/lit/ - Literature

>>4123595
I was definitely getting a Lovecraftian horror vibe. The whole "unspecified location of unspeakable eldritch horror" practically spelled it out it out as far as I was concerned, and I think you hit the mark there.

I know you're posting looking for feedback, and to be honest, that's the first step towards becoming a better writer. I really encourage you to keep writing: you've got a tight vocabulary and a quite pleasant cadence to the way you write, and I think you can do well at it.

I've been writing full time for over a year now and since I started I've become so much better at what I do. Part of that was because I eagerly sought out feedback and got a lot of criticism which I took on board. I still have a lot to learn, make no mistake, and I'm determined to keep learning, keep getting feedback, keep making mistakes and getting them fixed. That's the journey.

A lot of writers never get past that, are too precious to have their work publicly critiqued, so I really, genuinely celebrate you and wish you the best.

Good luck OP. Let me know when you're done with publishing (you can email me: dave at lacunaverse.com).

>>4123374
Uhh sorry the formatter stripped it out. Rivers are where your words____get____really____spaced____out.

>>4123353
Also if you're justified remember that you need to watch for rivers in your text, lines where your words look like this.

You fix them by adding a return after the line (it happens on the last line of a paragraph; if it's happening elsewhere your renderer is fucked).

>>4123353
I would also recommend not indenting the first paragraph of a chapter (stylistic but a common choice), and I would strongly recommend putting much less white space between paragraphs, none if you can get away with it. Take a look at the screenshot I linked earlier; it has no extra spacing and it looks like a book.

Extra white space looks unprofessional and "internet published", simply because print books can't have so much paper being wasted on nothing. It sucks because having those extra space is good, but people are used to it. You have to meet reader expectations with these things. The bottom line is... if it looks unprofessional, it probably is.

>>4123339
Oh yeah when I say hyphenation I don't mean that you should manually do it, your software should be doing that for you.

>>4123344
Aye, I thought the same thing, that the story needed a hook.

>>4123325
You have an interesting cadence with your words and I found it to be an interesting read.

Your formatting is kind of off though. Ragged edges always look odd to me; can you try it with justified font, and also with hyphenation so that things like:

the layout of the city was
>dat huge gap
incomprehensible at best.

Other than that... well, yeah, you can write. It's a little slow to get started; I'd recommend putting a 'hook' right at the beginning, a one-liner just to bring the reader in.

In pic related, for example, in the prologue the first line is "I was born dead." It's a way to immediately grab the reader's attention.

You can also see pic related for an example on how to format (note the uneven margins; it's a print book, and that's where the gutter goes).

I used Scrivener but you can use Word just as easily.

Interesting OP, but first let me ask, what are you looking for? Feedback on the content, or the formatting? It's unclear.

For what it's worth, the first thing that comes to mind is that your paragraphs have a lot of whitespace between them. If you give me a second I'll give you some screenshots of my 5"x8" formatted books for comparison.

>>4092645
Hey, no worries. I'm glad you're on the way to publishing.

Regarding cover artists, that's what I did. Went to Deviantart and found people looking for commissions. I looked at what they'd done recently and asked for prices.

$2.99 is definitely a fair price for work of that length. I sell all the Rakshasa pieces at that length and they do go fine, although there's an occasional review saying they were too short. Just suck them up and move on.

My experience was mixed. Sometimes people's stuff that they posted on their accounts was the "Very best of", so the end result wasn't as good as I'd hoped. Some people priced themselves way out of my price range. The key was finding someone who was good enough, and cheap enough. It's a balance.

Never pay royalties for a cover IMO. It's a shit of a thing to keep track of, you're basically inheriting a chore for the rest of your life. Always pay a flat fee. For a nice cover, an illustrated cover, I usually pay around $200. Since you're doing short stories, I'd recommend getting one done and, if possible, reusing it with minor variations.

Good luck!

>>4091808
Self-publishing is almost all electronic or print-on-demand. The alternative is usually called 'vanity publishing' because it rarely results in copies sold that aren't to friends or family.

The main platforms for self-publishing are Amazon's Kindle, Apple's iBookstore, B&N's Nook, and lots of other smaller, more specialised players like DriveThruFiction.

You go about self-publishing by uploading your edited (right?) manuscript to these services, and setting a price. Most allow free although some don't. If you're a non-US resident things get tricky, because some stores are US only. Use something like Draft2Digital to get it into all the stores like I do.

That, in a nutshell, is self-publishing. Amazon's the biggest market by far.

>>4091705
No worries mate, good luck to you too.

If anyone else has any questions now's the time, I'll keep the tab open but I'll be heading off now soon too.

>>4091638
Makes sense.

Also, yeah. Createspace is pretty easy to navigate; doing covers is harder, but if you're savvy with Photoshop and can work a calculator it's not that difficult.

>>4091601
If they're free it's not a wasted effort, I guess, it's just that I don't see many downloads coming from it. Still, I mean, if you're determined, give it a shot! My suggestion is to print out the leaflets to be a copy of the cover, with the information and download link on the back.

Cool, the actual mechanism behind having some way to contact your readers is irrelevant as long as you have some way.

I write a serial called Rakshasa (paranormal romance, under the pen name Alica Knight) and each episode is 10k. I charge $2.99 for those, putting every five pieces into a book. You could do the same with your superhero stuff, just be aware that if it's available online in its entirety Amazon will bitch at you (they are cracking down on books you can just get online for free). You could sell your small episodes for 99c, and then put the compilations out (in groups of 5 I'd recommend) for $2.99. Note you actually make more money that way, since $2.99 gives you 70% royalty, whereas 99c gives you 35%.

You can also make the first part of your serials free, which would help a lot too. I get a dozen downloads a day each on various things that are free, sometimes more. One of those is a short story I made permanently free like two years ago.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EZ4CEO2/?tag=wwwlacunavers-20

>>4091579
Also, if you're seeding the ground for later novels, I strongly recommend creating a Mailchimp mailing list and putting a link in the back of your books. Signup for readers is easy, and you just send out a new mail when you've got a book. Bam, pre-packed reader base!

You can also make a Facebook group, and while many more people will 'Like' it that's less direct and Facebook's putting the squeeze on people to pay in return for views. So be wary of that.

But the mailchimp mailing list is absolute gold.

>>4091579
I'd say that this has a low probability of working. You're better off using that money on something much more targeted: there's a lot of stuff you can do to help your KDP Select days work better. I got this question a lot, back in the day, so I created a Google Doc with a huge list of places you can notify who will email people saying your book is free. Seen here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PeMi5a2jcn1cWkJzzz8QXfs4xrh2YlIOwfjOBiBZ21c/edit

It might be a bit out of date, I haven't been in Select for nearly 8 months, but the big players are still around.

When you get some more reviews (I'd recommend 30-40ish, depending on how good they are) I'd do a Bookbub promo. They cost money, but they're well worth it, I found. Again, though, Select has been less powerful this year so I'd be wary of paying for results, even if they're strong results.

Good luck with your promo mate!

>>4091559
No, you've got them mostly right, but Amazon bought out a new feature with keywords and the various fantasy sub-categories (such as Sword&Sorcery). If you put the name of the category in your key words, the book is added to that category, assuming you don't already have too many (the max is like 10).

>>4091525
675 pages? Man, nicely done.

Suggestions: use keywords to get into any more categories that your book fits into. You could also try setting your USD price to $2.99 since it looks cheaper.

I picked up a sample, I've got some time tonight, I'll see what it's like! Seems pretty cool.

>>4091061
There's no 'proper' way.

A chapter is as long as it needs to be. For third person work, I tend to favour longer chapters; 6-10k words each, three chapters per act, prologue and epilogue which are usually 2-5k each. I know the modern thing is to avoid prologues, but I try to use them the way GRRM used them; to show something that otherwise really doesn't need its own chapter.

For first person work, I make the chapters smaller. 3k-5k is a good number for a first person POV chapter. They're different because, I think, first person is a bit more tiring on the reader; it's harder to stay focused. Accordingly, I tend to put in six chapters per act in first person POV, along with a prologue and epilogue.

Sometimes the structure breaks down a bit though. Ren of Atikala begins each act with an essay, which are about 500-1000 words, so that affects the word count.

The above's a good guide, but there's no set, hard way and you should never feel like you have to pad out a chapter to make it fit, or cut a chapter because it's too long. If it's too long, make it two chapters. The purpose of a chapter is to give the reader a good place to stop for a break, and for the micro-plot within the section ("How are we going to get out of this pit?") to be resolved. That's all they are. They're very flexible.

>>4091005
For novels I usually start with three acts, work out how many chapters I need, then put in a paragraph or two of notes for each chapter. I then start writing at the beginning, but I tend to jump around a lot. I often write the end very early, or at least have a good idea about how it's going to go down.

I then work towards that end. If someone dies at the end, I give them plenty of "screen time". If the finale is the reactor going critical needing someone to crawl in and fix it, I foreshadow that a lot. "If that coolant valve goes, the whole thing could explode" etc etc.

Writing scenes out of order is a nice way of writing (you get them out of your head while they're fresh and good), but it slows the process and you have to stitch them together later, which can sometimes be awkward. That said, that's usually how my best scenes are written because they have so much work put into them and multiple passes to make sure they're right.

The main thing is to do what you feel works best for you, to experiment and find the best thing to match your style.

And to finish what you start.

>>4090982
Yeah, I guess that's a good point, but the Show, Don't Tell rule applies. Show how your world works, don't just talk at the audience. LotR got away with it, but most writers can't.

>>4090972
You could also get the epub from Smashwords so the formatting's not fucked, but that also works. The book's also available from B&N but I know a lot of Nook users shop at Amazon. There's no DRM so that should work.

No worries man, good luck with your writing.

>>4090953
Because it's not about escaping to a place, per se, it's about escaping to the people within it. The place can be interesting and engaging, but it's always the people that are the most important factor for any fantasy.

Or any story.

>>4090947
Oh yeah, that's very true. Like I said earlier, worldbuilding is nice, but story is king.

>>4090941
Really good question, and I had exactly the same problem myself in Ren of Atikala.

Ren of Atikala was originally third person and had a LOT of world building. It was all about the kobold society, their structure, their training, the way they grow and fight and die, etc etc. It was all about this world.

The problem is, it was boring. It was a history lesson in a book. And the more I wrote, the more I was like "Okay, all I have to do is explain this one thing for ten more pages and then I can get back to the story again..."

So I cut it. I cut all the worldbuilding, by and large, and rewrote the story to be first person. Now it focuses entirely on Ren and her personal journey, which I found much more compelling. The world flavour is still there, you can see it in the way people act and talk and in the maps that are included at the front of the book (which show a vast world almost completely untouched by the protagonists), but it's not the focus of the story at all.

It taught me a really valuable lesson, and that's that sometimes too much world building can crush you. World building are the supports a story rests upon. They aren't the story. You can't make a house out of foundations.

Applied sparingly it can make your story interesting. In RoA, for example, the Gods are dead. There's no healing magic, but there once was. This affects how people think and act.

But a pantheon of dead gods, and POV flashbacks to the fall, and all that other shit? Largely irrelevant.

In a way, it's like ASOIAF, if GRRM had cut everything but Danny's story. The other stuff is still HAPPENING, it's just that it's so far away and so unrelated to everything that you could genuinely cut it and the story would be okay, even possibly better because it's not burdened with all this baggage.