Tag Archives: Eureka Street Press

Novel Wednesday Excerpt for March 15

KEPT: The story of the cover art

When you self-publish a book, one of the crucial decisions you make is approving the cover art and design. For most writers, this is counterintuitive, as our strengths generally (at least we hope) lie in the realms of words and storytelling, not so much in imagery.

Which makes this process even more nerve wracking.

Because – there’s this thing out there called the Internet now. Where everybody goes for books. And usually they’re bombarded with a screenful of pixellated book covers, all of them vying for the opportunity to catch the browser’s eye. Decisions are made on the basis of interest in the cover. There’s no table full of books to flip through. There’s no physical shelf showing all the new books in the genre. It’s a much bigger and confusing landscape and of course, it’s all virtual.

And what is it that catches the browser’s eye? Color, for one thing. Red is more eye-catchy, than say, brown or yellow. Hello stop signs! Also strong graphics, I think, especially considering small screens.

And of course, naked men, for this genre, which is a gay mystery/suspense/thriller. The one action the cover is designed to elicit is a click further – basically that’s it, stop and find out some more.

So I did have an image in mind, which I gave to the cover designer at that point — it’s this:

I found it on the internet, on Flickr. I didn’t take the photo and I don’t know who the subject is. But I do know it’s an image of the desert near Palm Springs, and also has a hot looking half-naked guy who looks vaguely Latin as the subject.
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One of the main characters in KEPT, if not the main character, is a guy named Jorge who anglicizes his name to George. This would be my cover image.

The cover designer at CreateSpace (the company Eureka Street Press uses for actual book and ebook publication) came up with this image based on the idea of a man in the desert:

So, a different desert (it looks more like Joshua Tree to me, and well, it’s close enough) and a different man, obviously, someone from their bank of usable images. Yeah, he’s got better abs, too, that never hurts, right?

Simple typography for a very simple title, and my name as the author. I think it sticks out on a page full of busier titles (though I was unable to get much red in this image). What do you think?

“Kept” Book Cover, the real one, has arrived.

Here it is, the final cover image for “Kept,” my novel of crime and sex set in Palm Springs. Available March 2016, exact date TBD, but targeting March 20.

My hope is this cover will make readers want to know more. What do you think?
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The Reasons I Left Facebook

Yep, I retired from the Facebook like-athon on January 1, my one and only New Year’s resolution this year.

Two weeks later, so, how’s it going? Do I have regrets, do I have posting or “liking” withdrawal?

Have to admit, there’ve been a couple of times when I wanted to “share” something, like a thought about a movie, or the weather, and there was no one to “share” it with — something I would have just typed into the Facebook “status update” box.

What I find most odd about that is how quickly my mind was trained to “share” my life in such an artificial way. It’s kind of frightening. Five short years is all it took and I’m that digital lemming!

So, actually, the world did not really need to know that the wind is knocking over plants on my balcony, or that isn’t it funny that two closeted gay actors both have lead roles (as straight men) in “American Hustle” (you figure it out), or, whatever else it was I was thinking about that particular day.

This is the last message I posted on Facebook, as a sort-of explanation to “Friends,” both the real kind and the Facebook kind:

Facebook Friends: With the New Year, I’m going to be signing off Facebook. My decision is a combination of wanting more of my focus to be in the offline (real?) world as well as crucial privacy and business model concerns (Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t need to be making any more money on my digital assets, thankyouverymuch), as well as wanting to devote more time to my own social media outlet, my blog (jimarnoldblog.com/blog)! I’ve tremendously enjoyed all the banter, throwbacks and flashbacks, sharing and reconnecting and hope to continue doing so—just not here. Those who don’t have my contact information already can find it at the blog. Thanks for keeping in touch, and have a great 2014.

A lot of bloggers and others have posted their own reasons for leaving social media, specifically Facebook, and I’ve been influenced by those. Some of my favorites are here and here.

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These are my own top reasons for leaving Facebook, in no particular order:

I really, really, really don’t want to see pictures of your food. I mean gag me, OK? I don’t know why this grosses me out so much, but it really does. Why would you think this is interesting to anybody? We’re lucky to be living in a country that (at least so far) is not starving.
Facebook connections are not real connections. They’re not real friendships. Real friendships involve messy interpersonal actions over time. Anything virtual keeps that human messiness at arm’s length, and I find I want, I crave, the messy. Bring it on.
I began to realize I was presenting to the virtual world a highly curated version of myself, hoping that it would somehow be attractive and acceptable to a large number of people I hadn’t really met or known in the physical world. This is probably pathological. I had to stop it to remain sane. (or at least somewhat sane)
The vast majority of my 800-ish Facebook friends were/are people I had maybe met once or twice. A lot of them turned out to be oversharers, and I found myself finding out way, way more about them then I ever dreamt possible. It was lazy; you click here, you click there, you see an old photo, you find out their politics. Truthfully, this seemed like creepy stalking to me. I supposed that others probably did it to me. Eeeewww.
I read a book. It’s called “Who Owns the Future,” by Jaron Lanier. He presents the idea that way things are going in the digital economy, it will only be those who own the biggest computers (the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons) who will make any money in the future and the rest of us will basically be serfs, fighting over the scraps. The trade that’s presented to everyone on Facebook is that you can use the service for free, in exchange for handing over digital rights to your life and your data. This is not in any way, shape or form a fair trade. The only way Facebook makes their money is for you to give them your data. You need to be compensated in some real, monetary way for this above and beyond access to the service for free. Would you like to stop giving Mark Zuckerberg your life?

Facebook increases isolation, rather than alleviating it. By comparing myself to the highly curated versions of my Facebook “friends,” I often felt worse about my own circumstances rather than better. I also could not say one more time to someone in real time, “Oh, yes, I know you on Facebook, we’re Facebook friends!” I mean really, how lame is that?
Time’s a wastin’. I would frequently fall down the Facebook rabbit hole, reading all sorts of links, especially to political articles, etc. I’d look up and wonder where the hour had gone, without a lick of my real work getting done.
Marketing my books on Facebook was a fool’s errand. I found this out, that people on Facebook aren’t interested in reading books, for the most part. Sure, if you’re Stephen King or Anne Rice or someone like that, it might be cool to have them as your “friend.” But I found that in my case, nobody was looking for books to read on that particular platform. My time is much better spent writing the next great book, or possibly interacting with readers on a site like goodreads.com – which is specifically for people who like to read.

I’m sure there’s more, I’ll probably add to this list. Why would you leave Facebook? Or do you love it?

Here’s another for me: name-calling. I noticed it was really easy to get caught up in comments to posts, particularly bickering, partisan political ones. And how easy it was to fall into cowardly, obnoxious name-calling. So I may have called S. Palin a c*** on Facebook. Somewhere, if there is a heaven, my dear mother would not be happy. And honestly, I don’t want to be that guy who calls people easy vulgar names on social media. (Even if she is a c***.)

Beach weekend: The Forest Dark

reviewer beazy says: “Some of these people have a really dark side. Like me, you’ll be drawn in and probably have to keep reading to get the gist of this really fun book.” Going to the beach or campground this weekend? Take along “The Forest Dark.”

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Forest Dark Press Info

Press release out on the new book today. And Kindle edition is here!

Book Review by Amos Lassen

Amazon Reviews for The Forest Dark

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My Reasons To Self Publish!

Print on Demand, original version!

People often ask me why I decided to go the self-publishing route with Eureka Street Press – and now to continue along that path with my second novel (“The Forest Dark“). Here are the reasons. (If you have any questions, I’d love to respond to them – just put them in the comments.)

So, why Self-Publish? Here’s what happened with “Benediction” (2009):

Initially, I went the traditional approach looking for a book agent, specifically, one who had supported Gay Fiction in the past (this was for my first novel, Benediction)
I sent out 30 or so letters to agents and got back respectful rejections from all (all that I heard back from, which was most of them, if not all)
I also realized that the question of how to market this book (about a middle-aged gay man with prostate cancer) was equivalent to the question of the quality of the book itself – which struck a chord with me, as it was similar to my work experience in the entertainment industry, i.e., the questions we asked about film and TV projects, regardless of subjective “merit.”
It’s all about genre: to successfully market a book, you have to choose a genre. Even though I always felt the book (Benediction) had wide appeal, I chose to brand it Gay Fiction.
About the same time, I spoke with an acquaintance who had a good experience with self-publishing (Drew Banks, Able Was I) and took a seminar at the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center on Self-Publishing (given by bestselling writer Nick Nolan).

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I took the class, and his ideas really seemed to make tremendous sense, particularly from a niche marketing model
I’m also a big fan of Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail, and realized how the internet has basically changed the way we find out about and buy media (among other things), but especially music and books.
I had done this before – with a short documentary video, which is for sale VOD (video on demand) on amazon.com and has been for years. (Our Brothers, Our Sons, which was also an independently produced project from start to finish.)
My old day jobs (remember them?) have mostly been in marketing/PR, so doing that aspect of this process (and it is a significant part of the process) was not daunting to me.

The Basic Process

I chose a publishing company (originally BookSurge, now they’re CreateSpace), which is owned by amazon.com, and intimately connected to all the marketing strength of amazon. (This is also the company that distributes my video.)
I hired a copyeditor and a separate graphic designer for the cover.
I submitted text files once the book was edited, and then proofread, made changes, then approved galleys.
Once that was done, the title was ready to be printed P.O.D. (print on demand) model, i.e., there is no inventory, when a book is ordered, they print one, which makes this business model doable. It was also formatted to Kindle ebook, which have turned out to been the lion’s share of sales.

The Marketing Part

Challenge – you do have to find your audience, which is mainly people who not only buy their books online, but also find out about their books on the internet.
I committed to spending about an hour a day for a year (at least, gulp) doing marketing on this book, mostly online.

After the launch, then what?

Pitfalls

Growing an online fan base is really slow – hopefully, these books will pay for themselves eventually, but there’s no guarantee.
You have to do all the marketing yourself – or pay someone to do it for you.
The whole issue of “returnable books” makes the economics of selling self-published or P.O.D. books in brick-and-mortar bookstores really difficult – so you do miss that audience, or they are harder to reach. (You tell people about it, but they don’t see it in bookstores, so out of sight, out of mind…)
There is still some prejudice against self-published books as being of inferior quality, though that is rapidly changing year over year.
My hunch is that self-publishing is best for books that have a real clear niche to them – probably the best for non-fiction (like a self-help or a finance book, for example), followed by really definable genre fiction books – such as mystery, romance, etc. It’s much harder with literary fiction unless there’s a great marketing hook or you’re already a well known writer with a platform (a blog, a following on Facebook, a YouTube sensation, an email list of thousands, etc.)

Benefits

Online royalty structure is outstanding – up to about 35% of list price for paperbacks, 70% of list price for ebooks.
The book will never go out of print, unless I take it out of print.
Control, control, control! As the author, I have total control over this book and what happens to it – and with CreateSpace, it’s a non-exclusive arrangement, so I can pursue other sales channels (for instance, with Barnes & Noble, Apple, etc.) as well. (And I admit it, I’m pretty much a control freak.)
No need to share the royalties with an agent.
Timing – you can have a book out in the marketplace in a couple of months – vs. a year to 18 months or more with a traditional publishing deal.
A successful self-published book is also a frequent launching pad to a traditional publishing contract, should you want that. (Amazon Encore for successful self-published books, others.)

But don’t just take my word for it! Here are Guy Kawasaki’s Top Ten Reasons to Self-Publish (from his 2013 book, How to Publish a Book):

1. Content and design control. Self-publishers can control what’s in a book, how long it is, and how it looks. They only answer to themselves for most aspects of their books.
2. Time to market. Self-publishers can get their book to market in less than a week once it’s copyedited. Traditional publishers take six to nine months to get a printed book to market, and they will not release the ebook version earlier than the printed version.
3. Longevity. Self-publishers can keep their book in print forever—or at least as long as it takes for readers to discover it. Traditional publishers stop marketing a book once sales decline.
4. Revisions. Self-publishers can revise books immediately with online ebook resellers and printers that are working “on demand.” Traditional publishers can take months to fix errors because they print revisions after they’ve sold off current inventory.
5. Higher royalty. Self-publishers can make more money. Amazon pays a 35 percent or 70 percent royalty to ebook self-publishers. On a $2.99 ebook, most authors make approximately $2.00.
6. Price control. Self-publishers can change the price of their book at will. For example, they can set a lower price to try to sell more copies or set a higher price to communicate higher quality.
7. Global distribution. Self-publishers can achieve global distribution of their ebook on day one. For example, Kindle Direct Publishing will list an ebook in one hundred countries. Apple’s iBookstore reaches fifty countries.
8. Control of foreign rights. Self-publishers determine who buys foreign rights and for how much. They can make more money because they are not sharing foreign-rights revenues with a traditional publisher.
9. Analytics. Self-publishers can receive real-time or near real-time sales results. Traditional publishers provide twice-a-year royalty statements—imagine running a business with two sales reports a year.
10. Deal flexibility. Self-publishers can cut any kind of deal with any kind of organization. Traditional publishers only sell to resellers except for bulk sales of printed books to large organizations.

How do you say “Los Feliz?”

Enjoyed this. I’ve always been of the camp who pronounced it “Loss – FEE-liz”, instructed as I was, not only by native Angelenos, but also by Joan Crawford as “Mildred Pierce,” who has one of her namesake restaurants in this neighborhood.

What better guide could there possibly be? It’s also the location where a lot of my novel “The Forest Dark” takes place, locations real and somewhat imagined. Indeed, I lived there for four years on Rosalia Road, and, if you count the adjacent Silver Lake location of a former apartment on Auburn Street, a grand total of about 15 years.

Some may cheap viagra http://new.castillodeprincesas.com/directorio/seccion/trajes-de-novia/?wpbdp_sort=-field-1 not be able to deal with the device. This only means that your phone can still work fine after cialis in canada being dropped on a sink full of water and even if-God forbid-on the toilet. People browse for source viagra low price are using e-mail blasts to sell sex, drugs and other items of less than favourable roots. Make sure to follow these simple tips and soon enough you’ll start feeling better and be on your way generic tadalafil to a gout free life. Funny how some SoCal Spanish place names can be anglicized, like “Los Feliz” or “Los Angeles” but others resist this – such as “La Cienega” or “Sepulveda,” which are still pronounced in the correct Spanish way. I can’t tell you how long it took me to learn to pronounce these when first living in L.A. All these years later I’m still working on “Tujunga.”

The Forest Dark – galleys are on my kitchen table

My new book innards, The Forest Dark

Here they sit, waiting for me to proof.

The new novel, The Forest Dark, will be available in May. What it’s about:

Genre: Family Drama/Mainstream-Contemporary/Gay-Lesbian Fiction

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I know that’s kind of vague, so stay tuned for more! As soon as I have a good cover graphic, I’ll launch the Facebook page. There’s a placeholder there already, so you can “like” the page, and I’ll post all updates there as well.

Reading and Infosession at LA Gay Center, July 22

Outing Prostate Cancer postcard 1

Outing Prostate Cancer postcard 2

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Thursday, July 22, I will be reading from Benediction and answering questions about my own experience with prostate cancer. This is a great event the Center is putting together, part of a series, which I believe will focus on various health challenges in the community. They will have Dr. Hodges on hand to answer medical questions. They’ve also promised to have FOOD! And the event is FREE. So, LA friends, mark your calendars.