Selivia wrote:

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Oo Ooo The last pep talk from NaNo - Piers Anthony - now there's an author I recognise, and respect (although his message should have been sent as one of the earliest). Wheeee!

Yeah, I noticed that too as I read it... it would have been more appropriate for Week One.

Janet Fitch's pep talk from last week was a lifesaver. I really needed that boost when I hit writer's block about 3/4 of the way through the story. She had a good point about situations like that--you just have to make a decision, any decision, and move the story on, otherwise you have nothing... and from my experience, she's generally right.

Hey gals, just a follow-up on last November's NaNo event... I was poking around the NaNo website on Sunday evening and I found out that Amazon.com's free self-publishing website CreateSpace had a deal going for a free proof copy of your novel (if you hit 50,000 words and completed the story). If you log into your NaNo account and go to the "I Wrote a Novel, Now What?" section, they have information about how to create a CreateSpace account and will also give you your discount code for the free copy. The deadline supposedly was June 1st (yesterday), but I ordered my proof copy today and the code still worked. Even if the code doesn't work, I only would have had to pay about $5.50 plus $3 shipping for it. The preparation process was pretty easy, too--all you have to do is convert your manuscript to a PDF file with book-sized pages and create your cover art (they have a cover art generator if you don't have original artwork available), upload it, wait for their OK that the book meets technical specs, and that's it!

I submitted mine to get the proof copy--even if I never decide to make the book available to the public (right now my e-store is set to private), it will be so nice to have a "real" copy of the book instead of a laser-printed manuscript in a three-ring binder!

Well, I got my proof copy last Monday (I can't believe how fast they printed and shipped it!!) It looks fantastic.



I wish I hadn't been under a 1-hour deadline to get the whole thing submitted to the website at the time; I could've come up with much better cover art, but at least what they had on the cover art generator was decent and somewhat ties into the plot of the novel (there's two trips across the Atlantic and two across the English Channel in the story). I'm not really happy with the way the margins turned out--I followed their suggestion of a 1" margin on each side, but it still looks too wide for my liking...but that's something that can also be edited before giving a final approval for official publishing. The binding is solid and doesn't look like it would fall apart like some other print-on-demand books do.

On the NaNoWriMo LiveJournal group, a lot of people have done the same thing--just ordered the proof copy with no definite plans to actually publish the book. Sounds like a lot of people did fan fiction with copyrighted characters, which legally you can get into trouble for if you publish, and others are in my situation where the novel still needs some editing and some changes before we'd ever put it up for sale.

I think I'm going to do a run of Lovers at Lockwood with CreateSpace, though. That's my project for the next couple of weeks. I already have the cover art done, so now it's just the matter of tweaking the manuscript a little bit.