Blog Posts - R.P.L. Johnson

Asura Cover Reveal

4/16/2020

OK, so its not much of a surprise as I've already written quite a bit about the cover design (plus the book is already up for pre-order), but here it is: the official cover from an original painting by Matt Dobrich.

I think Matt's outdone himself with this one. It will be interesting to see what happens when the advertising campaign goes live with this cover.

You can pick up your copy of Asura here.

Self Publishing: Writing Workflow

4/14/2020

So now that I've decided to publish via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), what does that mean for the actual process of writing?

I tend to write in Courier New, 12 point, double spaced. This used to be the standard manuscript format for submitting short stories to magazines and is still widely used. There are many advantages to this format: it's easy to read, it allows experienced editors to quickly estimate word counts and provides plenty of room in the margins for hand-written notes. But as you can see from the except below, it doesn't look much like a real book.

The manuscript that is uploaded to KDP needs to be in a specific format so that it can be easily incorporated into your e-book. Fortunately Kindle offers a free program that does just this. Kindle Create is kind of like a word processor, except that it offers some additional features like automatic inclusion of a standard copyright page and ultimately it saves (publishes) the file as a .kpf file which can then be uploaded to your Kindle Bookshelf and forms the text of your ebook.

I wouldn't recommend writing the book or even doing any serious editing in Kindle Create, though. As a word processor, it's a bit clunky. I would advise doing everything in your word processor of choice (be that Word, Scrivener, Pages or whatever...) and only when you are happy with the file, then copy it into Kindle Create for publishing.

(If you plan on employing your own copy editor or just relying on your Beta readers, I'd do that here before uploading to KDP.)

At that point Kindle Select with automatically find chapter breaks and make a table of contents for you. I then simply added dropped capitals on the first lines of each chapter and wrote my dedication and that was that.

When you upload the file to your bookshelf, it will be analyzed and you may get notifications of spelling errors etc. Hopefully, if you've edited and polished your manuscript in your chose word processor as I suggested above, any changes at this stage will be minor. Writing sci-fi I tend to make up a lot of words and strange names which sometimes get flagged as spelling errors. Fortunately there is an option inside KDP to go through each error and ignore it if that's appropriate. Or you can get a list of errors e-mailed to you. Depending on how many you have you may decide to do this in Kindle Create, but I'd still recommend updating your original file so that the bedrock on which you're building your story is always sound.

And this should go without saying but backup, backup, backup. I tend to e-mail drafts to myself so I can access them anywhere as well as saving onto a memory stick or external hard drive(s). But the last thing you want to do is lose your work at this stage. You're so close to finishing. The end is in sight!

Next, marketing...

Self Publishing: Covers

4/13/2020

OK so you’ve written a book and you’ve gone over it again and again through multiple edits and honed it to the best of your ability, but how do you get people to actually read the damn thing? We’ll talk about marketing in more detail in another post, but one way to get readers’ attention is to have a great cover.

The old adage is wrong, people judge books by their covers all the time, which means this is your first chance to pique the reader’s interest. The cover wants to look professional--that implies that what’s inside will be of a similar standard--and it needs to show the reader what kind of book it is. It’s no good writing a fantastic romance novel if your cover makes the book look more like a horror story. You wont find the readers you want, and those that do click may be disappointed.

If you’re happy with a stock image and simple text, its easy enough to do yourself. Packages like Canva or Kindle's online cover creator allow you to create serviceable covers with minimal artistic skill, but they may not have the wow factor needed to entice readers to buy your book. In my case, as a science fiction author, I felt that the stock images available were quite limited and didn't really reflect what I wanted.

My novel Asura is a techno thriller with some heavy sci-fi elements. I was reading a lot of Matthew Reilly and James Rollins at the time and I suppose I was trying to emulate that kind of book. It is an Airport novel: 120,000 words of action set on the slopes of the Karakoram mountains on the disputed Line of Control between India and Pakistan, so for the cover I boiled this down to three key concepts:

Mountains
Sci-fi “thingy”
Ominous... That’s supposed to tell the reader it’s a thriller

Are you ready for a laugh? Here’s my first attempt

You can see I needed help. Whatever artistic instincts I possess are limited to the written word and apparently my tactic of pasting two stock images together and hiding the join with a big rectangular title block looked less than optimal. (By the way the sepia filter was not an artistic choice: just a ham-fisted attempt to make two very differently coloured stock images look the same.)

Fortunately I had a Plan B.

I’d previously self-published a couple of short stories through Smashwords. Those covers had been drawn by a friend and former college Matt Dobrich. (www.MatthewDobrich.com)

Matt’s a professional draftsman and a great digital artist as you can see from his covers on the sidebar of this blog (he did covers for This Other Earth and And the Lion said Shibboleth). Recently he’s moved away from digital art into the world of traditional oil painting. At first I was on the fence about this. I wasn’t sure that an oil painting style would suit a sci-fi thriller. But eventually I decided to hit Matt up for another cover. He’s a great artist and no matter the medium, I know I like his style.

In the past, I had given Matt excerpts from the stories that I felt captured some image or tone that I would like to see on the cover. But for a novel I feel the best way to work is to explain what you want as best you can and then ask the artist to give you some quick sketches or mock-ups. This saves the artist's time and makes sure you end up with something that you are happy with.

Remember that when you are self-publishing, you are the boss. You are writer, editor publisher and financier. The success of your project depends on you alone, so don't be afraid to be particular about what you want.

With Matt’s permission, here are a few of the early sketches. Remember: mountains, Sci-fi “thingy”, ominous…

But what do you do if you’re not lucky enough to know any artists? Well just typing "ebook cover designer" into Google will give you a multitude of options, but finding one who is good, easy to work with and affordable is not easy. I had had mixed experiences with various online companies, often spending a couple of hundred dollars and never really getting what I wanted. Typically these companies don't offer bespoke art (unless you pay through the nose), but you will get a few artfully placed stock images with enough filters and text to tie it all together.

Another way is to look on sites like DeviantArt. This is particularly good for the sci-fi and fantasy genres. There's a ton of talent out there, just find an image that grabs you and then contact the artist directly through the site. I admit that I haven't tried this method myself, but I have browsed through lots of amazing images that I would have been happy to have used on a book.

Fortunately, I've been able to rely on Matt for Asura. Once we'd agreed on a general theme, Matt did a digital painting to work things out and get colors he was happy with.

I love his use of color in this picture. One problem I had run into with the story was that the mountain setting challenged my descriptive abilities (how many different ways can you describe rock and snow without repeating yourself?) Matt neatly side-stepped this problem by adding a dramatic swirl of color in the sky above the mountain.

I love this image, particularly the textures Matt's used on the distant mountain.

I would have been quite happy with that image, but Matt is a perfectionist and is currently exploring the world of oil painting. So after the digital mock-up, he started painting for real. You can see his progress below. The great thing about this is that as well as an ebook cover, I get an original piece of artwork to hang on my wall!

Here's the work in-progress on Matt's easel.

I'll do an official 'cover-reveal' in a later post. But if you can't wait, you can pick up a copy of Asura here.

Self-Publishing: So you've written a novel...

4/12/2020

So you've written a novel... now what?

A lot of people dream of writing a novel, but for most people it remains a dream forever.

The sad truth is that even for those that manage to finish their book, most remain unread: bought by family and friends perhaps, but a long way off the bestseller lists. But why? One reason is that the skills needed to publish and market a novel are very different from those needed to write the thing in the first place.

In a traditional publishing model that wouldn't matter so much. The author's job is to focus on writing a book that is good enough to attract the attention of an agent. Then the agent pitches that book to a publisher and it's the publisher's job to work with booksellers to get the book out to the public.

But what if you are self-publishing? Then the author runs into two problems. First, the relative ease of getting your book out there means that competition is fierce. And second, the author finds themselves suddenly having to make decisions about marketing, cover art and half a dozen other subjects that they may know little about.

Now, I am by no means an expert on self publishing. And this series of posts is not intended to be a roadmap. I encourage any authors out there to read widely and consult YouTube videos and the advice of writers' groups. The best thing you can do is gather as much information as you can and work out what works best for your particular style. I hope that this blog helps in some small way.

Over the next few blog posts I will try and document my experience publishing on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). I can't say this is a comprehensive guide to self publishing, but my experience may help you on your journey, even if only as an example of what not to do.

SNAFU at the Aurealis Awards - Round 2

4/6/2020

Very happy to announce that my short story Canute, from SNAFU: Last Stand, has been shortlisted for an Aurealis Award in the category of Best Science Fiction Short Story.

See the full list of finalists here.

I'm a bit of a pessimist so when I see a movie about alien invasion, find it very hard to believe in a happy ending:

Independence Day - Human race smooshed from orbit

Battle for Los Angeles - Ditto

War of the Worlds - No way an advanced alien race would fall to the common cold.

So when I got the chance to write my own take on humanity's last stand I grabbed it.

Canute follows the last human settlement in the UK as it ekes out its desperate final days in the face of an advancing, semi-sentient nanotechnological plague that has consumed the rest of the country. It's full of action (as all SNAFU stories are) but it's also about why we continue to fight against impossible odds and what's worth fighting for.

Huge thanks to Geoff and AJ from Cohesion Press for picking up this story and making out what it is.

You can pick up a copy of SNAFU: Last Stand here.

SNAFU: Medivac

3/14/2020

No, it's not SNAFU cashing in on the medical problems plaguing the planet at the moment. It's actually a mix of reprints and original stories re-released for a good cause.

Many people will be familiar with author James A Moore. As well as writing great books like the Serenity Falls trilogy he has also been a regular feature in the SNAFU series of military horror anthologies.

Unfortunately James has been doing it tough recently. And Geoff and the team at Cohesion Press have stepped up to produce SNAFU:Medivac.

Authors have donated their stories free of charge and all proceeds will go towards helping James out with his medical expenses.

It's available for pre-order now. Just click the photo for the Amazon link.

The Inevitable Star Wars Post - No Spoilers

1/3/2020

Well its not as bad as I thought it would be.

I was ready to dislike this movie. I'd heard all the spoilers and watched YouTube analyses and on that basis I couldn't see any way in which this film would be a satisfying conclusion to the Skywalker saga. And it isn't - not really. But it's not the disaster I was expecting.

Imagine you are playing chess and at the start of the game you decide that white will win by a back rank checkmate with the opposing king obstructed by his own pawns. The game then starts and, as things often do, circumstances start to work against you. So, in order to maintain your original plan of the back rank mate, you start to bend the rules a bit... then a bit more. Now this bishop can move like a knight, now pawns can move backwards...

That's what this movie feels like. JJ Abrams knew what needed to be in place for the finale: a personal triumph from the movie's heroine set against an epic backdrop. But in order to get there he needed to push a lot of pieces around in ways that felt decidedly un-natural.

I'll leave the spoilers to another post, but suffice to say that whenever a character needed to know some information, they just did. Whenever they needed to find something, they simply stumbled across it. I would usually call this lazy writing, but there is nothing lazy about this movie. In this case it was a series of desperate shortcuts taken in order to reach a destination which could not, under any circumstances, be missed.

That it hangs together at all is a tribute to the fact that filmmaking is at least as much art as it is science. On paper this movie should not work. If it was a scientific formula, the experiment would fail. But it doesn't fail, not quite.

The problems it has are all structural and related to the plot and the work that needed to be done to make a functional trilogy from the point Rian Johnson left it at the end of the Last Jedi. How much those faults will affect your enjoyment of the film will depend on how much stock you put in that aspect of filmmaking.

It has a few things going for it: a universally uplifting message that is hard to go against, pretty graphics and decent performances from a likable cast.

I still can't believe the utter lack of coordination between Rian Johnson and JJ Abrams and the consequently jarring middle movie of the trilogy that necessitated all this rough carpentry.

I'll shed no tears over the death of a franchise, for that is not what this is. But I will mourn what could have been: a beloved original trilogy, universally timeless themes, an extant and well-realized aesthetic; an original cast still vital (at least at the start of this new trilogy). In the end they took Wagu steak and made it into a cheeseburger. I guess we should be thankful. It could have been a lot worse.

Release Day!

12/14/2019

SNAFU: Last Stand

It's finally here.SNAFU: Last Stand was released to the public today.

I've had an advance copy for a while, so I've been able to read a few of the stories and there are some real crackers here.

I particularly enjoyed Skitter by Anna Stephens with it's fresh and brilliantly realized fantasy setting. And there are many other favorite authors (Alan Baxter, Jason Fischer and Patrick Freivald to name but a few) whose stories I'm looking forward to reading.

My story even gets a shout out from Tim Miler in his forward:

"This collection is truly a buffet of style, tone and desperate action. Do you want a post-apocalyptic and heart-rending story about nanotechnology gone wrong? Try 'Canute'."

If you're a fan of action-packed stories, you're bound to find something in here to enjoy. You can get your copy at the links below:

UK
USA
Australia

And if you really want to help an author out, please leave a review or rating on Amazon or Goodreads or your own social media or blog.

Wolves at the Door in Print

11/25/2019

The excellent Cohesion Press is finally releasing its catalogue of e-book anthologies in print. Next up is Wolves at the Door.

This was my first sale to Cohesion and my story Taking down the Top Cat about a military raid on a drug lord’s compound that takes an unexpected turn into the macabre is one of many great stories from authors like Kirsten Cross and James A Moore.

Cohesion Press, and particularly their SNAFU series of military horror anthologies, are focused on bringing you action-packed short stories that blend military detail with other-worldly horror.

They’ve even caught the eye of Hollywood with some SNAFU stories being adapted for Netflix by the award winning animation series Love Death & Robots.

Stories in this book typically have a theme of lycanthropy (If you’ve seen the excellent movie Dog Soldiers, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s in store), but the authors manage to apply that theme to a wide range of stories from Scotland in The Middle Ages to the modern day jungles of Columbia. There’s a bit of something for everyone – provided that they’re fans of fast-paced action (and are not too squeamish). You can pick up a copy of Wolves at the Door here…

SNAFU: Last Stand

11/25/2019

My fourth outing with Australia’s own Cohesion Press is coming out later this year.

SNAFU: Last Stand features action-packed stories of desperate standoffs, heroic sacrifices and thriling rear guard actions from authors like Alan Baxter and Patrick Freivald and features a forward from Tim Miller of Deadpool and Terminator: Dark Fate fame.

Cohesion Press typically publishes stories of military action with a slice of science fiction or the paranormal. I can’t give away too much about my story, Canute. Suffice to say that I thought I’d maxed out the action and horror and then the editors’ comments came back saying they wanted even more! So I guess this one’s going to be a pretty wild ride.

You can pre-order SNAFU: Last Stand Here…