Category: Marketing

Holiday Shopping Can Be Stressful — We’re Here To Help

It’s a good idea not to brave the stores this year, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be generous.

The Divided Man series offers hours of fun! Some of it is the kind of fun that makes you laugh, and some is the kind that makes you flinch, or even shake your head in dismay. It has love, and hate, and existential dread. It has sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. It has a talking lava lamp!

The whole trilogy can be ordered in your choice of paperback or e-book formats. Sample chapters are available on our writing page, along with links for purchase options.

Rune Skelley Author Page

Beat the crowds — order today for everyone on your list!

Rune Skelley and the Secret of the Hidden Bookcase

We do most of our writing in the aptly named Writing Cave, but from time to time, especially in the winter, we like to hole up and work in the Auxiliary Writing Cave. It has a fireplace, you see, which makes it extra cozy. It’s also the only room in our house we hadn’t gotten around to redecorating. This year we’d finally had enough of the dingy yellow paint, and a decision was reached: it was time for a change. Once we hauled out all the mammoth bones and gave the place a good sweeping, we decided a little bit more than a coat of paint was needed. We would update the fire. As part of the process, we had to put in a false wall.

In the past when we’ve done projects around the house, we’ve written messages on the backside of drywall before installing it, and on the floor before tiling over it. Fun little surprises someone might discover in the far future. This time we got a little more creative.

The fireplace redo is the first major renovation project we’ve done since self-publishing our Divided Man books. Jen thought it would be fun to hide signed copies of the books inside the wall for some future homeowner to find. Kent heartily agreed.

We inscribed all three books.
Kent installed a hidden shelf between the 2x4s.
Up went the backer board.
Then the tile.
Voila!

We think it looks amazing. It’s hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to replace the tile, so perhaps our secret hidden bookshelf will never be discovered.

Format Wars

The Music Novel is not a slender tome. It’s a beast, frankly. A big, complex story richly told.

Part of that richness is expressed in the complexity of the formatting. It’s a thing that we did with footnotes, but they’re not really being treated like footnotes so we had to get tricky with it. We’ve found it works well to provide it as a PDF, because that way we can be sure that the reader will see each “footnote” where it’s supposed to be.

To a great extent, writing is independent of the visual stylistic choices of fonts and layouts. The words are the words, regardless, and they should mean the same even if the letters look a little different. But, design is also communication. The choice of font really does affect how readers respond to the text. Reading comfort is part of that, but also the mood of the font, even if it’s not an especially funky font. Juxtaposition is a powerful way to link ideas. For instance, a footnote needs to be on the right page (even if you’re being too clever for your own good about what a footnote is for). Presentation matters as much with a novel as it does with a meal. Hence, our preference for PDF, which gives us lots of control over such things.

Well.

Our agent asked if we could provide it in Word format instead. Like, right away.

Okay, couple things there. We don’t use Word. We work mainly in Scrivener, but one of the very few things that application won’t let us do is set up footnotes on arbitrary pages. So for the Music Novel’s clever formatting stuff we used Pages, which is essentially Apple’s version of Word, and then exported to PDF.

Pages also allows us to export to Word format, so that was at least a start, but then the output had to be tweaked. Fancy fonts that embed just fine in a PDF and look the same everywhere were a big nope, so we had to change them to standard fonts. Page breaks didn’t fall at the same places, so things had to be checked and adjusted in (no shit) about 500 places.

So, it made for a late night with no actual writing progress to show for it. But the request wouldn’t have been made if there wasn’t a reason, so it was something we were happy to provide.

The ironic part of all of this is, messing with the formatting was supposed to be one of the problems that we could offload to the fine professionals at our publisher when we got one, but this sojourn into tweaking and fiddling about with such minutiae came up as part of our quest to get a publisher. At least we have each other, so we didn’t need to do it alone.

2019 Preview

Last week we recapped our 2018. Now it’s time to look ahead and see what the coming twelvemonth will hold in store.

Our top priority will be writing Sibling of Music Novel. The first round of outlining is essentially complete, which does not mean we are yet in possession of anything that resembles an outline. But it does mean we’ll be ready to begin the actual writing pretty soon. Hard to say how long that will take. Our past few projects have been all over the map. Hopefully we can be speedy this time!

After that, we have a couple of good candidates for our attention, depending on which story world we want to focus on. We can stay with the Music series and do an editing pass on Son of Music Novel, or we can pivot back to the Science series where there are two manuscripts that need such treatment.

Deciding which of those worthy endeavors gets our attention first will depend on how our near-future publishing strategy shapes up. 2018 was the year we got an agent, and 2019 will be the year that we adjust our routines accordingly.

And, that means as of now we don’t have an answer for “What book(s) will you release in the coming year?” Everything’s topsy-turvy! But we can say for sure that we’ll be sweating in the writing cave. (Not really, though, because it’s air conditioned.) We will let you know what’s coming just as soon as we find out ourselves. Watch this space for updates.

To sum up, we expect to be busy!

A toast: May this, the year two thousand nineteen, be generous and gentle to you and everyone you love.

Exciting News! We Have an Agent!

* For Immediate Release *

Rune Skelley is thrilled to announce having inked a deal with Prentis Literary. Woo hoo! (Can you say “woo hoo” in a press release?)

Our writing journey is now officially leading toward hybrid publishing, after independently publishing three novels. We’re looking forward to learning many new things. We’re very fortunate for the opportunity to work with Trodayne Northern, who has been patient and helpful with us at each turn as we figure out how to be a client. As a bonus, he really gets our stuff.

What this means for our release schedule is not clear yet. Trodayne has taken on the Music Novels, and meanwhile we are thisclose to releasing the first of the Science Novels. Or, are we? The landscape has shifted, and we’ll need to figure out what path now makes the most sense. It’s a good problem to have!

Being coauthors has (hopefully) prepared us well for the collaborative relationship between author and agent.

Is This Thing On?

One of the most informative sessions we attended at the Independent Authors Conference was the one on audiobooks. Among the things we learned:

  1. they’re expensive
  2. producing them costs a lot of money
  3. they ain’t cheap

Audio is the fastest-growing publishing segment [citation needed], and it’s not just a “millennial thing.” More than one of Kent’s coworkers where he dayjobs has asked when the works of Rune Skelley will become available in audio format, because they utilize their lengthy commute times to consume books. (These are people whose kids are millennials. But yeah, the younger crowd likes to consume content that way, too.)

The duration guestimate is around 9500 words an hour, so if your book is 95,000 words then it will be roughly ten hours. While there are different ways the billing can be structured, professional audiobook production basically runs several hundred dollars per finished hour. Given the scale of our novels, we experienced major sticker shock. The question that logically occurred to us was, “What about doing it ourselves?” We do everything ourselves. How hard can it be? Kent reads all the manuscripts aloud multiple times anyway in the course of our standard process, and we often say we ought to be recording.

Well. Short answer: yes, you can DIY your audiobooks. But it’s a lot of work, and requires adequate setup and preparation.

  • Needless to say, the manuscript needs to be final. So, our scheme to capture the audio on-the-fly during our writing process isn’t really sound. (Drat!)
  • If you flub anything, you need to do it again. Even if you said all the correct words in the correct order, you might not be pleased with your cadence or inflection. You’ll end up needing to record much of the text twice, or more, to get a top-notch end product.
  • All those takes need to be edited together. This is time-consuming, probably double or triple the finished hours of the audiobook. (And that’s assuming you already know how to drive the editing software.)
  • The narrator’s delivery must be even and distinct. This requires considerable concentration and holding a consisten posture, which can become exhausting over periods of hours. And, across multiple sessions. If you catch a cold, you might not be able to record until your congestion clears up.
  • Good narration is a form of acting. The book’s tone needs to come through, and each character’s voice should be distinguishable. Can you do the accents? Male and female roles? Remember, the listener is counting on you to bring the story to life.
  • The recording environment has be free of background noise, reverb, and interruptions. You need a space where you can’t hear traffic or opening and closing of doors, and so on. If there are other people or pets in the house, and you don’t have a soundproofed room, they’ll have to be unreasonably still or they’ll spoil your takes.
  • It’s critical to have someone do QA (quality assurance) on your output. This is a big job, and doing it well requires a good ear and the ability to deliver honest criticism. It might be hard to find someone willing to donate the hours whose relationship to you doesn’t interfere with their objectivity.

We’re still flirting with the idea of trying it, despite all these obstacles. It’s not impossible, but there’s a reason that the pros charge serious money to do it. Perhaps we’ll have an update in the future, whether it’s a sample recording or, “Yikes, that didn’t go well.”

 

Stereos in the Snow

When we designed the covers for the Divided Man series, we worked on the three of them simultaneously. It was a good way to produce a unified result, with the content, colors, layout, and typography working together so the books really looked like a set.

We liked how that went, so we’re following the same methodology for the Science Novels. For books one and three, the main images were downloaded and then manipulated in Photoshop, much as with the earlier cover designs. But we just couldn’t find a stock image anywhere that really worked for book two.

So, we took our own, snapping extreme closeups of an old amplifier from our music room. The initial candidate gave us very encouraging results, but we felt dissatisfied that there wasn’t any ice in the image (probably because we took the pic on our dining table). Pervasive cold is an important thematic element in the story that should be reflected on the cover, plus it would help connect the imagery for the other two books. Kent tinkered with adding ice and snow textures sampled from many of the same images that we’d already auditioned and rejected, but it wasn’t coming together. The effects he was getting didn’t match what Jen saw in her mind’s eye.

A confluence of propitious events followed. Jen tracked down a source for salvaged electronics, where she purchased another techie gizmo for us to photograph. This also prompted us to scavenge our to-recycle pile. That turned out to be a been-recycled pile, and therefore it didn’t exist. Rats. But, Jen’s mom was looking to clear out some old stereo equipment that no one had used in years, so we grabbed it.

And then, best of all, it snowed. We took all our delightfully obsolete treasures out on the deck and let nature heap them with eleven inches of snow. We also spritzed them with a squirt bottle to help things along. The neighbors, if they noticed, didn’t say anything.

The final cover image will be an amalgam created from portions of several of the pictures Jen took. It’s not done yet, but already it looks awesome.

Holiday Sanity Check

We are still toiling away toward the upcoming release of Science Novel, and it’s going well. Jen’s innate knack for project management has again risen to the fore, and Kent has been able to take down nearly one-third of the neon-orange sticky notes that she put up on the board to track his editing progress. The cover is resting comfortably, as is one of its siblings, with the remaining one nearing completion as well to round out the trilogy’s wrappers. (More about the covers in next Friday’s post!)

Also, we have a houseful of (very welcome!) distractions, and tons of baking and cooking and cleaning to do, plus visiting and shopping and, well, you get it. This season is a really tough time to try to cloister ourselves for a final push to complete a project. Work continues, but life goes on. There must always be a balance.

Thus, because we absolutely will not release anything that feels rushed, we have chosen to buy ourselves a bit of breathing room and push the new book back until January. Once we have a firm date, we’ll schedule a cover reveal.

Meanwhile, enjoy your holiday rituals, feasts, and companionship, along with anticipatory tingles about our new novel. Delayed gratification will be our gift to you. Hope you like the color!

This Little Author Went to Market

There’s this amazing new method for helping the public learn about your product. It’s called “Marketing.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

We’ve talked a little before about how much we don’t like marketing, and how we therefore don’t really do much of it. But here’s the thing. If you want to sell books, it helps if people know they exist. And we want people to buy our books! We really enjoy writing them, and think that a lot of folks will enjoy the hell out of reading them. We know they’re not for everyone, but that’s what makes them perfect for an elite few (including you!).

In order to learn about this new “marketing” thing all the cool kids are into, we attended this year’s Independent Authors Conference. Careful readers of this blog will recall that we attended last year, too, but the difference is that this year we’ve actually made a plan to implement what we learned. Gasp!

(We have a great excuse for why last year was a bit of a bust. We returned from a big trip to the Adriatic four days before the conference started, and our heads were still mostly in Croatia.)

So we spent this past weekend in Philadelphia, attending sessions, meeting other authors and industry pros, eating a seven course Moroccan meal without silverware (so. delicious.), and watching a goofy video of Kaiju Ben Franklin battling a giant cheesesteak.

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D-I-Why Do We Do This To Ourselves

The end of the year marks our target for releasing the first book of our new series, and even though the manuscript is in really good shape there is So. Much. To. Do.

And we’re doing all of it ourselves.

Final edits and the cover design are keeping us both quite busy. But on top of those major endeavors, we also need to write the blurb, assign the ISBN, polish up the maps and the Russian glossary, write the dedication, format everything, assemble it into an actual book, and order a proof copy. While we wait for that, we also have Amazon keywords and other metadata to figure out. Then the making-it-available-to-readers workflow can kick in, which itself has multiple steps.

This part of being a writer is exciting, in its way, but it’s the dirty, open secret of the writing life. There’s so much other stuff you need to do, stuff that takes a shit-ton of time away from your writing. (All those things listed in the previous paragraph? That doesn’t even include any real marketing.)

At least with two of us, we can spread the work around a little and each focus on our strengths. We make a great team, if we do say so ourselves. Still, we’re running out of year real quick at this point. Better get back to work!