“Zorya” available now!

Zorya is now available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover (casebound). I’ll be getting it into more e-book formats soon. See the Zorya website for purchase links.

This book has been marinating for a long time and was sent to many agents and editors. I’m grateful that self-publishing has gotten to be so much easier and inexpensive for authors, although the real hurdles (as always) are in marketing the book after you publish it. Still, I remember when “self-publishing” meant paying a printer, stacking boxes of books in your garage, and trying to figure out how to get them to the readers and stores.

All it’s cost me (so far) was some time, a few skills, and my computer. That may change now that I’m in the advertising zone. I notice, for example, that book giveaways on Goodreads aren’t free anymore.

I used Kindle Direct Publishing for all three Amazon editions. Paperbacks used to be a separate process on Amazon’s Createspace, and they didn’t have a hardcover option at all until recently, but now all three options are integrated into KDP.

The Kindle version was composed on Microsoft Word, and crunched into Epub3 by Calibre. I used the simple “iPod” cover I had generated in Photoshop for my old Lulu editions. The paper editions were composed in Adobe InDesign CS6 and uploaded as PDF files.

Now, we’ll see.

Some of the people I wish had done my book cover instead of me.

Michael Whelan:

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Mark Ferrari:

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The people at Platinum:

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The book cover I did, a Photoshop illustration designed for a hardcover wrap-around dust jacket with end flaps. The artwork was done with an ancient version of Accurender and an even older version of AutoCAD.

(All illustrations copyright of their respective artists)

Kindle Direct Publishing launches beta of cover creation tool

Article at “The Digital Reader.”

One of the hardest parts of self-publishing is generating a good cover, either for paper books or digital ones. Places like Createspace and Lulu, among others, already have “cover wizards.”

You can certainly get a workable cover out of these “wizards,” but in my opinion it’s worth the effort to learn how to generate the artwork yourself, or at least hire it done. For one thing, there may be rights issues involved in reusing a cover created by a particular format’s “wizard” for another format. For another, you’re never going to get as much originality from a “wizard” as you can from real artwork.

Artwork for paper books, using the “one piece cover” art method, is hard to lay out. A one-piece cover is what you get by basically flattening the book out, or in the case of a book with a dust jacket, by removing the dust jacket and flattening it out. It’s easy to see that lining up the spine, end papers, and everything else can be tricky. Even changing the number of pages can affect this kind of cover design as the spine area gets larger or smaller.

Cover artwork for Kindle (or other e-books) is much simpler. It’s just a single JPG picture with art and title text. Last time I checked, preferred sizing for Kindle covers was 1563 pixels on the short side and 2500 pixels on the long side.

If you’re planning to do a lot of this kind of thing, it may be worth it to invest the time and money in learning Photoshop, InDesign, or other professional publication software. Adobe’s “Creative Suite” isn’t cheap, but it could be a good investment.