1. Do not over-think the process of writing a book. Writing a book should be tackled just like any other task. Decide what you are doing and how you are going to do it. Then get it done.

2. Decide what subject/topic you are passionate about and write about it. *Note: Unless you have an extraordinary life story, do not try to write some autobiography about the “trials and tribulations” of your life.

3. Write yourself an outline. You can use whatever method is comfortable for you. A simple “bullet point” system works wonderfully. *Note: All stories should have a purpose but they do not have to follow any specific format. Write from your heart and you will end up with novels you will be proud of.

4. Create your chapters using this outline. This is part of what will help you complete this book in a timely manner. This is also a danger zone for over-thinking. If you have 10 bullet points for your outline then you should have 10 chapters based on those bullet points.

5. Decide from your outline, how many pages you would like your book to be and how many pages you would like in each chapter. This is a very important aspect of writing a book in my opinion. This is where things get fun. What you come up with are just guides. Your book may be more or less pages, as well as your chapters but you do need a guide for you own sanity. But here is the thing … When you are thinking about how long you would like your book to be, consider this, if you are writing a novel that will most likely be in its final form a 6×9 (or smaller) trade paperback, then there will be double the pages in the printed version of your book than what you have decided to write.

What? – For example, lets assume you are writing your book in Microsoft word or some other word processor and the page size is 8 1/2 x 11 (standard size) and you want your final printed book to be 300 pages. You only have to write 150 pages at 8 1/2 x 11. When the book is formatted at 6×9 or smaller, you will end up with double the pages. So if you wrote 300 pages at 8 1/2 x 11, you would end up with a 600 page book.*Based on single spaced typed pages.

So lets say you want a 300 page printed book and so you are going to write 150 pages at 8 1/2 x 11. You can determine from this how many pages you’d like in each chapter. Again this would be just a guide. If upon finishing your outline you see you will have about 10 chapters then you can play with the numbers a little bit depending on how much material you think you will have to write for that particular chapter. For instance you many not think you need as many pages for the story setup chapter that you need in the middle chapters or vice versa.

Lets put this to work shall we? – If you have 10 chapters and you are writing 150 pages then you could set a goal of 15 pages per chapter. That is 15 pages at 8 1/2 x 11. That is a typical college paper. You can do that! Give yourself a week or a couple of weeks to write the 15 pages. This time frame depends on how busy your life is. At the very least, try to write a page a day! If you can write 15 pages in a week then it would take you 10 weeks to finish your book. That is 2 1/2 months!

6. Once you create chapters using your outline, only tackle one chapter at a time. If your outline is “plot driven” you won’t have to worry too much about your chapters not making any sense in relation to one another. Also only work on chapters you are “in the mood” to work on. It makes little since to fight your way through chapters you aren’t interested in writing at the time. For many writers, writing involves a great deal of emotion. This should be your guide to writing. So take care of your emotional self and you will have less “stalls” because you aren’t “in the mood” to write. Just be sure to write something every day. Even if you have to sit in your bathroom for an hour to write a page… do it!

7. Once you have your book written to your satisfaction you have a few choices:

1. You can get someone you trust to read it over and give you feedback. This should be someone who will give you honest feedback and who will not just tell you what you want to hear. You should also be prepaired to accept feedback and use it to your advantage. This doesn’t mean you have to change everything they say to change but try to understand where they are coming from and see if you agree with it.

2. You could start sending query letters to publishers about your book and possibly sample chapters to trusted publishers if your goal is to have a publishing company publish your book.

3. You could send your book to an editor to be edited. Make all the necessary changes then self-publish your book by obtaining your own ISBN numbers.

Happy Book Writing!

ISBNs have helped publishers, libraries, schools, and retail outlets keep tract of all items that can make use of ISBNs (written & audio titles, etc.). For instance, having US ISBNs entitles you to have your book listed in the “Books in Print” directory maintained by Bowker. This is the database used by libraries, schools and retail outlets to find books that are in print, soon to be in print, and out of print.

Getting Your Own ISBNs:

When you obtain your own ISBNs, registered to yourself or your own company, you are a Publisher. Those ISBNs belong to you and only you. You can not transfer ownership of ISBNs to anyone. You can assign them to titles written by various authors, but the authors will never have ownership of your ISBNs.

If you decide to become a publisher and publish your own work and/or the works of others all you need to do is obtain your own ISBNs. There are several ways to do this.

You can purchase ISBNS from Bowker, the US broker for ISBNs. You can also purchase ISBNs from other countries if you meet their requirements for obtaining ISBNs (Tip: You can get an unlimited number of ISBNs from Japan for the same price as 10 US ISBNs). There are also countries that will assign your company ISBNs for free if you meet their requirements. One such country is Sweden.

Bowker – US ISBN Agency:
http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/index.asp

International ISBN Agencies:
http://www.isbn-international.org/en/agencies.html

Traditional & Vanity Publishing:

Traditional publishing is pretty straight forward. A Publisher (a person or company who owns their own ISBNs), offers to publish your title. They will negotiate a contract with you. You pay NOTHING for them to publish your work. They may or may not PAY YOU an up front advance (it depends on what you negotiate with them). They assign your title an ISBN from the ISBNs they own. *I will go over what a traditional publisher’s responsibilities are once you have signed the contract in another post.*

It is important for self-publishers to understand the various workings of “Vanity” publishers. These are usually companies that CHARGE YOU money to “publish” your book. These aren’t terrible services if you understand and agree with the arrangement. The primary goal of these companies are to make money off authors. No matter what they claim they will do for you in terms of sales and marketing their goal is to make money off authors. If you keep this in mind, you can make an informed decision about using a “Vanity” Press. *I will go into detail about these services in another post.*

Another important thing to note about using “Vanity” Presses and Self Publishing Services:
“The ISBN identifies not only the specific product to which it is assigned, but also the publisher to be contacted for ordering purposes. If an ISBN is purchased from a company other than R.R. Bowker or through the special programs of the companies listed here (Aardvark Global Publishing Company, Bethany Press, Espressio, FilmMasters, Instantpublisher.com, Lulu.com, PPC Books, Publisher Services, RJ Communications, RKD Press, Signature Books, WordClay), that ISBN will not identify you as the publisher of your title. This can have implications for your business in the publishing industry supply chain. ” – Bowker – US ISBN Agency

First things first; when being a creative person, you must rid yourself of the social conditioning that may hinder your creativity. It is a delicate balance. On one hand you want to use the experience of others to avoid the same pitfalls and mistakes but at the same time allow yourself to go beyond what others are comfortable doing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that little social conditioning voice in my head that says “you can’t do that” or “that can’t be combined with that”. I’ve had to consistently ignore those messages until they no longer pop into my head. You have to get to that point too if you aren’t there already. Your creative projects will go much faster when you start trusting yourself and your own ability to create fabulous artwork.

With that having been said, lets take a look at the following book covers I created in fifteen minutes or less (there are several more but for the sake of time, I will go over these three). Also these are only the front covers. I use size templates provided by my printer (and you should too), which also help making creating full covers faster. So the back covers already have the area for the subject genre, publishing company info, and barcode. I don’t usually get too fancy on back covers (or I use a stripped version of the front cover design so the back cover text can be placed over it). :

 This title published by blue ocean press took about fifteen minutes to create. It is a fairly simple cover, yet very effective. Funny things is I acquired a series of royalty-free photos that were processed like the photo used for this book cover. When I bought the series, I did not like the photos at all. I didn’t like the over processed look. But I knew this image was perfect for this cover. When it was complete, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked out. I find it challenging to create book covers with predominately white backgrounds. It’s hard to find images that work with all white backgrounds if you don’t like clutter or you have to have perfect matching. But I think this image worked very well because it’s over processed.

What I did here was simply decide what image I was going to use for the cover. I like using images that cover most if not all of the cover. Because this image dealt with Japanese Kanji Radicals, I opted to use a photo of a Japanese man instead of using just text or Japanese characters which would also have been a good alternative.  I moved the image to various different spots to see which I liked best. I don’t like the hard edge created when a photo ends and the background begins. So I will usually cut it with something. In this case, the orange stripe in the center. All colors used on this cover were matched to the image. I don’t always do this (using complimentary colors instead) but for this particular cover, it was necessary.  I felt the title should be in the middle and it fit perfectly under the photo of the man. The most challenging part was deciding what to do with the subtitle. I offset it to make sure it used as much of the front cover as possible.  I put the author name next to the man and as you see it, to create yet another interesting element to draw attention to the cover. There is an acceptable amount of white space above the subtitle. I didn’t put the author name in the space where the subtitles are because when I did, it looked like “too much” text in that area.

When you noticed things that just don’t “look” right, go with your instinct. If it isn’t sitting well with you, change it! That’s very important. Make your changes and move one. It’s when you start debating with yourself about if you should put something here or there, that your projects may take a long time.

This cover took about 8-10 minutes and is one of my favorites. The book is about Micronesia (Islands) so a royalty-free image of a nice island beach was perfect. But there is nothing interesting about yet another pretty picture of an island on a book cover. I wanted to add to the book cover without covering up any of the image and I love using transfer modes in Photoshop. I think transfer modes are the best thing since Cuban sandwiches. I learned a while ago that strips of color are very useful when creating any graphics design work. I added some strips of color (all on different layers). I left the top and bottom strips black where the titles would go and used an overlay transfer mode for the two middle strips. Then I could easily add the author names in-between the two strips. I also like that blue ocean press uses all lower case for their company name. This works well on book covers as well. But this is also where those little social conditioning voices pop up saying you can’t use all lower case or shouldn’t , etc. But you can and it works well when used at the right time.

 The Last Chamorro on Guam is another favorite cover of mine that took less than fifteen minutes to create. I chose to make this book cover simple because the author wanted to be listed as anonymous. I thought “what would be a great looking cover for a book written by an author that doesn’t wish to be known?” And I came up with this all white cover that would look a bit academic and personal. The word “Chamorro” has a texture applied to is using “Layer Options” in Photoshop. The biggest challenge for me when creating any book cover is how to arrange the text. It’s quite an art.

We watched with delight as person after person slowed down or stopped to look at our books and book covers. I have to admit we had the most colorful and eye catching booth in our area because of our covers. Several people stopped just to say how amazed they were at our book covers and countless fair-goers wanted to know more about the books because the covers caught their eyes.