Barnes and Noble's "Pubit"

B&N has come up with a newish tool for their site. It's called Pubit. For the past few days, I've had the opportunity to experience it first hand. And I absolutely hate it.

For you nonpublishers out there, I'll keep it simple: Pubit doesn't recognize simple formatting ("page breaks" for chapters are ignored. You have to use "section breaks"), so the book comes out looking like one big chunk of text. There's no chapters (even though there are). Pubit's solution? Insert random breaks through the document. 

And you can't delete the breaks. 

My left eye is starting to twitch. 

So you can either go through your document and manually change all the formatting just for them, or you can do it from their very own program. The program looks like it might be easier, so you try that. 

Three crashes and starting over twice and the whole left side of my face is twitching. 

So you try to get a hold of customer support. They're too busy to talk to you. So sorry. 

N'kay, Pubit, let me take your hand and tell you how it is. Publishers are a busy lot. I don't have time to play with your crappy program. Just accept my document with the industry standard formatting so I can move on with my day. 

If you don't, you're simply giving me more reason to hang out with Amazon . I don't like to play favorites, but Amazon doesn't make me jump through hoops. They answer all my questions promptly and take care of crap on their end. Also, I make 10X more money with them. 

You can see how our relationship is feeling the strain? 

Get it together, Barnes and Noble. You're already playing catch up. 

Witch Fall might make it after all . . .

You guys have no IDEA how stressed I've been. The first half and last quarter of Witch Fall are done and I love it. The latter part of the middle doesn't exist. And the bleeping thing is due out in October. I've been wracking my brain and struggling with it for months. Finally, I just decided to start with a character rewrite and hope for the best. And then I read this article. Here's the short of it:

"The antagonist is the beating heart of the story. He/She/It creates the crisis and the crucible that forces our protagonist to become a hero. If we don’t know the endgame, we have no idea how to insert roadblocks, create misdirection, setbacks, or drama. So if you keep getting stuck? It might not be you are lazy or fearful (I wasn’t either). It might be your foundation (the antagonist/core story problem) either isn’t there or it’s weak and unable to support the bulk of 65-100,000 words."
~Kristen Lamb

Light-freakin'-bulb! My problem is I have two villains with dual purposes, which makes a mess out of the middle and undermines the beginning and the end (because one villain appears at the beginning, the other at the end).

The two need to be collaborators! This changes everything. Why didn't I see it before? It's so simple and so perfect and I missed it!

But really, who cares, because now I can finish the bleeping thing, and maybe, just maybe, I'll make my deadline. Pray my kids cooperate.

No really. Pray. It's gonna take a miracle.

On coming out

I haven't really talked publicly about this. I haven't really avoided the question either. I just kinda figured it didn't really matter for my readers either way, so I kept quiet (on my blog at least).

But I've finally come to a place where I want to explain a few things. So here it is:

I've gone indie. For those of you not in the business, that means I self publish my own books, starting with Witch Born and moving on to Winter Queen. Witch Fall will be self published as well, and I recently bought my rights back for Witch Song.

One reason I held back was because there's a lot of judgement about self published authors in general. That somehow indies settle because we couldn't wiggle into traditional publishing. That quality wasn't something you found in an indie author.

I've stopped caring what those people think. Partly because I know they're wrong (my books are some of the best YA fantasy out there, indie or traditional). And partly because I don't care if they refuse to read the books because they're indie. Their loss.

So why did I decide to go indie? It's a really long story, but I'll try to keep it short: I've had an agent. I've had a contract from a publisher that I turned down. I've had a traditionally published book. I've had editors from publishers that you have heard of call me to tell me how much they loved one or the other of my books, but that they couldn't publish it (mostly due to someone else's call). I've had similar calls/emails from more agents than I care to remember.

And I hated it. I hated the drama and the waiting and the way so many authors are treated like minions because they've signed away their power. I despised basing my life on someone else's approval. Waiting for some publishing fairy to tap my manuscripts with her magical wand and transform it from loose pages into a hardbound princess.

And I especially hated my traditional paychecks.

So I made the hard choice--the scary choice. And it turned out to be incredibly hard (at least at first), but not really that scary. I make lots more money as an indie than I did in traditional. I can let my perfectionism for my books have free reign. And my life doesn't revolve around someone else.

Being indie is not for everyone. I don't hate publishing or traditional publishers. I'm positive that with the right team of professionals in the right situation, I could be very happy. And if that found me, I might consider it. But I'm not looking for it. I'm perfectly happy where I'm at, and there are some things in the works that I'm super excited about (can't talk about it yet, but soon!)

Questions? Comments?

Witch Song cover revamp

My cover artist and I are trying to decide what to do with Witch Song's cover. It kind of bugs me that the title/author for Witch Fall and Witch Born are on the bottom. Basically, they match, and Witch Song doesn't. 

But if I move it lower, I cover the pendant, which is a unifying theme throughout the entire series, and serves to visually tie the covers together.

So do we leave it the way it is, or move the title around? 

Option three is to back up the focus, so we show Senna from the waist up instead of just below the shoulders, but I'm not sure we can make it look right. 

I love to involve my fans, so let me know your opinion. 

Original cover

Come check out my new blog!

Let me know what you think! If there's any changes that need to be made or nifty ideas you'd like to share, now is the time to let us know.

Big thanks to Jessica Porter for the redesign!