Foo Foo, Smashwords Adventure Part II

A few months ago I published Foo Foo on Smashwords. It took a month of waiting, but it ended up on the Smashwords "Premium Catalog". While this did not generate any extra sales, the extra potential purchase avenues are ones you want to be in.

Since, I have updated Foo Foo three times, correcting errors, and niggling the details as Tolkien would say. The updating process, provided your document conforms to the Smashwords publishing guide, is absolutely painless. While I haven't sold enough books to warrant receipt of a check from Smashwords (yet!), their online store is pretty awesome. It has a coupon manager you can use to provide discounts, which is really useful for promoting your work.


Smashwords also provides ISBN numbers for your books. That service alone is really awesome, and it doesn't cost you a dime.

Overall, as an author, I've been really impressed with Smashwords.

5 Riots

FreeMind - Software for the Writer

I've been working on an idea for a low-fantasy epic for several years now, but as of yet I've had zero success at actually spinning the idea into a story worthy of telling. I know it has to do with prostitutes, rat demons and redemption, but that's the big picture. The little picture has plagued me. The sheer volume of information that I've been collecting over these past four years have morphed in scope to become more epic than any yarn I could weave. I've had this problem with stories in the past, stories which have been tossed by the wayside because I couldn't figure out how to tell them effectively. It's like knowing that you want to drive from New York to LA, but you have no idea what roads you want to take, and therefore it's safe to say you'll be stuck in the Big Apple for the rest of your life.

Recently, I dug up my epic in an effort to revive my work on it. I beat my head on it for several days before realizing that what I needed was a mind map that would diagram all of my ideas in one centralized location.

For those who live under rocks, a Mind Map is a graphical representation of various ideas centered around a main idea. The ultimate objective for using a mind map is to hack a statue of David out of a block of intellectual marble.

I've used a variety of tools to create mind maps. Mind maps can get sloppy very quickly, and thus I've found pen and paper (and their white board equivalents) too limiting. I'm constantly erasing as I'm refining the ideas, or crossing out huge blocks of text. Note cards are satisfactory, but they do not suit the purpose of the early stages of idea construction, and the cards eventually hit a ceiling of unwieldiness. Software, therefore seems the best solution. Relatively infinite space, no unwieldy cards, easy editing.

I looked around at several software solutions, and the best I found, by far, is FreeMind. Within seconds of installing it, I had created the basic outline of my epic. By the end of the second night, I had compiled almost all of my notes into the map, and had become rather adept at using the software. I'd even taken the time to generate a nice story structure mind map, containing the 3-act, 5-act, and Monomythic story models and another map regarding my notes on mythology. All three maps are enormous, now, with text, images, links, etc.

The software is very easy to use. Creating a new sibling node in the map is as easy as hitting Enter, and inserting a child is as easy as hitting Insert. The arrow keys move you about in the map. Space bar collapses and expands nodes, allowing you to hide portions of the map that you don't want to see. You can use clouds to help organize ideas into visual clusters. You can hotlink nodes, or have them expand to sub-maps, draw arrows between nodes... It has all sorts of wonderful bells and whistles. For the writer organizing his ideas, the software is invaluable.

The very best thing about FreeMind, however, is that it is free.

It's not perfect, however. In my own mind maps, I will sometimes draw relationship arrows and note the relationship on the arrow itself. I can't find this capability in FreeMind if it exists, but thus far it hasn't hindered me overmuch. There's also some weird node-jumping by the cursor when you swap to a different program and back again, causing you to have to arrow around a bit to get back to the node you were working on.

Overall, I'd highly suggest FreeMind to, well, everyone. It's really helping me find that statue of David that I've been looking for, and I think it can help you, too.

 Five Riots, indeed.

Free Foo Foo

Until midnight tonight you can download a free copy of Foo Foo using the coupon code UK82D. 

Get it here.

I've also dropped the price to the lowest possible: $.99.

I suppose the next step is to give steaks away to people who read it.*


*(No steaks are included with the ebook, yet.)

The Smashwords Adventure

I've taken Foo Foo down from LuLu and put it up on Smashwords, instead. Smashwords seems to have a wider distribution model, including stores for Sony, Amazon, and some that I've never even heard of.  Eventually, I'll return to LuLu for some hardback copies, but that's down the road a bit - there are a few more illustrations to be done before Foo Foo is ready for hardback.

Foo Foo at Smashwords

Smashwords has been an adventure, to be sure. Their formatting document is the War and Peace of style guides, and it took me about a week to make sure the Word copy of Foo Foo met their standards. It was worth it, though, because the book looks so much better than the LuLu version, and while the Style Guide is hefty, it is very easy to use and understand. In the end, I only had one problem from the AutoVetter (the program that scans your document for formatting errors), and that was one of my fonts was 2pts too large. Fixed and resubmitted in minutes, and it's now eligible for their premium catalog. I'm not sure how elite of a club that actually is, but I'd settle for even just a tiny bit of elite right now.

I had to redesign the cover, unfortunately, since I really liked the old cover with the dead rat. Smashwords doesn't allow the depiction of violence on their covers, and while the old cover ranks up there with Itchy and Scratchy in terms of horror content, I didn't want to risk being off the premium catalog because of it, so I just went ahead and did a little redesign.

The Smashwords site appeared to be a little slower than LuLu's, which isn't good since LuLu's site is already pretty slow. Thus far, though, the overall experience at Smashwords has been easier than LuLu's, formatting aside.

I've already made 6 revisions to the text (you can sort of get away with it if nobody has read your book), but I think that the Smashwords edition will be the standing edition for a while, at least. One of my writer friends suggested that the allegory was a little heavy-handed, so I took the effort to tone it down, some. I think it adds to the experience, personally.

Buttons and Tricks

Here are two illustrations from the upcoming hard and softback editions of Foo Foo.

The mouse with the flag is Buttons, an otherwise intelligent mouse that ends up getting sucked into the fervor of nationalism in the face of an invisible enemy.

The dark mouse is named Tricks, and he is armed with a blood-soaked hammer.

These were created using CAD software, then exported into Photoshop and the gray tones added. They are in black and white because the color printing process is so much more expensive.

I've got about 4 or 5 more to do.

Illustrations

I've been working on some illustrations for the hard and softcover editions of Foo Foo.  Unfortunately, I don't have much to share right now, but stay tuned.

Foo Foo, by Me

I've just self-published my first eBook, entitled Foo Foo. It is a young-adult parable about fear in the face of an invisible enemy as told from the perspective of mice. From idea to the first draft that hit LuLu, it took 60 hours. I've since made a few little tweaks to it based on reader feedback.

"The mice of the United Squeaks have been attacked by the rabbits that live under the chicken coop. Can Milton keep his neighbors from going crazy with fear?"

Foo Foo, by Patrick Riot

I hope you enjoy it, or Little Bunny Foo Foo will get you.