Sunday, January 8, 2017

The Paperbacks (well, some of them) Are Coming

You may recall that in the days before last weekend and the turn of the calendar, I posted my list of writing resolutions for 2017. One of my resolutions, right in the middle, was to learn how to do wraparound book covers for paperback books through CreateSpace.

As I wrote in that blog: Honestly, I should know how to do a wraparound.

Of course, there's a reason why I didn't, and as always, I'll be honest with you: I was scared. Scared to fuck up what is supposed to be one of the most important parts of a book. I can tell you that looking at the specs in order to create a cover--and this was before I discovered they had templates to do your wraparounds--I easily felt my rear end pucker with fear.

So with that known, I decided to outsource my paperbacks to people more competent in PhotoShop. First Trish, then D.W. Bruce gave me an awesome cover to Zombie Showdown. They delivered quality work, and I was proud of what they easily created.

But as my own PhotoShop skills increased, I felt I needed to learn how to do them myself, especially after last year's local Comic Con--July 29th, this year--made me realize that I needed more on-hand product. And as I wrote in early August, I wanted the product out in time for this past Christmas sales, but that didn't happen: the interior files I did that week, but I couldn't do the wraparounds. I sat on them. I decided just before the New Year that I needed to watch a tutorial on YouTube--seriously, there is a tutorial for everything on YouTube--and learn how to do it.

I found some time for the tutorial this past Friday, and right after that, I got bold: I did the wraparound cover to The Lone Bostonian, a book I've wanted to get into paperback for a while. It took me about half an hour or thereabouts, and I managed to create a solid wraparound.

Still, I wanted to puke afterward.

Saturday afternoon, I did the wraparounds for An Invitation To Drink... Or To Die: A Murder Mystery Novella and Scollay Love: A Romance, the latter under my D.L. Boyd pen name. The novella went through without a problem. Scollay Love, on the other hand... I didn't use the .psd for the front cover, since I deleted it a while back, and I found out earlier this morning there were bleed issues on the ebook cover version, which I used. As soon as I can afford to re-download the cover, I will re-do the .psd in order to get the paperback out there. So right now, Scollay Love is on hold for paperback.

And this morning, I did the covers to the Small Town P.I. series' individual books. Those went like clockwork, and probably took an hour of time. I'm expecting those five finished paperbacks, three novels and two novellas, to be available for sale by the end of this week.

I'm holding off on a few of the last books I need to do for now: Royal Switch, like I wrote in the resolutions blog, is on hold until the summer: I want to do a full revision on the story and move a few things around, quite possibly after I write the first draft to the ninth Jaclyn Johnson novel. In addition, I want to improve the cover and see what I can do with it.

In addition, the Obloeron novels aren't ready for singling--i.e., I don't have individual covers yet--so there are no Obloeron paperbacks at present. There are also no Obloeron single ebook versions yet, either. One thing at a time.

Still... getting these five books out is a great relief.

Now... about getting certain books out in hardcover--we're working on that.

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