Reflections on Self Publication of First BookToday, I am happy to announce that I have completed my first ever book – “Carthick’s Unfairy Tales”. As of now the book will be only in e-book form and will be available only on Amazon’s Kindle Platform. Based on the response to the book, I will consider a paperback launch later. It is expected to be launched in December or January. The exact details will be decided based on the planning for the marketing activities. Most of the book production activities are complete except for a couple of final proof reads to remove any of those little niggling errors that creep in despite doing your best and hiring one of the best in the business as an editor. READ MORE
Why I wanted to be a Writer?
As I mentioned in my previous post, I wanted to do a series of posts reflecting on my writing journey that led to the book “Carthick’s Unfairy tales”, which is due to be released in Amazon Kindle platform very soon. In my earlier post, I mentioned how the choice of publication platform is a determined by what motivates ones to take up writing. In this post, I want to talk more about what motivated me to take up writing. In some ways that is the most critical aspect as it determines not only the platform, but also the topics, genres and themes one picks for writing and on and how much one can invest oneself into the pursuit of this art. READ MORE
Finding a theme for a Fiction Book
Third in the series, leading up to my book release, I am going to talk about one of the most important topics – how I hit upon these theme for my first book. Very often, we want to write but stuck not knowing what to write about. So I am going to do a recap of the journey of this idea – how it was born and how it evolved to this form.
Back in 2011-2012, I used to actively participate in contests organized by brands. For one of the contests, I did a spoof on Snow White. I really enjoyed that and later did two more – one each on Rapunzel and Cinderella. Then in 2013, I started a dedicated blog for science fiction and fantasy. There I was doing alternate series of reviews and original stories. One of the story series was retelling of fairy tales where I covered Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Bean Stalk, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel to add to the 3 I already had. So I had 8 stories available with me. READ MORE
The Cover Story
In this fourth post leading up to my book release, I shall cover one of the most important aspects of book production – ‘the cover’. Old wisdom asks us not to judge a book by its cover. But then old wisdom also also says face is the index of the mind. Isn’t the cover the face of the book and hence the index to its contents? All these sophisms aside, fact is people do get attracted to books by their covers. The way it works for me for unknown authors is first cover, then blurb and then finally maybe first few pages. So, if a book fails at cover stage, blurb does not even get a chance. Here I will share how I went about getting my cover done. READ MORE
Judging Book Covers
So, I continue the story of my book publication journey with yet another post on the cover. I left off the last one with a request to the Roman designer for a third draft of the cover. I was hoping that would be the final one. But when I showed it to people, they still found the cover cluttered and the title unreadable. Having shown it mostly to writers, I decided to try to show it to my non-writer friends as well.
One of the persons who came to my rescue was the one who had introduced me to this artist initially. She told me, one should not try to include too many elements in my cover. It should be restricted to 1-2 elements only. READ MORE
From the Writer's Desk to the Editor's Desk
In this sixth post on my journey to ‘Carthick’s Unfairy Tales’, I will talk about a very important element – editing. Editing is a term in writer parlance similar to strategy in corporate parlance. It gets thrown around in every conversation and nobody really knows what they are talking about. Editing means different things to different people. You have one school of thought that say a book needs 5 different kind of editors – Beta reader, Developmental editor, Fact checker, Copy editor, Line Editor and Proof reader. When a new writer hears of this, he is totally bewildered. He wonders if he is writing a book or producing a film with so many technicians. And one even wonders whether the story is one’s own after so many people have been through with it. READ MORE
Book Cover Contest
This post is part of my series on my foray into self publishing and it is not. I will write a detailed post on my various promotional efforts. One of the things I did was a pre-release launch event in auspices of FWBA (For Writers By Authors) and Litventure. I have been closely associated with the people who run these groups for close to 3 years. While generally I have kept off names and specific details in my series, here I need to express gratitude for help rendered to a first time author. So I would like to mention Neil D'Silva, Vanita Bodke, Kavita Singh and Varun Prabhu who organized this event for me. As part of the event, I announced a contest to write something inspired by my cover. I wanted to make a cover that intrigues readers and make them curious enough to pick up my book. Through this contest I wanted to gauge what kind of ideas this cover inspired in the minds of the people seeing it. READ MOREOriginal link
Why I wanted to be a Writer?
As I mentioned in my previous post, I wanted to do a series of posts reflecting on my writing journey that led to the book “Carthick’s Unfairy tales”, which is due to be released in Amazon Kindle platform very soon. In my earlier post, I mentioned how the choice of publication platform is a determined by what motivates ones to take up writing. In this post, I want to talk more about what motivated me to take up writing. In some ways that is the most critical aspect as it determines not only the platform, but also the topics, genres and themes one picks for writing and on and how much one can invest oneself into the pursuit of this art. READ MORE
Finding a theme for a Fiction Book
Third in the series, leading up to my book release, I am going to talk about one of the most important topics – how I hit upon these theme for my first book. Very often, we want to write but stuck not knowing what to write about. So I am going to do a recap of the journey of this idea – how it was born and how it evolved to this form.
Back in 2011-2012, I used to actively participate in contests organized by brands. For one of the contests, I did a spoof on Snow White. I really enjoyed that and later did two more – one each on Rapunzel and Cinderella. Then in 2013, I started a dedicated blog for science fiction and fantasy. There I was doing alternate series of reviews and original stories. One of the story series was retelling of fairy tales where I covered Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Bean Stalk, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel to add to the 3 I already had. So I had 8 stories available with me. READ MORE
The Cover Story
In this fourth post leading up to my book release, I shall cover one of the most important aspects of book production – ‘the cover’. Old wisdom asks us not to judge a book by its cover. But then old wisdom also also says face is the index of the mind. Isn’t the cover the face of the book and hence the index to its contents? All these sophisms aside, fact is people do get attracted to books by their covers. The way it works for me for unknown authors is first cover, then blurb and then finally maybe first few pages. So, if a book fails at cover stage, blurb does not even get a chance. Here I will share how I went about getting my cover done. READ MORE
Judging Book Covers
So, I continue the story of my book publication journey with yet another post on the cover. I left off the last one with a request to the Roman designer for a third draft of the cover. I was hoping that would be the final one. But when I showed it to people, they still found the cover cluttered and the title unreadable. Having shown it mostly to writers, I decided to try to show it to my non-writer friends as well.
One of the persons who came to my rescue was the one who had introduced me to this artist initially. She told me, one should not try to include too many elements in my cover. It should be restricted to 1-2 elements only. READ MORE
From the Writer's Desk to the Editor's Desk
In this sixth post on my journey to ‘Carthick’s Unfairy Tales’, I will talk about a very important element – editing. Editing is a term in writer parlance similar to strategy in corporate parlance. It gets thrown around in every conversation and nobody really knows what they are talking about. Editing means different things to different people. You have one school of thought that say a book needs 5 different kind of editors – Beta reader, Developmental editor, Fact checker, Copy editor, Line Editor and Proof reader. When a new writer hears of this, he is totally bewildered. He wonders if he is writing a book or producing a film with so many technicians. And one even wonders whether the story is one’s own after so many people have been through with it. READ MORE
Book Cover Contest
This post is part of my series on my foray into self publishing and it is not. I will write a detailed post on my various promotional efforts. One of the things I did was a pre-release launch event in auspices of FWBA (For Writers By Authors) and Litventure. I have been closely associated with the people who run these groups for close to 3 years. While generally I have kept off names and specific details in my series, here I need to express gratitude for help rendered to a first time author. So I would like to mention Neil D'Silva, Vanita Bodke, Kavita Singh and Varun Prabhu who organized this event for me. As part of the event, I announced a contest to write something inspired by my cover. I wanted to make a cover that intrigues readers and make them curious enough to pick up my book. Through this contest I wanted to gauge what kind of ideas this cover inspired in the minds of the people seeing it. READ MOREOriginal link
Sign in to leave a comment.