Karen Sandler

Tag: timewrecked

  • Ghost Town Inspiration (How Bodie Became a Book)

    Mono Lake in WinterYears ago, my mom and stepdad owned a family restaurant in the Eastern Sierras that overlooked Mono Lake. The Mono Inn was four miles north of the small town of Lee Vining, and Lee Vining was about a half mile from the “back gate” to Yosemite National Park.

    The restaurant was also about 20 miles south of Bodie State Historic Park, a gold rush/silver mining ghost town. When we would visit my mom and stepdad, at the restaurant, we’d often take a side trip to Bodie. The ghost town is in a “state of arrested decay,” its few surviving wooden structures all that are left of a once bustling town. You can read more about the old ghost town here.

    ChurchBodie is quite an evocative place. Empty buildings scattered across the lunar-like landscape, some of the structures with the original furnishings inside. Back when I used to visit the town, there were only two ways in–a road that was dirt for several miles, and another that was paved up to the last two miles, then it was dirt as well. The idea was that when you were inside the “bowl” of the town of Bodie, there would be no signs of modern civilization.

    Eric & Mom FarYou can see from the photo at left (that’s me with my older son) that the bowl of Bodie is a wild and lonely place. It’s thoroughly snowed-in in the winter. The town actually burned down three times in its heyday (once thanks to a young boy playing with matches) and was considered quite a lawless place. It’s rumored that a young girl whose family was taking her there wrote in her diary, “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.”

    BarnMany years later, after my stepdad had died and my mom sold the restaurant, I found myself wanting to write a children’s book. I’d been writing romances that weren’t appropriate for kids, and I wanted to create something that my own boys could read. Besides photos I’d taken, I had read quite a bit about Bodie and decided to use it as a jumping off point for a story.

    Cain HouseI considered writing historical fiction. But I love stories with an SF/F/paranormal angle. So I wrote a middle grade time travel adventure in which four 7th graders are thrown from present day Sacramento into 1880’s Bodie due to the antics of a mischievous cat and a malfunctioning computer. I made my cast of characters multi-ethnic. The main character, Kevin, is white, Naomi, the girl Kevin has a crush on, is Chinese-American, Tanya is Black, and Michael is Hispanic (and also ADD). My original plan was to write a story from the POV of each of them, but I never got past this first book.

    I eventually sold the book to Hard Shell Word Factory (now an imprint of Mundania Press). They used the photo above of the Cain house for the cover, putting a cobalt blue glass bottle into the window of the house. Here’s the paper version of the book on Amazon showing the old cover.

    TimewreckedWhen I got the rights back to the book, I republished it under my own name as the ebook Timewrecked. I really love this book. I love its adventuresome view of the gold rush era, told through the eyes of modern day kids. I love that it’s such a fantastic teaching tool for 4th grade California history. I’m tickled about its multi-ethnic cast. And here’s the best part–the Timewrecked ebook is free. That’s right, just go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apple and you can download it for freebies.

    If you’re a teacher who’d like to have me do a Skype visit or if you’re local enough to Northern California that I can drive to be there in person, just go here to request an appearance. I do still have paper copies available for students to purchase.

  • Adventures in the e-Trade – Part 2

    I decided to start my foray into self-publishing with my two Berkley Jove Haunting Hearts books, Unforgettable and Night Whispers. These were the only two books for which I did not have an electronic file. There were my original files, but I wanted to start with the final edited book. That I had only in printed form.

    So I sacrificed one author copy of each book, sending them off to Blue Leaf Book Scanning. Since I was willing to let them cut the books up to make scanning easier, the cost for scanning two 300+ page books was quite reasonable.

    They did a decent job, but it still took a good long time to correct the errors. Besides misinterpreting letters (a cl might become a d), paragraphs throughout were often chopped in two mid-sentence or even mid-word. Sometimes italics became plain text, so I had to flip through the physical book to make sure text that I wanted italicized was indeed italicized.

    I made several passes to correct scanning errors, then at least one editing pass. My cover artist was busy with the covers for the first two books (the final for THE IN-BETWEEN, formerly UNFORGETTABLE, is above), so when the manuscript was ready, so was the cover.

    But nailing down the typos and polishing the prose was only the first step. Next I had to make sure the manuscript was in a format that would easily and correctly convert to Kindle (I’m mainly selling my books through Amazon). I had to make sure that where I wanted blank lines, I had to use the before/after spacing option in Word rather than just hit enter. I had to make sure I was using indents for each paragraph rather than tabs. Without these two crucial fixes, the converter would ignore all my paragraph indents and blank lines. I of course had to do manual page breaks where I wanted a new chapter to begin.

    I then had to wrestle with the converter program I’d decided to use, Mobipocket Creator. In my opinion, the interface is a little goofy and klugy. It asks for information (pricing, for instance) that you will then have to enter again when you put the book up on Amazon. It is not at all clear how to, say, change the cover art or substitute in a new book file without deleting everything and starting all over. I am a very experienced computer user, but many aspects of Mobipocket Creator baffled me.

    I did finally get the book into Kindle format (which I could check out using my PC Kindle reader). I discovered with subsequent books (I’ve done seven so far and intend to do two more) that the best time to check for those final little issues is using your PC Kindle reader. It’s far easier to navigate through the book there than later when you’ve uploaded it on Amazon’s website.

    Once the converted file was ready, I filled in the forms on Amazon, uploaded my cover image and .prc file and waited the couple days for that book to be published. In the case of the first two books, I went ahead and also submitted them to Smashwords as well. That necessitated me inserting certain language on the copyright page, so I had to have a separate version of the book just for Smashwords. Assuming you meet the qualifications, Smashwords will put up your book on Koby, Nook (Barnes & Noble), Sony, and the iStore unless you opt out of any of those venues. It’s been a little trickier getting them taken down (which I’m trying to do, to make these first two books exclusive on Amazon as the rest are), but I think I have it nailed now. Their customer service is not as responsive as I might like, but they have a lot of authors to take care of.

    Side note: Why am I going exclusive with Amazon? Because in their KDP select program you get a couple of bennies: free days (up to 5 where you can offer your book free) and inclusion in their Amazon Prime library. Also, I found it tedious working with Smashwords, and after selling a whopping 3 books there, it didn’t seem worth the effort. I confess to a certain amount of apprehension contributing to the unvanquishableness that is Amazon, but I’m doing well there sales-wise and making some decent money. Hard to pass that up.

    Going back to The In-Between (formerly Unforgettable) and Dark Whispers (formerly Night Whispers), it was a whole rigamarole figuring out I wanted to change the titles and author names after I’d published them. The cover art change wasn’t a problem, since my artist is so easy to work with. And it was simple enough changing the book title and author on Amazon. But I couldn’t make heads nor tails of how to accomplish the same task on Smashwords. Apparently there’s a way, but I never figured it out. I ended up abandoning one account and adding a second one, which led to no end of confusion when I decided to unpublish my books from there.

    So, be sure of your title and author name before you request your cover art and start the publishing process. Otherwise you’ll be chasing your tail trying to fix things when you really just want your book up for sale so you can start building an audience.

    One last note regarding self-publishing. As I mentioned in a previous post, all the books I’ve put up on Amazon are books I’d already made money on, that had already been edited. They’d proven themselves by having been either traditionally or small press published.

    I won’t tell anyone not to self-publish a book they’ve either not been able to sell traditionally, or are choosing not to go the traditional route at the outset. But I beg you not to toss any old bowl of spaghetti against the publishing wall (i.e., to see what sticks). Get the book vetted first by writer friends you trust, or beta readers, or pay an editor if you can afford it. I’ve discovered some dreadful books using Kindle’s sample feature and more often than not, they’re (a) self-published and (b) the only book the author’s written. Pul-leeze, learn your craft first.

    Any questions? Ask ’em in the comments.

  • Adventures in the e-Trade – Part 1

    Kensington Books published my first two romance novels, Just My Imagination and Table for Two, back in 1998 for their Precious Gems program. Not long afterward, I sold two to Berkley Jove’s Haunting Hearts line, Unforgettable and Night Whispers, which were released in 1999. (side note: when my Night Whispers came out, there were two other books available with the same title, one by Judith McNaught).

    Within that same time period, I sold my first e-book, Eternity, a science fiction romance, to Hard Shell Word Factory, which was strictly an e-publisher at that time. I later ended up selling them one other original romance, The Right Mr. Wrong, and an original middle-grade book, Time in a Bottle. In 2000, when rights to my two Kensington books reverted to me, I sold those to Hard Shell too. One other romance, Chocolate Magic, which originally came out in hardcover and then trade paperback from Thorndike Press, eventually became a Hard Shell e-book as well.

    But I didn’t stop with selling rights to those early books only to Hard Shell. I discovered the large print market and was able to sell all  of my first six romances as hardcover large print. That meant that for Just My Imagination and Table for Two, I sold various rights to three publishers within five years.

    This is all prologue to what I’m up to now. Rights for all of the above-mentioned books reverted to me August 2011. Since then, I’ve been republishing the books one by one as Kindle e-books.

    It’s been a steep learning curve. First, the cover. I am not a visual artist. I just don’t have the patience to search through online clip art, nor the talent to put images together into a cover. No clue at all as to what would look good.

    I was lucky enough to find a cover artist who’s quick and reasonably priced. She uses royalty-free clip art to keep costs down, and has a good eye as to what elements work for a given story. I’m astute enough to look at what she’s done and suggest changes as needed, but I don’t have to create the cover myself.

    My second problem was the author name issue. In the last couple years, I’ve switched from romance to the children’s market (young adult). It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want my YA readers to figure out that I’d written romances as Karen Sandler (Harlequin is still selling all the romances I wrote for them under that name). It was more a marketing issue. I didn’t want to tweet about my romances using my @karensandlerya identity on Twitter, for instance. I didn’t want to advertise my romance novels on my karensandler.net website. Which meant I needed a new identity.

    I’ve always wanted to use my mom’s maiden name, Russo, as part of a pen name. With that as my surname, I only needed a first name. I had the perfect choice right at my fingertips, so to speak–Kayla, the name of my main character in my YA book, Tankborn. So my romance identity became Kayla Russo.

    I also started thinking that maybe I ought to be retitling my books. For the most part, I was going for something a little less generic. I also wanted a fresh start on the books. It’s not that I wanted to fool anyone into thinking these are brand-new books. There’s a note inside each one identifying the original title and publisher which a reader can find by downloading a sample. But I wanted to catch the eye of those who might not have heard of me before with (hopefully) more clever titles.

    Unfortunately, I didn’t make the decision to change my name or the titles until I’d not only had the covers created, but had also put up the first two books for sale. Having my cover artist make the name/title change was the easy part. Getting the books updated on the venues I’d submitted them to was a whole other story. I’ll get into that in part 2.

     

  • RTW: A Rose By Any Other Name

    Today YA Highway‘s Road Trip Wednesday asks: If you couldn’t use your own name, what would your pseudonym or pen name be?

    I feel like I’m cheating here, because I already have a couple of pen names. Back when I was writing adult romances exclusively (as Karen Sandler), I decided to write a children’s book so my then-young sons could read at least one of my books. I ended up publishing that book, then titled Time in a Bottle (but soon to be re-released as Timewrecked), under a pseudonym. I thought it would be better if young readers didn’t stumble across my very sexy romances, so Time in a Bottle was published under my pen name, Karen Anzalone. Anzalone was my grandmother’s maiden name.

    Now I’m focused exclusively on writing children’s books (my first being Tankborn). I don’t intend to write any new adult romances. But last year, I got the rights back to several of my older romances and decided to re-release them myself as e-books (as I’m doing with Timewrecked). Since those romances are entirely different books than Tankborn or the other YA books I’m planning to write and hoping to publish, I decided to market my self-published books under a pseudonym.

    So I stole the name of my main character in Tankborn for a first name (Kayla) and appropriated my mother’s maiden name, Russo. I only have two paranormal romances published under the name Kayla Russo so far (Dark Whispers and The In-Between), but there are more in the queue.

    It’s a bit ironic that when I re-publish my middle-grade book, Timewrecked (I’m currently waiting on cover art), I will be using my real name, Karen Sandler. Now I have a bit of a track record in children’s literature under that name, so I want to take advantage of that.

    But maybe I ought to have a few other pen names on the back burner for future books. Like for that mystery novel I haven’t been able to sell, I could be Agatha Agapantha. Or I could pen that dessert cookbook I’ve always dreamed of writing under the name Chocolate LaRue.

    How about you? Have any cool pen names in mind for yourself?