The Field

The Field was released on Amazon.com as a Kindle book last night. I hardly ever reveal what a character in the book actually looks like or what my mental image of a character is, but this is an exception. A little dog named Everett is a big supporting character in the book and I modeled him after our rescue dog, Hank. Not to give much away, he has it pretty rough in the book.

Check out The Field here: http://www.amazon.com/Field-John-Silver-ebook/dp/B00QVYW91W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418422168&sr=8-1&keywords=the+field+john+silver

Text to Speech Readthrough

There are fourteen days left until The Field is released and I’m going through the final read throughs. I’ve found the best way to catch errors and to tweak a manuscript is hearing it read out loud.

I use Scrivener for my books and one great feature is the speech synthesizer. You can read your manuscript out loud yourself, but after awhile your throat starts to hurt and you still miss a lot. At least I do. Having a separate voice read it helps immeasurably. I’m making three read-through passes through the book to catch all the typos and polish the manuscript. It’s drudge work at times, but necessary. If you’re considering releasing a book, listen to it at least once before hitting the upload button.

Graphic Novel First Steps Part II

As stated in the last post, I’m experimenting with photographic backgrounds with hand drawn characters to produce a graphic novel. For practice and fun I’m putting a recurring strip up on this blog entitled JUSTICE – DETROIT STYLE. I’ll show the tools I use, the process to produce the panels and I will also post the script so you can see how that works.

Here’s the first panel I’m playing with:

I took the photo earlier this week and used Pixelmator for everything. If you have a Mac, Pixelmator is the way to go. Here’s a post about it here: http://stefanstudios84.wordpress.com/blog/ If you don’t have a Mac, you can use GIMP which is open source and free. GIMP is a great tool for creating graphics and manipulating images. If you have Photoshop then you’re all set.

The main character is Rick Justice who appears like a normal guy but takes extreme justice into his own hands. The first story is worked out which will result in about eleven or twelve panels. After that I’m going to make it up as I go along. I’m working on the characters (bad guys, Rick’s girlfriend, victims, etc.) now for the first story and for future installments.

The Field Update

t’s been a long time since I’ve posted on this blog. I’ve been working on The Field for about a year now, a lot longer than any other book I’ve written. This is a tough one. It’s at about 85,000 words and a working draft is heading to the beta readers next month with the word count of around 90,000.

This is one of those books that could go on and on like a Stephen King tome but that goes against the way I like to write. I like to write short novels a person can finish reading in a matter of hours, but I get consistent complaints that my books are too short. This time I’m going to take the advice of my beta readers and expand it to around 120,000 words if they believe it should be longer. Please let me know if you would consider being a beta reader on this or future books. 

Regardless of length, the book will be out by December 2014 at the latest.

Wallpaper, Editors and Updates

A few people asked me where I got the wallpaper for my iPhone. Here it is:

It’s the cover of a new book that will come out early in 2014. It’s called …evil…

Here’s the short teaser:

A friendly game

A deadly player

It’s name is …evil…

If anyone wants to use it as wallpaper, please go ahead. Just copy it from here.

On another subject, David Gatewood has agreed to edit The Field, which is very exciting. The only downer is that he won’t be able to start until April 22nd, 2014. I’ll be done with the third rewrite by then so it will be interesting to see what his edits are.

I planned on releasing The Field around the end of March 2014 so this will set the release back, but that’s a trade off I’m more than willing to make. The Field is going to be longer than I thought. First estimated at 60,000 words, it looks like it may wind up in the 90,000 range.

In the meantime I’ve started work on …evil… and plan on having it finished and released possibly before The Field.

This is probably the last post for 2013, so everyone please have a happy and safe holiday season!

 

Winter is Coming to Detroit

Winter is coming to Detroit. I plan on producing another photo essay book entitled Broken City, Big Hearts. It will be about organizations in Detroit that help people survive, especially during the winter.
The entire essay will be shot in grainy black and white. I took these test location shots today.

 

I’ve begun shooting this month during late fall…

 

…and plan on shooting and developing the narrative throughout the winter.

Heavy shooting will take place during December, January and February where the chances for surviving in the city hits bottom.

 

 

 

Audiobook Production: Help Your Narrator

Here’s something I learned fast working on audiobooks for audible dot com. Help your narrator.

The audible dot com process works like this. You upload a section of your book, and unless you’re a professional voice talent and plan to narrate the book yourself, narrators audition for you. You provide a small segment of your book and the voice talent narrates it. If you are the rights owner (either the author or publisher) you choose the narrator. Once you’ve selected a narrator, you or your publisher negotiate a royalty agreement.

There is no guarantee that anyone will audition for you. Narrators gamble their time and talent on your book and its anticipated sales. If you find a narrator that you click with, latch onto them, for now and in the future.  A big thing to consider is brand consistency, especially if your books are a series. Having the same person narrate your books presents a consistency to your work, literary voice, and brand.

What’s the first thing you can do to help your narrator, which helps your final product? Provide them with a detailed character summary. When listening to the auditions you might be surprised that the characters DO NOT sound the way you envisioned, in tone, attitude and rhythm. Put yourself in the narrator’s place. All they have to go on is the short segment of text you or your publisher provided. They make their best guess and interpretation. If it’s wrong, it’s not their fault. It’s yours.

This is where the character summary comes into play. Having a cheat-sheet of sorts prepped for your narrator helps immensely. They know who the protagonists and antagonists are and they know who persists throughout the story and who doesn’t. They know  who must be liked and who needs to be loathed. This helps them invest their time and talent in the characters that require it.

You, the author, will learn a lot about your book listening to the auditions. I learned an old trick from another author a long time ago. You’ve probably heard of it. To accurately proofread your book, say it out loud. That way it’s almost impossible to let a grammatical errors slip by and is a means for correcting awkward passages. You’re listening to your own voice. When you hear a professional narrator recite your book. It’s cool and puts a new, unique light on your work. To get to where you want your book to be, do all that you can to help your narrator get it right. A solid character summary will go a long way.

The Day Detroit Went Dark Audio Book

Sealing the deal and kicking off the audiobook production of The Day Detroit Went Dark. The audiobook will be available on audible.com, targeted for December 1st, 2013. Narrating the book is the voice talent Stephen Marsden. I’ll be posting progress reports here and what I’ve learned throughout the course of this project. It’s kind of like being a movie director (without making a movie).

Elmore Leonard Visitation

I was going to go to Elmore Leonard’s visitation today, which is in walking distance from where I live. I stayed home out of respect for the family’s privacy. It turns out the hundreds of people showed up.

Link here: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130823/ENT09/308230074/Hundreds-attend-visitation-crime-novelist-Elmore-Leonard?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

It just shows how loved and revered Elmore Leonard was in these parts. He will be sorely missed.

 

 

Creating an Audio Book

I’ve uploaded The System – A Detroit Story and The Day Detroit Went Dark to ACX to create audio books to be made available through audible.com.  A lot of people really like audio books and have been asking for them, so I thought I’d give it a shot. ACX and audible.com are owned by Amazon.com, so that made it really easy to get started. You, the author or copyright owner, log in through your Amazon account and go from there. I found out about ACX via Hugh Howey’s blog. Hugh is the author of the WOOL series.

It works like this: you upload a sample of your book and actors and producers audition for the audio book. You, the author, choose who you like and the rest follows from there. There are essentially two ways of getting your book produced: A) you pay up front and then keep the profits if and when your book sells or B) split 50/50 with the producers  and pay nothing up front. I opted for plan B.

This is my first experience with audiobooks, ACX and audible.com. I will keep everyone posted how it goes.

Here are some links: www.audible.com

ACX: http://www.acx.com/