#7659: I'm sweating
Why? I just started a process that will lead to me self-publishing (via Amazon) an anthology of short stories.
I was dicking around at work yesterday afternoon--having done everything I could reasonably do, I was left to wait for those things to percolate--and I read this post by Sarah Hoyt in which she said:
This is the post Sarah Hoyt linked to and it made plain how one writes the back-cover blurb for a book. And having read that piece thoroughly, I realized that anyone capable of writing a novel (or a novel-thick stack of short stories) could probably also write a blurb for it, given a formula...so, yeah.
So, the cover--because I try to sanitize my ascerbic and cynical commentary here of any identifying information, to avoid being canceled (but we were born free!) I can't show it here. Those of you who know my real name can find me on Fatzboob, though, where I did publish it...but it's just a work-in-progress and not the real cover. You see, the font for the title is too small. I need to use a good image editor (I whipped that one up in MSPaint) which will allow a font size greater than 72-point type.
I need to start pushing on this stuff, and I've been thinking and thinking about doing this anthology first. So I've got some shorts that need just a hair of editing to be completely worthwhile. They're not all SF, either. Some "plain fiction", a horror story--a few other bits and pieces, here and there. Some of them are B-list, most of them are A-list, none will be C-list stuff.
So besides the blurb-writing and the cover-creating prods, I happened to read the horror story that I want to include...and when I had finished reading it, not only did I realize that I'd utterly lost track of the entire real world while reading it, but I wanted to read more.
So, yeah. Finally taking a couple of baby steps towards putting it out there. Go, me.
I was dicking around at work yesterday afternoon--having done everything I could reasonably do, I was left to wait for those things to percolate--and I read this post by Sarah Hoyt in which she said:
why don't you hie over M. C. A. Hogarth's post on how to write blurbs, and then write blurbs for the books below, which, yes, I totally made up (in a hurry, from Pixabay. With the fonts on the laptop). Make them interesting!I went to find out what "Pixabay" was and found an image that would work for my collection, and I put together a cover real quick--and liked it. A lot.
This is the post Sarah Hoyt linked to and it made plain how one writes the back-cover blurb for a book. And having read that piece thoroughly, I realized that anyone capable of writing a novel (or a novel-thick stack of short stories) could probably also write a blurb for it, given a formula...so, yeah.
So, the cover--because I try to sanitize my ascerbic and cynical commentary here of any identifying information, to avoid being canceled (but we were born free!) I can't show it here. Those of you who know my real name can find me on Fatzboob, though, where I did publish it...but it's just a work-in-progress and not the real cover. You see, the font for the title is too small. I need to use a good image editor (I whipped that one up in MSPaint) which will allow a font size greater than 72-point type.
I need to start pushing on this stuff, and I've been thinking and thinking about doing this anthology first. So I've got some shorts that need just a hair of editing to be completely worthwhile. They're not all SF, either. Some "plain fiction", a horror story--a few other bits and pieces, here and there. Some of them are B-list, most of them are A-list, none will be C-list stuff.
So besides the blurb-writing and the cover-creating prods, I happened to read the horror story that I want to include...and when I had finished reading it, not only did I realize that I'd utterly lost track of the entire real world while reading it, but I wanted to read more.
So, yeah. Finally taking a couple of baby steps towards putting it out there. Go, me.