The deer are coming for their breakfast, trotting down the driveway toward our patio. Although I haven’t seen the lame deer yet, I suspect he’ll be there. They’ll crunch up some corn, then groom each other, licking and preening just like cats do after a meal, and finally they’ll move off to settle in the sun. Sometimes the neighborhood flock of wild turkeys approaches while the deer are still eating, and when they realize there’s corn to be had, they sprint in and grab what they can. There is much whirling of turkeys among thin deer legs, much precision pecking. The deer try to shoo the turkeys off, but turkeys don’t mind well. It’s clear they are used to guerilla eating.

When the turkeys have moved off to search for birdseed that smaller birds have kicked out of neighborhood feeders, our resident chipmunk pops out of wherever he lives, and cleans up the remains of the morning corn meal. Both deer and turkeys leave a few kernels in unreachable places—under the garden cart, deep in crevices between rocks—and the chipmunk is happy to root them out. He nibbles them into manageable bites, packs his cheeks with food and scampers off to deposit it somewhere else, a hedge against the remains of winter. Junior, our orange tabby, sits at the sliding glass door and makes what I call “hunting noises”—little kitty throat clicks—and switches his tail as he watches the chipmunk perch on a boulder, his own tiny tail twitching in time with Junior’s. The pecking order is complete when the chipmunk retreats to his burrow and Junior curls up on our bed for his 8-hour day-nap. All is right with the world.

It’s going to be nearly 70 here today, and I’m going to begin cleaning out my gardens from last season and watering the lawn, which is still brown and hasn’t seen much moisture this month. Then I’ll get to work on my novel, which is currently giving me lip. More on that tomorrow.

A lot of people who live out here in the forest outside the city of Rapid City don’t care much for deer. They’re protected, of course, when they live inside rural suburban communities like mine—it’s illegal to discharge a gun in our subdivision. The predator that kills the most deer out here is the family sedan, or maybe the pickup. (Next in line is the mountain lion, but they’re just as likely to pursue a family dog or cat, which are probably easier to take down than a deer.)

As a result of the no-shoot policy, deer proliferate. I worked for a while for a man who, in a previous career, had been a forest ranger, and he told me that whitetail deer typically grow up, bear their young, live and die within 300 yards of where they’re born. The does, especially, hang out in their neighborhoods. Then people come along and build homes there, and try to push the deer out. But deer are persistent. They’re happy in our subdivision because in spring, summer and into fall, there’s plenty to eat. We happily provide grass, shrubbery, flowers and vegetable gardens for them to graze.

People do try lots of interesting ways to keep deer out of their beautifully landscaped yards. They scatter mothballs. They buy lots of “deer-away” products and spray them at the perimeter of their yards. On advice from a local gardener, I sent my husband outside to pee around the perimeter of my vegetable garden. None of it really works. Every year I go to the local garden center and choose plants that are marked “deer resistant.” Yeah, not so much. Usually it goes like this: a deer wanders into the yard, takes a bite of the deer-resistant plant. Doesn’t like it. Moves on. Then her yearling follows suit. Ditto the rest of the herd of 25. Result? A plant eaten down to its roots. So I keep a planting diary from year to year, marking “deer resistant” things I’ve bought that deer ate anyway as “don’t buy again.”

One of the secrets I have found useful, though, is this: deer are lazy. So I try to plant things they really DON’T like (daffodils, snapdragons, catmint, lavender) around the edges of my garden. They graze past, sniff, and don’t usually step deeper into the garden in search of something better to eat. So now my spring battle is usually one of setting up my parapets of plants to protect the rest of my garden. I’m planning it now, though March is typically our snowiest month.

The lame deer was back this morning for corn. One of these days I’ll post pictures of my herd. While I love them to death, they are hard on gardens. 

I know it’s a bad idea, but I feed whitetail deer. By this time of year, they’ve denuded every bush, eaten every dried husk of weed and grazed grass nearly to its roots. The prospect of corn, whole kernels, dried and hard, makes them literally lick their deer lips. The yearlings, which are much less timid than their mothers, come onto the patio and right up to the sliding glass door, smearing their noses across the glass as they peer in, looking for me. And when I trot down the stairs inside, they mill excitedly around the concrete slab, flipping their tails in pleasure. I toss out about ten cups of corn for the 16 or so deer that show up each morning, then listen while they crunch it down.

I hate it when the bucks turn up. They’re bullies used to having their way, and they intimidate the does, pushing them aside. When that happens I open the door and frighten them all away. It takes the bucks longer to come back—they’re conditioned more to avoid humans, I think—so the yearlings and does eat frantically until they do.

As it turns out, deer faces are every bit as different from each other as people faces. My favorite deer, whom I have named “Betty” after my favorite aunt, has wide-set eyes and ears that stick out to the side more than most. “Suzy” has the perfect deer face: wide eyes, symmetrical features, petite. She reminds me of a homecoming queen. The yearlings, whose faces are still evolving, are harder to tell apart.

A couple of weeks ago a deer turned up with a broken leg. Actually, more than broken. His knee joint is completely disarticulated, the bones separated, the bottom half of his leg hanging like an unused mitten from a sleeve. He hobbles (quite well) on three legs, and is happy to have the corn. I expect food is tougher for him to find because he can’t fight back when the big does rear up and flail at him with their front hooves, which is how they enforce their pecking order. I keep expecting them to make noise, but really the only sounds I’ve heard them make are snorts and stomps, which are prompted by our cat Junior, whom they don’t trust.

When they’ve finished rooting our as many kernels as they can find, tongues probing into the expansion cracks in the concrete, pushing through the rocks next to the patio, the deer move off about ten feet and groom each other. I am always surprised at how thorough they are, much like cats bathing after a meal. There doesn’t seem to be any particular partnership among the deer—who licks whom seems random. They work in pairs until they reach some point of cleanliness (when the burrs are banished? I don’t know) then move into the weeds in the gully to lie down and chew their deer cuds for an hour or so. Content. Full for the moment.

So now I rise every morning, pour myself a cup of coffee with a slug of fat free French Vanilla creamer, and look out the dining room window for my deer. They’re usually there, looking up at me, waiting for their breakfast. If the lame deer is there, I go downstairs to feed them immediately. If he’s not, I wait for a half hour or so. Sometimes he’s there, sometimes not. I hope his dead leg falls off and he manages to live a while more. But there are mountain lions here. Life for a lame deer must be iffy, and every morning I see him, I’m glad. The price of the corn is well worth it, though everybody here says it’s a bad idea. I can’t help it; I love my deer.

It’s here! After much editing, followed by several mindless days of formatting the manuscript and wrapping my head around the details of production in the e-book world, my first mystery, UNREASONABLE RISK, has arrived in amazon.com’s Kindle Store. It’s been uploaded to smashwords.com as well, and will be available there—and at other e-tailers—sometime soon. Woo hoo!! And I do have to say that, especially when compared to the $27.99 + tax pricetag on the hardcover, the e-book price of $2.99 is quite the bargain. (And for those of you who don’t own an e-reader yet, you can still read this book at $2.99 by downloading the free apps at http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=sa_menu_karl3?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771. You can read it on your PC, your Mac, your phone, pretty much anything that has a screen.)

The cover, which I think is fabulous, was designed by a great illustrator, Kate Brennan Hall. Notice the similarity in names, did you? Yes, we’re related. She’s married to my brother John, but that doesn’t make her less of a talent in the illustration world. Check out her website at www.katebrennanhall.com. And when you do, wander through her blog for a moment; there’s always something interesting going on there. Anyway, here’s the cover:

Cool, isn’t it? Wait until you see Kate’s cover for my next book, THROUGH DARK SPACES, coming soon to e-book world now that I know how to make that happen.

If you’ll forgive the allusion to childbirth (about which I know little, having never done it myself), bearing the e-book was much more like labor than the hardcover was. I’ll be talking about production of the perfectly formatted manuscript for the rest of this blog, so if that makes your eyes roll back into your head, just reply with praise for the cover design and check back again another time.

If you’re interested in how to format your own manuscript for e-book retailers, however, read on. Begin with a Microsoft Word document. If you have Word 2007, though, please save yourself a ton of trouble and save the manuscript right now in an older version of Word. At least one of the major e-tailers won’t upload a file with a suffix of .docx. Done? Okay, now it’s time to confront your formatting.

If you use Word’s Styles and Formatting function, you’re probably in better shape than you think. If you don’t, it’s time to learn about it. If you use the Tab key to create paragraph indents or if (heaven forbid!) you space over five space using the Space Bar, you’ve got a lot of work to do. If you’re not sure, go to the toolbar at the top of your page and turn on the little button that looks like a paragraph symbol (¶). It’s called the “Show/Hide” button. When you turn it on, a whole lot of little characters will appear in your document. If there are any arrows (→), you’ve used the Tab key. Grit your teeth and take them all out. Yes, out of the entire manuscript. If you’ve used the Space Bar, there will be little lines of dots (…..) instead of arrows. Take those out, too, all of them. In their place, use the Enter key to separate your paragraphs.

How SHOULD you indicate a new paragraph then? Use a Style. Go back to the toolbar at the top of the page and look to the left of your font name, which should read “Times New Roman.” There’s a box there that probably says “Normal.” If you pull down the options, however, you’ll see a list of formatting styles. Click on “More” at the bottom of the list and a window will pop open at the right of your screen. (If the option for “More” doesn’t appear when you pull down the Normal list, go to the button immediately to its left, the one that looks like it has to capital A’s on it, and click on that. Same result.)

To make a style that indents automatically when you hit the Enter key, click on “New Style” that’s located just under the top white box. You’ll see a series of boxes. Under “Name” select something you’ll recognize and type it in (like My Paragraph). Leave the second box at “Paragraph” since that’s what you’ll be formatting. You can leave the other two alone, too, at ¶ Normal and ¶ Style 1. Make sure your font is Times New Roman (preferred by many e-tailers) and the font size no larger than 14 – I used 12. Then click on the Format box at the bottom left of the window. The results will be familiar to you when you click on “Paragraph.” You’ve most likely been to this window before. Under Indentation in the Paragraph window, go to Special. Pull down the menu and click on “First Line” and under “By” type in 0.3”. Under “Spacing” just below that, make sure both Left and Right are at 0, and set Line Spacing to Single. When you click OK back to the main screen, your new Style will show up in the list under “Pick formatting to apply.” How cool is that? Now you can highlight all of your manuscript using Edit/Select All, then click on your new style, and wow! All the paragraphs indent three tenths of an inch miraculously.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about smart quotes, chapter headings and breaks, symbols, and all the rest. But now, I’m going to go read my very own e-book, UNREASONABLE RISK! I hope you will, too.

Clichés generally became clichés because they’re true, or at least apt. Lori Devoti, romance and fantasy author, knows that, and when she devised the concept of a “plotting party” she remembered one of the most tired clichés of all: two heads are better than one. I attended her presentation on plotting at the University of Wisconsin’s Writers’ Institute several weeks, and thought it was a practical, no nonsense and imaginative approach to sparking ideas for plots that are going nowhere.

Are you stuck for an idea? For direction? Is your protagonist mired in indecision? Here are a couple of steps to take to resolve the impasse:

1) Know your protagonist.
What motivates her? In the now-standard language of goal, motivation and conflict (see Debra Dixon’s book here), you must be able to fill in the blanks in this sentence: My protagonist wants __(goal)_____ because ___(motivation)___, but __(conflict)___. As a challenge, give her an internal as well as an external set of G,M and C, and make sure that those, in combination, drive the action. (Note: every story, every novel, every screenplay and every stage play must be built around a conflict. If there’s no conflict, there’s no story, right?)

2) Follow the writer’s journey.
Once you understand what’s moving your character (and your plot) forward, compare your plot to the points outlined in Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey. (Check out my previous posts on the film, Avatar, for more on that.) The structure of the hero’s journey, as outlined in Vogler’s book, is found in the mythos of nearly every civilization on earth. It resonates with nearly everybody, yet it provides for enormous variety of circumstances. Your characters don’t have to hit every single plot point, but the more difficulty they encounter, the tighter you put the screws to them, the more satisfying the ending will be. If, however, your characters refuse to cooperate, if they won’t turn the corner into the disaster you’ve planned for them and you see no way to push them into it, here’s Lori’s idea:

3) Host a plotting party.
Lay in supplies—crackers, cheese, fruit, ice cream, maybe a little alcohol, caffeine, whatever gets you going—and invite your writer friends to join you. Supply a white board and markers, presentation-size tear-off tablet paper, or lots of colors of Post-It notes. When everybody has settled with a plate of food and a beverage, spend some time explaining your book. If you know the beginning and ending but have no idea how to get from one to the other, tell them. If you love your protagonist but can’t quite see what her nemesis looks like, tell them. If you’ve plotted the thing, scene by scene, but your characters can’t seem to go where you want and do what you need them to, tell your friends about that. Then ask for their help. You’ll be amazed at the twists and turns that will emerge from their fertile imaginations.

At the conference, five of us discussed a plot problem supplied by a group member. Turns out the problem wasn’t with the plot, it was with the protagonist. Her goal wasn’t worthy of a whole book and her conflict was marginal. The author hadn’t set her against the antagonist until very late in the book. The secondary characters were carrying the load while the protagonist wandered, sans conflict, through the chaos around her.

Even if the plotting party doesn’t steer you to the best and final solution to your plot problem, I guarantee it will provide ideas. It will highlight problems you, the author, have been too close to recognize, and it will jump-start your imagination. The only caveat you must absolutely remember is that, when your writers friends call on you to help them with plotting, you must graciously and enthusiastically help them, too!

Many thanks to Lori Devoti for a wonderful discussion. Please visit her website for more writing tips.

Openings are tough. It’s incredibly difficult to write one that agents and editors haven’t read before, much less one that will surprise readers. One of the most important things is to remember that you must write a beginning that appeals to ALL of them. Now before you panic, here are a few things to consider:

1) Agents and editors will give your manuscript, oh, maybe five seconds, as long as it takes for a hand to reach to the round file under the desk, or as long as it takes to call up the next e-query. (Well, that didn’t help the panic, did it?) Face it. Agents and editors are jaded. They receive hundreds of manuscripts a year, and if your manuscript reads like one they received last month, last week, maybe even yesterday, there will be no pause on your sample chapter’s path to oblivion.

2) Readers are slightly more forgiving. Most of my reader friends will give a book fifty pages. One or two are a little more impatient and will quit after ten if they aren’t yet hooked. Does that ease the panic? Nope.

What do readers look for in a good opening? What do agents and editors look for? It’s essentially the same thing. THEY LOOK FOR A REASON TO KEEP READING.

Before I take a shot at what to put into a great opening paragraph/page/chapter, I’m going to eliminate some possibilities. These openings are so common, so tried and true that they’ve become clichés. They’re a surefire way to make an agent yawn and your chapter to be tossed.

The don’ts:
1) Don’t ever open with weather unless weather causes the opening conflict or inciting incident (i.e., the tornado in THE WIZARD OF OZ, but keep in mind that it’s been done before).
2) Don’t open with a description of place, no matter how beautiful it is. Get to the action!
3) Don’t open with an alarm clock or telephone waking somebody up. Waaay too well used. Shame on you.
4) Don’t start with your protagonist in transport, especially climbing into a cab or standing in line waiting to board an airplane.
5) Don’t open with an unnamed bad guy lurking somewhere. We want to meet the character we’ll be with for the next 300 pages. The bad guy comes later.
6) No dreams. Never, never, never, never, ever.
7) A beautifully rendered scene that contains no action, doesn’t further growth of characters or advance the plot.
8) An action scene that has nothing to do with the conflict of the story.

(Okay, you say. What about the film, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK? The action sequence at the beginning had nothing to do with recovering the Ark of the Covenant. True, but think about how much we learn about Indiana Jones in that scene. He’s a risk taker, an adventurer, a quick thinker, a lover of antiquities, accomplished with a bullwhip and dedicated to saving precious artifacts for museums [read: for us], not for profit. And he’s afraid of snakes. Every one of those qualities is exploited later in the film. It also introduces us to his nemesis, Dr. Rene Belloq. And the kicker: if you were reading that first sequence, would you want to keep reading? That’s a big old YES.)

So maybe 8) should read, Don’t open with an action scene that has nothing to do with the conflict of the story and doesn’t add to the reader’s understanding of the characters. Fair enough.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with some examples of what I think are great openings and why I think they stand out. May be a word or two about what SHOULD go into an opening.

PS I’m not sure why the smiley face turned up at number 8, but I’m taking it as a good omen!

Have you ever read a book and KNOWN the author hadn’t done the necessary research? The plot has holes in it large enough to fly a 747 through them? Yeah, me, too. I’ll give a book a serious try, though, despite major deficiencies, if I like the characters. And for that to happen, they have to ring true.

The most difficulty I have, especially in genre fiction (mysteries, science fiction and especially romances), is with men writing female characters and women writing male characters. I think that, with the deadline pressure a lot of genre authors are under these days, it’s difficult to add dimension to characters book after book. In some cases, authors simply don’t write the opposite sex — it’s too much work. In other cases, their opposite sex characters are secondary rather than primary characters and don’t have to be fully fleshed out. Henning Mankell’s female characters are skeletal. Many of John Sandford’s female characters are high-powered women (Weather Karkinnen is an ophthalmic surgeon) and behave much like men do. And then there’s Robert B. Parker’s Susan Silverman, Spenser’s love interest, who makes women furious and has prompted many nasty comments in on-line forums. Who eats a quarter of a lettuce leaf for lunch and takes two hours to finish a small glass of white wine? And then there are romances, where men are always sexy, are always ripped and cut, always type A personalities. Yuck. Romance heroes are much like the willowy fashion models we see, touched up and perfected, in ads: not remotely real.

So how to write a good character of the opposite sex? I try to do two things:
1) observe and
2) ask.

It’s really a lot of fun simply to watch men. I go to the local mall and eavesdrop on groups of men. I sit near them in the food court, walk just ahead of them, listening, down the center of the mall. I go with my husband to events where men go: hockey games, the race track. I go to the Home Show and the Sportsman’s Show at the local civic center. In other words, I spy. I listen to the words they choose. I listen for emotion and how they express it (not much, and not often, but every once in a while there’ll be a real pearl). I listen for how they describe things. I watch them in action, try to figure out how they notice things and what they notice.

And boy, are they different from women. An acquaintance of mine once wrote a scene where the hero wakes up next to the woman he’s been pursuing for a while. They’re both naked. His first thought: “I love her so much. I can’t wait to marry her.” Yeah, that ain’t happenin’ in the real world. That’s the perfect example of misunderstanding the differences between the sexes.

So once I’ve done my spying, I’ll go back to my writing space and draw those male characters as well as I can. Then I ask my male writer friends and my husband to read them critically. It’s probably the most important step I take in creating characters. If my guy characters don’t ring true, they’ll tell me, and bluntly. In one scene, my working class male character was speaking with another man as a pretty women walked by. He commented, “Man, look at that. She’s hot.” I was corrected to, “Nice ass, eh?” Fewer words, more direct. Probably more real.

If you’re a writer, though, here’s another tidbit: readers like to be surprised. They like it when characters do things that are unexpected. Characters gain in complexity when you, the writer, put them in situations that push them, make them react, and they do something unusual.

So the watchword is: research the opposite sex, ask somebody to read your stuff in draft and fix the inconsistencies, yet try to give your characters dimension by challenging them and allowing them to react in inconsistent ways. How’s that for an assignment?

Tomorrow, I’ll start a series of blogs on openings. What hooks a reader, right there, on the first page?

This week I’m working for a friend in her used bookstore. Lori’s had a terribly difficult year, as has her husband, and they wanted to take a vacation long enough to relax and rejuvenate their bruised spirits, but she couldn’t find anybody to take care of her store. So I volunteered. Now don’t get me wrong: she’ll pay me for my time, probably mostly in credit for books at her store. And if you’re like me, if you decorate your home with books, you’ll understand how broad a smile lingers on my face as I think about that!

Everybody’s Bookstore has a thriving internet trade which, fortunately for me, has been suspended for the week (but check back after May 9th!). It also has a large, loyal clientele of local and regional readers. They bustle through the door, wave, and head for their favorite section of the store. Some have tastes I never would have predicted (men reading Johanna Lindsey romances and women shrieking with delight at finding a Louie L’Amour they’ve never read), and all of the patrons are interesting. Lots of retired people, people who have an admitted addiction to the printed word and leave the store with a stack of ten books, people who search diligently for a new author or a long out-of-print classic. People whose faces light up with delight when I pull the book they’ve been looking for off the shelf. A few have asked for recommendations, and are excited to hear about some of my personal favorites, authors whose work is a must-buy for me. “Ooooh,” they say. “Do you have any of her work here? If so, I’ll start at the beginning of the series.”

Interestingly enough, I have noticed that many of my favorite authors aren’t readily available at the store. Because I write mysteries and thrillers, I read a lot of those simply to gauge where the market is going. The store, though, has few of my favorites: William Kent Krueger, C. J. Box, Margaret Coel, Craig Johnson, Louise Penny. Maybe it’s because readers love those books and don’t easily trade them in; maybe it’s because those writers don’t get the national recognition they deserve. It certainly can’t be that my taste is mid-list. 

And then there’s the conundrum of the used bookstore. While the lure of deeply discounted books is like a siren song to people like me (and most likely you), the problem is this: when I buy a used book, it supports my friend Lori, but it doesn’t support the author. Since I’m an author myself, I can’t help but think about how this system works. My hardcover edition of UNREASONABLE RISK sold for a whopping $27.99. Of that, I got $2.00 in royalties. Not much, considering how much sweat and blood went into writing it, not to mention the vast uncounted number of hours. Now used copies are for sale not only here in Rapid City at Everybody’s Bookstore, but on line at amazon.com and many other e-tailers. While I applaud the possibilities of wide distribution and its potential to increase readership, with respect to those used copies, royalties for me are now a thing of the past.

So as I think about buying used books, I’m developing a personal credo: if I have the resources, I’ll purchase new books simply to support the author, even the big ones. If I’m trying a new author or exploring a new genre, I’ll try a used book first if it’s available. In the past, I’ve used the library for those instances where I launch out into new reading experiences, but now that I’ll have some trade credit, I’ll use it that way. I’ll also use that credit to help expand my existing collection of reference books: chemistry and biochemistry texts (I know, geek), gardening tomes, craft how-to’s, that sort of thing. I’ll always buy new books on the craft of writing. There are some inconsistencies here, for sure, but I feel obligated to do as much as I can to support the writer, for without her, my life would be much smaller, much less imaginative and much, much less enjoyable. We’ll see how that works. I’ll let you know.

So here’s to the writer, to the purveyors of new AND used books, and to the much-treasured experience of reading! I’m just finishing Dana Stabenow’s A FINE AND BITTER SNOW, a Kate Shugak novel, and will write a review of it next week. My mystery book club will be discussing it Monday, so I’ll report on their collective opinion then.

Now that I’ve registered the copyright for my first novel, UNREASONABLE RISK, I’m ready to move on. So what’s next?

Another decision. Shall I purchase an ISBN for my book or simply go with the flow and let amazon and other e-book distributors take care of that for me? Hmmm. To make a good decision, I first decided to check ISBNs out.

What IS an ISBN? An International Standard Book Number (ISBN) identifies each uniquely published book or edition of that book. For instance, if you publish an electronic book, an audio book and a trade paperback in addition to a hardcover version of your book, each one of them will require a separate ISBN. So stop and think: will you be sticking solely with an e-book? What if your e-book vaults to the top of the e-book best seller list? (One can always hope, right? ) Even if it only does modestly well, you might want to produce a physical copy through one of a number of respectable publishers like Createspace or Lightning Source. (More on that in later blogs.) You might want to record an audio version to market through audible.com and other audio retailers. My advice: think BIG!

ISBNs are distributed worldwide, not just in the United States. An ISBN is a 13-digit number that identifies your book, allowing for efficient marketing and cataloging of books by libraries, bookstores and book distributors, ALL of whom are terribly important to you as the publisher of your book.

ISBNs are purchased through a single company in the United States, Bowker, Inc. True, it’ a monopoly, but the ISBN system was set up that way in every country to avoid possible duplication of numbers. Each country has a single source for ISBNs purchased by publishers within its borders. Bowker’s website explains a lot about ISBNs, and you can find it at www.bowker.com/index.php/home. Click on “Identifier Services,” then ISBNs, and check out the FAQ. You can also go to www.isbn.org, which takes you through a different portal to the Bowker website.

Okay, now that you’ve learned what you can about ISBNs, check out what the e-book retailers like amazon.com and barnes&noble.com offer. Let’s check amazon.com first. In the FAQ under Kindle Publishing, amazon says this: “An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is not required to publish content with Kindle Direct Publishing. Once your content is published on the KDP web site, Amazon.com will assign it a 10-digit ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), which is unique to the eBook, and is an identification number for the Kindle Book on Amazon.com. If you already have an ISBN for your eBook, you’ll be able to enter it during the publishing process. Do *not* use an ISBN for the print book edition.”

Barnes and Noble: “You do NOT need an ISBN to sell your eBook through PubIt!. If you don’t have an ISBN, just tell us that you don’t have one by answering No when prompted. In that case, Barnes & Noble will assign an internal 13-digit identifier to your title for you when you submit the title to go on sale.”

So far so good. No need to purchase ISBNs. Let’s check one more. How about Apple’s iStore? They say: “You must have an ISBN number issued for your book.” So if you wish to sell through Apple’s iStore, you’ll definitely need one. Admittedly, Apple’ share of the e-book market is small today, but it may grow into a more significant slice of the pie. A member of the publishing panel at the University of Wisconsin’s Writers’ Institute last month told us that Apple requires an ISBN because it’s a way of allowing the cream to rise to the top. If you’re not willing to invest in an ISBN for your book, it’s a sign that 1) you’re not a serious publisher and 2) your book is probably not a great one.

So once you’ve made your decision about ISBNs, if you intend to purchase one for your book, you still have another decision to make: how many to purchase? One ISBN costs $125.00; ten cost $250.00. I bought ten, because I’ll be publishing my second novel, THROUGH DARK SPACES, too. Eventually I hope to publish paperbacks of both books, too. That means the investment in ten ISBNs was a good one, because purchase of four individual ISBNs would have cost me double the $ that ten cost.

If you’ve decided to purchase an ISBN (or more than one), you can do that through Bowker’s website. They have, of course, made it easy to buy. Just follow the “Buy” buttons, pull out that old credit card and complete your transaction.

Later, when I blog about publishing the paperback version of UNREASONABLE RISK, I’ll discuss the purchase of bar codes, also through Bowker. Ah, so much to learn…..

Last week I posted a couple blogs on what writers call “voice.” So far, I’ve discussed these parts of a writer’s voice:
– point of view
– style
– personality

On to more descriptors! Let’s talk “consistency.” Here’s how Christopher Mohar, University of Wisconsin writing program faculty member, describes it: does the book “sound” the same all the way through? Or are there odd deviations of tone and style? If the departures are consistent, they’re probably intended, but if they’re not—there’s a problem with the voice of the piece. Occasionally I find a novel that lapses into political diatribe, interrupting the flow of the action; even if I agree with the writer’s politics, I’ll put the book down in favor of something without the unnecessary commentary.

[Aside: There are political novels, however, which are entirely persuasive simply by NOT adding the interrupting diatribes. Take Richard North Patterson’s CONVICTION. It’s a masterful look at the death penalty. The crime is unspeakable, the arrest totally consistent with the evidence, the suspect somebody you’d be happy to have off the streets. Yet Patterson skillfully turns the reader to his political point of view. It’s a great example of persuasive literature. Take a look if you haven’t read this one yet.]

According to Mohar, another piece of the writer’s voice is “moderation.” Does the book try too hard? Is the tone forced? To make a book seamlessly readable, those glaring examples of forced prose must go. Of all the prose styles, I have the most difficulty with humor, simply because it must sound effortless to the reader. I’ll don’t have the ear for it, can’t write it, and likely never will. Sadly, I’ve read stuff by people who have no more talent for humor than I have, and the results sound predictably forced. One of my critique partners, though, Jared Rittberger, writes travel humor that makes me laugh so hard I cry. I’ll let you know when his stuff is available for purchase.

Forced prose also sometimes turns up in romance novels and historical fiction with the use of, in my opinion, way too much flowery language. It’s fine to use ornate language now and then, but if every sentence contains adjective after grandiloquent adjective, I’ll toss the book aside and look for something that doesn’t make me feel like I’ve just bathed in Chanel No. 5.

Finally, a word about “transportation.” Does the book grab you, pull you into a world that you hate to leave? If it does, the voice is clear, the prose style strong. What was the last book you read that you couldn’t put down? A book whose universe you wanted to become a part of? For me it was Louise Penny’s STILL LIFE. The village of Three Pines, just outside of Montreal, is so charming I wanted to go there, to have coffee and a scone at Olivier and Gabri’s Bistro, to look at Clara’s latest painting and compare it with her husband Peter’s latest work. To meet Myrna, who makes bouquets that contain kielbasa sausages and branches of apple trees still containing apples, not to mention books of poetry. What a cast! What a place! It’s no wonder that Ms. Penny has won four consecutive Agatha awards for Best Mystery. In fact, I’d love Ms. Penny’s writing without the mystery, which for me is almost ancillary to the visit with her wonderful characters in the magical place of Three Pines.

Okay. That’s about it for voice. It’s a tall order, but if you check all the characteristics of voice against your current work in progress and fearlessly search out the language that doesn’t belong, your work will be the better for it.

Tomorrow, the next step in e-publishing….