Designing Every Aspect of a Book

Me, last year, shopping for fonts for a book cover: “Why are fonts so expensive??? $10 is plenty for a font. I mean, come on.” Me, now, in the midst of taking a font designing course: “Why are fonts not $5,000 apiece?????”

I’ve wanted to tackle font design for quite some time. I’m thinking it would be especially useful for some picture books I’ve got coming along.

I knew it’d be tough, but hoo, doggies, it’s enough to make your head spin. (I’m in the midst of a section on discretionary ligatures right now.) It really is true—you don’t quite appreciate a job until you’ve actually had to do the job yourself. I’ll never want a free font again.

Book design is one aspect I never thought I’d tackle back when I started writing—or love as much as I do. There’s something about being able to make every single decision for your book, from cover design to page layout to trim size. It gives the book your thumbprint.

This is all to say I hope you all snag a book by an indie author this week. Any indie author. It really is an enormous job putting a book out in the world—an even bigger job if you’re doing it all yourself (including marketing and promos). Those of you who have a favorite indie author or discover an indie you think I should know about, please do shoot me a message here or hollyschindlerbooks (at) gmail (dot) com. I’d love to know more—and maybe even highlight them here.

Just as I’d never want a free font again, being an indie author has made me want to support fellow indies as much as I can as well.

Until next week (when I bring a fresh drafting tip),

Holly

Pre-Order the Haunted States of America

I’m delighted to be part of this seriously cool project:

The Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators is releasing a collection of 52 scary based-in-some-kind-of-truth stories, one from each state (plus D.C. and Puerto Rico). The idea is for each writer to spin a fictional tale (MG-level) based on urban legend or unexplained paranormal phenomenon from their home state.

My own “Spooklight” is the story for Missouri, and it’s based on the spooklight out near Joplin. I’ve heard tales of the Joplin Spooklight most of my life. My grandparents actually went out to Joplin in search of the spooklight before they were married. My own story has a bit of a sweet twist at the end (I can’t help it; I’m a sucker for sweet ghost stories).

If You’d Like to Pre-Order:

The collection is due out in July, but you can pre-order now. If you use my Booklist affiliate link, I get a little bonus.

Thanks—I can’t wait to see this one out in the world!

—Holly

The Unexpected Rough-Weather Friend

I dug out my yard-working shoes. I’m on year three for this pair:

I’m surprised this pair has held up. They’re really cheap. They have kind of a plastic feel to them. But for some reason, they refuse to crack. The soles are still stuck on tight. It’s become a bit of an experiment now—I’m curious how many years I can squeeze out of them.

I have a few friendships like these old shoes—faces that are still in my life, decades later, that I never would have bet on back when we met. And others that I would have sworn would have stood the test of time that are long gone, the bond between us cracked in two.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I’m pretty sure we’ve all been surprised at who actually shows up when times get hard.

The same, I think, should also be true of our characters—showing up during a time of trouble would be a great way to build a truly likable character, one readers would immediately find endearing.

Because readers would have had the experience of the unexpected rough-weather friend themselves.

Backin’ Up

I had a break in my schedule, so I decided to finish uploading the rest of my backlist into my author bookstore. Right now, those titles (five of them!) are available at a pay-what-you-want option. Which means you can get them for as little as…

well, nothin’.

I’ve also had some questions about how to best download and read these titles, especially if you don’t have a Kindle. I wanted to write a post on the subject to offer a little help.

If you’re a Mac user, it can all be as simple as downloading the .epub version and choosing File > Import in your Books app.

If you’re a PC / Android user (as I am), one of the best (and easiest) ways involves the Kindle app. I’ll admit, I’ve used the bejeezus out of dedicated Kindle ereaders (I’ve worn out three and am currently using a Fire). But I use the Kindle app too—I’ve read a ton of books on my phone while waiting in line, etc. I can even read personal documents on my phone using the Kindle app.

How to Download:

When you order one of my books, you’ll get emails from two different services, offering you two methods to read: Payhip and BookFunnel.

Payhip

Payhip processes all orders for my direct-buy books. When you make a purchase, they’ll send you an email with a download button. Click to download the file of your choice (only use the .mobi file if you have an older Kindle device you want to sideload the file onto, otherwise use the .epub).

Once you’ve downloaded, the easiest method I’ve found is to use the Send to Kindle app to send to your Kindle device or the Kindle app on your phone. (Note: There’s a bug in the right-click method of using the Send to Kindle app. You need to launch the app on your device and drag the file into the window in order to get it to work.)

BookFunnel

With each purchase, you’ll also receive an email from BookFunnel. If you choose to use this method, simply locate the BookFunnel code at the bottom of that email. Type that code into the BookFunnel app. You can read the book in the app itself, or have BookFunnel send the file to Google Play Books or your Kindle device or Kindle app on your phone.

I’ve used all of the above methods, and one doesn’t work any better than another (in fact, there are many similarities—BookFunnel also uses Send to Kindle to deliver the file to your Kindle). I’ve also enjoyed reading in the BookFunnel app itself.

Easy peasy.

So what’re you waiting for?

Head on over to my author bookstore.

If you have questions or found an easier method, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: hollyschindlerbooks (at) gmail (dot) com.

PS: Those of you who have been longtime readers might notice there are a few titles still missing—Feral’s not there, for instance. And neither is Spark. A few of my picture books or illustrated MGs aren’t there. I’ve got different plans for these books.

Stay tuned…

Lightning Strikes

Monday was kind of a wild night of thunderstorms here in Missouri.

It’s April, which means it’s officially tornado season. I’m not sure there’s a really peaceful season here in Missouri—maybe fall? For the most part, it feels like we go from one extreme to another—ice storms to tornadoes to over-hundred-degree droughts.

But lightning? That one gets me. Because I’ve got quite the history with it.

My family house has been hit by lightning more than once—the worst strike happened when I was really little. My brother and I were basically toddlers, because neither one of us was in school yet. Not even pre-school. We were actually sitting at our child-sized table, eating breakfast and watching Captain Kangaroo when the boom hit. Poor Mom went crawling around in the attic, trying to find out if anything was on fire. It wasn’t, but there was a scorched mark on the outside of the house, right on the opposite side of the wall where my brother and I had been sitting. And, of course, the TV was dead. It was never positioned by that wall after that.

A few years ago, another lightning strike hit a power line, and a subsequent surge knocked out the electronics all down the street. My six-month-old computer got completely burned up.

There have been others—we’ve lost a fridge. Once, I had just let my dog Jake out when a lightning bolt (on a completely sunny day, mind you) went straight down into the ground, out of nowhere. I yanked the door back open and called Jake back in—but he was already running in my direction at that point.

The only thing predictable about lightning out here is that I’m bound to have another run-in with it. So if you’re trying to reach me this spring and I haven’t responded, most likely, I’ve disconnected everything.

And I’m writing out a chapter or so in longhand.

A New Way of Looking

So I was out in the middle of the street the other day, taking pictures:

Yes, I was literally taking pictures of the street itself. I was after the cracks. I wanted to vectorize the texture, to add it to a repeating pattern I was working on. (I’ve developed second life as a commercial artist and designer.)

My camera roll is full of a ton of these pictures. Bark and mold. Close-ups of weeds and rocks. A pile of brown leaves because I was interested in using the different brown hues in a color palette.

Surface pattern design has definitely changed what I look at—what parts of the images are clear and what gets blurred in the background.

This new focus happens alongside any side interest a writer might have. Not just art. It happens with music or knitting or sports or camping or hiking or…

You get the point.

Seriously—if you feel your writing is getting stale, find something that allows you to look at the world in a new way. It’ll change the details you want to include in your writing. Cracks and mold and brown palettes. Things you were previously overlooking. It’ll give your writing a new texture, too.

Quit Writing Chapters. Write Scenes.

This is another strategy that’s helped me enormously lately.

Once you’ve outlined all your major (and supporting) plot points, and you’re ready to start the actual drafting of the book, do not think in terms of chapters. Think in terms of scenes.

The characteristic moment. The inciting event. The pinch point. The midpoint. Write scenes.

This is a lovely little scene. The kind of place you like to visit. Your WIP should be a place you’d like to return to as well.

This technique has a ton of advantages, but primarily, it allows you to jump around through the manuscript, as you probably were during the outlining / brainstorming stage.

The way I handle this scenic jump-around is to use Scrivener, and lay out the main scenes I want to draft in the binder. (Each scene is its own entry in the binder, with a title that easily identifies it.) I can always see the full list of scenes I initially wanted to draft. When I get a new idea for a scene, I can easily just slip it in the binder, in the approximate area I think it needs to appear in the book.

I can go where my heart wants to take me, drafting scenes at any point in the book, rather than in a chronological order. As I progress, I can better see where the major plot holes are showing up—what needs to be further developed with some better scenic or dramatic writing.

At the end of all this, I might move the scenes around a bit. Once everything is in the right place, I can begin to think about writing the narrative thread that connects the scenes and figuring out which scenes combine to create chapters.

It’s a little like the fun of a jigsaw puzzle—seeing where pieces go together, how everything lines up. I mean, you would never expect to put a puzzle together by working in solid rows left to right, right? You do it in chunks, and then begin to connect chunks.

Same goes for your novel-in-progress.

What’s Your Protagonist’s Ghost?

I’m starting to think this is the most important question you need to address during the initial brainstorming / character creation / drafting process.

What is your protagonist’s ghost?

It’s sometimes referred to as a wound in posts and articles on the drafting process.

Basically, it’s what happened to your protag in their backstory. What life-changing event hit them where it hurts?

And—this is the kicker—what kind of self-protective lie did they wind up building up around this ghost or wound?

Okay, so take Officer and a Gentleman (I’m an ‘80s kid, so my head always drifts back to ‘80s movies when I’m talking plot). Anyway, the Richard Gere character’s wound is that his mother committed suicide when he was young, and he got shipped off to live with his less-than-child-friendly father. When we see him enlisting in a naval aviation training program, he is firmly entrenched in the lie he has built up around this ghost or wound: You are better off going it alone and never getting involved or attached to people. They’ll only hurt you in the end.

The rest of the movie is his character having to learn that this lie will not serve him well forever—when he finally accepts this, he literally sweeps Debra Winger off her feet and carries her out of the paper factory where she works, while Joe Cocker belts “Up Where We Belong” in the background.

Ta-Da! Happy Ending!

What Richard Gere’s character goes through is similar to every main character’s arc—they don’t necessarily have the same lie, but they’re on the journey to finally stop operating under whatever falsehood they do hold tight to. They’re on the journey to becoming a more fulfilled human being—the events of the book are allowing for that transformation.

So what’s your character’s wound? And how are you going to get them to their own “Up Where We Belong” triumph?

Outlining Ain’t Stuffy

Since last winter, I’ve been ripping apart my own writing process. Finding out what works, what’s a liability. One of the biggest revelations is that even though I was adamant about being a plotter, I kinda—wasn’t. What I was doing was writing down a few vague ideas, broken into major sections of a novel. I was still having to figure out the nitty-gritty of a book while writing it.

I know a ton of writers who swear by “pantsing”—figuring out a plot as they go along. But as far as my own process goes, I’ve always felt that pantsing only forced me to revise a book about 47,0000 times before it finally came into shape. And I also felt that pantsing wasn’t a process I could replicate—it was discovering a book by accident. Just stumbling onto a book’s main theme and purpose after trial and error and error and error.

I wanted a process I could replicate, a process that was streamlined and more fun than struggle, which was why I started plotting in the first place.

But, like I said—I wasn’t really plotting it all out. I was leaving sooooo many questions and plot points unanswered.

I think where it would start to go wrong is that I felt I could only plot out so many points before I really needed to start writing in order to figure out the rest.

But here’s the thing: You can write scenes as part of the plotting process.

You can write confrontations as a way to figure out character. You can write dramatic scenes to figure out if that’s really the plot twist you want. And then you can take what you learned during that scenic, dramatic writing to further develop your outline.

The thing is, you can actually plot your way through the entire first draft. All of it. And then, when you go back, you’re not writing the entire book. You’re writing additional scenes. You’re sliding those scenes into place and you’re writing a bit of narrative thread to string it all together.

And then you can get into the super-fun revising stage.

Outlining doesn’t have to be stuffy—actually, it shouldn’t be stuffy. It should be fun and messy and wonderful. It should be a process during which the blank page is a playground and not a chore. So go for it—let your heart take you where you want to go when you’re outlining. Write scenes. Write character descriptions. Try out bits of dialogue.

Make sure, above all else, that outlining is not some boring chore you have to slog through in order to get to the fun stuff of writing. Make sure that outlining itself is one of the most fun, more important parts of your writing process.

New Stuff ‘N Backstory

Okay, so the new stuff first: I mentioned in a previous post that I’d been working on wrapping my brain around pattern creation—and I’m thrilled to announce I got my Spoonflower store open!

Are you familiar with Spoonflower? They sell home goods as well as fabric and wallpaper, all designed by independent artists. My first patterns are available now at my store. If you’re a sewer or are working on your house and have not quite been able to find the fabrics or wallpaper you’re dreaming of, you can absolutely hit me up with that wish-list (hollyschindlerbooks at gmail dot com), and I can create a pattern you could purchase through Spoonflower.

I’ve also created some new cards at my InkBerry Cards shop on Etsy.

This congratulations card is one of my all-time faves, since it’s especially good for my fellow punctuation nerds. A congrats card that commemorates turning the someday dream into something that’s been tackled and made a reality. It reads, “You turned your … into a !”

Use promo code THANKYOU for 10% off any order at the card shop.

(You’re probably noticing all my art designs are all under the name InkBerry—the inkberry is a shrub in the holly family.)

Now for a bit on backstory:

I’m juggling several writing projects—I’ve long wanted to get into audio, and I’m currently working on a story that I’m going to turn into my first audiobook. But the story starts in medias res, which has me thinking quite a bit about backstory, and how you filter it into a book naturally.

Blog subscribers: you can view the rest of the post on backstory—and comment and all that good stuff—by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack. New subscribers can get 50% off monthly subs ($2.50 a month), or you can get $15 for the entire year of content. It will renew at that rate as well.