Usually the biggest amount of money I shell out for a book is to get it edited.  This is kind of the one area where you cannot skimp on.  If you go live with your book, and it has poor grammar, haphazard punctuation, and fifth grade spelling, then it doesn't matter how gripping the plot is or how rich the characters are; your reader will be turned off.  You cannot edit your own work.  I know some people swear they can.  They spend long hours poring over their work, checking every sentence and stand vigilant against split infinitives.  I'm sure with enough elbow grease this works.  For many of us, though, we're too engrossed in our own work.  When I read what I wrote, I don't see the works and sentences as they are, I see them as I want them.  For me, my book is a mental movie that plays out before me.  I am simply transcribing the events as they happened in my fantasy world.  The words are representative of those images, so it's easy not to see easy spelling mistakes or grammar.  Usually the word processor will smooth things over, and a quick scan will remove all of the "there/their/they're" mistakes that one can make when typing fast.  However, even with all of that editing, you still can miss a whole lot.

When I first came out with "So You Want to Play Go? Level 1" I was really proud of myself.  I did the cover myself, and spent some hours putting in the word to edit my work.  I started getting good reviews, but I got some bad reviews from other readers who were not used to my conversational style and felt slighted as readers for all of my capitalization/punctuation mistakes.  I thought I had the kinks worked out.  Then I got a slap in the face.  My readers loved the content of the book, but they felt I hadn't edited the work and that it was sub par.  I felt this had affected my sales, and having a review like that was like the mark of Cain.  I began fretting over all of the sales I had possibly lost at appearing amateurish.  Sure, I didn't get my book edited, but having it professionally done was out of my price range. I was a student with a part time job and paying my own rent.  There was no way I could sink that much money into editing. 

I dusted myself off, and eventually found a way out.  I had to relearn punctuation and grammar.  I learned in grammar school like everyone else, but the age of email, texting, and an overall de-emphasis on quality writing can leave one with a lack of good punctuation and grammar.  I had to relearn the rules for commas, for capitalization, and some other rules I didn't know existed.  Since I could not go to a professional service that would charge anywhere from $30-50 easily, I relied on friends.  One of my friends is an English major and she was kind enough to charge me way below the market rate to edit my books.  She did a bang up job.  Through the editing process, I learned a lot about proper format and punctuation.  What this did for me was to prevent these mistakes in the future.  Future manuscripts came out much better. 

If you are having problems getting an editor, or if the price is restrictive, then having a friend edit your work is a great idea.  If that is not an option, you can go to your local library or university.  There are plenty of students willing to do the work for far less than the professional rate and are every bit as capable.  Sure, a lot of editors advertise that they know what publishers want.  They know the ins and outs of what that editor looking at your manuscript with their dark black, thick framed glasses wants.  To be honest, if you read with any frequency, which I assume most writers have, then you already have a sense of what's out there.  If you need to keep up with what's hot in contemporary publishing, then look no further than the internet.  A lot of what editors claim they can, besides be glorified spell/grammar checkers, is something that you can replicate, or even better, go your own way.  There are free online grammar and style checkers as well, that can do a lot of the heavy lifting.

As far as style...well, we can save that for another post.  It would go well into the night regardless!

Do you do a lot of prep work before you start your next great epic?  Do you write out an outline of your story, take time to flesh out your characters, and jot down great plot twists and interesting ideas?  For new writers, these are big questions.  I didn't for a long time.  I used to write straight out.  I would dance from idea to idea.  I would write out a scene until I was no longer interested, then jump ahead.  I still do this a lot, mainly because I have to maintain my interest level in my piece to make sure that I can stay on course.  However, once I started to outline my work and do a lot of thinking before the main event, the entire process would go a lot smoother.  I don't want to sound like your fifth grade teacher here...wait...maybe I do. 

In fifth grade I had an excellent English teacher who fostered the idea that I should write.  Her name was Ms. Elliot.  She was the quintessential school teacher.  She always dressed conservatively in long dresses, had her hair held back, and had a great love for the children she taught.  We had an English class where she discussed how to prepare to write a long piece of prose.  I usually looked forward to those assignments.  I already wrote for fun at home on my mother's word processor.  That thing had soul.  You would type out everything, and then you would instruct the machine to print.  It would start typing everything out, and I used to love the sound of the keys hitting the paper.  I would write short stories that were 5-10 pages long, so Ms. Elliot's assignments were cake walks.  I'd easily do three or four times what she asked for because it was enjoyable.  One day, she showed us how to write a short outline, then asked us to come back to class the next day with an outline.  I came back with the story already done, but no outline.  Ms. Elliot then showed me how an outline can strengthen one's story, even if you can just pop one out of your head.

An outline can help you catch problems in the plot or story before they come up.  Nothing is worse than writing fifty some odd pages of prose, only to have a great idea for a plot point, but nowhere to put it that makes sense or doesn't disturb the flow of the story.  This way, you avoid plot holes and outright contradictions.  Working that out beforehand will keep you from running into those snags.  If you think that it'd be great if the protagonist were to go turncoat, and betray his friends to switch sides and strike it out on his own, then that's a great twist.  However, if doing that stops the story, you might want to have that twist already planned out, as well as the subsequent story.  Plots that run out of gas will leave your reader confused or bored. 

Flesh out your characters.  Your characters should be treated like real flesh and blood characters. They should almost have a life of their own.  They should have dreams, aspirations, likes, dislikes, and back stories.  I'm not saying write a documentary fit for the Biography channel, but at least think about it.  I usually do a half page writeup on any characters I am going to work with.  If I get the inspiration for a new character during the course of writing out the story, I take a break to work him/her/it out.  What does your main character like?  Is he/her a jazz fan?  If they're a jazz fan, maybe they have a favorite spot to hang out to hear their favorite singer.  Maybe they go there to see their favorite singer to be seduced, only to have their advances slapped away.  The secondary effect of fleshing your characters out this way is that it can help you with developing the plot of the story.  If your character is especially paranoid and distrustful, then you can easily add some flavor to the stories by painting other characters in a paranoid light.  Whenever your main character meets someone new, he can scrutinize them.  You can paint even the most innocuous acts as sinister in some way.  It can really flavor your writing and set it apart from others in your genre.

An outline is also key to speeding up the process of producing your first draft.  A good outline is the best cure for writer's block.  If the action slows down, and the scene seems to just drag on and on, refer back to your outline and see where the next plot point is.  You know the goal, so just keep writing until you can logically connect the two.  For example, if one point is that  the main character steals the Jade Statue of Emperor Zhang, and the next point is meeting a potential buyer in a dark alleyway, a lot can happen in between those two events!  If you start to lose focus after he steals the statue, you can invent all sorts of great difficulties for him to overcome.  Maybe there is someone else after the same statue?  Maybe the local crime boss is waiting outside of the cave to spring a trap, taking the statue after the main character has done all of the hard work?  Maybe the main character receives a phone call, warning him of the shadowy buyer he will be meeting to pawn the statue off on.  The sky is the limit, and knowing that you will eventually go from point B to point C, will help you develop interesting ideas while you're building that bridge. 

Recently I've read a book that's really struck me as a great.  I know a lot of people sing Asimov's praises, and perhaps it's trite to add to the pile, but I just cannot help myself.  I've fallen in love with the Foundation series and I felt I just had to write my thoughts down!  I found Asimov rather late and I'm surprised I have not read him.  I enjoy science fiction, in fact it's my favorite genre, and I overlooked a giant like him and went on to other favorites like Bradbury or Orwell.  Recently, my computer was rendered inoperable with a computer virus, and I had a lot of spare time on my hands.  I picked up "Foundation and Earth" off the shelf, and I read the first half that evening.  I know, I started biting the sandwich at the end, without knowing it of course, but not having read the first book in the series in no way detracted from my enjoyment.  In fact, starting off with "Foundation and Earth" and then going back to read "Prelude to Foundation" helped me understand the fantastic scope of Asimov's ideas, which gripped me even more.

The series has a chilling premise that I often contemplate when thinking about human events.  In psychohistory, large scale forces enacted through large groups of humans are the most important forces in deciding the trajectory of human society, and that through some magical mathematics we can sum up human history into probabilities.  The quantized individual's behavior is swept up in mob psychology, where unseen yet wholly logical psychological forces sway mankind's destiny.  As a concept, I really wondered if Asimov could pull it off to where I could really believe it, and not just think "Well, he had to fudge this or that to make the entire idea work."  He pulled it off.  I could see an empire such as the Galactic Empire eventually decaying, for many of the subtle reasons he outlines in "Prelude to Foundation" for instance.  The cessation of the thirst for knowledge, a society flushed with so much information people specialize beyond reason, and the downward march of scientific knowledge, are trends and patterns that I could visualize and see as having major impacts over hundreds of years.  In a society flushed with material wealth and power, the complexity of the entire system in and of itself becomes a liability.  There's too much for a person to know, to research, to study, and much of what can be discovered might not be useful for future growth.   Eventually what happens, is that people who do not necessarily wish to devote their life to a certain field of study, have the confidence that somewhere, someone has, and that all the necessary knowledge is available to them at their fingertips.  Pure decadence.

I've heard some critiques that Asimov favors preaching an idea or ideology rather than fleshing out the characters and developing them.  I tend to disagree on this point.  While the characters are pawns to the larger ideas he wants to express, there is more than enough to learn and to enjoy about each individual character without turning the whole piece into an "I" novel.  Hari Seldon is an academic who grows bolder and bolder as the story progresses.  He's not just a doll with a string in his back, waiting for someone to pull it so he can spew the theories on psychohistory.  He has fears and concerns.  He has subtle wants and desires.  He shows compassion and has a set of ethics and morals he lives by.  I can much say the same for many other characters in his other novels, including Trevize, Hardin, and Colonel Pritcher.  Sure, they have larger meaning and they are useful in making useful points on the relationship of the individual to collective currents, but to say that Asimov sacrifices character development for that is a bit much. 

Sometimes when I write science fiction for fun I feel I was born in the wrong era.  A lot of the great thinkers and imaginers who've really done the heavy lifting have already put ink to paper a long time ago.  At least, in my imagination.  Asimov's mind was most certainly ahead of his time, and his insight into large, sociological forces often gives me pause and makes me wonder the power of my own existence in the backdrop of psychohistory.  Would I be like Hardin, a character whose personal qualities get him through his own Seldon crisis, or am I like Barr, who sees much of what goes on around him, but in all honesty, is not a serious enough actor to change any current. 

So you are on a strict budget but you need a really great cover to catch a potential reader's eye?  The cover is really the most difficult aspect of publishing because it's the most important.  It sounds superficial but it's true: You will get overlooked if your cover is unimpressive.  People will judge your book by its cover.  Why?  Human nature I suppose.  Good things are supposed to come in nice packages.  If it weren't a part of our make up as homo sapiens, then Christmas presents wouldn't need the gaudy bows and glittery paper.  Your cover will visually speak to your audience, tell them what your book is about, and inspire an emotion within them to actually take a look or possibly even buy your work.  I'm sure that your story or idea is gripping, but if it cannot pass the 15 second sight test, it'll stay on the shelf and collect dust.

I'm not an artist.  I can draw stick figures at best.  Even then, they don't look all that great.  If you can find an artist to do your cover, then you're really in luck.  I could not afford an artist as a student.  Many of the professionals I talked to would draw or design a cover, but for a price that would've exploded my non existent budget.  However I wasn't going to give up.  A bland cover would be suicide, after all.  So, I tried to look for programs that were inexpensive and tried to go it alone.  If you have a little visual skill and some time, you can make a great cover, and spend only a slight amount of money!

First off, I use Gimp as my program to manipulate images.  GIMP is like photoshop, but free.  That's all I needed to hear.  I use a lot of freeware.  Openoffice and GIMP are both good examples of programs that can do a lot, and for my purposes, were no different from the high end programs that I could never afford.  The only program I paid for was BookCoverPro.  I wasn't even going to spring for that, but it wasn't that expensive, $30 or so, and it helped when I was doing covers for other people and needed a quick way of inputting dimensions for the book.  It's not necessary though.  You can do all of the dimensions yourself, but if you find yourself having to do a lot of book designs and just want something to take the load off of you, BookCover Pro is great.

So, I had to think long and hard about what I wanted to convey to my reader.  My main book series is "So You Want to Play Go?"  It's a three part primer on the Chinese game of Go.  Go is relatively unknown in the West, but has gained popularity over the past few years.  Still, I figured that since none of my friends or my family knew of it, I'd have to relay a LOT of information in the cover.  I'd have to let the viewer know my book was about a game, what that game looked like, and to also convey whether or not my book was for people who were absolute beginners, or more experienced.  The book series is graduated.  The first book is for people who've never heard of Go, while the third book is for people who have probably been playing for at least a year and were interested in the game.  So I decided to first color code the books.  Green would be for beginners, Blue for intermediate, and Red for expert.  I figured that if in the future I were to come out with supplementary books, I would use the same color coding so that people would know that the book was designed for someone with their skill level.  I also needed images of a Go board and stones, so that there would be a little mystery surrounding the game, and also to make it look fun.

I tried taking pictures of my own go board, but I didn't really have the equipment or the lighting to make it look book cover quality.  I would have to spring some money after all.  There are a lot of great stock photo sites.  It's like hiring a professional photographer and having him take a single picture, then charge you a decent price for it.  I used Istockphotos, which is a user friendly and great site.  They had a decent selection of pics of go boards, and I picked one out.  So, I had the picture and a color code as a theme.  I decided to divide the cover into three parts and used bright colors to convey the book was family friendly.  I added a caption to say that the book was "Level 1: Beginner" and then added 30-20 kyu for people who knew Go terminology.  The cover design is very simple, but it says a lot.  The Chinese character indicates the culture the game is from, China, the picture shows that it's a game and also communicates the pieces used for the game as well as the board, and it's clear the book is for a beginner.  People who first start playing Go get a little intimidated with Go books, because the game can seem complex.  Letting them know that the book is just for them is a way to assuage their fears. 

So, some tips:

To veteran writers this post may not teach anything new, but I wanted to talk a little bit about how to take that great book idea you've had and bring it to life.  I've written five books so far and handled the workload myself, from writing it to designing the cover, so I think new writers would find some of the following advice useful.   I also do a lot of freelance work editing manuscripts, designing book covers, and offering people advice on how to make their book sing on the shelf.  I'm working on a fiction novel right now.  So far, I've done books on the Chinese game of Go and my travails through South Korea, but I've always been a fiction writer at heart.  For our purposes today, though, the genre is of little importance.  The basics are what matter!  Over the course of the next several weeks, I'll do some short essays on some ideas to help you on your self publishing journey. 

So, you've got your great idea bouncing around in your head, but that's basically the only place anyone can find it.  You've got to actually sit down at your desk and make your idea dance on the page.  This takes discipline, plain and simple. It also takes a lot of self knowledge.  Different people have different energy levels when it comes to the creative process.  I'm a person that has bursts of energy.  I dream of book signings and television interviews, and how great my work will be, and how many people will enjoy it.  This puts me in a great state of mind, when I get what my friend calls the "fever."  For instance, I wrote my first two Go books in two weeks.  I started earlier than that two week period, but I had just pecked at them without much inspiration.  When I finally got it in my head I really wanted them done, I focussed my will and worked like mad to get them done.  This produces the best results for me, but usually amazes anyone I tell it to.

How do you maintain your energy levels?  Some people are disciplined and can maintain a steady level of energy.  Some people prefer having a set schedule and love falling into the rhythm of habit.  Some people set aside one to two hours specifically for writing everyday, and then slowly but surely reach their goals.  Some people prefer to write in cafes, or near calming scenery.  It's important you understand yourself well enough to be able to write in a consistent manner so that you can be assured that you'll finish your project.  Also, be sure it's enjoyable, and keep your focus on how much you'll enjoy yourself once you get to the finished product.  I won't give you the speech about how most authors don't make what J.K. Rowling makes, or the speech about loving what you do and not worrying about the money.  I've never agreed with either sentiment.  I want to make as much as J.K. Rowling AND love what I'm doing.  In fact, the salary would make me love it even more. 

You cannot get discouraged.  The reason I spend a lot of my time dreaming of all the great things that will come of my work is so that I will have the gas to reach the finish line.  Whether you are the tortoise or the hare, you have to believe you'll eventually break across that red tape to have any chance of getting to where you want to go.  Some people advise not to think too much about how to market your book, your cover art, or any of the nuts and bolts of actually getting your work out into the public during the creative process.  In my opinion you should, because again, it will help you get into the mindset that you will eventually finish writing that novel, and the task of bringing it to the market will seem like less of a fantasy and more of an inevitability.  Anything that helps you foster positive feelings towards the idea of finishing, will help push you to greater heights.