, and I think that will be the norm for the rest of this month.
Husband lectures on Tuesday and Wednesday nights for his online courses, so getting home this late was a bit of a problem - we live in a small condo and he lectures in the dining room, so I have to tread softly around the kitchen to get dinner for myself before hiding in the study or the bedroom. But he held off on starting his lecture right on time today to show me what was waiting for me at the bottom of a tall stack of junk mail: a slim package from CreateSpace.
I used my fingernails to break through the tape holding the cardboard pieces together, and there it was. My book, in print. With my name on it and everything.
Wow.
So I know what I'll be doing with the 15 minutes per day I'll have after work and before bed for the rest of this week: picking over this review copy with a fine tooth comb. It's my last shot to make it as perfect as I can get it. I already know a few things thanks to my dad's keen eye taking a last-minute look over everything.
Then, finally, it will be go-time.
It's so close I can almost feel it!
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Cover Reveal: On Her Own Two Wheels!
Without further ado, I present: The cover for my first self-published novel, On Her Own Two Wheels! I incorporated as many suggestions as I could from my test subjects, so thank you so much to everyone who gave me feedback! I am extremely excited; this was one of the most difficult decisions to make, since all of the ideas I got were phenomenal, but I went with what I felt would show up best on Amazon, since that will be my primary outlet (until I make it big in publishing, of course! teehee!).
Friday, October 12, 2012
CreateSpace: The waiting is the hardest part
So, as of today, I've done the following:
Picked my cover; like, 100% settled on it
Submitted and approved the interior formatting
Received my promotional text
Corrected my cover when the wrong text was put on the back of it (I guess this was partially my fault though)
Waited.
Filled out the questionnaire for my promotional items (which now I'm wondering how long it'll take to get them and wondering why they didn't give me the questionnaire to fill out a little sooner).
Suffice to say, I'm getting a bit frustrated. Somehow, I had it in my head that this would be something like a 6 week process. Well, I started this process at the beginning August and we're now half-way through October. I kind of feel like my physical review copy should have been here about a week ago; and the last cover revision, which was really just fixing some text, somehow ended up taking over a week before that.
One thing I will say: My. Cover. Looks. Awesome. I really can't wait to show it off to the world. I'll be posting my cover reveal within the next day or two so stay tuned!
Another thing: I'm really glad I hired people to handle a lot of this stuff for me, because I think I'd get massively annoyed trying to figure it out myself. Sitting around toying with a word processor and other crappy software for hours is not my ideal pastime.
But on the other hand, I feel like this would be going faster if I were more involved. Maybe not? I don't know.
I have been feeling pretty antsy over the whole thing, though. I have barely written anything while I've been waiting for this process to move forward - I guess I kind of have target fixation. I have a kind of annoying habit where I like to work on just one thing at a time and give it my full attention. No grand multi-tasker am I. I feel incomplete if I start on something else before my original project is done. Plus, I feel like I'll forget something if my attention is too divided. But, then again, that's why I hired people to do these parts for me - so I'd have more time for other things. It's a conundrum that I need to work out.
So, now I just obsessively check my mailbox each day to see if my physical proof is here yet. I think I need to go check again just to be sure.
Picked my cover; like, 100% settled on it
Submitted and approved the interior formatting
Received my promotional text
Corrected my cover when the wrong text was put on the back of it (I guess this was partially my fault though)
Waited.
Filled out the questionnaire for my promotional items (which now I'm wondering how long it'll take to get them and wondering why they didn't give me the questionnaire to fill out a little sooner).
Suffice to say, I'm getting a bit frustrated. Somehow, I had it in my head that this would be something like a 6 week process. Well, I started this process at the beginning August and we're now half-way through October. I kind of feel like my physical review copy should have been here about a week ago; and the last cover revision, which was really just fixing some text, somehow ended up taking over a week before that.
One thing I will say: My. Cover. Looks. Awesome. I really can't wait to show it off to the world. I'll be posting my cover reveal within the next day or two so stay tuned!
Another thing: I'm really glad I hired people to handle a lot of this stuff for me, because I think I'd get massively annoyed trying to figure it out myself. Sitting around toying with a word processor and other crappy software for hours is not my ideal pastime.
But on the other hand, I feel like this would be going faster if I were more involved. Maybe not? I don't know.
I have been feeling pretty antsy over the whole thing, though. I have barely written anything while I've been waiting for this process to move forward - I guess I kind of have target fixation. I have a kind of annoying habit where I like to work on just one thing at a time and give it my full attention. No grand multi-tasker am I. I feel incomplete if I start on something else before my original project is done. Plus, I feel like I'll forget something if my attention is too divided. But, then again, that's why I hired people to do these parts for me - so I'd have more time for other things. It's a conundrum that I need to work out.
So, now I just obsessively check my mailbox each day to see if my physical proof is here yet. I think I need to go check again just to be sure.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
CreateSpace: The Next Steps
So, it's been a while. Sorry about that. Truth be told, though, there hasn't been tons to tell. It's tough being in the "hurry up and wait" phase, but I've found ways to pass the time (that haven't involved hitting "refresh" on my CreateSpace page every 5 minutes; no, really).
Well, we left off (I think) with me hitting "submit" on my questionnaire and specifications. I also uploaded my manuscript - that was a bit of a project, though. I write my novels in Scrivener, and to use the CreateSpace services, they recommend you upload your manuscript in Word. So I had to convert it over, which is an imperfect process, and then add some formatting elements to ensure the translation worked well. This leads me to a caveat: if you plan on using CreateSpace, it'd be a good idea to write your novel using Word to begin with, or at least use a program that converts to Word pretty easily. I love Scrivener, though, so I think I'll just build in the conversion to my expected workload in publishing a book with their tools (and work on learning how to do it right; I think I figured it out, but it took some fiddling and I still had to go through and double-check everything).
So, after all the submissions had been made on my end, I cooled my heels until the best day ever: my cover concepts came in.
I cannot tell you what an emotional experience that was. I know it's a little silly, but getting to see the cover ideas for my book, with the title and my name and everything, was one of the most exciting moments in this whole process.
Until I then had to agonize over which one I was going to pick.
I polled several people in my target demographic before making my decision. I got a lot of great input from folks, but ultimately I had to make a very tough choice. I can't wait til it launches and I can show it off!
CreateSpace uploads your cover concepts to your project toolbox, where you can view them and then select which one you want to use. You're allowed to request a certain number of changes or a third concept if you don't like either one. I requested a few changes to my chosen cover design, which I'm supposed to get back in another few days for final approval.
In addition to my covers, I also received the internal formatting file so I could review and make sure the page layouts were done correctly and looked good. This includes things like chapter headers, spacing, the little symbols between separate sections of the chapter (what're those called again?), etc. I got mine back and it was also AWESOME. It wasn't just a few random pages off of a PDF - it had my name on each page and the title of the book on each page, just like a real book. These are things that make me go "squee", people. It's things like these you don't even probably notice when you are reading, and it just tickles me.
I had to send in my initial approval of the internal formatting and will get a final review of it when they send me my physical review copy.
Finally, they also sent me my promotional text. This was something I really debated about doing - after all, I'm a writer, how tough can it be to do promotional text? But the truth is, I can't do stuff like that without feeling campy and ridiculous. It felt about 100% better to have someone do it for me, and I'm glad I did it. I didn't like all of the choices they made and I edited a few parts pretty heavily, but just having that launching point saved me hours of time agonizing over it myself. They did a pretty good job, though the concise-writer part of me just had to tweak it (srsly, there were quite a few run-on sentences, be on the lookout).
Sooo. My promotional text is all approved, my book cover is almost done, the internal formatting is completed. Next: Physical review copy, and then onward to my final approval and marketing products! Gah it's so exciting I just can't stand it!
Well, we left off (I think) with me hitting "submit" on my questionnaire and specifications. I also uploaded my manuscript - that was a bit of a project, though. I write my novels in Scrivener, and to use the CreateSpace services, they recommend you upload your manuscript in Word. So I had to convert it over, which is an imperfect process, and then add some formatting elements to ensure the translation worked well. This leads me to a caveat: if you plan on using CreateSpace, it'd be a good idea to write your novel using Word to begin with, or at least use a program that converts to Word pretty easily. I love Scrivener, though, so I think I'll just build in the conversion to my expected workload in publishing a book with their tools (and work on learning how to do it right; I think I figured it out, but it took some fiddling and I still had to go through and double-check everything).
So, after all the submissions had been made on my end, I cooled my heels until the best day ever: my cover concepts came in.
I cannot tell you what an emotional experience that was. I know it's a little silly, but getting to see the cover ideas for my book, with the title and my name and everything, was one of the most exciting moments in this whole process.
Until I then had to agonize over which one I was going to pick.
I polled several people in my target demographic before making my decision. I got a lot of great input from folks, but ultimately I had to make a very tough choice. I can't wait til it launches and I can show it off!
CreateSpace uploads your cover concepts to your project toolbox, where you can view them and then select which one you want to use. You're allowed to request a certain number of changes or a third concept if you don't like either one. I requested a few changes to my chosen cover design, which I'm supposed to get back in another few days for final approval.
In addition to my covers, I also received the internal formatting file so I could review and make sure the page layouts were done correctly and looked good. This includes things like chapter headers, spacing, the little symbols between separate sections of the chapter (what're those called again?), etc. I got mine back and it was also AWESOME. It wasn't just a few random pages off of a PDF - it had my name on each page and the title of the book on each page, just like a real book. These are things that make me go "squee", people. It's things like these you don't even probably notice when you are reading, and it just tickles me.
I had to send in my initial approval of the internal formatting and will get a final review of it when they send me my physical review copy.
Finally, they also sent me my promotional text. This was something I really debated about doing - after all, I'm a writer, how tough can it be to do promotional text? But the truth is, I can't do stuff like that without feeling campy and ridiculous. It felt about 100% better to have someone do it for me, and I'm glad I did it. I didn't like all of the choices they made and I edited a few parts pretty heavily, but just having that launching point saved me hours of time agonizing over it myself. They did a pretty good job, though the concise-writer part of me just had to tweak it (srsly, there were quite a few run-on sentences, be on the lookout).
Sooo. My promotional text is all approved, my book cover is almost done, the internal formatting is completed. Next: Physical review copy, and then onward to my final approval and marketing products! Gah it's so exciting I just can't stand it!
Friday, August 10, 2012
"The Book of Love" by Magnetic Fields/Covered by Peter Gabriel
I am a loser and am staying in tonight watching old Scrubs re-runs. Husband is chilling with his friends but I'm just tired and wanted a night to myself. So, as any good Scrubs fan knows, during JD's final episode, the song that plays at the end is Peter Gabriel's cover of the Magnetic Fields song "Book of Love." This isn't that poppy, "well I wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, who, who wrote the book of love!" song, but rather a slow, thoughtful tune that made me curious. I wondered what the original writer of the song must be thinking. So, of course, like all good people of my generation, I Googled it. Sadly, there's no explanation out there that I could readily locate.
Due to my innate fear of copyright infringement, I'm not going to re-post the lyrics or video here, but I assure you, if you Google this song and listen to both versions (and perhaps follow along on a handy lyrics website), your ears will be well-rewarded.
I'm curious what other people think this song is about. The song lets us know a few times that "the book of love is long and boring." It also goes on to mention things within the book of love - music, charts, facts, figures, instructions for dancing. Even though the singer seems mildly irritated by these things - perhaps not a big fan of music, reading, or dancing - he reassures his beloved that he loves to hear her sing, or read; and that she could read or sing him anything. Evidently, the book of love also contains things such as flowers, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, and "things we're all too young to know."
My thought is that this song is about people who grow old together.
Anyone who has been in a marriage or long-term relationship for longer than a few years will tell you - love is work; marriage is work. It isn't all dancing, flowers, and chocolates, although that is part of it at first. There are times where a relationship, if it's gone on long enough, will become, in fact, "long and boring." Think of those you know that have been married for years and years - grandparents celebrating their 40th, 50th, or even 60th wedding anniversary. I would bet you that they will inform you that many times, their book of love seemed long and boring. But there are certain things that help you hang on - the fact that, even though you may grow angry with one another, and sometimes things get hard (sometimes the facts and figures don't add up, for example), there are things to still love about each other - hearing their voice, hearing them sing, or just being together. And once you've built a life together - it's important not to throw that away.
Hopefully the book of long goes on for a while; but eventually, loss does happen, and finally, the book of love has endings - the things "we're all too young to know."
It's an interesting love song. Not like the typical impassioned love songs used to woo women or to express some kind of short-term lust; this seems more about enduring love, after you realize it's not all optimism and sunshine but also come to know that marriage is more than that in the long-term.
Anyone else heard this song and have any insights?
Due to my innate fear of copyright infringement, I'm not going to re-post the lyrics or video here, but I assure you, if you Google this song and listen to both versions (and perhaps follow along on a handy lyrics website), your ears will be well-rewarded.
I'm curious what other people think this song is about. The song lets us know a few times that "the book of love is long and boring." It also goes on to mention things within the book of love - music, charts, facts, figures, instructions for dancing. Even though the singer seems mildly irritated by these things - perhaps not a big fan of music, reading, or dancing - he reassures his beloved that he loves to hear her sing, or read; and that she could read or sing him anything. Evidently, the book of love also contains things such as flowers, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, and "things we're all too young to know."
My thought is that this song is about people who grow old together.
Anyone who has been in a marriage or long-term relationship for longer than a few years will tell you - love is work; marriage is work. It isn't all dancing, flowers, and chocolates, although that is part of it at first. There are times where a relationship, if it's gone on long enough, will become, in fact, "long and boring." Think of those you know that have been married for years and years - grandparents celebrating their 40th, 50th, or even 60th wedding anniversary. I would bet you that they will inform you that many times, their book of love seemed long and boring. But there are certain things that help you hang on - the fact that, even though you may grow angry with one another, and sometimes things get hard (sometimes the facts and figures don't add up, for example), there are things to still love about each other - hearing their voice, hearing them sing, or just being together. And once you've built a life together - it's important not to throw that away.
Hopefully the book of long goes on for a while; but eventually, loss does happen, and finally, the book of love has endings - the things "we're all too young to know."
It's an interesting love song. Not like the typical impassioned love songs used to woo women or to express some kind of short-term lust; this seems more about enduring love, after you realize it's not all optimism and sunshine but also come to know that marriage is more than that in the long-term.
Anyone else heard this song and have any insights?
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