Monday, November 7, 2011

"Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder" has been approved for publication!

I just ordered a proof copy from CreateSpace for my first-ever publication.  It should be available by the end of the month.  I've been writing forever, but I never felt justified in putting down "Writer" as my occupation because I was never published.  "Unpublished Writer" felt the same as saying "Loser."  Now, even though it's self-published, maybe I can hold up my head!  It's more respectable to do it yourself than it used to be.  However, I was looking at the Science Fiction Writers of America website and it says you must have "sold" a certain amount of writings to join.  That's pretty snobbish of 'em!  Ha, ha!

I'm also planning to publish "Monster" as an ebook, but I haven't started on that yet.

I could not use my own artwork on the cover of  "Monster."  We figured out a way I could upload my Word drawing by turning it into a JPEG and it uploaded all right, but then it informed me that the DPI was too low - only 96 and it has to be 300.  At that point, I threw in the towel.  Word just won't work as a publishable drawing program.  "Monster" is an intense and  compelling story, well worth buying and reading, but it's only a 73-page novella, not  a major novel like "The Termite Queen."  So I found a ready-made cover in Cover Creator and adapted that.  It has no relation to the story, but it has a fairly dramatic look to it.

As soon as the book is officially available, I'm going to publish my own cover drawing here on the blog.  I think anyone who is reading the book might like to see it.  And I'm searching for the right vector graphics software that will give me a PDF drawing with the right amount of DPI so I can make my own cover for "TQ."  I really doubt that I need something as expensive as Adobe Illustrator or Corel -- after all, I've done good, fun stuff with the simple system that Word provides.  So I'm thinking of getting a trial version of Mayura when I have time to spend working with it.  Any advice?

I had wondered why I had never gotten any comments on this blog, and then I discovered that Comments weren't enabled.  Now they are, so feel free to share anything you like!

2 comments:

  1. Paint.net is very good, and its free. http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. If you need vector graphics, I can recommend you Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/). It's comparable to Illustrator or Corel Draw in terms of features, and it's completely free (as in beer and as in speech). It uses a standard format (SVG, also used in browsers), and has very good export capabilities (including PDF).

    I use it myself for the logos of my webfiction and plenty more work. It's really powerful!

    ReplyDelete