… “last chance” being because the Giveaway is ending today, not because a giant asteroid is going to come crashing down on our heads, obliterate Mongolia, and engulf us all in a dust cloud that will blanket the world for three years, stop all crop growth, and starve us into extinction. Stop panicking! Good grief. You people are kind of paranoid, you know that?
Anyhoo, my Goodreads Giveaway ends tonight (around 2 a.m., for some bizarre reason), so if you haven’t entered for a chance to win my awesome-tastic book, Imminent Danger And How to Fly Straight into It, click the link below and get hopping!
Excellent form, my hoppers. You’re regular spring bunnies. And no, you don’t look at all ridiculous bouncing around your living room in your PJs — and don’t let anyone tell you differently!
Unrelated link of the day:
Cracked wrote an amusing article about punching writer’s block in the face — check it out:
In a somewhat suspicious turn of events, my Camp NaNoWriMo attempts are going extremely well this year. As of thirty seconds ago, I am officially at 8,666 words — 43% of my goal for the month. And it’s only the 6th! Huzzah! I suppose it helps that I actually have a plan for what I’m writing — not an outline, of course, but more of a general “This happens, then this, then this.” I’m really excited, guys. Chasing Nonconformity is going to be epic. Well, as soon as I finish writing the darn thing, that is.
And I have new pictures for you! But first, let’s do a brief iUniverse update …
iUniverse update
Remember the pricing issue I was talking about? According to iUniverse, it is impossible to solve it. iUniverse sent out their recommended sales price, and now apparently the online retailers (Amazon, Kobo, etc.) have complete freedom over how much they want to sell the books for. Grrrr. So I said, “Dear iUniverse, if you can’t control the eBook price, can you at least make the physical books less expensive?” To which iUniverse responded that they used a base print-on-demand algorithm to determine the price, blah blah blah, and that the softcover price is fixed at $21.95, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Like heck they can’t.
Chapters update
On the other hand, my book is now in Chapters! Check it out:
HOW COOL IS THAT???
The Chapters people have been absolutely awesome, as you can see from the above image! The only thing they were obligated to do as part of my publishing package was put the book on the shelf, so the fact that they stuck it at the front of the store, on the top shelf, is beyond fantastic. Huge shout-out to the staff up at Chapters North, London!
I’ve also contacted their general manager about doing a book signing — no word back yet, but I have high hopes!
Other update
The lovely and talented Ms. Tania L Ramos is currently rocking Las Vegas on a writer’s getaway. She brought along Imminent Danger, and took this adorable, alien-themed photo:
Okay, enough bragging for one day. Off to work! But before I go, I shall leave you with your favourite part of my posts, the …
Well, maybe not cheat, per say. More like deviate slightly from the rules, while still sticking with the spirit of the event. Sort of …
As I explained in some post in the past, Camp NaNo is all about sitting down every day for a month and writing. Now, you’re supposed to start a new story from scratch. But to that I say PAH! As if I have time for such shenanigans. What I really need to do is finish the sequel to Imminent Danger, and I’m about 20k words out from doing exactly that. And since they changed the rules this year so you can set your own word count limit … talk about a golden opportunity for a little free motivation!
So, basically, I will be attempting Camp NaNo this year, and I urge you all to join me. You set the word count, so there’s no need to freak out about having to write 1,667 words a day, where failing damns you to the eternal purgatory of crushed literary dreams. And since I’m cheating blatantly, y’all should feel free to do the same!
Got a story squirrelled away somewhere that you never quite finished writing? First of all, stop squirrelling things away. It’s undignified. Second of all, grab that story, dust off the bark and acorn crumbs, and join me for a month of glorious writing awesomeness!
This concludes my confession / call to arms. Here’s a link to my camper profile. Feel free to add me, or friend me, or however the heck the internet works. To Camp Nano-finity, and beyond!!!
Related media of the day:
More fan art!!! Today’s offering comes from the lovely Kate Sparks. Check out her rendition of Miguri, the loveable, contraction-phobic alien:
Related update of the day:
No news from iUniverse yet on the ebook pricing debacle. The general consensus seems to be that people in the USA see the correct price, and everyone else … well, doesn’t. If you live outside the USA and for some reason you can’t possibly live another second without reading the brilliant literary masterpiece that is my book, Google Play has the ebook for super cheap. Oh, and the free Goodreads Giveaway is ending in the near future. So check that out. Or not. Whatever pressurizes your escape capsule.
Update: The pricing problem seems to be related to which country you’re looking at Amazon.com and Kobo from. Americans see the proper price ($2.99), and then outside the USA it ranges from $7.69 up to $12. Eek!
In the latest silliness news, my ebooks (formerly priced around $2.99) may or may not have jumped up to $9.99. Now, this may not entirely be iUniverse’s fault — shocking, I know! Here’s what happened.
So on Monday I hopped on to Amazon.com to see if I got any new reviews for Imminent Danger. Pretty legit, right? But when I got there, I discovered the kindle edition of the book is listed at $9.76. Um … what? So I checked Amazon.ca, Amazon.uk, and Kobo … all around the $9 range (well, Kobo is $7-ish). Very sketchy.
I contacted iUniverse, and they explained that while online retailers can bump your book up $2 or down $1 based on assorted promotions, it definitely shouldn’t be $9. First of all, that was news to me — I had assumed that when I listed a book as $2.99, it would stay $2.99. But apparently that’s not the case.
Anyway, further strangeness ensued when iUniverse informed me that they’d also gone to check out my book on Amazon … and found that it was listed as $4.99 — and then $2.99 on Kobo. They even sent screenshots to prove it. I don’t doubt them at all, so this begs the question … what the heck is going on? Has my computer been possessed?
If you have a spare second, please do me a favour and check out the following two links. I’m curious to know what price you see pop up on your screen for the ebooks. Is it just my computer malfunctioning, or is there some devious internet plot going on against me? So check these out and let me know what you find!
And I suppose this begs the question: would I be having this problem if I’d gone the total self-publishing route and uploaded my book to these sites myself? It’s my understanding that you completely control the price, and they can’t touch it at all. Is that true? In which case, that’s a further strike against iUniverse — not because they did anything wrong in particular this time, but just because they apparently have no control over the pricing of their books.
Educate me, blogosphere! Also, I wish everyone a phenomenal Easter!!!
Sorry, I tend to get over-excited by little things. However, yesterday was quite thrilling in that my shipment of 3,000 bookmarks arrived in California in preparation for the LA Times Festival of Books. Here’s a photo of the bookmarks sprawled across a random flat surface, courtesy of Daniel Mariano at Blackbird LSD:
Ain’t they bootiful? I’m still not sure if 3,000 bookmarks is way too much, or way too little. On the one hand, the Festival of Books attracts 200,000 people a year. On the other hand, 3,000 bookmarks is a lot of bookmarks. Let me find the other picture Daniel sent me … hang on …
See??? That’s a stupid amount of bookmarks right there. And yet I have a feeling they will all be snatched up long before the end of the weekend-long festival due to their extreme awesomeness.
Moving on.
I went through several designs before I landed on this one. My initial design was incredibly crowded, as you’ll remember from my previous post about bookmarks. Here’s the new design — you’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s an improvement or not:
Important note re: designing bookmarks — you have to leave a 1/8 inch “bleed” around the edges of the bookmark design, since this will be cut off when the bookmarks are printed.
This design is definitely much simpler, but it’s more in keeping with the simple, black and red theme of Imminent Danger’s cover. Plus, my hope is that when the bookmark is stuck in a book, the Imminent Danger title / “A YA sci-fi novel by Michelle Proulx” part will stick out the top of the book like a mini billboard for my book. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
My bookmarks, for anyone interested in bookmarks and printing and whatnot, was ordered from printrunner.com. The price was reasonable — it came out to $174.96 with tax and shipping — and the quality of the bookmarks looks to be pretty good. So if you’re in the States and looking for bookmark printing, check it out!
As for creating the bookmark itself, I used Inkscape, which is basically the free, glitchy younger cousin of Illustrator. It has lots of neat features and, fingers crossed, I will hopefully be able to design book covers using this program in the future.
This concludes my sales pitch / bookmark how to lesson of the day. Live long and prosper, fellow bloggerites.
We’ll start with the exciting bit first. The lovely Ms. Tania L Ramos and the folks at Blackbird LSD run a website, which celebrates well-written books and the people who write them. Naturally, my book is nowhere to be found. Ha! Kidding, kidding. They were kind enough to slap Imminent Danger up on their site a few weeks ago, and to my delight, they’ve actually named it the Book of the Month for March 2013! Wooooo!
Another item of note, for anyone who lives in the vicinity of California: Blackbird LSD will be representing my book at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I will not be there in person, due to my living in the frozen wasteland that is southern Ontario, but they’ll have lots of Imminent Danger swag (bookmarks, stickers, books, etc.).
So if you’re in the LA area April 20-21, stop by booth 214 and claim your swag! Or, if you have a moral objection to the term ‘swag’, you can claim whatever you want — booty, plunder, spoils, etc. *insert pirate joke here*
In other news … some minor iUniverse silliness
I say “minor” because it isn’t a huge deal — more of a “Really, guys? Really?”
You all know about my struggles to get my book listed under the correct genre, right? I would have thought that, at some point, a proactive iUniverse employee might have put a note on my file mentioning that the book is actually “Young Adult”, and not “Children’s Lit”, despite what the unfortunate book category might say otherwise.
This is apparently not the case. I’ve recently been corresponding with the iUniverse Publishing Programs Department, who are going to get my book into Chapters for 8 weeks as per the publishing package I purchased. So the lady I was talking to whipped up a “sell sheet”, which basically has all the relevant information about Imminent Danger that she’ll send out to the local Chapters store in my area. Here’s a screencap of the top of the sheet she sent me for approval:
Time to play Spot the errors!
1. “Children’s” should be Young Adult or Teen.
2. “Juvenile” should be Young Adult or Teen.
3. Romance is fine, but Sci-Fi should really be first. Also, who ever heard of a romance book for children? Is that a thing?
4. Fantasy is just wrong — maybe stick Romance here instead?
On the plus side, they definitely got “Fiction” right. Three cheers for iUniverse! I shall inform them today of their amusingly incorrect first attempt, and advise them on how to actually make it accurate on their second go.
Update: The iUniverse lady was very prompt and professional, and said there was no problem changing the genre to Fiction / Teen / Sci-fi / Romance. So points to iUniverse for fixing this problem ASAP!
Just popping in to share some super exciting news — I’ve officially entered Imminent Danger into the 2013 IPPY Awards (Independent Publisher Book Awards). Preliminary research indicates that this is a legit contest — and if it isn’t, don’t tell me now, because I already entered and it’s a little too late for second guessing.
Because the deadline is in two days, the entry fee is $95. Yikes. But you know what, why not? I think I’ve produced a pretty darn cool book, and I’m hoping the IPPY peeps will think the same.
Anyway, if you’ve got $95 lying around and feel like entering your book in what is purportedly the “World’s largest international and regional book awards competition”, this is pretty much your last chance! Deadline is March 16th, so get over to their site and enter! For anyone interested, I used the online entry form, which just involves filling in a few fields, entering your credit card info, and then printing out the resulting page and sticking it in the front cover of your book and sending it off to the address they helpfully provide.
I predict great success and imminent victory for Imminent Danger. Should I not win this prestigious award, I shall do something JAW-DROPPINGLY TERRIBLE!!! — probably along the lines of drowning my sorrows in ice cream and then writhing on the floor in pain because I’m lactose intolerant. The future is bright, my friends. The future is bright.
Unrelated media of the day:
Some English guy in Japan moved into a new apartment and got this note from his neighbour:
I’ve started off small — just 2 books to be won — but if I get enough entrants, I’ll upgrade them from softcover to hardcover. Woo! And in case you don’t know about Goodreads Giveaways, they’re awesome. They’re totally free to enter, requiring no commitment other than providing your mailing address. The address is only sent to the author (me) if you win the contest, and we have to click a little “I agree” button to promise that we won’t use your mailing address for cruel or nefarious purposes.
What else is relevant? Um … oh yes, the giveaway is open for an entire month — so, until April 11th. I’m sure I’ll bring it up at least once or twice before then, so don’t panic. And, as always, I will love you forever and a day (but not a minute more) if you’d be so kind as to spread word of the giveaway to your assorted social media associates.
Fin.
Unrelated media of the day:
This one’s for all you Game of Thrones fans out there.
Remember how I was very amused a few days ago by the fact that it cost less money to buy my own book from a third party source, rather than direct from the publisher (iUniverse)? Well, the 100 copies I ordered through Chapters.Indigo.ca arrived yesterday, and they’re glorious. Share in my joy with me via my latest vlogging attempt:
So they’re all here, they’re awesome, and now I have to figure out what to do with them all. Definitely giveaways of some sort … I’ll have to look into a book signing … a couple copies donated to the library … and then whatever else I can come up with.
As for the randomly faded dropcaps in the softcover version, I’ve contacted iUniverse about it, and they’re looking into a solution. Mother is righteously outraged on my behalf (“Your book consultant assured you that the printer copy was just a fluke, and now you’ve got 50 copies with that same fluke! You should be furious with them for lying to you! They need to fix this immediately and apologize!”), whereas I am taking a more zen approach. Expect the worst, and nothing can disappoint you. It’s working out well so far. I’m not going to let up until iUniverse figures out why this is happening and fixes it, obviously, and I’ll explain that I’m displeased, but I don’t think anger is the way to go.
Other than that … life is good. Got ma books, got ma magnets, got ma … slippers? There’s no stopping me now!!!
I feel that there are two types of book memories. There are the big memories, like a major plot point, where you look back and think, “Aw man, I never saw that coming, that was so cool!” And there are the little memories, like a line of dialogue you thought was so hysterical you fell off your bouncy ball laughing. Both are important, and both are necessary to create a great story.
I’ll tell you why I’ve been thinking about this. I’m always reading about writers who swear by their outlines. And they have a good point — how can you make sure you include everything you want to include in the story if you don’t have it written down? Unless your memory is unbelievably fantastic, in which case never mind. But I’ve tried making elaborate outlines, and here’s what happens: it becomes a plodding, paint by numbers exercise in soul-sucking futility, and while I hit all the big memories (the plot points), the little memories are much, much harder to come by.
Maybe it’s just me. I’m horribly disorganized anyway, so maybe outlines and I just don’t mix by default. But when I have an outline that I’m trying to turn into a story, I follow it step by step, doing exactly what it says, and I feel like I lose some of the spark that comes from just attacking a project with a handful of characters in your head, and a vague idea of where they’re going to end up.
So when I go back and look over what I’ve written, I’ve hit all the relevant plot points — oh boy, have I hit them. But that’s all the characters do. They’re so focused on getting from one pivotal scene to the next that they never stop to have fun, or say an amusing quip, or do something ridiculous, like have an impromptu game of laser tag and fall into a vat of space jelly.
I feel like outlines stifle me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. At the same time, I’m sure there are perfectly brilliant authors out there who use outlines all the time, and produce stunning pieces of literature. It probably just boils down to personal taste.
My personal strategy is to jot down very brief notes on what will happen in the story, and then make up the details as I go. For example, in Chasing Nonconformity (the sequel to Imminent Danger), I know that the gang will head to the planet Chingu to retrieve something very valuable that they’ve misplaced. I have several plot points down for what they’ll do when they’re on the planet, but other than that, they can really get up to whatever the heck they want. At the moment, Eris has decided to go shoe shopping. And why not? I can always cut it out later if it doesn’t work with the flow of the story.
That’s the beauty of writing a book — you’re the author! You can write whatever you want, and you have no one to answer to except yourself! Well, and your fans. And your friends and family. And the general public. And reviewers. And the …
Maybe I should start that outline after all.
Unrelated media of the day:
I’ll be honest, I haven’t kept track of what I’ve posted under the Unrelated Media section, so I have no idea if I’ve shared this already. Oh well. Don’t watch it if you’ve already seen it! Or do watch it. Whatever floats your tiger-infested lifeboat.
In today’s unrelated media, Buzz Aldrin raps about how awesome it was to be an astronaut.
Michelle Proulx - Author 
