Macyntire & Hough FREE 11/19-20

I'm in the middle of NaNoWriMo and trying to crank out a first draft of my sequel to Macyntire & Hough, but I thought it wold be fun if I did a few freebie days on Amazon and Kindle for my book this month for anyone who's interested in checking out my first book. I've never done one of these before, and I've read a lot of opinions about the free days promotion on Amazon. Well, it's my turn to see if anyone takes a chance on my book (Why not? It's free!) or if I remain in obscurity until I get done a few more novels.

If you like reading eBooks, please check out Macyntire & Hough on Amazon and spread the word! It is a book that I am passionate about (though moving forward, the sequel is my new favorite child) and hoping to get it in front of a few more eyes. You can get the eBook for free starting tomorrow on my Amazon page.

If you're doing NaNoWriMo like me, best of luck getting to the finish line! We're almost there!

The Curtain Falls (eBook)

Looking for a great read for Halloween? Check out The Curtain Falls by Maine author Meg North!

I just finished reading this book that I purchased a few months ago (I am a slow reader, in case you haven't noticed!) and I absolutely loved it. This book had everything I was looking for, including Victorian romance, drama, family tension, and magic.

Get it now on Amazon while it's free and help boost it up the charts! If you loved it like I did, don't forget to leave a review. Personally, I am waiting anxiously for Miss North's next book which I hope is finished soon!

Aleister Character Portrait

As a special treat today I have a character portrait of one of the villains from Macyntire & Hough, Aleister.

Aleister is a lower form of demon, a minion if you like. He is the hired hand who goes out and threatens the lingering ghosts of people with fear and, sometimes if his boss allows, he gets to bring them in and watch then become part of Haures Grantley's library of souls.

Macabre? Of course! It's October after all! Hope you enjoy, and if you haven't, pick up a copy of Macyntire & Hough in paperback, or save a few dollars and get it in eBook on Amazon!

How To Create An eBook

Here's a little shameless self-promotion, but also a bit of useful information for anyone out there who wants to know how I create my eBooks for Kindle.

I've written a modest-sized (41 page) eBook on how I created my novel, Macyntire & Hough from start to finish. This book includes all the information on my outlining process, how I keep track of drafts and the number of passes I did to the manuscript, and also a step-by-step guide to how I formatted my Scrivener document and compiled for KDP.

This book is only $0.99 on the Kindle Store. The process I detail as far as formatting is the same exact process I used to create this eBook, so if you enjoy the way it's all put together, you can achieve the same exact results for your own book by following the steps. (To be honest, I worked on a short story earlier in the week and ended up using this book as a refresher to how I had everything set up. There are a lot of things that go into an eBook, and it's great to have them all in one place as opposed to when I was figuring everything out with different bits of information and tips scattered on napkins and notecards!)

For those who love print, I don't have a physical option...yet. But I successfully made it through my first CreateSpace adventure and will see about making a "real" copy of this book soon!

I hope it helps!

Macyntire & Hough Cover Preview!

With publication day coming up for my first novel on October 1st, I thought it would be fun to unveil my cover design for Macyntire & Hough. This design has gone through five different versions to arrive here, and I'm pleased with the end result. While this is a paranormal romance, it's also a contemporary romance. I wanted to steer clear of all the dark, gloomy colors that I traditionally see in paranormal romance covers, and go with something warm since the story takes place during the fall. Without further ado, here it is!

I'd love to hear your thoughts. I have a background in graphic design and was excited to try my hand at putting this together. I've done plenty of movie posters for my short films, and this wasn't too far from that. Hopefully this cover entices some people to check out the story and leave feedback. I'm still waiting for feedback from my betas, so I'm anxious to hear what they think.

Back to my revisions! (You can never do enough revisions before sending something out into the world, and thankfully, in this digital age, even after publication, typos can be fixed!)

My First Novel - Sneak Peek!

I have read on many blogs that it isn't that important to promote your first eBook, but I can't help myself. I've been working on this project since last October, and as I get closer to my October 1st publication date, I have barely said anything about the book.

Until now!

I thought it would be cool to post the title of my novel and also reveal the synopsis that I plan to use on the "back cover". The book is still with my beta readers, but if anyone has a comment, feel free to let me know what you think!

Without further ado...

Macyntire & Hough

Do life and love continue after death?

Tadin Hough is a ghost who desires a quiet afterlife.

That plan is out the window when he opens an art gallery with Shelley Macyntire, a mortal. Things become more complicated when romance sparks between them.

But, just when things look promising, a demonic soul collector sets his sights on Tadin. His peaceful days with Shelley are numbered.

Can he protect Shelley and everything he loves from being dragged into the bowels of Hell?

Some additional info on the book before I finish - it's the first of a series, though I don't know how many books I plan to do. That all depends on if I can come up with enough stories for the characters. The book is set in my native state of Maine (love it here - especially in the fall, which is when this book takes place) and I'd describe it as a paranormal romance, or at the least, a romantic thriller.

I'll premiere the cover of the book on this blog before publication. Not sure when exactly, so it will be a surprise!

The book is going to be my first time trying KDP Select, so I will make sure to post when the freebie days are for Macyntire & Hough. It might be a little bit, but I'm anxious to see what I can learn from my first publication. Now, back to editing the manuscript!

Why Scrivener?

I will admit right off that I've been using Microsoft Word since I was in high school, and if you want to count, that was roughly ten years ago. I was typing away on an old Windows machine in the basement, writing Harry Potter fanfiction every night. If only I could be so productive now with my own stuff! But I digress...

The argument I'm going to make here is that it's hard to jump ship on a typing program and learn a completely new piece of software if you're looking just at the act of typing words on the screen. I heard about Scrivener last year, and the free trial has sat on my laptop since then, barely used. Originally I was trying to use it to write a few screenplays, but never really got into the nuts and bolts of the software with that usage alone.

Fast forward to a month ago.

Nearing the end of my first draft of my manuscript, I decided to try my hand at formatting for Kindle, my end goal format for self publishing. I thought it would be easy. After all, with every Kindle that I've purchased (I own a Kindle 2 - purchased in 2009, the original Kindle Fire, and now my beloved Kindle Paperwhite) Amazon has provided a free eBook that goes over the process of publishing on Amazon. This step-by-step guide insists that I use Microsoft Word, so I was thrilled that I already had my hands on the program and was doing all my typing in it.

However, when I actually got into the nitty gritty of formatting, I wasted at least three hours on trying to get my tabs to work (I had already stripped out the manual tabs like it told me to do and replaced those with the auto formatting of first-line indent x percentage). After all that time, I still had tabs that were off kilter and looked like a mess! Now, you have to understand that I worked for two years as a graphic designer for the University Of Southern Maine's music department where my entire job consisted of making sure that all the text of their music programs was lined up precisely and all the italics were where they should be. Seeing my manuscript, a 50,000+ word novel just thrown together with me being helpless to figure out what was going wrong - I was ready to cry or drink a very large glass of red wine!

I did enjoy the wine regardless, but it wasn't until I re-discovered Scrivener through the Self Publishing Podcast that I found a solution to all of my formatting woes. (If you haven't checked out that podcast on iTunes, I highly recommend it). You see, the main roadblock to my using Scrivener was simply that I didn't want to learn a new, fancy interface in order to do something that was so simple up until now: type words on a screen and print them later. But, with the advent of self-publishing as eBooks, I found that I wasn't printing my words any more, rather, I was going to be exporting them as a digital book that is not unlike a website. The table of contents is a list of links, and the image insertion is exactly like a web page. I didn't finish my only HTML course in high school with flying colors, but I knew the basics and was easily frustrated when the codes didn't do what I wanted, or I forgot how to type some random tag.

Scrivener takes all the headache out of this export process with some very cool presets for Kindle (.mobi) and other major eBooks (.epub). I found some excellent blogs about formatting my document for the best possible .mobi output and went to town. There are way too many things to type right here, but if I get a chance, I will try to document some specific revelations that I found while formatting with custom fonts and cover images. In a matter of three hours in Scrivener, I had a beautiful Kindle book that I loaded onto my Paperwhite and enjoyed like a kid in a candy store. Why would you ever try the headache of Microsoft Word when you can get better results with complete customization options in Scrivener? I don't know.

What I do know is that I can't imagine using any other writing software moving forward. With all the different things you can do, from drafting to completed Kindle export, Scrivener is a dream. Definitely check out the free trial if you are struggling to get your work out to eBook stores like I was. There's a great peace of mind that settles over me once the technical aspect of constructing the eBook product is finished and I can focus completely on what really matters to my creative brain: my story.

Skeleton of the Novel

I recently found an amazing eBook by CJ Lyons that talks about three-act structure. I was skeptical to check it out at first because I have not found many of the writing formulas to be very helpful in the past, but, boy, am I glad I gave this eBook a shot!

I love movies. I watch many of them. I also watch many television programs, mostly fictional, and I am always amazed when something hooks me. It's hard to figure out what really drags me along when I watch something like Downton Abbey, or Lord of the Rings - but it's undeniable that something catches me and gives me the desire to follow the episode or movie through to the end. I never thought it was the structure of the story. I always believed it had something to do with the plot, the setting, or any other myriad of things. But, the structure of the story? That sounds crazy!

But, I started a test outline of a novel using the three act structure the past two days, and I am blown away at how exciting it is to see the structure of a story as I come up with ideas for the plot and characters. It's like seeing the track of a roller coaster before actually zooming down the loops and curves. What I previously believed about fitting into a mold when it comes to story structure, that it would make me feel stuck and rigid - I am glad to say that the exact opposite has happened. Instead I feel like a million opportunities have laid themselves before me. Having a map before diving into a large project is essential for me.

If you have struggled with pacing, building tension, or any other novel-related issues in your own work, check out No Rules, Just Write! by CJ Lyons. It is well worth the time. I feel energized every time I read another section about the three-act structure. Now, for more time working with Scrivener...my new obsession!