5. First North American Serial Rights Only.

I’m not sure why anyone would send a book publisher the opportunity to buy serial rights at all since that’s for magazines, nor why anyone who knows our first publication is always electronic would limit it to North American. It is possible to limit electronic book sales if you only want to sell through Amazon for the Kindle or on Mobipocket, but we sell through a lot of outlets. We don’t limit print sales either. You can buy our books in Denmark, New Zealand, or South Africa if you want to, whatever format you read.

4. Locked Document/ Copyright the Author. Do Not Steal This Book.

This is an odd one, but it does happen. Most of the time I wouldn’t even notice the document was locked… if it’s formatted in 12 pt. Courier and double-spaced. If it isn’t, I usually give the author the benefit of the doubt and CTRL+A to change the font and spacing. If I can’t? It’s an immediate no. I usually assume these people are related to the COPYRIGHT people. The zealous copyright notification combined with the “don’t steal notice” all over the place is wince-worthy. I don’t have time to steal someone else’s work. I not only don’t have the time, I don’t want to do that. Setting aside the distastefulness of the whole idea, how long would I last as a thief? Word tends to get around. Assuming those people are going to be suspicious of everything, I put them in the No pile too.

3. PDF.

I don’t receive many of these anymore, but still, now and again I’ll get a 150k word manuscript formatted like a book, with acknowledgements page and thank you and copyright all neatly typed in some font the author thought would be attractive. As a PDF. If the font is legible, I do usually read the first few pages, but the minute I itch to write a little note to the author to explain that there’s a POV problem, or the pacing is off, I close it. I prefer to make my notes on the manuscript so I don’t lose them. If I can’t, then there are no notes. And if the manuscript was borderline, it goes in the “NO” pile. (Exception, an intricately formatted poem that requires special handling.)

2. Illegible.

I know a lot of editors don’t care what font something comes in as long as it’s readable, but my preference remains 12 pt. Courier, and the lines have to be double-spaced. I read too many submissions to switch back and forth. As I mentioned before, if the author sends it in something else, I usually fix it first–if it’s fixable.

I doubt you’d believe how often I’ve changed the font and line spacing to discover that the author used a “hard return” at the end of every line. A hard return is when, instead of allowing the word processing software to wrap the line wherever it would naturally, the author hits the ENTER key at the end where he or she wants it broken. When I get those, it often looks fine until I change the font size, type face, or line height. Then I end up with text halfway across the page, or broken in the middle. I can’t tell where one paragraph ends and another begins. Most of the time these came in a font I can’t read on my machine, so there’s no going back, sucking it up, and reading it as the author sent it. It’s a sadly wasted effort, for both of us.

1. Info dumps all over the first page.

The star had once been a yellow star, some 5 million light years from previously explored space. At the height of its power, it had had a gross weight of at least 10 × 10²⁸kg.*

As the star’s hydrogen supplies run out, its form changes significantly. Its core, now composed almost entirely of helium, begins to collapse upon itself, releasing further energy. This is sufficient to power an expansion of the matter around the decaying core, and the outer layers of the star swell to many times their original size. Meanwhile, the collapsing helium core reaches a point where fusion can proceed once again, this time fusing atoms of helium to produce carbon and oxygen. In this new phase, the temperature of the outer layers of the swollen star has cooled to give it a red light, and the resulting star type is known as a red giant.

Just as the star’s original hydrogen fuel was eventually exhausted, so the star’s new supply of helium fuel will also eventually be exhausted too. The next developments in the star’s life will depend on its mass. If it is sufficiently massive, it can once again ‘recycle’ its fuel into heavier and heavier elements, until eventually its core is composed of iron. But beyond this limit no further processing is possible: the core collapses completely to form a superdense neutron star, while the outer shells of material are blasted away in a catastrophic event known as a supernova.

This star, though, has too little mass to pass through this process. Once its helium core is depleted, nuclear reactions will cease, and the core will shrink to roughly the size of the Earth. The result will be an inert and highly dense stellar remnant, known as a white dwarf. Meanwhile, the outer shells of the giant phase will drift away from the dead core, eventually forming a bubble or ring of matter known as a planetary nebula.

However a star dies, much of its matter is spread back into the Interstellar Medium, whether through the supernova explosion or the formation of a nebula, and in that medium the processes that formed the original protostar are always at work. The matter cast away by one dying star may eventually find itself taking part in the birth of another.

And that’s where our intrepid crew was headed, a white dwarf 10 million light years from home.

(*Thanks to glyphweb.com/esky for the example of what not to do at the beginning of a piece of fiction.)

At least with #1, I have something to tell the author about the reason behind the refusal.

This is the basic progression of events: You send the typesetter your manuscript, describe your trim size, and let the typesetter know if your printer accepts spreads or single pages. If your printer will print spreads, that means the interior margin can be wider than the exterior margin, making it easier to read the book when it’s open without sacrificing too much space on the outside margin. If your printer only accepts singles, the margins must be the same size on both the left and the right.

Your typesetter sets up the master(s) in InDesign (or some other layout software. Layout can be done in Word or Open Office, but the fine-grained controls aren’t there and it’s much harder to get a truly professional look.) The master is the design template. Depending on the type of manuscript, there may be two or many more masters. For an anthology where the authors’ names and titles have to appear on each page of each individual story, there are often twice as many masters as there are authors/stories.

Once the master(s) is/are set up, then the typesetter imports your manuscript into the program and makes sure that it flows from beginning to end without any weirdness. Sometimes the fonts change in size or style, or broad swathes of nothing pop up, so he–or in this case she–normalizes everything, getting rid of extra white space, setting the font face and size, and defining the line height.

Then, starting at the beginning and going through to the end, she will format the titles, make the page breaks where they should occur, place the images with the text to which they apply, and apply the appropriate master to each page. Then (or immediately before or after), she will also make sure that names aren’t hyphenated, that the lines and pages break cleanly, and that there’s good balance on each page, hand-kerning where necessary. If she runs into any oddness in the manuscript (misplaced word, strangly garbled line, some obvious mistake), this is where it will happen, and she’ll likely drop you a note and tell you so that you can tell her to either leave it alone or fix it like this, whatever your preferred this may be.

Professional typesetting is a painstaking process. It’s not particularly hard, but it’s fiddly, and there’s a lot to remember. Since, I just finished a typesetting project, you’re getting the benefit of my recent mistakes experience.

Font size, margins, and line height can dramatically affect the length of your final product. Look at a lot of books. do you like a lot of whitespace? A little? About what font size seems attractive to you, what style? How long do you want your book to be? How long can you afford it to be before you have to raise the price and/or lose money on it? Do you like plain chapter headings or unusual ones? Do you like graphical elements or straightforward text? Do you like drop caps? Raised caps? Lines, graphical elements, asterisks, pound signs, or nothing to mark your scene breaks? Left-aligned titles? Right-aligned titles? Centered? A title font different from the regular text? It’s okay to not know exactly what you want. If you like watermarks or graphical bits and bobs, even if you don’t know exactly what, let the typesetter know. Hopefully he or she will be happy to share his or her expertise with you as well, and together the two of you can come up with something amazing.

Do you have interior images? Make sure they’re at least 600 dpi (dots per inch), CMYK or grayscale TIFFs, and that you have the copyright or permission to use them. Be sure to give credit for their use in the text, in footnotes, or on your copyright page. Determine what text they should appear near. Most books are “poured” into the design software (InDesign is the current favorite, though there are others) and then massaged to fit the space and look good on the page. That’s when the graphics are placed. Some typesetters will charge per image, some will charge more after a certain number of images. Make sure you find that out first.

Speaking of copyright, if you use quotes to enhance your text, make sure you have permission to use those, as well, and include that information on your copyright page.

To make this job easy for everyone, consider the following:

1. What are your printer’s requirements and what are the things you know you want? Be sure to state those clearly so the typesetter is aware there’s no wiggle room. (For example, your printer may say ‘minimum of .5″ margins on all sizes.’ you may find that you prefer .75″ margins instead.) Find out if your printer wants the manuscript laid out on a full 8.5 x 11 page size or if trim size is appropriate, and what their file preference is. Find out if they need the fonts embedded or turned into graphics. Pass on any tips or tricks the printer gives you to the typesetter, as well as the elements you want to see in the manuscript.

2. What do you want your typesetter to watch for? A typesetter is not a copy editor, but if a mistake is noticed, the typesetter should inform you so that you can determine the best way to fix it. Ask your typesetter about his or her policy on that.

3. Ask for a sample page if you’re not sure about title style, margins, line height, font face, or font size. Deciding that the font is too big, too small, just plain wrong, or that you need more or less space on the page after the entire thing is done means that you have to ask your typesetter to do the whole thing all over again. You don’t want to have to pay twice.

4. Determine how much room the typesetter has to implement her own creative bent. In the recent project I mentioned above, I was really excited to do it; absolutely bursting with ideas. I contrived clever little sketches that evoked the theme of the story or the anthology as a whole at the top of each story. I was very proud of myself. I didn’t ask first… The publisher didn’t like them. I took them out. He asked some other people. They did like them. He thought about it and realized there was really only one he hated; it just happened to be the first one. I put them back (with something else for the first one). I also didn’t ask him how he felt about line height, font face, or font size. Thankfully he liked the font face I chose. The rest? …yeah. Then I realized that the margins were too narrow. They were according to the printer’s minimum specs, but killed too much white space.

After three layouts (give or take) and some tweaking, we both ended up very happy with the final product. In fact, it’s a beautiful book with amazing stories and I’m proud to have had a little hand in it, but it would have been ready for the printer a lot faster if I’d asked the questions I should have asked at the very beginning.

5. After the typesetter is finished, set the manuscript aside for a couple of days and then look at it again with fresh eyes. Does it work? Does it need something else? Are the cool graphical bits and bobs interesting or distracting?

Anything you remove from the master should take no time at all and shouldn’t affect the final product. That means, if you decide that the little smiley face you had put at the bottom of every page is silly, it can be removed without making the typesetter start over. Replacing one image with a different one of the exact same size is also a quick fix. Neither of those should cost you anything extra. Changing the font, the line-height, or the margins, however, will dramatically affect the final product and may cost you a bit to fix.

*I can only speak to my experience. Other typesetters may have their own ideas, but considering these issues should help you find a good typesetter and ensure that your final product looks the best possible.

“Brilliant! The next great American Vampire novel!” Famous Author

After you dismiss the rumor about how Famous Author is paid to do that, shed the bad advice you’ve most likely read somewhere. That is, “You should never pay for a blurb.”

How in heaven’s name did the unknown author get the famous author to say that? It would mean the famous author read it! (Absolutely, entirely, right now, dismiss from your mind any rumor you may have heard about how Famous Author really doesn’t read the book; he or she is just paid to say that. That’s unprofessional behavior and unlikely; a rumor probably started by those sour grapes people who can’t get a blurb.)

As everyone knows, getting anyone to read something by an unknown author is an uphill slog, and the hill gets steeper the more impact the reader may have on the author’s career. You finally got a publisher to read your novel, maybe you even have an agent, which means you’ve convinced two people to read your work and they liked it!

You probably don’t absolutely need one of those blurbs, but it’s a hefty piece of artillery when you’re selling your book. So, how do you get one? Ask.

Ask? That’s it? No.

Somewhere in there after you’ve dismissed the rumor that famous author is just paid to do that, shed the bad advice you’ve most likely read somewhere. That is, “You should never pay for a blurb.”

The thing is, that author is in the business to make money. Famous Author may love telling a good story, may love creating fascinating plots and great characterization, but their cats have to eat too. Their time is extremely valuable–as valuable as is yours!–and they’re hard at work tapping out the next Great American Novel. You’re asking them to interrupt their work, which goes to feed their slightly-better-fed-than-yours cats. That doesn’t mean you have to pay them what they’re worth. If you’re just starting out and you’re a normal human being (not a member of any monied class, I mean) you can’t afford what they’re worth. So:

1. Start with an author of your acquaintance, or the acquaintance of a good friend, loving relative, or someone you can blackmail or bribe for a polite introduction. Your editor may know someone who would be perfect. Your agent may too. Ask them first. If they know someone, your work may be done for you. If the introduction is from a friend or family member, you’ll probably have to keep working it. Try not to accept introductions to self-help gurus if you write torrid romances. It will only embarrass you and Famous Author. Your clueless friend or relative will just wonder why you’re both confused and embarrassed. If Famous Author writes potboilers and you write fantasy, a blurb from them will most likely not serve you well. Readers who are drawn to a blurbed book pick it up because they expect it to be “just like” the work of the author who blurbed it. That doesn’t mean they want the exact same thing. It’s easier, for me, to think of it as a food craving. If your Famous Author writes steak and he blurbs your watermelon, readers who wanted steak, even if you provided a very good watermelon, may feel cheated, and readers who feel cheated complain.

2. If you can, find out if the author you want to ask has a no-blurbs policy (many of them do). If they do, Do Not try to get them to change their mind for you. Believe me, the rules always apply to you, even if you think they don’t. Just go find another one.

How do you find out if they have a no-blurb policy? One of the easiest ways is to search the author’s website and/or blog. I’m betting that all mid and top list authors have been asked for at least one blurb and will probably have written about it. Make notes of what they said. Plan to use them later.

3. Now’s the time to ask. A sample letter might go something like:

Dear Author who is my friend:

I don’t know if you remember, but my novel, “Abigail Adams” is going to be published by Brilliant Press this year and will be coming out in December. “Abigail Adams” is an 80,000 word story that is sure to attract your readers, since it contains blah and blah, and has the edge of the seat quality you’re known for. I know you are very busy and that this may be an imposition, but I wondered if you would consider reading my story and providing a blurb for it.

Brilliant Press is a micro indie press, but the publisher appreciates your time as much as I do and has offered to pay an honorarium if you’d be willing to read it, even if you’re not comfortable providing the blurb after you have done so.

Your friend,

New Author

Your publisher may not be willing to provide the honorarium (ask if they’ll at least pitch in). You may have to do it yourself. Ask yourself how hungry your cats can get before they gnaw off your toes in the night, cut that amount of cat food in half so that you don’t lose your toes, and plan to spend that amount. Being a new author, I wouldn’t expect you to offer more than $500.00. I would hope you could offer less.

Your new acquaintance, the friendly author, is either going to ignore your note, tell his or her secretary to ignore the note, have a minion answer that he or she doesn’t do blurbs but please buy his or her next novel, or he or she may come back and say “how much of an honorarium?” or “I remember you! Sure!” or even better, “Oh, I’d love to, no honorarium required!” Any one of those means you’re very likely in (though the second and third are best for that Whoot! feeling you want).

Please note: It helps with the remembering you part if you’ve met him or her more than once, perhaps even talked to him or her about his or her books, or even struck up a casual friendship where you could talk about clothes, children, or those pesky cats. The casual friendship should feel mutual…on both your parts. Don’t assume they’re just like you, or that they’ve been waiting for your call/e-mail/registered letter/actionable offense in a parking lot and will drop everything to get this done for you.

4. If he or she says “how much?” or “I remember you sure!” ask the author what his or her normal honorarium might be, but be prepared to make an offer if they hem and/or haw. If what they normally receive is completely out of your budgetary range and would mean that you’d be eating the cats instead of the other way about, tell him or her so honestly and regretfully decline. Then start over again at the top with a new author. You may find that the author will come back and say, “Naw, that’s okay. Send it anyway,” but please don’t plan on it.

5. If the author says “sure!” or any form thereof, tactfully try to discover how much time they think it might take, while you’re straightforwardly asking if they want an electronic copy, and if so what format they’d like (PDF, Word document, Works document, Open Office Document, some other document from some obscure software!?) or a printed copy and whether they would prefer bound or loose pages (you can get it bound at Kinkos and sent at the same time). Professional reviews from respected publications often take 4 months. Give your author the courtesy of at least that long, and let them know that you’ve done so.

Be sure to send the payment with the book in the type of payment they prefer (check, PayPal, money order, cashier’s check, other). If they want an e-copy of the book but don’t want electronic payment, be sure to inform Famous Author that the check went in the mail on the same day that you e-mailed them your manuscript, and don’t let that be a lie nor the check rubber. You don’t want to add this author to the list of famous authors with a no-blurb-ever policy.

6. Be sure to include a release for the author to sign stating that you can use their words in your marketing campaign.

7. Be prepared to lose the honorarium without losing your professionalism. That’s a tough one to swallow, but remember, you told the author not to provide a blurb if he or she couldn’t in good conscience do so. Then, too, the author may forget, or get behind on deadlines, or be swamped. It’s okay to write and ask the author about the blurb when you’re getting close to when you MUST have it or the publisher will pull your book from the print lineup, but… be prepared for it all to go pear-shaped, just in case.

If the author provides the blurb after the book is published, if an e-book with print occurring later, it can be added. If it’s already a done deal up there on Amazon and available at all fine book outlets, the blurb can be used for marketing purposes. If the author doesn’t provide it at all, just don’t talk about it.

If you talk about it, you run the risk of creating resentment in the famous author, or in the hearts of the famous authors’ friends or fans. You really don’t want to do that. If you talk about it, it will appear on the Internet. If it appears on the Internet, everyone will know. They will wonder why Famous Author hated your book. They will wonder why you’re lying about Famous Author. They will not, most likely, consider that your book is brilliant but that something happened that caused Famous Author to renege on his or her friendly agreement with you.

If you’re gracious, if you forget it, if you get the opportunity to be friendly with Famous Author again, you’re very likely going to improve your chances of becoming Famous Author yourself. Most Famous Authors are also people, really likeable people, and often very professional people. They’ll talk about you, and that, if you’re gracious and polite and write well, is a very good thing.

And that’s pretty much it. Let me know how the blurb went. I’m sure I’d love to read it.

Website Design

Endicott Studios… Beautiful images, beautiful stories…

CSS, Design Inspiration. One of my very favorite websites to visit now and again, especially when I need inspiration, has been the CSS Zen Garden site. Since 2004, designers have been sending in beautiful designs that demonstrate the flexibility of CSS. The content of the site never changes, only the way it looks, from a movie theater to a garden, a sci-fi thriller theme to a daguerreotype. The brain behind CSS Zen Garden, Dave Shea, wrote a book about the beauty of CSS that’s pretty important reading for anyone who wants to design beautiful websites that people can actually use. As of this writing, CSS Zen Garden is down, but I hope it comes back. Dave Shea thinks it’s still relevant and so do I. Based on the comments I read when I Google for news about when Zen Garden might be back, so do many designers–all of them, like me, not quite sure we’re up to that standard yet, not every site every time, but we’re working toward it. And that’s a beautiful thing. Dave Shea’s blog is the absolutely gorgeous mezzoblue. (And thumbnails of the old Zen Garden designs are hidden away here too. Now that I’ve found it, I intend to haunt it until he gives me back my inspiration. If he does.

Blogging, Website Templates. This website is based on the WordPress engine. WordPress is a wonder and I’m completely sold on it. Anyone who wants a beautiful website can make it happen all by themselves. A quick installation (and many hosting companies offer automated set-up so you don’t have to get into the guts of things), and it’s time to go theme shopping. Take a look at the many, many free themes available from smart designers who like to share and choose one (after spending far too many hours going, “That one! No, no, I want that one!”). If you know any CSS and/or basic HTML and/or basic PHP, you’ll find that you can customize it in a lot of different ways very easily. The best part, you don’t HAVE to know those things to post news, your opinion, or pictures of your kids in their halloween costumes. And, if you don’t have your own website, you can put a blog up on the WordPress site for free!

One caveat: Do a little research. Some WordPress themes have code embedded in them that might do things you don’t want your website to do in sneaky ways. I believe the honchos at WordPress have removed any hinky themes from the template site, but it’s not hard to do a quick Google search on the safest, least hacked, best designer, or what have you. Just to be safe. The WordPress Theme Site.

Excellent WordPress Themes. Chris Pearson gives good advice. He calls his blog “The best damn blog on the planet.” He might even be right. He also dishes up perfectly validated WordPress themes, SEO tutorials, and a dozen other bites of tasty Internet pie.

CSS. Whenever I’m stumped about code, I take a gander at A List Apart‘s archives, usually to find that they’ve already solved the problem (often a year or two before I thought of it).

Code. W3Schools are a boon to designers, wanna be designers–anyone who ever wanted to roll up their sleeves and figure out the code–or crazy people like me who, once upon a time said, “I could do that!” They provide a great resource for code snippets, loads of tutorials, and even a little sandbox where you can tinker with code and immediately see what your tinkering broke. Changed. I meant changed.

CSS, Code. Alsacreations is a nifty website that provides cool tutorials for website building. I like them as much for the lovely citrus header as for their easy to understand lessons.

CSS, Code. Listamatic is the CSS Zen Garden for navigation. Designers from all over the world have donated their take on simple list navigation, both horizontal and vertical. Listamatic and its siblings are provided by Russ Weakley of Max Design.

Standards and Practices. No talk of design is complete without mentioning the Web Standards Group. Like art, web design is best when it works within the limits of its form and transcends them using the right tools. The Web Standards Group “promotes web standards and best practices,” a good resource if you don’t want to be left behind.

Publishing

E-Books. A post about inspiration would be incomplete without listing the teleread site. Teleread lets me know what’s going on in the world of e-books. Since I consider them pretty important, it’s a good thing to skim. The contributors are prolific (most of them, I’m one, but not so much with the prolific), so skimming is all I can do some days, but if I want to know the latest news about Amazon’s Kindle, the IADP, or how not to brick a Sony, that’s where I go. How is that inspirational? It’s always good to know what the limits are before I get in over my head.

E-Books. I also head over to MobileRead. MobileRead’s forums provide a lot of great chatter about e-books, their books section provides some great reading, and they often have the latest e-book news before anyone else.

Print Books. PersonaNonData keeps me up to date with the world of publishing, often inciting me to more “I could do that!” than is currently wise.

Creativity

Endicott Studios gives me candy. My kind, anyway. Beautiful images, beautiful stories, and information about more stories, more images, and all things mythic. It’s probably the one site I would be lost without.

And talking about stories, we must, of course, talk about With Intent to Commit Horror, my very own Undead Rat’s website. He’s been compiling the information about horror authors, horror books, and horrid websites listed on that website for years (thank everything you believe in that you don’t have to listen to him talk in his sleep) and it just keeps on growing. The blog provides links to great content on other sites and the book lists provide information on what you really really don’t want to be reading in bed just before lights out… unless you’re just like him. Then all bets are off.

There are far too many really wonderful websites to list, but I leave you with one last one. Mine. My other one, that is. Drollerie Press publishes amazing fiction in every genre in both print and electronic formats. Our first print book will be pre-released on the site this month. Still Life with Devils, by the incomparable mystery author Deborah Grabien, (author of 12 novels, not including the upcoming Kinkaid Series) is a freaky supernatural thriller that is seriously hard to put down (don’t believe me? Ask Publisher’s Weekly; they suggest a sequel!). We also have a couple of e-novels coming this month, Alien Dreams from John B. Rosenman and Pixie Warrior from Rachael de Vienne. We’ll have more print and electronic works, both full length and short stories, coming soon.

Take a look at the resources page for great free fiction reading, and if you’re into both good and free, check out the stories from our authors.

Got a great site about design, art, books, or anything else? Drop a comment. I’d love to go check it out.