Sky Diary: the blog

May 18 was one of those chase days that was pleasantly low-pressure. Alethea Kontis and I chased with old friends, and we didn’t find any tornadoes, just beautiful storms from Alva to Enid, Oklahoma, culminating in amazing sunset colors in the turbulent clouds.

The time-lapse video is hypnotic, and I was delighted with the photo opportunities on the beautiful farm road where we wrapped up the chase as golds, oranges and blues roiled through the clouds.

Today was the first real chase day for Alethea Kontis and me in 2019. We’d driven out from Florida a couple of days before. It was Alethea’s second year of storm chasing, and she hadn’t seen a tornado yet. This day would deliver a beautiful one near McCook, Nebraska, that we saw from just south of Culbertson. At times it had a “Wizard of Oz” appearance. We met up with more chaser friends, and later that night, we saw a gorgeous lightning show from Lexington, Nebraska.

We drove about 450 miles this day – some of which was a large and frustrating circle. Pretty much par for the course on a storm chase.

Roll over the gallery images for more information about each photo, and click on a photo to see larger images.

A morning hailstorm on March 27, 2019, took Florida’s Space Coast by surprise. I saw it coming and got a few shots from U.S. 1 in Rockledge before it clobbered our neighborhood and went on to do even more damage on the beaches.

Two-inch hailstones fell in Indialantic, taking out car and house windows and damaging roofs and stucco. The biggest stones I saw at our house in Rockledge were one-inch-plus, right as the onslaught began. Unfortunately, we also had so much rain – especially since another hailstorm followed the first one – that a little water got into the house.

Time equals money, especially for authors who become indie publishers. That equation becomes all too real when you hire an editor, designer, formatter or author assistant.

Sometimes you pay for time explicitly — for instance, you’ll pay an assistant to work ten hours a month to do everything from social media to dealing with distributors. Sometimes you pay a flat fee for a service based on word count or complexity. But when you go beyond the scope of that fee, your hired expert may charge you by the hour.

Efficiency and planning are the best ways to meet your budget. Here are five ways to keep costs from spiraling out of control.

1. Know what you want.

It’s easy to say “I just want to write” and give up every other task to an expert you hire, but that choice can also be expensive. If you are publishing as an indie, take a little time and read some of the many, many free sources of information online. Listen to relevant podcasts. Or buy a book, such David Gaughran’s Let’s Get Digital, and learn some of the basics for yourself. That way, you can speak intelligently with the person you hire to help you, and you’ll have an idea of what to ask for.

Just some of the questions you’ll want to answer before hiring someone: Do you want a paperback as well as an ebook? What genre is your book? What publishers/distributors do you want to use? Do you want to buy ISBNs or use free ones? (There are good posts online that can help you decide all of these things. Google is your friend.)

2. Be clear about the scope of the work.

Make sure you understand what you are getting from your expert help and that it is what you want. You may or may not have a written contract; an email can be the equivalent of a handshake.

Ask questions. Will this editor provide the editing that you need? Will your editor go back and edit your post-edit revisions, too? Is your formatter willing to do a handful of reasonable corrections at no charge after you’ve seen the formatted product? Either way, endless revisions are probably not going to be covered in the initial cost.

If you’re hiring an assistant, how much do you want them to do? Social media? Graphics? Metadata? Marketing? Quantify your expectations and make sure they can meet them in the time allotted.

Also think about what you can do yourself. While many of these tasks have a learning curve or require a level of expertise, some — like uploading your book to various distributor sites — are not as hard as you might think. Social media can benefit from a personal touch. You can retain control, look for opportunities and save money if you do some things yourself.

3. Don’t rush.

There’s a reasonable expectation of getting a book back from an editor or a formatter in a week or two, especially if you have scheduled those services in advance. But if you rush into any aspect of publishing, you are likely to forget things, change your mind, or otherwise require changes after they’ve done all the work. Changes mean more time. Time means more money.

Take your time and do each step well. For instance, if you ask for a cover design without knowing your final trim size (print book dimensions) or change the title or back-cover copy, the cover designer will have to redo the cover. Cover changes are rarely simple.

In the same vein, editing a book once it’s formatted can be especially time-consuming/expensive if you have a lot of graphical elements, photos, featured quotes, or anything that makes pagination more challenging. Just deleting one sentence can change the layout of a complex book. Changes aren’t as easy as they are in a word processor, so they may take more time than you think. Besides, every time you touch an edited manuscript, you run the risk of introducing more errors.

You may end up paying double or triple for these services because they have to be repeated. A formatter may be willing to do small corrections as part of the original fee, but your rewrites should be over at that stage.

4. Do things in order.

This point is a corollary to “Don’t rush.” You should not ask for a formatted copy of your book when you haven’t completed revisions or edits. You may have a front cover in the works during editing, but you should not have your print cover (i.e. with back and spine) created before you know all of the points listed below. Otherwise, your hired help will end up doing the same work over and over again and will charge you for that time.

In addition, your expert helpers are busy. They have other projects on their schedule and other clients who have booked their time. They may not have time to completely reedit or reformat your book with every change you want to make immediately. You will face unexpected delays as well as costs.

Here’s a reasonable sequence of events when you publish:

• Write.
• Revise.
• Edit (a developmental edit, if you get one, should happen before a copy edit, and then a proofread should follow; I also recommend that you, the author, read the book one more time).
• Finalize copy before formatting!
• Buy ISBNs (if you aren’t using free ones) and have metadata filled out at Bowker for each edition (at myidentifiers.com). As part of this process, determine a preferably unique name for your publisher imprint, e.g. Jones Press, and create that in your account at Bowker. (Optionally, have a logo designed for your imprint; it can appear on your book spine and sometimes back cover, and on the title page.)
• Establish accounts on distributor sites (Kindle Direct Publishing, Draft2Digital, Smashwords, iTunes/iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or whatever you choose) and fill out financial/tax information.
• Have your title, author name, book description, author bio, review quotes, potential categories (BISAC and Kindle, which are different), potential keywords, additional metadata (like series title and book number), imprint name and ISBNs (if relevant) gathered in one document, especially if you are asking someone else to format, upload and publish your work.
• Provide this information along with the final manuscript, high-resolution front cover, and interior graphics/imprint logo (if you have one) to your formatter to format your book for print and ebook.
• Upload files to distributors.

In parallel, you may have a designer working on a cover, but you should:

• Know your print trim size (cover dimensions) at minimum before commissioning a front cover, including an ebook cover, and let your designer know if you plan a print edition so they can allow for the bleed (where the design is trimmed at the edge of the cover). Kindle Direct Publishing has a list of standard sizes here.
• Make sure you’ve communicated what you want to your designer, including mood, genre and specific imagery, but also be open to taking her advice on what works. This is why you’ve hired her. Saying you want a “science fiction cover” will mean many iterations until you get what you want; saying you want “a cover with a spaceship, stars, planets and a battle” is a lot more specific and will save you time and heartache.
• When it’s time to complete the full print cover, know what interior color paper you want (for instance, white or cream on KDP), which affects spine width.
• Know how many pages your book interior has (after formatting). This number also will determine the width of the spine.
• Make a decision about your cover finish as well (glossy or matte).
• Finalize your title, subtitle and author name.
• Write your back-cover copy (or have an expert do it) and have it edited.
• Know your genre (primary BISAC category, which is often placed on the back cover). See the BISAC category list here. Note that Kindle has different categories.
• Provide all this information and your print ISBN (unless you are using one provided by the distributor) to your cover designer.

If your formatter is also your cover designer, then a lot of this communication will be easier. You may outsource some of these steps, but if you do, include deadlines in your plans so you have everything done in sequence.

5. Be patient and publish.

If you’ve planned well, you will have scheduled all of these steps and allowed a little time for the unexpected. Maybe you’ve put your book on preorder and you have to meet that deadline, so building in a little extra time for life, glitches and hurricanes isn’t a bad idea. Plus you’ll want to allow time to build buzz and market your book before publication. Publishing is not instantaneous; sometimes it takes a while for a book to hit stores even after you hit “publish.” Allow enough time and be patient.

You want your book to be perfect. I know the feeling. It’s important to be meticulous and publish a great product, but at some point, you have to let it go. You have to stop making revisions and publish the book, especially if you’ve done your due diligence and reached the formatting stage. Worst-case scenario: You make changes later. The beauty of indie publishing is you can go into a book and change a word or two — this is fairly easy with ebooks — and hit “publish” again if you must. (Perfection is still desirable; with print, more steps are involved in re-publishing, and if you are publishing with, say, IngramSpark, every change costs you money. Yes, more money.)

If you plan ahead and allow yourself enough time to complete each task properly, you can publish with confidence — and without breaking the bank.

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Chris Kridler is a writer and editor who specialized in copy editing in journalism school and went on to have a career in newspapers. Now she writes books and works with other authors, when she’s not shooting photos and chasing storms. Learn more at SharpEditor.com.

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Illustrations licensed from DepositPhotos.

Once upon a time, I created book covers for my storm-chasing adventures, the Storm Seekers Series. I was striving to capture their cross-genre nature — they include adventure, romance, drama and humor — and I thought it might be cool to be a little different. I’ve learned a lot since then, and one thing that’s clear is that cross-genre covers are just confusing to readers. Another lesson is that “different” isn’t necessarily good. And the third, obvious lesson to anyone selling books these days is that books have to look great at thumbnail size, too, because the majority of sales of ebooks and print books happen online.

I’ve been designing covers for other authors and decided it was time to give some attention to my original trilogy. Using photos I took while chasing storms and a couple of smaller licensed elements, as well as the magic of Photoshop, I created illustrations for the covers that I hope will convey the excitement I still feel when I think about these stories.

I like romance in my adventures and interesting characters who grow (it takes Jack three books to complete the journey from cad to hero). I love action and, of course, the thrill of seeing a supercell come together and produce a tornado. Add elements of a science thriller and some kick-ass women as heroines, and you have the Storm Seekers Series. The first three books are also available in a virtual boxed set.  I say “the first three” because I am contemplating more. In the meantime, I’ve been writing romances under a pen name. More on those later.

The new covers are percolating through the online bookstores.

Want to chase some storms? Check out the books on Amazon or learn more and get links to other stores here.

I confess it … I’m hopelessly behind in updating the storm reports on ye olde Sky Diary website. But in the meantime, I’ve made my almost annual attempt to film night-blooming cereus flowers opening in a time-lapse. These huge, beautiful flowers bloom for just one night each from a cactus vine that looks kind of like a snake curling up a palm tree and the posts of our deck. Every spring, I look forward to these magnificent blooms in our neighborhood.

Check out the latest video below.

To see further (past) attempts at capturing these blooms, you can check out my YouTube channel.

Alethea Kontis and I targeted southwest Kansas near the Colorado border for our first Tornado Alley chase of the 2018 season. Despite a brief foray into Colorado, we ended up chasing pretty cells from Kansas into the Oklahoma panhandle. We saw multiple funnels but nothing close to a tornado. It was mostly a rainbow chase, but a pretty one. And we got to see Dorothy’s House, straight from Oz.

Roll over the thumbnails to see the captions, or click on an image to start a slide show of larger photos.

March 20 brought severe storms to Florida, so my friend Alethea Kontis and I headed out for a shakedown cruise of my new storm-chasing data setup. Unfortunately, we were chasing in the Orlando area, so we saw a lot more red lights, strip malls and trees than we did storms – but we did get a nice view of a tornado-warned cell on the west side of Orlando. See photos from the chase here.

In the meantime, I’ve added a chase report to the 2017 files here. On May 22 of last year, I chased in New Mexico. The day ended with a gorgeous storm that is much better to describe in photos, not words.

Not long until May – and another chase in Tornado Alley!  Stay tuned.

On this storm chase, Alethea Kontis and I headed west from Brevard County, targeting storms coming ashore on Florida’s west coast. I anticipated catching a cell west or just northwest of Orlando. City chasing is horrible, but we still managed to catch a tornado-warned storm, briefly.

Roll over the thumbnails to see the captions or click to see a larger image and start a slide show.

 

Professional editing is essential, but you must be the first editor on your book.

I’m a writer and an editor. I’ve been both for a long time. And despite my training in copy editing and years of experience, I still need an editor.

We all need an editor. The big question for indie authors: What kind of editing do you really need?

There are multiple types of editors. Self-published authors are most likely going to deal with one or more of these:

Developmental/story editor: This editor reads your book for the big picture. She looks for plot holes, characterization issues, clarity, continuity, tone, and whether you’ve fully exploited the themes of your book. She may make suggestions regarding structure, chapters you can cut, and more. She may also include line edits and light copy editing.

Copy editor: A copy editor corrects grammar and spelling. She looks for factual errors, including geographical goofs or anachronisms, such as a song that didn’t come out until a decade after your characters go to the prom. She will catch inconsistencies and continuity errors, such as when a character’s name changes halfway through. She pays attention to style, which is another way of saying she will make your book conform to standards, like those detailed in The Chicago Manual of Style. (Though the beauty of indie publishing is that you can set your own style on certain terms, as long as you’re consistent – like how you handle blond vs. blonde or whether you prefer the Oxford comma.) She may make wording suggestions or point out sentences that could use a rewrite for clarity or tone (line editing). She may also find plot holes and point out bigger issues. I tend to do the latter as well as the former, so my copy edits have a touch of developmental editing, but your mileage may vary.

Proofreader: The proofreader reads your book after all the other editing is done. There shouldn’t be many errors for him to find. A proofreader might find a missing word or quotation mark or the occasional typo.

Do you really need all of these editors? Do you need any of them? Maybe you’re thinking, hey, my mom is a big reader and got top grades in English in high school and loves reading my books. She’ll catch those errant apostrophes, right?

Alas, unless your mom is a trained copy editor, her loving ministrations are unlikely to be good enough. And you might not be ready for copy editing anyway. Writing is a process, and so is editing. You shouldn’t hire an editor until you have done everything you can to make your book as good as it can be.

In other words, you are the first editor on your book.

The editing before the editing

You shouldn’t ship your book to an editor as soon as you’ve typed “The End” unless you have a lot of time and money to spend. While it’s great to get professional feedback, you’ll get the most out of an edit if your manuscript is refined before you send it off. As a writer, I know what it’s like to be sick of a book, to have lived with it for so long that you’re ready to hand it over and walk away. But making your book great is YOUR job. You’ve spent the time to write it; don’t rush revisions.

Start by getting feedback from fellow writers, if you can. Often, a critique partner or critique group can take the place of a developmental editor. Whether you exchange work by email or sit around a friend’s living room, drinking wine and reading your latest chapters to one another, you can get invaluable input into your story’s strengths and weaknesses.

When I’m done writing a book, I give it a first read to make sure it has all the basics. Usually I feel pretty good after that read. I’m like, hey, I’ve written a book! And it doesn’t suck! By the second read, I’m grimacing and slashing my way through it. Its faults become manifest. And there are multiple reads after that, or as most writers call them, revisions.

I’ve heard a couple of famous writers say they never revise. I congratulate them on their superhero powers. But I believe that just as everyone can benefit from an editor, everyone can benefit from a revision. And then a beta reader, if you have one, can help you pinpoint some of those story and tone issues that you didn’t catch in revisions, before you ever send your work to a copy editor.

Preparing for the copy edit

Many editors will edit a free sample to make sure both of you know what to expect and to gauge whether you’ll work well together and if the manuscript is ready for a copy edit. I’ve occasionally turned away copy editing clients when I thought a copy edit would be a waste of their time – at least, a waste right now. It didn’t mean the book was bad. It just meant it wasn’t ready.

After you finish your first draft, a revision, a critique process or a developmental edit is in order. A copy edit should be considered the very last step before publication (or second to last, if you have a proofreader). You should consider your book darn near perfect when you hand it over.

One reason you shouldn’t just hand over a rough draft is that copy editors are not going to fix big plot holes and sloppy characterizations. They don’t do wholesale rewrites. That’s not their job. Another is that they’ll do their job a lot better if you give them as clean a manuscript as you can. Even though a good copy editor will go through a manuscript two or three times, she will occasionally miss things. A copy editor will miss more things if you give her a really messy manuscript.

If grammar isn’t your strong point, you can address some of the technical stuff with software, such as Grammarly or ProWritingAid. There’s a good comparison of these kinds of helpers here.

Be prepared to deliver a manuscript to your editor electronically in a commonly used format. Word is an industry standard and is my preference, especially because I’m on a Mac, and Word can go back and forth with PCs. Not many editors want paper these days, because electronic editing is so efficient for the editor and the author. A readable font (for instance, the dull but practical Times New Roman in 12-point type, double-spaced) is also necessary. No cursive or sans-serif fonts, please. Paragraphs indented using the paragraph formatting tool instead of tabs are helpful, too, in anticipation of later formatting. Insert page breaks or section breaks at the end of chapters instead of hitting the return key a dozen times.

If you’ve never hired a copy editor, ask for references or get recommendations from fellow writers. Ask if the editor will edit the aforementioned sample, usually a few pages from the start of your book. And then be prepared to reserve that editor’s time. Allow at least a week or two for editing, though some may work faster.

The most popular editors are busy and scheduled out months in advance. And that means that you need to give yourself deadlines and stick to them. Being indie these days also means being professional and planning ahead. Do you have your writing projects mapped out for the year? Then you should also know when your manuscript will enter each phase of editing.

After the copy edit

You also have to allow time to review the copy editor’s changes. A good copy editor respects your voice and your opinion and gives you a chance to answer questions and make changes as you see fit. For instance, I make edits using Word’s Track Changes so the author can see exactly what I’ve done and accept or reject the edits. The writer can see my comments and make decisions about my suggestions. Don’t expect to get your book back from the copy editor and hit “publish” on your e-book the same day.

Finally, after your (careful) post-copy-edit edits, a proofreader is always helpful, even if it’s just a grammar-savvy friend who can catch a missing word or bad punctuation. If you know you’re one of those writers who’s oblivious to grammar, then make sure you have an editor or proofreader backstop your post-edit changes.

It’s always good for the author to read the book one last time. To make your last pass as fresh as possible, read it on a different computer, in a printout or on your e-reader. It’s amazing how a change in format helps you see glitches you missed before.

Do you need a copy editor? Yes, you do. I read constantly – indie books and traditionally published books in a variety of genres. Even “trad” books usually contain a few errors. Readers may forgive a few errors, but when there are mistakes on every page, readers may leave bad reviews and never pick up your books again.

Errors in early drafts are to be expected. Even brilliant writers make errors. Even grammar wizards make errors. Thus savvy editors are friends to us all.

“Indie” doesn’t mean you have to do everything yourself. It means you are your own publisher, and a publisher needs good design, editing and marketing. A professional indie author will publish edited books.

There can be a happy ending to your story – a cleanly edited book you can be proud of. But you have to make the investment of time and effort before and after your editor reviews your masterpiece to make it happen.

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Chris Kridler is a writer and editor who specialized in copy editing in journalism school and went on to have a career in newspapers. Now she writes books and works with other authors, when she’s not shooting photos and chasing storms. Learn more at SharpEditor.com.

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Illustrations licensed from DepositPhotos.