Darlings were killed: total #indiepub mediated through #selfpub

I’ve had some questions that nibble around the edges of the “who is publishing you” biscuit. I thought I’d take a moment to address this specifically.

biscuit-344899_960_720 — NIBBLE THE PUBLISHING BISCUIT!

I’m self-publishing this novel for a range of reasons but, yes, it’s self-published. However, let me be the first to say that this means that you now know less about the process that the book has gone through. For a trad publishing gig, the book has had to make it past several layers of readers and, once accepted, it has been edited, re-read many times, adjusted and tweaked at the structural and syntactic level. As someone who has read self-pub (and trad…) that has obviously not gone through that process, I understand some concerns here. I recognise the importance of objective criticism, other views, and good editing. I wanted to make sure that this work went through a production process that would lead to a really good final book.

What has happened to this book? Let me tell you

The original idea was developed in early 2015 and the work was researched, planned and written over a period of about nine months. I then revised it, fixed some of the more obvious problems, and sent this second draft to readers. I’m lucky that I can write a reasonable first draft and I’m usually happy for D2 to go out as a reflection of what I was thinking.

Those readers gave me early feedback, based on their own broad reading experience and knowledge as writers. I made some modifications and then gave the next draft to two people who were readers in this genre to see what they thought, from a more commercial perspective.

When I received feedback that one of them had spent three hours on a plane reading it on the tiny screen of an iPhone because he was enjoying it, I took that as a positive.

Overall, reader reception across five different readers was overwhelmingly positive, with valuable critical feedback. This was my (self-created) quality gate to move to the next stage.

We then moved to a detailed editing and restructuring mode. The opening chapter changed. The ending changed. Three times. Entire sections of text disappeared. New characters appeared. Swathes of names shifted for effect. Individual words were tweaked to change the rhythms of a critical sentence.

Darlings were killed.

I decided it was good enough to publish but that, to be fair to readers, I should use a professional editor to carry out the structural skim and deep copy edit to make sure that we’d done a good job in the early stages. I also hired a professional designer and artist to design and construct the cover. Both of these people are part of my local art and writing community and the money I pay them goes straight back into making my own city a more literate and beautiful place.

This is still my vision. This will be my book. But it has gone through multiple readings, a lot of editing, and, by the time it reaches you, it will have been scrutinised by professional eyes to make sure that the $2.99 you spent was worth it.

That’s my process. The book is an exciting action adventure where my characters fight bravely against the forces of darkness. I’ve been told it’s a page-turner and that makes me very happy. The structure of the book will be good enough to support that, because that’s how I built the process.

I can only hope, as release date starts to creep closer, that all of the love and care shows.

Just because I’m selling a book for bus fare doesn’t mean that I can give you a bad ride.

Book launch – April 1st!

Yes, I know, I’m launching my first novel on April Fool’s Day. But why not?

4489749576_0274e1918f_o — Lovely WIP Lino “Poisson d’Avril” by Helen Harrop (flickr)

If you’re in Adelaide on April the 1st, from 6:30 to 9pm, why not register on EventBrite and come and see an invisible book being launched in the electronic space!

Click here to register! It’s free!

More handy #Scrivener #indiepub #regex

I’m trying to come up with a set of easy mistake catchers that will do a lot of the more mindless editorial work for me. Having stared at the same 100,000 words for about six months, I’m losing the ability to see the errors. Here is another short set of Scrivener Regular Expression (regex) patterns that will find easy-to-fix problems. (Look at yesterday’s post on #regex to get more information on the definitions I’m using here. As a note, \w means word characters, ^ means ‘start of the line’ and [ ] is used to allow a range of characters to match. I’ll add some more as I go.)

\w”
- This is looking for a single “word” character, followed by closing quotation marks. Scrivener usually replaces straight quotes with opening and closing quotation marks. It’s important to use the right one but you can look for both by modifying the pattern to \w[“”].
- This should catch every time you’ve written speech and missed the punctuation at the end.
^[““][a-z]
- You have to switch on case-sensitivity in the search to get this one to work but it will start at the beginning of lines (^) and look for opening or straight quotes that are followed by lower-case letters.
- This will catch sentences such as “the fish sang.” and “dang it all to heck, man!” but it will also pick up any deliberate use of the lower case, such as “iBooks is a distribution platform.”
\w,[””]$
- Now we have a word character (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and _) followed by a comma. After this, we’re looking for closing quotes. But what about the $? That means “this has to be at the end of a line”. It’s the companion to ^.
- This will show us any time that we used a comma as the final punctuation inside quotation marks and then started a new line.
- This will find
  “This is a terrible thing,”
  
  but it won’t find
  
  “This is a terrible thing,” said Charlie, “What are we to do?”
  
  because the ,” isn’t at the end of a line.
\s\d\s
- This will find any digits that are sitting around by themselves. If you, like me, would prefer to write most of your numbers as words but keep forgetting to do it, this pattern is for you!
- \d means any digit from 0-9. The spaces are around it to stop the pattern matching digits that are part of bigger numbers. (\d by itself would match the 1, the 9, the 3 and the 2 in 1932 but as individual matches.)
- This will find patterns such “He said that there were 3 beasts”.
- Want to find longer numbers? \s\d{2}\s will find all numbers that are two digits long and are surrounded by spaces.
- Want to find all numbers between 1 and 4 digits long? \s\d{1,4}\s is the pattern and will find numbers that are 1, 2, 3, or 4 digits long.
(\w)(\w)(\w)\3\2\1
- This one is just for fun. It finds palindrome patterns that are six characters long. In my text, “sniffing” and “suffused” are matches.
- Adding a space character in the middle give us (\w)(\w)(\w) \3\2\1 and this will match “sword dropped” and “now wonder”.
- Really rather useless unless you have a habit of writing palindromic text and wish to stop.

Launch date: April 1st!

I’ve still got some details to sort out but it appears that things will be together by April the 1st. If you’re in Adelaide, there will be a book launch (location to be advised) and I’ll have an on-line update as well. I’m hoping to have a pre-order option where it’s available but more details as we get closer.

I’m pushing myself to meet this date to bring everything together but, given that I have no physical distribution to worry about, it may shift. Keep your fingers crossed that my tax administration details are all sorted soon!

launch-pad-67651_960_720 — Getting everything into position.

More automated checks. Fun with #scrivener and regex

I ran several other Scrivener checks today, once again using the amazingly handy Regular Expression (RegEx) facility to find patterns on things.

Punctuation is easy to mess up, especially where spaces are involved and I find some of the following patterns very handy. Remember that to do this in Scrivener, you will need to go to the global search the project field, set the Operator to RegEx and then you’ll be in the right mode. Here are some handy patterns, with explanation.

^\s+\w
- This pattern will find any sentence that has spaces before you start using words. The ^ means start at the beginning of the line. The \s+ means you are looking for 1 or more spaces (\s means space, + means ‘at least one or more’). \w represents a word character, from a-z, A-Z, 0-9, including the _ (underscore) character. This will catch lines such as (ignoring the quotation marks, here used for clarity) ” Bosco said…” and ” Bosco said…”, which can be very hard to pick up from visual inspection.
\w,\w
- This will pick up word characters that are tightly packed around a comma. If you are prone to writing “very,very high” then this will find that for you. (Sometimes this is a legitimate pattern! 100,000 is valid but will be detected by this.)
\w\s+,\w
- This is very similar to the above but now it picks up when you have the space in the wrong place. This will find “very ,very high”.
\s+(\w+)\s+(\1)\s
- This one is more complicated! I’ve mentioned it before but this is an optimised version. Remember that \s means “a space character” although formally it means any whitespace character including tab, space, carriage return or new line. Adding + means that \s+ will match ” ” and ” ” and ” newline tabcharacter “. \w+ means that we are now looking at words of at least one character in length.
- But what does ( and ) mean? This is a grouping operator and, because we’ve used it, anything that matches this now has a numerical reference. We call this a capturing group because we’ve ‘captured’ that pattern and numbered it! We can refer to this capturing group (our first) with the shorthand \1.
- Now we can explain the whole pattern. Starting with any number of spaces (but at least one), we look for characters that make up words, stopping when we find a space. Remember this captured group of characters is labelled as \1. By using \1 again, we are saying that we want to find all the situations where we have the same pattern of characters twice in a row, separated by spaces. Once we match that first group of characters, the regex system can then build a pattern where that group is repeated. The magic of regex!
- This pattern will find ” of of “, ” it IT”, ” and and ” and also things like ” R R ” if you’re spelling something out.
- If you simplify it to (\w+)\s+(\1), you’ll find all of those patterns plus things like “he heard” (where the he he is actually located), “pithy thyme” (thy thy) or “puny NYC” (ny ny pattern will be found here unless you use the search option ‘case sensitive’).
[ ]{2}
- There’s a single space between [ and ]. The {2} means that you are looking for exactly two of these in a row. This will find every time that you typed ” ” instead of ” “. (Some of you like to double space. Many of us do not.)

That’s it for today. Back to editing for me!

Talking to an editor! #indiepub #indieedit

Had a great meeting this morning with an editor, looking at making those final tweaks to the work. My great bunch of critics, supporters and very detailed readers have done an enormous amount but I’ve decided to ask a professional to look at this, really to confirm how close this is and to get those little tweaks that make it great. Well, good. 🙂

You only get one first novel and, after much thought, I’ve decided that a light structural and copy edit is not going to break my brain, loosen my grip on my work, or cause Babylon to fall. Again. I have a direct connection to the editor and I’m supporting locals while keeping control. I’m still very happy with this version of the Indie process.

I want you to have something good to read. This will help.

After a great coffee meeting, the editor likes the concept and her interests are bang in the middle of the genre I’m writing. I think this will lead to a good outcome.

Not much longer, dear readers! You get to read the final version of this is about 6-8 weeks, assuming that I get the business details and launch issues sorted in time.

Reality increases #indiepub #digipub #isbn

While I wait for Tax Office administrative detail to resolve and the editors tear my book apart looking for final problems, I’m delving into the wonderful world of ISBNs. For those who don’t know, each book and each variation of that book have a separate ISBN. While this used to mean two codes, one for hardcover and one for soft, this means at least three for digipub: MOBI, EPUB and PDF. I find this fascinating, from an informational perspective, as I can see why soft and hardcover are different because of the significant structural changes that would lead to repagination, but the idea that two free-flowing text formats aren’t informationally equivalent is not something I’d thought about. Fortunately, the Australian arm of Bowker sells blocks of ISBNs and I’m going to buy enough for two books.

I am, apparently, madly optimistic. Or in deep denial.

It’s worth noting that Canadians get ISBNs for free as part of cultural enrichment, while most of us have to pay for them! Canadians, you have no excuses for not writing lots and lots of books.

All Platforms! All! #indiepub #curseofkerevesdere

I’ve had some more questions about what you’ll be able to read “Kereves” on and the answer is, effectively, anything electronic. I’m partnering with a couple of distribution platforms and, between them, they give me all of the reader formats and a small bit of extra control for one of the dominant formats in my own market.

Ultimately, Apple, Android, Kindle, Kobo, B&N… whatever… you should be able to buy it for your device.

My apologies to those of you who are still reading on the reticulated bronze harmonascope. We are apparently all out of the Cavorite required to power your device.

OldLHC — I know… and you’d just rewound the core, hadn’t you?

B£ing, ca$h, edit, dash!

Things are moving along! I’ve had to spend some time setting up the business side of this enterprise. The Australian Tax Office and I now know each other a little better.

My constant readers are going through the manuscript again and I have a meeting with a professional editor this week to discuss making a final pass over it to make sure that all of the processes I’ve put in place have resulted in something that’s fit for sale. There’s a lot of good work out there that is marred by accidental or unnecessary issues with editing. I want to keep those problems to a minimum and I want to learn how to improve my own processes. One of my key interests has always been “how can I become a better writer?” Good editing is an essential part of that and it has been one of my weaker areas in the past.

In between applying for various important numbers and talking to people, I’m making (mostly small) changes to the work itself. I hope I’m only a week away from announcing the launch date.

Oh, and the launch date for a collection of my short stories to whet your appetite for the main book. Did I not mention that before?

Keep following for more news on releases!

The Curse of Kereves Dere

TheCurseOfKerevesDereCover

Set in the early 1930s, this action adventure follows Charles Kerry and his friend Bosco, survivors of the Great War, as they struggle against terrible, dark forces who would destroy the world. They have Williams and Fauve, London’s most interesting booksellers, and Dr Cavendish of the British Museum to help but their opponents are deadly. Can the British-Kadariak society be defeated or will their insane plans tear apart London and bring forth The Unspeakable One from his sanctum on Lost Carcosa?

“The Curse of Kereves Dere” is Nick Falkner’s first novel and is fast-paced and engaging, with a plot that spans myth and legend from the Celts to Lovecraft. Early readers have called it a page turner, with characters that are interesting, distinct and in good assortment.

If you like adventure, realistic heroes, a touch of horror and snappy dialogue, you’ll enjoy “The Curse of Kereves Dere.”

(If you happen to really like one-armed Frenchmen who never say die then have I got a book for you.)

Available soon on iBooks and the Kindle bookstore. Detailed timeline to be released soon.

Nick Falkner, author and artist.

Thinking, dreaming, writing and printing

Tag: Curse of Kereves Dere