Maturing My Books

I've had a burst of motivation for writing since publishing Scripted. Honestly, publishing a novel has probably made me more excited about working on my books than almost anything else has.

Way back in high school, I started writing a sci-fi/fantasy trilogy. It took me about four years just to finish the first volume, and I'm not even sure how long the second took since I took a break from it for several years in college. I'm still working on the third. My writing style, some of the plot, and the background of some characters have all changed since I started writing that first book. I decided last year that I wanted to go back to the first book and update everything so the first, second and third books were more cohesive, and so I could feel semi-okay with having someone read it to give me feedback.

Besides having to completely rework a few chapters to fit with the plot changes I made later on in the trilogy, the biggest problem I've come across is dialogue. My main character is a teenager, and I wrote the first book while I was a teenager, so you would think that she would talk like a teenager. She doesn't. She talks like some wizened old war veteran. Which, given her age, actually makes her sound very conceited, not to mention unrelatable.

So, ironically, in trying to make my high school writing more mature, I am making my main character sound less mature. But I find myself liking her much better. She actually has a personality. I think originally, I wanted her to be this strong heroine that girls could look up to. Now, I still think you can look up to her, but you can also relate with her.

Aw, my book is growing up.
"Growing Up" by Lomasi_ is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Paperback Nightmares

Kindle Direct Publishing has this really nice tool called Kindle Create that lets you format and prepare your e-book before uploading it to their site for self-publishing.

I didn't know it could also format print editions.

So I worked for several days to get the paperback edition of my book ready to upload, but without Kindle Create to do everything for you, you have to figure out exactly how to set up the pages so it prints properly. Kindle does provide Word doc templates to help with this, but I forgot that if you copy and paste text from one doc to another with CTRL+V, it will keep the formatting and page setup from the doc you copied. 

After several minutes of trying to figure out why some pages were larger than others and realizing my mistake, I then tried to fix it manually, instead of just starting from the beginning and re-pasting the text only. This was frustrating as well, because I kept having to compare the page setup of the original template with what I had, but as far as I can tell you can't have two page setup windows open in the same time in Word.

Finally I discovered that Kindle Create has a beta version that will work for paperback editions. I am often wary of beta software, since of course it's still beta and usually comes with a ton of bugs. But trying to format my book by myself was driving me nuts, so I tried it.

It worked perfectly.

All this to say, Kindle has some pretty cool tools if you're self-publishing. You don't have as many options when it comes to fonts and stylized features as you might if you formatted everything yourself. But if you don't care too much about that, Kindle Create is a super easy way to get your book ready for publishing on Amazon.

Oh, and Scripted is now available both as an e-book and a paperback.