Louise Armstrong's Blog

Kingfisher Days will no longer be free after this week - it gained some reviews, and maybe a few readers, who knows? But I've decided to take it off the free books sites and put in on Amazon. Their free promotion is much more effective in terms of numbers, I tried it with Concrete Proposal and over a thousand people downloaded it each day, and it continued to sell after the promotion was over - so if you still want a free copy of Kingfisher Days, look out for it on Amazon!
As ever - free copies will be available for readers who offer reviews in exchange for thier copies.

I have just read Twilight by Stephenie Myers and it made me think that there are two literary genres (or are they themes?) that I've never seen discussed, or named, yet I'd say they are the most popular of all.

For women, it's Cinderella Suffers in Luxury. Bella is a good little girl, and she cooks and washes the dishes for her daddy. Edmund (and sometimes his sister) FORCE her to go to parties, drive posh cars and wear nice clothes. She cries a lot and feels pain all the time. See what I mean? Danielle Steele was brilliant at this type of novel. It's usually a sub genre of romance.

For men, they like to get into a small enclosed area such as a submarine, a prison or a court room and shout at each other. I call this (think cockney accent) Geezers Shouting at each other in a Small Place.  But is it a plot, a theme or a genre, because it pops up in all kinds of settings? I adore SF - but not when it's Geezers Shouting at each other in a Spaceship.

Alas, I've not patience to write a Cinderella Suffers in Luxury story. I'll never be rich!

I'm so grateful to great people who post on the Internet. How else would a British author find out how to get an exemption number so that they don't have to pay US tax at 30% on their e-books?.
I am in the happy position of being owed money for e-book sales by both Kindle and Smashwords, but they are American publishers, and I am a UK author. When I published my e-books, I ticked the boxes that said 'don't send me any money yet'. This is because if they pay a UK author who isn't registered with Uncle Sam, then they have to withhold tax at 30%. So I thought, I'll sort it out later, and promptly forgot about the whole thing - until I checked my balances and hey! Diddle dee dum. I've got royalties coming to me!

Of course, I'll have to pay UK tax at 20%, but a short session with my calculator and some sums that made my fingers inky convinced me that it was worth getting an ITIN number.

Smashwords very helpfully tell you what an ITIN is and have a link to the US government website where you can download form W-7. Then I Googled to see what other authors were doing. Two (sorry, lost the links, but you can Google them too) very helpfully detailed the whole process. I filled in the W-7 form the way they suggested and sent it off with my passport to the American Embassy in London. A couple of days later a letter, addressed to 'Dear Taxpayer', came back saying they were happy with the documents and had sent them off to America to be processed. Thank you, fellow authors.

Two extra notes for UK authors who want an ITIN number:
1. You need TWO special delivery envelopes - one to get your passport to the embassy, and one to have it sent home again.
2. Send off for your number NOW! My letter says that the ITIN number will take 4 months to arrive - and then I have to fill in another form and send that to the publishers, so I should have started this process last year some time.

It'll be so nice to be paid, though. I love royalties!

One of life's crumpled rose petals has been smoothed out at last! When I formatted my books for e-publishing, they looked perfect on Smashwords and in all other formats but Kindle, and it took me forever to find out why!

The publishing convention for paper books is that the first line of a chapter, or a section after a line-break, is NOT indented, like this.
         Then all the other lines are indented, like this!

It looks unprofessional if you don't format your books that way, as if you didn't know any better. But for some bonkers reason, Kindle insists on adding an indent. I didn't want an indent. I'd set the styles function of Word to remove the indent, an indent looked completely and utterly wrong, but, there it was, every time: a rubbish, extra indent.

I rummaged around the Internet. As usual, I didn't keep proper notes, so I can't credit anyone, but thanks to all those helpful posters, and eventually, I pieced together what I needed to know. Here is my (nontechnical) version in case it helps anyone else.

Those extra indents appear because Kindle is trying to be helpful - seems a lot of folk try to upload manuscripts with no paragraphing, so Kindle has been set to add a paragraph space automatically, but whoever wrote the programme didn't add the publisher's beginning-of-a-chapter-has-no-indent option. You have not gone crazy or formatted wrong. Kindle is overriding your instructions.

The way to fool Kindle is to go into the styles section of Word and alter your first line style. (If this means nothing to you, then I recommend the FREE styles guide over at Smashwords by Mark Coker.) If you right click it allows you to 'modify' then you select paragraph, then, where it gives you the option to set an indent, you set the tiniest possible indent 00.1 cm will do it. It is invisible to the naked eye, but it makes Kindle happy because it reads that line as having a proper indent. Your text looks professional. Everybody is happy. Hurrah!

I've been reading a book about promoting e-books (I'll blog more later on how to sell a million e-books by John Locke) and one thing he said seemed fairly straightforward: - make sure you have some good reader reviews in the beginning of your e-book. It puts readers in the right mood to enjoy your story.

So, I went and collected some kind words that readers had posted about my books (modest cough!) and cut and pasted them into the front of the book that I was editing. The stars vanished. So, I wrote by hand, 4 stars. It means the same, I know four out of five stars means the same, but words just don't have the same impact as a row of stars - I so wanted to see stars.

Well, I finally worked out how to get the image of stars into your e-book to show off your reader reviews. This is how I did it.

1. Collect your reviews and paste them into a Word document. The stars will show as pretty stars.

2. Format the document until it looks pretty.

3. Press the 'print screen' button on your computer.

4. Open the programme 'Paint' which is loaded free on most computers. It hides in accessories.

5. Save that document as a JPEG.

6. Open the JPEG in Picture Editor - or whatever software you use. Picture Editor is the free default one that comes with Office.

7. Select 'edit picture' and crop away all the edges that contain a photograph of your toolbars etc.

8. Resave the cropped photo.

9. Paste as an image at the beginning of your manuscript.

10. Lock the image in place by clicking on 'In line with text.'

11. Ta da! Reader reviews with pretty stars.

It's probably better not to resize the image - I made mine larger after pasting it into the text, and have since noticed that it looks strange in a couple of readers, so I'll have to enlarge the document, then go through the above steps as well. The text hasn't been updated on Amazon yet (or it hadn't last time I looked) so check it out on Smashwords if you want to see how it looks.

A Change of Heart on Smashwords

Hope this is useful.

Reviews are so important to authors - mine are building up, but slowly, if only because Amazon UK, Amazon.Com, Goodreads and Smashwords are 4 different places, so I have to have 40 reviews to get 10 on each site, if you see what I mean.
So I thought I'd try offering books in exchange for reviews.  So, if you like sweet romances, go to this link: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LouiseArmstrong and you can see what kind of romantic novels I write. Or this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Louise-Armstrong/e/B001HOGK5W/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1


If you would like a free paperback copy of a sweet romance in exchange for a review, just leave a comment with contact details below. I'll then send you my private email address so that you can send me your address and I'll post out a book to you. I won't keep any details if you tell me not to, and honest reviews are fine.

http://romanticnovelistsassociationblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/interview-with-louise-armstrong.html

Check out this link for an interview about how I write.

The RNA - Romantic Novelists' Association - is a great organisation. There is so much support available for writers and want-to-be writers. When I started writing I sent a novel to the New Writers' Scheme. It came back with a crushing report - but I needed to know the truth and somebody had to tell me! The conference is good value. There are so many workshops, and the networking opportunities are great as well. There are local meetings, but I'm usually working when they are held, which is a shame.

Another regret is that I wasn't writing when I lived in London - Lancashire is too far to travel for the events. If you live closer, take advantage of your luck and go!

I know, none better, that there's a million miles between an idea and a finished book, but still, a good high concept can be worth a lot - so here it is and if you write the book, let me know and I'll buy one.

I love to bake, and I have lots of cake books, but one problem with them all is that every recipe seems to need a different sized tin. Thanks to TK Max, I am building up a good collection, but it's costing me a fortune, and there's the storage problem. (There's an overflow in a box on top of the wardrobe!)

Here's the idea: why not produce a recipe book that featured different cakes that can all be baked in the same tin?

The 8-inch Round-tin Cake Cook. (Or 20CM as I suppose one should say these days). It could be a series: The 8-inch Square Cake Book. The 10-inch square...the bunt... the 9 x 5 loaf tin... well, you get the idea.

Every time you bought a new book, you'd buy a new tin to go with it. You could even bundle the tin with the book.

With a book themed around the cake tin,  the reader would be saved the frustration of flicking through a recipe book and going, 'Ooh, that looks nice! Dang! No 11-inch square cake tin. How about that one? Arrgh, you need a 1.5-litre bunt tin and I've got a one litre and a two litre but not the 1.5."

Like I said, I'd buy it.

I think I'm going to be a summer holiday writer - half term is now over, and I still have marking and prep to finish, lesson plans to prepare and not one but two inspections to prepare for. Ofsted and the exam board are due.
Well, it could be worse: I might not get any time at all. And if I get myself organised, one book a year every summer could work pretty well.

I needed cheering up after reading too much about real death on the internet (I became fascinated by the number of people, the HIGH number of people killed or disabled by their own pets), so I hunted for jokes to lift my mood and here's what came up:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on a camping trip. After a good dinner and a bottle of wine, they retire for the night, and go to sleep.
Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend. "Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."
"I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes" replies Watson.
"And what do you deduce from that?"
Watson ponders for a minute. "Well,
Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful, and that we are a small and insignificant part of the universe.
But what does it tell you, Holmes?"
Holmes is silent for a moment.
"Watson, you idiot!" he says. "Someone has stolen our tent!"

For once, dilly-dallying, or having no time, has paid off. Robert Hale are an independent publishers based in London (UK) who publish Black Horse Westerns. I wrote one when I was on holiday in Egypt, and they published it. For the sake of completeness, and because I really like it, I wrote to them a few months ago to check it was OK for me to publish it in e-format (I'd lost the contract - how organised is that?) and they replied saying, 'Go ahead.' I got as far as making the cover, but not any further, which is a good thing, because they wrote this week saying that Faber were going to publish it with all the other Black Horse Westerns, if I would give permission.
IF!!! IF??? Of course I want Faber to publish it! I won't have to go through the grind of turning it into an e-book. I won't have to force my poor dyslexic brain to proof read it. I won't have to find someone to draw me the half a dozen Chinese characters that are used as a part of the story. I won't have to scan the characters and find out how to publish a book with images in it. I won't have to try to market it. I won't have to make a cover...oh! I made a cover! Mind you, I'm sure theirs will be better. However, I've pasted my cover up here a second time, seeing as I had made it.
The secret to a good cover for an e-book (when you don't know what you are doing!) is to find a photograph that does all the work. This one does it all. I'm quite sorry about not getting to use it, but delighted about everything else.
My eyes have recovered. As soon as I've prepared a good few lessons ahead (all new syllabus this year - WHY do people change so often?) then I'll go back to proofing.