The Heroine’s Journey

I think many people are familiar with the idea of “The Hero’s Journey” (by Joseph Campbell), but what about “The Heroine’s Journey”?

If I ever heard of it, I assumed the phrase simply meant the Hero’s Journey applied equally well to women.

Maureen Murdock, a student of Campbell, came to believe it did not. She developed a model of a heroine’s journey based on her work with women in therapy. But when she showed it to Campbell in 1983, he reportedly dismissed the idea, telling her:

“Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”

How passive is that, eh?

Yeah, I agree with Murdock, not Campbell, but it was only from Sacha Black, on The Rebel Podcast episode in which she interviewed Gail Carriger on The Heroine’s Journey that my eyes were opened. So Murdock in the 90s wrote her book, for people to use as a model for their own behaviour, to improve their own lives.

Carriger is the author of The Parasol Protectorate series, starting with Soulless, a whimsical steampunkish paranormal romance thriller. (I love the whole series.)

Most of what I know about this topic I learned from listening to the Gail Carriger interview, who has just published her first (and she quips, hopefully her only) non-fiction book, The Heroine’s Journey. She said she’d been waiting for someone else to write about The Heroine’s Journey for fiction writers, but eventually realised if she didn’t write it, no one might, so she rolled up her sleeves and set to work. Also, because Murdock’s book was from a Jungian Archetype standpoint, that concerned Carriger because she felt such analysis often conflates biological sex and gender, whereas the two journey types are really genderless.

In the interview, they start discussing the topic at around the 24 minute mark. It’s worth listening to. In it, Carriger explains that in The Heroine’s Journey, there are big differences in purpose, approach, strength, motivation, and ending.

Key differences:

Carriger says (after warning that what she’s about to say will cause a ‘psychological break’ in people’s minds!), that a heroine’s strength is the ability to ask for help from others. Western culture has real trouble in seeing the ability to ask for help as a strength. But that ability lies at the heart of networking, and making connections.

A heroine’s goal isn’t Power, but Networking, Connection: reuniting with someone taken from her.

A heroine’s motivation is not revenge or to right a wrong, but restoration or connection.

Her approach isn’t to take the offensive, but through communication and information gathering. She’s a builder and a general, self-aware enough to know when to ask for help.

A hero’s end is usually poignant isolation, in power. The heroine’s is usually happy, surrounded by family and friends.

The hero’s power comes from his innate abilities and strengths, but the heroine is strengthened by her network of allies and her connections. I think I’m struggling with this concept too, since I had to remind myself of the truth that one twig is easily broken, but a tightly bound bunch of them is super strong. Or that ‘old boys’ networks’ can form powerful groups. The more you look at it, the more obviously true it is.

Carriger noted that a heroine is weakened by isolation from her network, and that often, a Heroine’s Journey story ends with the restoration of connections.

In her book, she gives pithy but flippant definitions of each type of Journey in the Introduction:

The Hero’s:

Increasingly isolated protagonist stomps around prodding evil with pointy bits, eventually fatally prods baddie, gains glory and honour.

The Heroine’s:

Increasingly networked protagonist strides around with good friends, prodding them and others on to victory, together.

Note: neither Journey is gendered: e.g. Harry Potter is a Heroine’s Journey. Carriger noted that if as an author your heroine is struggling and the plot is stalling it may be because you keep putting the heroine in isolation, cutting her off from her network. That’s what you do in the Hero’s Journey to force him to draw on his core strength, but for the heroine it cuts her off from her core strength. So if this is happening it may be because you’re trying to force your heroine’s story into a Hero’s Journey structure.

Three beats: Descent, Search, Ascent

The Descent (involuntary withdrawal)

1. Broken network (something taken away)

2. Pleas ignored

3. Abdication of Power

4. Family Offers Aid

– Isolation and Danger –

The Search (aided by companions)

5. (Goes into) Disguise, Subversion (Hiding)

6. Surrogate Family

7. Visit to the Underworld

8. Delegation, Networking, Information Gathering

The Ascent (structured reunion)

– The Compromise –

9. Negotiation for Reunification

10. Revenge & Glory Irrelevant

11. Network Established or Rebuilt

Of course, as I listened, I was asking myself “Is Leeth’s journey a Hero’s one, or a Heroine’s?”, and realised (yeah, a bit of an epiphany): it’s both. Individually each book is a Hero’s Journey, but the series as a whole will be a Heroine’s Journey. That feels both correct and good to me. I’m writing the series by the seat of my pants, but this structure flows from Leeth’s deepest motivations: her need to belong and her hunger for acceptance and love. So of course that’s going to play out across the series as a whole.

Further reading

Some good references I found while writing this were Carriger’s book (The Heroine’s Journey: For Writers, Readers,and Fans of Pop Culture or the book description page on her web site), and for writers I think that’s the most helpful reference.

A much shorter look at the topic for storytellers is Why Screenwriters Should Embrace The Heroine’s Journey, aimed especially at screenwriters. It uses the film Wonder Woman as an example of its ten stages of the Heroine’s Journey – with nifty chart.

The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroine%27s_journey gives a reasonable overview, pointing out Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s version of the heroine’s journey (which is set up as The Heroine Journeys Project, “Exploring and Documenting Life-Affirming Alternatives to the Hero’s Journey”.

Another article good article is Julia Blair’s The Heroine’s Journey: Examples, Archetypes, and Infographic. In it, she notes that the Hero’s Journey is rooted in ancient myths that no longer completely fit the modern world. Her article looks at the topic from several angles, including Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, noting that the heroine typically faces challenges from higher up that pyramid of needs. (Also interesting is that she sees the film Wonder Woman as following the basic shape of the Hero’s Journey, just with a female protagonist. I don’t agree.)

Maureen Murdock breaks her version of the Heroine’s Journey (for self-improvement differently):

1. Separation from the Feminine

2. Identification with the Masculine and Gathering of Allies

3. Road or Trials and Meeting the Ogres and Dragons

4. Experiencing the Boon of Success. (The Hero’s Journey normally ends here.)

5. Heroine Awakens to Feelings of Spiritual Aridity/Death.

6. Initiation and Descent to the Goddess.

7. Heroine Urgently Yearns to Reconnect with the Feminine.

8. Heroine Heals the Mother/Daughter Split.

9. Heroine Heals the Wounded Masculine Within.

10. Heroine Integrates the Masculine and Feminine.

A Novel Ending

A funny thing happened on the way to the ending…

I’m loving my new being-an-author career, despite my inability to earn a living from it. (Yet?)

One of the things I enjoy is that each book feels like it comes with its own unique challenges.  I hope that means I’m learning as I go along.

For the current book in my Leeth Dossier series, Lost Girl (#5), there were two challenges.  The first was my feeling that on the subject of plot, I fly too much by the seat of my pants, so the whole journey from start to end is like a billy-cart racing downhill out of control.  Exhilarating, but also nerve-wracking.

Looking back through my revision control files, I deduce I started writing the Lost Girl segment of the story back in Apr/May 2009.  I wrote a chunk more in Jan 2015 before posting the chapters for review on the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror over a few months and receiving valuable feedback.  By Oct 2015 it had grown to about 25,000 words.  I think that was when I set it aside to devote all my energy to completing the earlier books in the series.

That took five years.

So, for book #5 I was starting with a broad idea of the story, 25,000 words of draft, and thanks to a discussion with Jon Marshall one night, a good feeling for the theme of the novel.  I also wanted to try a hybrid approach to plotting.

Pantser or Plotter?

I love the organic surprises and creativity that comes from flying by the seat of my pants, but at the same time, having watched his video Misconceptions About Rewriting, and from my own experience in algorithmic development, I deeply understood the value in at least high-level planning.  So I hoped that creating the bones of a plot might work well, since it would only be a sketchy outline and thus pretty painless to change it if the story started going in a different direction.

I started reading John Truby’s “The Anatomy of Story” in early 2019, reaching a quarter of the way through before getting distracted. (I see there’s also a video interview here.)  The book and advice is fine, but it wasn’t sparking any flames for me and I set it aside.  (I do intend to return to it and finish reading it though.)

I’d downloaded a free writing book from Daniel David Wallace titled “How to Write Better Sentences”, and watched some of his videos, and liked them, so when he offered a course on his character-driven plotting course in December 2019 I decided to sign up for it.  I did that diligently from mid Dec 2019 to end of Jan 2020, and was very happy with the outcome.  I had lots of ideas for how the plot would unfold, all of course driven by the characters, which is how I have to write.

The problem that remained was that I only had a satisfying end.  I think you also need the ending to be unpredictable.  I (still) don’t know how you plan that.  For me it’s just happened by luck or inspiration, and I was still in the same position, lacking that final piece of the puzzle.

As I’ve written on several occasions now, I’ve really come to trust Unconscious Thought Theory.  It’s an excellent way to use the full power of your mind and surprise yourself.  So I carried on writing, always with the lightly-plotted ending in mind, and things flowed along pretty well.

Now, because the World Science Fiction Convention was to be held in New Zealand in July/Aug 2020, a place I’d wanted to visit and a convention that seems exciting, I planned to attend.  I booked my travel and accommodation, with the goal of publishing the book late July and maybe even launching it or promoting it in some way at the WorldCon.  To do that I needed to send the MS to Dave at ThEditors.com by E/April.

So I was trying hard to meet a deadline of E/March to have a good 1^st draft of the MS.  I was extremely lucky to be little affected by the unprecedented Australian bushfires of 2019, but no one could remain unmoved by those events - from the heroism of our fireys and communities ( (even this Aussie speculative fiction anthology put together for fire charities: Stories of Hope), to the jaw-dropping failures of our so-called political leader to actually lead.

There was also the ongoing drama of the Democratic run-up toward the 2020 US presidential election, which I had grown addicted to (since the US has an inordinate impact on world affairs, and I could see what a turning point the 2020 election could be, with luck).  Then of course, the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, making the insignificance of my own efforts even clearer.  Now, I may not be as stubborn as Leeth, but I am stubborn, so I carried on.

Like the period after the death of my wife Stella in Dec 2014, my writing sustained me and kept me positive. So for that reason as much as any I stuck to my plans.

Which brings me to the part of the story which most surprised me — and in the end delighted me.

How did it go in the end?

Approaching my deadline, I had set myself a (120,000) word count limit to try to hold myself to, to keep the book a manageable size for all concerned.  And as the days fell away and March 31 approached, it looked like I might just do it.  But when the days dropped from three to two to one and I arrived at the cusp of the ending, I’d run out of time and still didn’t know fully what the ending would be.

Partly this was just having confidence in my unconscious to pull a rabbit out of the hat; partly it was the belief that if I didn’t know what the ending would be, it might mean that when (if?) it did arrive it would also surprise a reader; and partly it was having faith in my characters.  I also had an interesting mix of actors there at the ending.  There was the potential to have… (counting…) seven major players in the scene at the end.  Unfortunately that meant there was a huge range of ways the ending could play out.

So I think there was a certain amount of choice-paralysis at work, although it’s also possible my unconscious was simply beavering away at the complex problem I’d set it.  Of course I was also worried I might not be able to pull it off at all.  Would the ending be good enough?  I didn’t want just an exciting one, I wanted it to have emotional depth too.  So the stakes felt high to me.

And still I couldn’t seem to make much progress.  Here’s how the last several days went:

March 29: Had reached the climactic scene — I mean, all the players were on stage together.
March 30: Wrote 3700 words of the scene.
March 31: Day off, visiting Mum.
April 1: (astute readers will see this is after E/Mar) Strangely blocked, until I forced myself to design the physical location. Then: +600 words.
April 2: Wrote 3,600 words and halfway through the “action” part of the ending.
April 3: Finished the “action” part (wrote 1000 words).
April 4: Still didn’t know how it would end. I simply considered each actor and let them do their thing. Various agendas in play, conflicting, and stage fully set and conducive to just letting the movie roll. Each one being clever and true to themselves, a dramatic race to the finish with real challenges and emotional drama. At the very end of the day (11:50pm), I felt delighted. My characters had thrilled me and moved me. I’d been biting my nails more than once, and in tears more than once. 5,100 words and the MS was basically complete.

I’ve never experienced anything like that last day.  My feeling was one of excitement and satisfaction.  I made some small additions while cooking dinner (9pm), and when I sat down with it I realised I didn’t want to watch any TV as I ate, I instead wanted to dwell on those final scenes, to savour and digest it all.  I suppose it felt a bit like I’d just stepped off an emotional roller-coaster!

I still have thirty one small gaps to fill or issues to check, and then lots of work to polish it up enough to be ready to send to my editor, so I can’t really relax much yet.  But the weight on my shoulders of finishing that critical 1^st draft, and perhaps as importantly, writing a ‘good’ ending, is over.  So a lot of unacknowledged stress has fallen away, and I must say I’m looking forward to the next few weeks.

I’ve written this because the experience felt really special, and I wanted to capture it. It was nothing like I’d had for the previous books.  Once again, I feel I learned a lot.  My fingers are crossed in the hope that readers will have the same opinion!

Overcoming Obstructions to Writing

(Photo by Travis Saylor from Pexels)

Just a quick post to share something small I learned about how my mind works when it comes to writing.  For the last week I’ve made no progress on Lost Girl (Leeth Dossier #5).  There were everyday tasks which I felt needed to be done (like coffee: harvest time won’t wait), but that wasn’t enough to explain it all.  Those tasks only took up the time and energy for a portion of each day.

I’ve written about the Unconscious Thought Theory several times now, and I know for certain it’s heavily involved in my own creative process.  (I strongly suspect it’s true for everyone, but I don’t know that.)  So I know a lot of the work happens in the unconscious.  I also noticed previously that I was blocked when my conscious plan for how a story would unfold didn’t agree with what was developing in my unconscious.  In hindsight, I felt my unconscious threw up obstacles to stop me heading down that wrong path I had consciously planned.

I also know the neuroscience says the unconscious parts of the brain have something like fifty ‘processing units’ running in parallel. That sounds like a lot, but it’s a finite number.

Anyway, what happened was that tonight I tackled a task that had been weighing on my mind for a couple of months now.  (Selecting and booking a hotel for the world SF convention next year in Wellington, New Zealand, to be precise.)  I felt some relief as soon as I’d done so.

What I realised later however was that when I started to think about the next scene in Lost Girl, my mind didn’t instantly shy away and offer up a distraction.  Then I recognised that mental shying away was something I’d learned to do a long time ago to protect myself from worry about a situation I had no control over.  At that point I finally put two and two together and realised my unconscious was trying to solve the hotel booking problem and didn’t want to spare time for book creation.  Each time I tried it distracted me in a non-creative direction.  Sneaky, wise unconscious!

So, if you’re finding yourself blocked, go looking for a cause and then tackle that.  There’s probably a lot of different things that could be the issue.  Two I’ve discovered are 1) your plan is wrong, and 2) you have something else that needs your unconscious attention first.  The unconscious is great at making patterns and weighing up combinations of possibilities, but it has limits!

Leeth’s Journey So Far: “Four Books!”

Chatting to an author friend today (Barbara Strickland), about what lay ahead for Leeth, she asked whether my idea for the series in the longer term was to pursue the action path or the emotional side of things?

I’m four books in now, and so far I believe I’ve delved deeply into both sides.  I had to stop and think though, to consider Barbara’s question.  Thirty years ago, I thought the series would be a sci-fi/fantasy action series, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t tell the story without honoring the depths of the characters.

(Because I love Mirella’s cover designs, let me just brighten this short post by including them here:)

Anyway, I realised my answer to Barbara’s question was “both”, even though it means I’ll need to continue a tricky balancing act.  I mustn’t let the excitement of the action elements of Leeth’s dramatic life distract me from the compelling human and emotional side of her story as it unfolds.  There’s no chance of losing sight of that in Book 5, Lost Girl, but in later volumes it may be something I’ll need to keep in the forefront of my mind.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

I’ll finish with a quick status update.  In August, Galaxy Bookshop hosted the launch (see the video) for Violent Causes (The Leeth Dossier Vol. 4): all my books are available on the shelves there!  As well, I’ve been learning bits and pieces about book marketing.  I’d much rather be writing, so I plan to go back to devoting myself to that — soon.  Maybe I’ll spend one day a week on the marketing side.

Things I’ve been learning about are Facebook ads from Mark Dawson and Nick Stephenson, Amazon ads from Bryan Cohen (I even created some ads), drawing up a far too exhaustive marketing plan, and learning bits about getting reviews and starting up a mailing list.  I also set up my Facebook Author Page (which I gather if you Like it, you’ll be notified when I post something there).  I also 99% converted my Blogger blog site into a kind of web site, only to stumble at the final hurdle.  Two days before I discovered how to overcome that last problem, I gave up and recreated my website in Wordpress.org.  It’s in pretty good shape, though I still have a small list of things to do.  Via my hairdresser Sebastian I discovered the talented Kellie M Davies and through her, the Aussie Speculative Fiction (ASF) FB group.

I also sent some books down to Bendi-con as part of an ASF contingent, and some are on their way soon to Supanova Adelaide and Supanova Brisbane with the same group of Aussie authors.  (We also had a small get-together in Sydney CBD, which was a great evening.)

Roger Patulny kindly agreed to shift the meeting date for our local writers’ group Authora Australis to a Wednesday that didn’t clash with the Sydney Mediaeval and Renaissance Group’s monthly meetings (thanks, Roger et al!), so I can attend regularly.  And this Sunday (Oct 13) Kristyn M Levis will be talking to our Book Marketing discussion group about Instagram for Authors.

I also created my first Nielsen “Book2Look” book widget (“biblet”) for Wild Thing.  Biblets let you look inside a book, share it on social media, find out where to buy it, and more.  Oh, and I had a flash fiction sci-fi story accepted by Antipodean SF magazine, called Dangerous January (which will be available there for a limited time).  Which also reminds me: I completed the Neil Gaiman Master Class too, and enjoyed it!

I guess I have been working hard after all (but not with blogging — shame, Luke!), even though there’s been far less writing than I like.

Amazon is failing its authors, its readers, and itself

There’s a growing awareness that using computer algorithms to handle decisions — from debt assessment or even being fired to self-driving cars — can have unexpected and even disastrous effects. Around October 2017, Amazon joined those unfortunate ranks.
Sounds scary? It is, when you dig below the surface a little.
Over a million new books are now published each year. Over half of those are in English.
I started publishing in December 2015, using Amazon exclusively for my eBook editions. Sales and reviews were low but showed a steady growth. My approach was to concentrate on writing each new book and do the bare minimum on the marketing side.
For almost two years that seemed to be working — until October 2017.
At that point, sales plummeted. Had I done something, or said something to upset people? Highly unlikely, since I’d been silently working on the current book. I assumed my silence was the cause. But after discussing sales with a few other authors who used Amazon ads and active marketing, I changed my mind. They told me that from around October 2017, they found if they pay $X to Amazon for ads, they came out ahead by about 10%.
What happened? What follows is my best guess. There are three parts to it: book discovery, Kindle Unlimited, and unscrupulous people.

Book Discovery

Readers can discover books on Amazon through various searches, but in addition there are three important ways Amazon promotes books:
Recommendations

1. Emails from Amazon to you suggesting books you might like.
   
2. Suggestions for other books based on your searches, on Amazon web pages.
   

Note: included in these recommendations are books that have paid to be promoted.
Best-seller lists. In each category, a list of the books that have earned the most revenue in the last 48 hours.
Popularity lists. Like the best-sellers, but across the last 30 days.

Kindle Unlimited

Readers who pay the monthly subscription fee can borrow books from Kindle Unlimited (KU) at no extra cost. Some of the subscription fees go into a pot of money paid to the authors.
This ‘Cockygate’ article by the Verge notes: “There are over 5 million books available via Kindle, with over a million books available on the Kindle Unlimited system. Amazon is currently paying out approximately 20 million dollars every month to authors on Kindle Unlimited.”
U$20M lying on the table: does that sound like a tempting target for unscrupulous people?
At first, Amazon divided up the pot based on number of books sold. Absurdly short ‘books’ started appearing. Amazon changed the algorithm to count ‘pages read’ instead of ‘books read’. Scammers started stuffing books full of ‘bonus material’ to dramatically boost their number of pages.
It’s been an arms race between scammers trying to grab money unfairly from the pot, and Amazon trying to counter them. This article by Derek Haines argues Amazon’s algorithms can’t count pages or words, but he goes on to add:
“KU scammers and ebook stuffers are not the real issues here.
[…] Until Amazon can find a better system to track and record KU ebook reading correctly, the scammers will keep finding ways to make money, and honest authors will lose out.
Or be terminated.”
But wait, there’s more…!

How recommendations used to work

Before Oct 2017, Amazon’s algorithms recommended books based on some score related to average review rating, the sales rate, and purchase by other people of similar books. (“People who bought TitleX — as you did — also often bought TitleY.”)
I think this system is still used for the 30 days after a book is released, perhaps extended if the book hits a best-seller list or while it is earning high revenue.

How they work, post Oct 2017

The only books being promoted were those from paid ads. At first, I guessed that Amazon had changed its algorithms to only promote advertised books. There are so many authors publishing, Amazon can profit from authors buying ads.
Amazon don’t disclose how their algorithms work, and rightly so. They’re in a war with those who try to game the system to make money. I have a lot of sympathy with Amazon and what they face.
But since October 2017, the KU pool of money has been paying large sums of money (perhaps most of it) to some unscrupulous ‘authors’. I say ‘authors’ because some are not authors: they are business people who pay ghost writers for content.
The result is, only books with paid ads are being promoted.

Unscrupulous People

David Gaughran’s Kindle Unlimited -- A Cheater Magnet and Kayleigh Donaldson’s Book Stuffing, Bribery and Bullying articles were eye-openers for me — I recommend them. The problem is that payments to unscrupulous people has a terrible effect on honest authors, harms readers, and has started damaging Amazon’s brand (and, I assume, the revenue from self-published books).
The effect on the readers is the smallest: the unscrupulous people can’t afford to annoy them too much, since readers determine the KU payouts. But even for readers, it’s making it harder to find and read books they’ll enjoy.
The unscrupulous people spend big, buying Amazon ads to turn a good profit, paying for those ads from the profits. If collectively they spent 18 million dollars for a 19 million dollar payout from KU, they’d be happy — and hey, that even leaves a million dollars to be divided amongst the remaining 500,000 authors! <sarcasm off/>
The greatest harm is being done to the honest self-published and indie authors. Like most skills, writing follows a Bell curve. A minority are really good; a minority are really bad; and there’s a big spread in the middle between those extremes. (The true picture is more complex, because everyone’s taste differs. But that’s not important for this argument.)
But most good and great writers have no interest or skills in marketing, nor in spending time and effort on it. So most authors can’t compete when it comes to marketing.
If you’re an author selling via Amazon and your readers have declined and your income has plummeted, take heart at least in knowing it’s likely not any indicator of how good your book is. Your small voice is being drowned out by the people gaming the Amazon system. The unscrupulous are producing ten or fifty books to your one, and paying for vast numbers of Amazon recommendations of their books, rather than a meagre few algorithmically-generated recommendations that yours are getting.
Writing a book is hard work. A lot of writers manage one. Producing a book proves to an author they can do it. But without a lot of luck, or a big and skilful marketing effort, few readers will discover the book, so the return is low in terms of money and in appreciation. And with Amazon’s ineffectual response to the cheaters, a lot of new authors will try, but won’t find out if they are great or even good. Unless new authors stumble over this article or one like it, they won’t know the failure may well have been Amazon’s, not theirs.
On top of that, the Amazon algorithms only seem to promote books for the first 30 days. This of course encourages writers to produce shorter books and pressures them to cut corners. For the unscrupulous, it actually plays into their hands since producing content quickly is something they can pay or cheat to produce — they just need to keep one step ahead of Amazon’s lacklustre attempts to rein them in.
By inducing many of the good and some of the best new authors to give up, while still ‘feeding the scammers’, over time the overall quality of Amazon’s book marketplace will decline. At first, not massively. Just a little. But the trend will continue, and in the long term will make Amazon the place for second-rate books which are clearly lower quality than those from other publishers.
The Amazon book marketplace will swell with the people who pay for the ads, and the people with good marketing skills. There’ll be some very good books in there, but on average, the rewards will go to the best marketers and to the scammers, not to the best writers.

How Amazon Could Fix This

It’s in Amazon’s interest to fix this, despite what some cynical people argue. Like other observers, I believe the problem lies as much with Amazon as with the scammers. Amazon seem determined to address the problems with technology (algorithms), not people, and I can see the sense of that: the solution must scale to handle millions of books, hundreds of thousands of authors, as well as defend against sets of active and inventive scammers trying to snatch an unfair share of the money available.
Taken together, this also means that until Amazon develop a solution to the problem, the company appears disinterested and unsupportive, damaging their brand even as the quality of their content declines.
So here’s my set of suggestions for Amazon (the first two of these I owe to a friend, Geoff Dash).
Follow the money. The problem of the scammers is proportional to the amount of money they’re taking. So audit the highest-earning authors in order of the revenue they earn. Examine their books to ensure they’re meeting Amazon’s Terms of Service rather than gaming the algorithms. Add legitimate authors to a register of Verified authors (and even mark their books as such). Add scammers to a list of banned authors and remove them from Amazon.
Suspect the absurdly productive. Amazon could reduce the number of authors they need to Verify by examining them in order of productivity: the authors producing the most books per year (or, per month).
How to Verify. It doesn’t have to be done manually, although the above two principles make that feasible. Instead, deep learning algorithms could be trained with examples of scam content and genuine content. Amazon could use the Mechanical Turk to help examine the books selected for audit. It could build a set of trusted Verifiers. It could use some of its own people to examine the books and explain to the algorithm developers what patterns and qualities to look for.
Only Count Content Once. Use its internal plagiarism detecting algorithms to identify content so that when a reader ‘reads’ a book, that content is only counted once. I imagine something like MD5 markers for a book, stored in a reader’s account. That information could even improve the user experience, by offering the reader a chance to skip the previously-read content.
Be more Transparent. It’s fine to have algorithms making decisions for you, and you need to keep their workings secret to make things harder for the scammers. But have a good and fair system for resolving disputes. Amazon needs to do this because its record of hurting good guys with bad algorithms has damaged its reputation in this respect.
Algorithmically select for quality. By this I mean, engineer algorithms that over time will encourage high quality work by offering reasonable revenue to the author. At the least, stop using algorithms that encourage low quality. The current system that only seems to recommend books published in the last 30 days encourages ‘publish fast’ over ‘publish high quality’. Blocking reviews from professional bloggers and reviewers who are gifted with so many books they don’t spend over $50, is another algorithm that does not select for quality.

What Will I Do?

At present, I see no value in being in Kindle Unlimited, and little value in selling your books through Amazon at all. Being exclusive with Amazon is worthless after the first three months. I recommend anyone who has currently chosen exclusivity with Amazon, to terminate that exclusivity. You may need to wait three months for your current exclusivity period to end, but when your sales are zero there’s no difference in revenue between 35% or 70%. Start publishing your books elsewhere, where you won’t be drowned out by ads and scammers.
If enough authors take this step, it will also send a signal to Amazon. Hopefully, such a market-savvy company will recognise and react to that. Certainly, from reports I’ve read, Amazon doesn’t appear to react to any other signals.
I'm quoting from the Verge’s ‘Cockygate’ article, in which Zoe York (romance author) notes:
“All of these people, without exception, all of them, publish exclusively on Amazon,” she said of the book-stuffers. “This is not a problem on iBooks, on Kobo, on Barnes and Noble, or on Google Play, which are the other major ebook retailers.”


Amazon did a wonderful thing in basically creating and nurturing the ebook marketplace, and through that, stimulating the self-published marketplace. It would be sad if it misstepped now and its know-how and support became irrelevant.
Amazon now rewards good marketers (honest ones, but also the scammers), not good authors. That needs to be fixed, or it will likely lead to the collapse of Amazon as a reputable self-publisher.

Writing, Editing, Creating

I wasn't planning to write a blog article, but felt after yesterday I wanted to make some notes while the recent events were fresh in my mind. I'm not sure what this piece will be about, but I guess it's going to touch on creativity (also see The Creative Process and the Unconscious, Where Ideas Come From) and An update on Creativity and the Unconscious), blocks, editing, and book 4 progress.

Yesterday was one of those wonderful writing days that sometimes happen, so this is partly about what led up to that.

I haven't written any articles for a while because I feel I'm way behind schedule on where I wanted to be for this fourth book. I had felt pretty comfortable that I could have it ready about mid-2018, but that turned out to be wildly optimistic. I'll lay out the reasons why, and let you see what you think of them.

I think I started writing the MS in 1991, and completed that 1^st draft near the end of 1993. I just realised that might be a fun image to share… here's a photo of the MS.

I used mostly used sheets of paper that had been printed. In fact, on the left you can find a draft of a page from my wife Stella's PhD thesis on the Percy Folio.

In my first draft of the start of Leeth's story, it opened on the scene where Dr Harmon is in the office of the Mother Superior of the orphanage, looking for a suitable subject to adopt.

Anyway, the MS went through many stages — the next one being typing it up on the computer, in the troff/MM markup. I worked on it and polished and edited it, sending it off to little or no response to publishers, and then about ten years later realised the whole second half was full of story — but no plot. So I bit the bullet and cut it in half. Then it seemed a little short, and I still felt it was lacking something. The Godsson-Disten idea came from somewhere to fill the gap, and I developed that and wove it in to the story. At the end, the MS was back to its original, pre-halved size.

I still kept editing and polishing, improving my craft. I fed that whole MS, chapter by chapter, through the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, and learned so much from the many very helpful reviews I received, and equally, from writing reviews of other writers' submissions there.

Learning your craft by writing a long novel is a hard way to do it — you need to fix stylistic errors through a much larger mass than a short story — but I rarely enjoy reading or writing short fiction. So I kept at it.

The point of this historical digression is to explain the first couple of special problems I faced with book 4. The first was that I hadn't touched (even read) this half of the original MS in about 15 years, so there was a reasonable amount of work just to apply what I'd learned in the meantime. A bigger problem was the lack of plot. Now, the large anti-emotion plot arc definitely helped, and tied nicely into what was already there — but even so, it needed more. There was also the fear that maybe the old MS simply might not be good enough? I had little idea what to expect when I sat down to read it again, but found myself pleasantly surprised: it was kind of nice, I felt. Leeth had grown and changed more, however, thanks to all the additional trials I'd put her through while developing the 1^st three books, so stretches had to be rewritten: what was there was more the Leeth you saw straight out of the Institute: no d'Artelle spirit confrontation, nothing with Disten, and, a really huge difference — no Marcie in her life.

Due to the need to write a short piece for my local writers' group, the Marrickville Writers Corner, I thought that one incident briefly passed over in the MS deserved some expansion: the heartbreaking Luiz assassination. And while writing that piece, while Leeth crept through the dark apartment in shock at what had just happened, she heard a creepy scratching coming from a drawer in Luiz's desk. I had no idea what was coming, just that it connected to Luiz's nasty past, but that led to the black dagger. That tiny seed germinated into the other major plot element for book 4.

The title came surprisingly easily: Violent Causes having several meanings, all of which were applicable for this book, so that was one element that I didn't have a big struggle with. But with all the things that needed addressing, and my desire to keep as much as I could of what was there, somehow even getting to the stage of the MS ready to send off to Dave at ThEditors.com) seemed harder. I'd arranged a slot, and as the deadline approached I found I was struggling to meet it. In the end I sent it off before I'd done my usual 2^nd polish, which was stupid. I'd told myself it would make it easier for me to cut things if I hadn't made over-polished them. Instead, it just made more work for poor Dave.

And when I received his detailed critique, he had some big issues with some of the early sections, and lots of the early chapters had a lot of small issues, too. (Oops: note to self: never skip the polishing!) After some very fruitful discussions back and forth, we got a handle on them and a plan for what I should adjust, and I carried on. And after a month of hard work, I was halfway through Dave's comments, and it was the end of July. Sigh.

The Marcie Problem

There was also one major extra piece of plot to work in, involving Marcie, and a key point in that was to be Marcie's inclusion into one scene. The problem was, that scene was kind of tightly scripted, dramatic, and I could see no way to work Marcie in without disrupting a sequence I'd been looking forward to making concrete, for at least fifteen years. In fact, I let this scene block my writing for at least a year, because I wanted to work it out so I could move on to the next piece of the story. This was long before I understood the role of the unconscious, and the simple trick of just writing it down, or skipping past the block. Instead, I'd sit down, and try to work out the scene in my head… and eventually fall asleep, and have used up all the time I'd set aside for writing, with visible results of zero.

Yet here I was, in 2018, with that scene looking and working like a dream — I think it would make a great piece in a movie — and now I needed to add Marcie, in a significant way. So I worked my way closer to this with, not exactly a growing fear, since I had confidence in UTT and my unconscious… but some trepidation, let's say.

And then on Monday I was at the brink: the next thing to do was what I had begun thinking of as The Marcie Problem. Tuesday I visited Mum, and saw the Equalizer 2 with her and a friend (hi Jacqui!), and then had afternoon tea and dinner with Mum, and watched an episode of The Avengers (courtesy of my brother Jonathan: B&W, John Steed and Honor Blackman as Dr Cathy King, not the Marvel Avengers), followed by the Hammer Horror film The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. (He seemed tall. I looked him up: he was: 1.96m, 6'5"!)

So, no writing on Tuesday. A whole day with ‘no progress'. But I wasn't too worried, since panic and fear are your enemies and I knew I was just giving my unconscious more time to come up with something good. And it's always a great day, visiting Mum; not to mention, relaxing and having a great meal to boot!

So, Wednesday arrives, and still no breakthrough. I could also tell I wasn't going to get it without a bit more positive action. And now we come to the nub of this article, and what drove me to write it. Because this time, I was more sensitive to what was going on in my own mind.

I remembered my own advice, of using pencil and paper to write stuff down so you're not wasting mental energy juggling ideas in your mind while trying to create new ones. So I took my little hand-made A6-sized notepad with its 4-leaf folded ‘pages' clipped to it, and my trusty propelling pencil. There are some nuances there: that style of pencil, using 2B leads, means your letters are crisp and sharp and the physical act is effortless; and the hand-sized pad means it's not flexing and flopping and you're fighting to support it. It just fits in your hand, you can lie back on the sofa, comfy and warm, and think, and write as ideas spring to mind.

All trying to make it as frictionless as possible when the ideas start flowing, you see?

But I still didn't have my idea. What I did have was some issues. So I started writing down stuff, and also thinking. Not rushing myself. Not stressing myself because I wasn't actually writing the story. Just trying to make the solution coalesce out of whatever soup of ideas was floating around in my head.

What started happening was somehow like doing a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces of the picture didn't exist until I thought of them, and it wasn't two dimensional but three. The depth part is not especially important, but the time dimension was critical. I started with asking "How would Marcie plausibly end up in this scene?"

(By the way, I'm going to avoid talking about this in a way that gives any spoilers.)

Marcie's appearance needed to fit in with a major plot strand we'd agreed on, that involved Harmon. But how would he know? So, that meant Nelson gave him the info. And then Harmon needed to persuade someone else. And that was kind of interesting. And then Marcie herself needed to find out enough to wind up in the scene. So I wrote that little sequence, which worked very plausibly and nicely I felt, and did good things for the plot, tension, and pacing. I now had the background of my jigsaw, in the sense of both the chain of events that led up to it, and of course I already had the tightly-written scene where Marcie would appear.

Her appearance also had to be significant: it'd be pretty weak if she just waved from the sidelines. Dave had suggested Marcie's appearance should cause problems for Leeth, so that was kind of the ‘shape' of one piece. But I still didn't see how to fit her in.

Now, I'd had one thought, too, that disturbed me: "if Marcie is here, and X is here too, then Scary-Y could easily result, and blow everything to pieces." But at the same time, they say you're supposed to place your characters at risk. Yikes! So that was percolating in the back of my mind.

1^st Wednesday of the month was my MWC meetup, so I gave a quick polish to a scene I'd written the week before, and headed off for a very convivial and inspiring evening at Where's Nick. But I still didn't have the Marcie Problem solved.

Thursday arrived, and I kept feeling, for some reason, that Marcie wasn't going to go alone into this scene. I kept imagining someone with her. Which just complicated things, I felt, and I didn't want to do it. But in the end, since I was just lying on the sofa and not exactly making massive progress, I shrugged and decided to explore that. I asked myself "How does Marcie go from where she is, to here?" and just started imagining and jotting down some points. That all seemed pretty natural, and that would put Marcie at the required place, with this other person. And their reaction to my smoothly-scripted scene would definitely fit into new-Harmon-plot-item-Z, and advance that.

Then Scary-Y idea popped back in my head.

And I suddenly saw that Scary-Y could easily unfold after the smoothly-scripted scene. And with that, the problem was solved. The solution wasn't to force Marcie and her scene to meld into the existing scene: it was to let that follow on and develop from the scene!

This definitely felt a Eureka moment.

So then I just let the characters do their stuff. All the different parties with their own agendas, colliding and reacting. Let me just have a count ([Spoilers stripped out]): total of 9 parties. And so events flowed, and the drama climbed, and Leeth pushed back, and things started spiralling into dangerous areas. Maybe half of it was just in my head, the other half the occasional explanatory note written down so I wouldn't forget, or a line or two of dialogue. My notes occupied less than two A6 pages of my tiny writing, but I had enough to set off and I was eager to do so. I broke for dinner, but basically wrote from 4pm till 1am, a bit over 4k words. Sitting back, I summarised it in the flush of excitement as "very plausible, didn't change the existing scene much at all, upped the tension, fulfilled more expectations, causes more troubles down the track, and also has some laughs and more character development, all while advancing the plot!"

And it was time for bed. Looking at the page, I saw that I just needed to write the emotional aftermath, and in due course explore the repercussions of what happened. "I'll just write a little bit, to start that," I thought. Then sat back and saw it was 2am. I'd summarise that effort as taking what had happened to a whole new level. Leeth once again surprised me; but this time, herself, too, and even scared herself.

So I ended the day feeling high, extremely pleased with how it all worked out, and of course relieved to have the Marcie Problem solved and the pressure/stress removed.

I won't have a chance to do any editing or writing today, and I'll be taking a day off tomorrow, so no progress then, either. And I still have the other half of the MS critique to work through. But I'm feeling much more relaxed now. Hopefully, there should only be small bumps in the road ahead.

So, what's next? I hope to have my editing and polishing done by around the end of August. Hopefully I'll find a slot in Dave's schedule for a 2^nd round critique, and then with any luck a much easier job for both him and myself following that. Mirella is on the job with the cover design (again, with another idea mainly from Dave), and then I need to try to do some proper marketing for a month or two before releasing this one. So my guess is it will be ready near the end of the year.

Better late than half-baked.

An update on Creativity and the Unconscious

Why have I written this article now? Well, I've been reading and reviewing and doing small fixes to the half of the Leeth Dossier MS I'd set aside in… (goes away and checks some file dates…) yikes: it may have been 2008, 2004, or even 2003!

Anyway, back then, whenever it was, I'd just re-read a print out of the whole MS and been horrified to realise the whole 2^nd half had plenty of story and action — but no plot!

So I cut it in half; then realised the 1^st half was now a bit short and could also do with some strengthening, and came up with the Godsson/Disten plot. From that point I left the 2^nd half lying there, collecting electronic dust.

Anyway, with Books 1 — 3 published, it seemed sensible to go back to the half of the original MS I'd set aside, that followed straight on. So in October 2017 I think, I brushed off the dusty electrons and poured the MS into the word processor and started reading and reviewing. It went very slowly for a while, as I carefully polished as I went, before I realised that was silly: if I did decide I had to throw away some or all of it, such loving attention and effort would only make it harder for me to ‘kill my darlings'.

Excuses, excuses. So I just corrected minor stuff and made notes about issues that would require more effort to deal with. What with suddenly needing to prepare for Christmas — not to mention a years-overdue de-cluttering of my house — as well as allowing myself a holiday and time to spend on some other non-writing projects, progress was slow. I eventually finished my read-through on Feb 21^st, 2018.

At the end, I realised my assessment from 10-15 years earlier had been correct. On top of that I found other structural flaws, all of which I felt might be corrected through ‘the right' plot adjustments. I mean, the 1^st three books did lead smoothly to #4 (in particular by continuing a major plot arc from them), but overall I felt the plot was weak, with several strands that felt disconnected. It also had pacing problems too, I thought.

Overall though I still liked it, and despite the flaws, felt this could be knocked into a pretty nice shape. In particular, my gut was telling me that the right modifications to the plot would fix most of the issues I saw.

UTT to the rescue. So, with the need for some creative thinking, and having had good success with the Unconscious Thought Theory in the past (see my older blog article: Where Ideas Come From), I turned to it again.

For the UTT, the first step is to steep your rational mind in all the facts. That was what I'd just accomplished by re-reading the old MS.

But the subconscious is hungry for relevant ideas, so as different thoughts about the story and plot occurred to me — during the embarrassingly long period I spent re-reading the MS — I'd made notes I could refer to later.

Write stuff down. That's a key point: don't rely on your memory. If you don't record the ideas, you'll waste mental energy remembering them or worrying about them. Just write them down instead so you can re-read them when you find yourself in a hole.

Clear the decks of clutter. For the intense parts of the creative thinking process — the parts where you make the act of creation your top priority and give yourself time exclusively for that — you need clear mental space for a problem requiring a creative solution.

So because you need to some clear mental space, write down the problem and all the issues you can think of: like constraints, goals, characters involved, what's at stake… etc. etc. — everything you need to take into account. If you think of more problems, simply note them down as you think of them. These are all grist for your unconscious mill.

Don't get daunted. The funny thing is, that although the number of problems might look scary, each issue is just another piece of the puzzle. In a way, it adds to the richness of the solution; it adds to the stuff your unconscious can use to create an arrangement that makes them all fit.

Give yourself space. Get rid of distractions as far as you can: set them aside and give yourself time. Do this as often as you need to, in each attempt to solve the problem or come up with the needed idea(s). In other words: you can solve these problems a little bit at a time.

Try and try again. You don't need to solve the problem in a single session: you can decide, "Hmm, this might help", or "That might be part of the answer" — so, note those ideas down, too. Sometimes the solution will turn out to be a jigsaw that needs to be assembled. Sooner or later though you'll probably start sensing the big picture: and then the pieces of the jigsaw will start appearing in short order.

Trust your gut. Your gut will often tell you "This idea feels right" — trust it. Think about it, and around it. ‘Your gut' is your Unconscious talking to you. Don't ignore it!

Don't doubt yourself. At this stage, where you're not sure how much of the MS should remain for the final book (since it depends on how big a plot change or other correction is), it can be scary. You could easily spend time thinking about worst case scenarios — like tossing the whole MS! — instead of trusting your gut instincts and the hard work you put in.

Focus on what needs to be cut or added to turn your rough diamond into a fascinating piece of jewellery. At this point, negative thoughts are just distractions. So treat them like everything else: boil them down to their essence and add them to the list of Problems To Be Solved by your creative thinking.

Recording ideas and thinking. For me in this process of creation, some of the time I'll do parts of it on the computer. I'll type up notes, grouping related ideas near each other so I'll tend to reread them all when I revisit one; I'll draw up little timelines (maybe with gaps and question marks: "How does the Department discover this?" or "How do the bad guys learn that?"); I'll sometimes make mindmaps so the connections are graphical and not just linear/textual — and I'll include the holes and question marks, and maybe even colour-code stuff.

But some of the thinking I'll do on paper with pencil, lying down on the sofa. Because for some of it, the computer becomes a distraction. But the pencil and paper is important, because as soon as I have even part of an idea, I can write it down to free up my attention from remembering stuff so I can concentrate on creating stuff.

My review/read-through: While I had been (too slowly!) doing my read-through/review, I'd been:

• Making notes of ideas that might help;
• For my local writers' group (the Marrickville Writers' Corner — hi everyone!) I'd also written a few pieces that I felt might fit into Book 4 (Violent Causes), or might just be background events not to be included;
• Making notes of problems;
• Forming my overall semi-objective assessment of the MS as a whole.

So I used all these things, plus I re-read my quite large file of random ideas and notes, and the fresh ideas I'd had over the last few months. Lo and behold: a couple of months earlier I'd had a key idea which fitted very well with what I needed! It still wasn't quite right, but it felt like it could form the backbone of the plot strengthening, and so it was back to the Unconscious Thought Theory.

There you have it. With all that fresh in my mind, I thought I'd capture some of the process and get off my backside and write this combined UTT update and status report.

Ah… I suppose that means I should probably write a little status report, shouldn't I? Well, the MS now has 90k words, which at this stage I think I'll be keeping. I'm not sure how many extra scenes I need, or how much editing is needed to fix the other issues I've identified, but my feeling is that it might need as little as 10k words of new scenes (maybe 20k?). So I think it won't be too much longer before I can start trying to book an editing time-slot with Dave at ThEditors.com! I should know in a week or two.

Scribus for print edition covers

Here’s the long-delayed article on using Scribus to make the cover for your print edition. It’s not a full tutorial on using Scribus — I’m sure there are Youtube videos covering that, and anyway, its manual and the tutorials that come with it are very good. It’s surprisingly easy to use, amazingly powerful and well-designed, and… I just love it! It’s also free, and works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. And it works so well!

(I wrote it today because someone - hi, Eustacia! - was interested.)

Why new covers, Luke?

Several reasons. I have a small sci-fi/fantasy convention coming up (the Sydney Freecon, Nov 3,4,5), but I have zero printed copies on hand. I also wanted to make some subtle changes to the covers, along with reformatting the internals of the first two. I was also finally ready to make the 4.25"x7" A-format ‘mass market’ style paperback editions. (Simply because I prefer that size for paperbacks.)

A brief digression, before I get to the topic at hand: the internal changes were switching the dialogue quotation style for the first two books to match that of the 3^rd. I’d held off for years, hoping the bug in LibreOffice preventing me from doing that would be fixed. In the end I gave up and used WPS to change them all. Of course, pasting the novel back into LibreOffice left the odd block of text in weird point sizes (some side effect of using ‘direct formatting’ instead of styles, I gather), but they weren’t too hard to fix. And having received help from some of the LibreOffice developers to understand page setup, I had created a good and safe couple of templates for 4.25"x7" and 5"x8" before transferring all the text into them.

One other thing, too: dreaming about offering some printed copies to my local library, I realised there was no way for a potential reader to know the story is quite dark, so I came up with the idea of including some quotes from reviews, since a lot of reviewers did comment on that. That meant I also wanted to insert one page in the very front, as you often see in traditionally-published books. For me though it was less for advertising than to warn readers what to expect.

And let’s start with a picture of the sort of errors that can occur if you don’t pay close attention to the trim and guide marks provided by your publisher. Here’s a picture provided by a very helpful person at Ingram Spark (waves to Erica), pointing out several serious placement errors in what I thought was a nicely-crafted cover for the A-format paperback edition of Harsh Lessons. How wrong I was!

What do you need for a cover?

I had the excellent cover files generated for my guesstimated size (page lengths) from Mirella de Santana, including the CMYK-profile Photoshop .psd files. You need a template from your publisher that lays out the exact dimensions for your cover: where the front, back, spine artwork goes, and what are the safe areas to stay inside. (The cover can shift a mm or few in the printing.) So I logged in to Ingram Spark and used their cover creator tool to generate and send me a PDF file for each of my books, and sat down with Scribus to make the new covers.

Here’s what the template for Harsh Lesson A-format looked like:

Now, because I had given Mirella only a guess of the no. of pages, and I was wrong in the end, I had to fiddle things to make them fit the template exactly.

Even if you have the right sized cover artwork, though, Scribus is great to let you prepare the right file for your publisher/printer/distributor. Although some people say you should be able to work in RGB images (the colour space you see on your computer screen, with its red, green and blue pixel elements), because printing presses cost millions of dollars and have a lifetime of decades, we’re still a long way away from being able to send most publishers anything other than the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK colour space files they need. Which is where PDF/X (which is also called PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-3) comes in. PDF/X is a file that lets you specify what’s called a ‘colour profile’ for the images in your artwork. Ingram Spark require/prefer ‘U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2’. You can download the free ICC CMYK colour profiles for a wide range of needs; as with everything Scribus, there are good pages about downloading, installing and using the ICC profiles, such as this one.

Setting the colour space in Scribus

I remember when I first started using Scribus I had trouble enabling the colour management. After some Googling, I found the answer at askubuntu.com. (Scribus 1.4.2: "PDF/X-3" option still grayed out, how make it work?) Manfred Moser posted with a problem similar to mine. Some time later he made a follow-up post (emphasis mine) —

"Okay, so I figured it out myself. It is important to turn on color management for the current document. This is done in File - Document Setup - Color Management. Changing it in File - Preferences - Color Management like described everywhere I found only affects new documents and not already existing ones."

If you’ve done that properly, when you open a new file in Scribus and go to File->Document Setup->Color Management, you can easily set things up so it will look like this (it’s showing ASUS for the RGB because that’s the display I use on my computer):

Note in particular the ‘Simulate colours on screen’ and the ‘Show colours out of gamut’. If, when you load in an image, it shows large patches of horrible lime green, that means it won’t print properly: unless you click on the image and choose the correct colour profile for it! As soon as you do that, all that nasty green should vanish. And you do that by right-clicking on the image and choosing Properties, clicking on the Image tab in that dialogue box, and choosing the correct ‘Input Profile’ (which in my case is ‘Embedded U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2’). That’s all you need to do.

How to use your cover’s template PDF

One of the many great features of Scribus is that it can read and work with PDF files, and understands some of the internal structure, so the PDF ‘image’ is not just one big image blob. So, just open the template file PDF for your cover with Scribus. E.g. in my template file (which I named HL-4x7-284pp-9781925430073-Perfect-template.pdf) here’s some of what that structure looks like in Scribus:

You can select each object and the corresponding picture element will move into view and be highlighted in the main drawing area.

At this stage, I recommend doing a few things that will make life easier:

1) Click about in the Outline dialogue until you find the three parts of the barcode for your book — the white background rectangle, the barcode itself, and the ISBN — and rename those objects to be something sensible. Then copy each item to the top of the page. With the object selected, the Properties dialogue easily lets you move it up and down in the drawing order. (You click on the green Up and Down arrows in the ‘X, Y, Z’ tab.) Don’t change the size of scaling at all: you want the barcode to scan properly!

It’s a good idea to Group these three parts together for convenience. And maybe name the group something sensible — like Barcode!

2) Now click about in the Outline dialogue until you find the parts of the template that show the inner, middle, and outer edges of the front, spine, and back of your cover, and rename them to something sensible.

3) Open the Windows→Layers dialogue and click on the ‘+’ button to create a new layer. That will make it trivial to flick all your artwork to be visible or not, so you can see whether all the important stuff fits entirely within the safe areas. It’s also a great idea to click on the Lock icon for the Background layer to make sure you don’t accidentally move or change anything in your publisher’s template!

Adding your Cover Image(s)

Next, insert the excellent cover artwork for your cover itself. For simple cases you can just create a single ‘frame’ to hold the whole cover image. Or you might need to create a separate frame for the back, the spine, and the front if you messed up and need to move or stretch or clip parts of the image.

You must create an image frame to hold an image: you do that by choosing ‘Insert Image frame’ from the Insert menu. Next, drag a rectangle that roughly sizes the rectangle. You can easily size and place it exactly, by either zooming in insanely far, or by going to the ‘X, Y, Z’ tab in the Properties dialogue and adjusting the Geometry by directly typing the measurement you want (and hitting Enter when you’re ready), or by using the up and down arrows beside each number. There’s also a small ‘Chain/lock’ icon you can click to tie the Width and Height together. Incidentally, the Name field in this tab is where you can type a new name for the object (Using just numbers, letters, spaces, parentheses, dash, or underscore: again, hit Enter when you’re ready).

Anyway, after you’ve placed and sized the image frame exactly right (or before: it’s up to you), you add the image to fill that frame by right clicking in the frame (or on the object) and choosing ‘Get Image...’ and then browsing to the location where your image is. Another insanely great feature of Scribus is that it understands Photoshop .psd files, including the CMYK colour space (unlike the Gimp), so you can directly use your cover designer’s Photoshop file if you thought to ask them to prepare a CMYK version for your print edition.

When editing the image (resizing, scaling, repositioning, etc.), just keep in mind: the ‘X, Y, Z’ tab in the Properties dialogue lets you adjust the image’s frame (the ‘window’ or ‘viewing port’ onto whatever part of the image you choose to make visible), and the ‘Image’ tab in the Properties dialogue lets you adjust the image itself. Again, you can (and should!) use the lock icon on the X-Scale and Y-Scale so you can’t accidentally squash or squeeze the image so it’s out of proportion.

And a super handy feature of Scribus is the ‘Scale To Frame Size’ radio button on the Image tab, which will quickly scale and position the image to good starting value that you can then later changing by choosing the ‘Free Scaling’ radio button instead.

One last thing: check! Use the Outline dialogue to click on those boundary objects for the front and back cover, and the spine. In the main view, you’ll see fine red selection rectangles appear, and you can use those lines to check that all the important parts of your cover are within the safe margins your publisher has recommended.

It was only after receiving the image at the start of this post, today, that I realised this was a really important step which I had failed to do.

Barcode (and QR code?)

You’re almost done! Just use the Outline dialogue to bring the barcode (that you copied and then Grouped together and named sensibly earlier, remember?) to the top of the drawing order so it’s visible, not hidden underneath the image you added for the cover. Make sure it’s still one inch (25.4mm) high. Don’t change its size!

I personally think it’s a good idea for self-published authors to also add a QR code alongside the barcode, containing a useful search string or URL as the encoded text. For this, I use the free software ‘qrencode’. Here’s the command line I used for Harsh Lessons:
qrencode -o QR-code-HarshLessonsBuyGoogleSearch.png -s 20 -d 300 \

"https://www.google.com.au/#q=%22L.J.+Kendall%22+%22Harsh+Lessons%22+buy"

which is just a way of encoding a Google search for: "L.J. Kendall" "Harsh Lessons" buy

There are also similar QR code tools with graphical interfaces, like qtqr.

Creating the PDF/X file for the printer

Your printer/publisher, who supplied you with your book’s cover template, will also have told you what kind of PDF file you need to create, but typically it will be PDF/X (PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-3), which means it supports CMYK.

In Scribus, simply select File→ Export → Save as…, and then

Choose the right ICC CMYK colour profile. These things are designed so the printer doesn’t try to put more ink onto the cover than the paper can handle, as well as faithfully reproducing the colours.

So… how hard is it?

I think my first cover, using Scribus, took me a day to work out most of the stuff above. Then, coming to it this time, I wanted to make four covers in one day (Wild Thing and Harsh Lessons, A and B formats).  I discovered I had no Scribus cover for Wild Thing — I had used Inkscape, and not provided a PDF/X!  I remember Ingram Spark at the time warning me that the cover was barely within the limits of the 240% maximum ink coverage, and a few parts slightly over. I realise now that it worked only by pure luck: the colours happened to be that way.

So I started from scratch, after having not used Scribus for several months (and that last time, was just one day in the last year). Even so, creating the cover for the B-format edition of Wild Thing took just 45 mins. For the A-format, I decided that process had been so painless and easy I’d do it from scratch for that one, too. This time, it took 20 minutes! So then I moved on to Harsh Lessons: each of those took me just 15 minutes.  That's right: four book covers in under two hours, since I already had the actual cover designs and the template PDF files.

So, yes: Scribus is powerful, flexible, robust, and once you’ve picked up a few key concepts, really easy to use.

Go forth and Cover!

Correcting your book on Amazon

This is a short piece about correcting your errors and updating your ebook, mainly on Amazon. It's an interlude to break up the series of Q&A discussions about my 1^st two books — this article is aimed at Indie authors.

Sigh. Well, I thought it would be a short piece. After all, the process can be explained in a few words: update/correct your MS. Upload it to Amazon. Contact them and ask them to offer the new version to people who have already purchased a copy.

Here's what Amazon say about the process: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/A2KRM4C8E91086

But I remembered Stella (my wife) telling me how much feedback she'd had from very satisfied users of her technical manuals saying how valuable it had been to get step-by-step instructions. Somehow the article just grew….

So, yes: the mechanics of making the correction to the edition you have on sale is straightforward: update your manuscript and make sure the same changes are made to your ebook edition. If you're using Calibre to generate the ebook file, that's trivial:

1. Save your MS as a Microsoft Word .docx file
2. In Calibre, select your book and Choose "Add files to selected book records" (then select your corrected .docx file). If asked about replacing an existing .docx, of course choose that option, since that's the whole point!

3. Still in Calibre and with your book still selected, choose "Convert books".
4. Choose ".docx" for the input format and (for Amazon) ".mobi" for the output format. For other publishers, you probably want to choose ".epub" as the output format to upload to your publisher.

5. Click OK. Calibre will spend a minute or so creating the .mobi file in your Calibre library. Upload that file to Amazon.

E.g. for me, under Linux:

$ ls -l "/home/luke/Calibre Library/L. J. Kendall/Shadow Hunt (99)"

-rw-rw---- 1 luke kendall 511043 Jun 9 17:33 Shadow Hunt - L. J. Kendall.docx
-rw-rw---- 1 luke kendall 1279081 Jun 9 17:35 Shadow Hunt - L. J. Kendall.mobi
-rw-rw---- 1 luke kendall 535810 Mar 26 2017 cover.jpg
-rw-rw---- 1 luke kendall 5658 Jun 9 17:33 metadata.opf

After the upload

This is where things get interesting.

What happens next is that Amazon will check your updated file before releasing it for publication. Basically, I think they check to make sure the book still matches its description and represents fair value, since Amazon has a duty to protect its customers. I imagine a small minority of shonky people try to use Amazon to scam or exploit people. Amazon works diligently to protect its customers from that.

This check can be quite fast if you're lucky, but may take up to two days (if I recall correctly).

At present Amazon provides no mechanism for you as an author to summarise the changes you made (for their staff who check your changes). I assume they have excellent internal tools for making the changes visible, though.

Amazon will send you an email when the updated file is released and available. On your Amazon Kindle Self Publishing page, under the Bookshelf tab, you'll see the book listing has changed back to LIVE

I think it's a good idea to have something like a revision number somewhere visible in the first few pages, so you can Look Inside to make sure the right version is there and available, and readers can also easily determine if they have the latest version.

Oh, and I strongly advise you to at least flip through the online preview of your uploaded content to at least glance at every page. This should pick up any outrageous things that have gone wrong — like blank pages, a shift into italics for long stretches, missing page breaks, illegal characters appearing instead as grey blobs… that kind of thing.

So, that's it — all done?

Nope.

Sure, people who buy your book from that date onward will get the new and corrected edition. But what about previous purchasers — won't Amazon distribute the corrections to them automatically? Or at least, offer it to them?

Nope.

The reasoning is that people might have made bookmarks and annotations, and preserving those when the underlying text shifts and changes is a tricky problem.

So, does Amazon at least inform existing owners there's a new version available?

Again: nope.

Well, at least you can inform people that there's a new version available, yeah?

No, not really. You don't know who bought your book. You can broadcast the news, but even if an existing purchaser goes to Amazon and re-downloads the book, they get the same version they originally purchased. Nor do they get the new version even if they delete the book from their device and re-download it!

Purchasers can only get the new version in one of two ways. One, by directly contacting Amazon and asking specifically to be given the new version. One of Amazon's people will then check and send them the new version manually. Which is a lot of effort for all concerned, right?

The other method requires no effort on their part, provided you do the right things. Using this second method, Amazon will send an email to all purchasers with a link they can click on to get the new content if they wish. Much easier. But you have to do some work as the author, to make that happen.

Have a look at what Amazon themselves say about this topic: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/A1RGGPBKDR1BPZ

You may think readers can set the options to get automatic updates; perhaps this works only in the US. After I'd tried and failed to get the updated version of another author's book, that I had purchased, after I knew she had updated it (waves to Barbara Strickland), I finally gave up and contacted Amazon via chat, to get the new version. After a bit of back and forth, the helpful Amazon rep pushed out the new content to me. But I wanted to know why I couldn't get it myself, so the chat continued:

Me: Great, thanks. But *surely* there must be a way for customers to do that without contacting Amazon? I was hoping to blog about the correct way to do this...
BTW, the new version is on my tablet, so that's good...
[Amazon rep.]: Thanks for your feedback.
Luke, is the automatic book update option turned ON on your account?
Me: I believe so... I'll check...
[Amazon rep.]: https://www.amazon.com/mn/dcw/myx.html/...(See full link)
Under settings, scroll down and you can see Automatic Book Update.
Please confirm this option once.
We value your support and look forward to the continued opportunity of serving you. Would be there anything else that I can assist you for today?
Me: Thanks. Yes, it is turned ON.
So, why did it not update, given that Automatic Update was already turned on?
You can still help me by explaining what should have happened, or by explaining why it did not update automatically.
[Amazon rep.]: Luke, some Kindle book update can be initiated only from our end.
Me: I believe that even with Auto Update, updates aren't pushed out automatically by Amazon because Amazon worries that people will lose their bookmarks, reading position, etc. So I though there was some user action required, to get an updated version. (And then I couldn't find a way to do it.)
[Amazon rep.]: Yes, you understood it correctly.
Me: So you're saying that there is no way to get an automatic update to a new version, except by contacting Amazon and asking them to do it for you manually? (I know that if the author goes to the trouble of requesting updates to be sent automatically, and I am not asking about that. I am asking about the situation when the author does not do that extra step.)
(I am having trouble understanding that Amazon don't provide such an obviously-useful feature: an option to "refresh/update" the book to the latest version.)
[Amazon rep.]: I can understand your concern completely. However, currently we don't have an option to process the update automatically without the request made from author or customer.
In this case I take it as feedback and forward it to the appropriate team.
Me: Thanks. I will do the same, from my end. I will also blog about it.
[Amazon rep.]: Customer feedback like yours helps us continue to improve the service we provide, and we're glad you took time to write to us.
We're regularly working on improvements to your experience with Amazon.

Pushing out the update

You can get Amazon to offer your update to all existing purchasers, by contacting them and asking them specifically to do so. It does take some work, however. The main thing you need is a clear and reasonably detailed explanation of what you have changed. You contact Amazon, and provide that information, and wait for up to seven days (usually) while they check the changes and your explanation, and decide whether it is a good enough reason to offer the new version to existing purchasers.

It's a little bit tricky, but not too bad.

For the explanation, they will happily accept very detailed lists of exactly what changed. E.g. for most of my (embarrassingly many) updates to Wild Thing after its initial release. E.g. for Release 5 (blush), my explanation to Amazon started with a summary:

Release 5: Based on reading the 1^st (proof) printed copy: numerous small improvements (punctuation, word choice), several small continuity errors fixed, several typos fixed, changed to us US-style punctuation within quotations.

"Global" changes:

+1) Replaced all pairs of "<non-breaking space><space>" by plain "<space><space>" (7,000+)

+2) Fixed all wrongly-spaced chapter headings (approx 10)

+3) Changed from British/Aust style quotation-punctuation style ('He said "Yes, really", then…') to US/Canadian style ('He said "Yes, really," then…') in majority of cases (approx 150). (The remaining examples, for unusual situations, are deliberate!)

+4) Replaced all British/Au-preferred "towards" with US-preferred "toward" (approx 30)

Below, the underlined portions of the "before" (left text, Release N-1) and "after" (right text, Release N+1) are to highlight the specific changes. The page numbers refer to the page number in the 5"x8" print edition: they are given just as an approximate indication of the location for the ebook edition.

(Followed by the detailed list of every change:)

Prolog, p6,p7 (punctuation)
'Or might they not even seek → 'Or, might they not even seek
but I believe! → but I believe.

p9 (punctuation, phrasing)
a hammer blow on meat, signalling → a hammer blow on meat signalling
her elbow against his ribs → her elbow into his ribs
and Shining Hair completed her spin → while Shining Hair completed her spin
as if expecting → as if he'd expected

p10 (punct)
husband's chest each impact → husband's chest, each impact

p11 (clarity)
She lunged, grabbing → She lunged forward, grabbing

p14 (clarity)
the female figure → the adult female figure

p15 (punct, typo)
the rigging lines he → the rigging lines, he
But you will → 'But you will
swallowed the land yacht.' → swallowed the land yacht.

Chapter 1, p21 (word choice)
before collecting herself → and she collected herself

Chapter 2, p27 (word choice, punct)
wall of affection → wave of affection
to his office → to his office.

etc. etc. ad nauseam.

Only on one occasion did I have trouble with Amazon. I had found an appalling error in the conversions, that had been present for volumes 1 and 2 for some period. What had happened was that in every place where I had used a blank line as a separator, to indicate a small scene shift or a passage of time, the conversion to .docx and then .mobi had lost the blank line — so the two scenes were jammed together! (I fixed this by making sure each empty blank line contained a "non-breaking space" character. This prevented the automatic stripping of these blank lines.) I provided just a summary of this change, and a sample of the places where this had happened, and uploaded the fixed versions. However, I got back a peculiar message from Amazon asking (I thought) more detail about my changes:

For example:
> Location 129**
> Error: Her mother have tol me
> Correction: Her mother has told me.

For months, as we went back and forth, the miscommunication continued. It was literally only while writing this blog article today that I realised they weren't quoting errors they had seen in my book and were concerned with, or couldn't find, as I thought they were telling me. I kept asking them to check the book they were looking at, and seeing the above errors, since those errors were not in my books — not realising they were giving me an example of the level of detail they needed, and were asking for additional specific examples.

Contacting Amazon

Okay, so, how do you contact Amazon to ask them to do this? First, login (Sign In) to your Amazon Kindle Select Program page:

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US

Scroll down to the very bottom. You should see a small, pale grey link called "Contact Us":

Clicking on that will lead to lots of useful help topics, but for this task you need to select "Book Details" under the "How can we help?" list of topics, and under that, select "Update a Published Book" and provide the explanation of what you changed, that we discussed above. You'll see from the template text they provide, Amazon also wants the title of your book and the ASIN (e.g. for my 1^st book, Wild Thing, the link looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Thing-Leeth-Dossier-Book-ebook/dp/B019DQVR76/)

Click on the "Send Message" link after you have filled in all the details (it will be quite long), checked it to make sure you haven't got silly typos or errors in your message, copied it and saved it away for your own records in a file or into an email you send to yourself.

Then wait for the news from the approval from Amazon.

So: is that it? Is it done now?

Why, yes, Mr Jones. I believe it is. All that's left is to perhaps notify your readers in your own social media that you've fixed problems and they might like to accept the offer of an improved version, when Amazon emails them.

And I think this blog article is done, too. I hope it's helpful for a few Indie authors!

Next time, I'll continue with the series of Q&A discussions about the 1^st two books in The Leeth Dossier.