About the Author:

• If you could have been the original author of any book, what would it have been and why? Any of Mitch Albom's books, particularly The Time Keeper and The Five People You Meet In Heaven. They are beautiful and inspiring.
• What do you think your biggest accomplishment has been? In less than 12 months I have been on the radio and the television for my writing, I have almost reached my 2000 sales/downloads goal and I have met some wonderful people through my author interviews and podcast, The White Room.
• What’s your next big goal? To re-write and release Eternity, book four in my Finding Pandora series. I also plan to re-publish the books as one volume.
• What’s something that no one knows about you? I don't think I'm much of a mystery but I'll admit I hate being the centre of attention. When you're promoting books and speaking in public is hard to avoid! I'm an introvert.
• Do you have any hidden talents? I'm lucky to be a writer because I can't draw, play a musical instrument or sing very well! I did learn to play the cup song like Anna Kendrick in Pitch Perfect with a plastic cup as a bit of fun. It's now my party trick.
• What’s one thing that you think you’re horrible at? I'm an author so obviously I think I'm horrible at writing. I think this is something we all fear.

And of course, now that you know the title, I bet you can't wait to get your hands on the cover. So, get your calendars ready because October 7th is the big reveal!

About the Author:

• If you could put any book in the high school curriculum, what would it be? Why? Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Not only is it a great example of world-building for creative writers, but it also has some beautiful themes as well: loss, friendship, character, right vs. wrong. It’s deep!
• If you could have been the original author of any book, what would it have been and why? Again, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I would happily take the credit! It’s what started the entire HP success and phenomenon. It also means so much to so many readers. I’d love for people to be that passionate about my work.
• What do you think your biggest accomplishment has been? Writing and publishing Doll House. Creating a book is no small task. It’s work! YEARS of work. And now I’m officially an author, which has been my dream since I was 14!
• What’s your next big goal? To see Doll House spread like wildfire and be made into a film. (Shooting for the moon here!)
• What’s something that no one knows about you? Well, most people didn’t know I was a writer! They got the hint when Doll House came out :)
• Do you have any hidden talents? I sing and play the piano. It’s pretty much a secret outside my church’s four walls.
• What’s one thing that you think you’re horrible at? Math! And underwater basket weaving.

The time is here! I can't believe it, but this is the official announcement for my call for beta readers! I honestly didn't expect to be ready for extra eyes this early in the process but I am! So make sure to get your name in the running!

About the Author:

• Where are you from? I am from Edmonton, AB, Canada and I’ve lived here all my life.
• Are you a full-time writer? If not, what else do you do? Writing is not my day job. I work full-time as an Emergency Communications Officer at Ambulance Dispatch. I take 9-1-1 calls and dispatch ambulances for central Alberta. However, at work I do get downtime here and there and while some people knit or draw, I write.
• If you couldn’t be an author, what would your ideal career be? Why? I would love to do something with wine and food. Become a sommelier and open a winery, hire a skilled chef, maybe even have a literary theme to the branding. Wine is a huge passion of mine, though all of that would be much more labour intensive than writing books!
• What’s your favorite genre to read? My personal favourite genre is thriller/suspense. I love a book that’s dark and twisted. If it shocks me and my mind is blown by the end, the book has done its job.
• What’s your favorite book? CREEPERS by David Morrell

About Being an Author:

• When did you know that you wanted to be an author? I’ve always enjoyed writing, as far back as grade 3 when my short story THE MAGIC HARP was published in the neighbourhood newsletter. The first time I realized I wanted to be a published author, I was 13 or 14 years old. Well, guess what, teenager me, you did it!
• Were you ever discouraged about pursing your passion? I’ve been lucky enough to never experience someone saying “you can’t do it” or “that’s crazy” or “but there’s no money in that.” I’ve only had people say that they think it’s really cool and that it’s something they could never do themselves. However, negative reviews can really hinder my creative drive, it’s difficult to overcome someone disliking something you worked so hard at.
• Does your family support your writing career? Yes. My dad was one of the first to finish reading CEDAR VALLEY. My mom teaches English to adults and is an avid reader so she’s always been supportive, however she says my novel is too violent for her. I think she’ll cave and read it soon, though.
• Did you ever consider writing under a pseudonym? Not for this book, but I’ve considered for another that is extremely personal and honestly, a bit scary to write about. It’s a story I need to tell, but I wouldn’t want certain people knowing that I’ve written it. Perhaps I will find the courage to keep it under my real name!
• Is writing your passion or your hobby? I would have to say both! I don’t occupy my time with much, but writing has always been a constant through the years.
• What has been your best experience so far as an author? Throwing a launch party for CEDAR VALLEY. I invited all my friends/family/coworkers, there was prosecco and snacks, I did a reading. It was so amazing to celebrate my accomplishment with others. I highly recommend this to everyone!

About Your Book:

• What gave you the ideas for your most recent work? I was camping with friends and one night around the campfire, one friend said, “What if at a certain age you had to kill your parents?” Dystopian premise at it’s finest. I took that idea and ran with it.
• What inspired your novel’s cover? My designer and I played with many ideas over many months and decided we wanted something unique and graphic oriented. The inspiration came from an image where the words were buried in flowers. We tweaked that to match the tone of CEDAR VALLEY. I love the final product.
• What was the hardest part of finishing your novel? Accepting that it was done. As a writer, you tweak and edit and revise and rewrite a million times. Eventually, you have to say enough is enough and let that beautiful book fly free.

• What’s your favorite genre to write? Anything dark. I want my readers to be surprised and entertained.
• What’s one genre that you secretly want to write? Secretly? Maybe something with more romance. Not erotica romance but I do enjoy a tortured love story now and again.
• Where do you get your big ideas? Usually when walking, people watching, or when I’m deliriously tired.
• Did any of your books stem from dreams? Yes, definitely. My current work in progress THE GEMINI BOOK is based on a dream I had.
• How do you come up with the names for your characters? Sometimes it’s first instinct but with Peter and Ari, I had them labeled as P for protagonist and A for antagonist for a long time before they had real names.
• Who’s your favorite character you’ve created so far? Why? Definitely Ari. Writing from the antagonist’s point of view was challenging and exhilarating. Peter is a close second. In the beginning, I had created Peter out of necessity but by the end I had fallen in love with him. I hope my future readers enjoy both of them as much as I do!

• What is your writing process like? I write the 1st draft all at once. No editing, no stopping, just unabashed words on the page. Then I rewrite, revise, replot if I need, and then go through a series of edits. I trade chapters with my critique partner. More edits. Edit a printed version. Then beta readers. Then more edits.
• Is there any part of the process you wish you could delegate to someone else? Finding plot holes. Through all the revisions, I’m bound to change something and forget to change it in another section.
• What’s your favorite part of the writing process? The blank page. The very beginning. It’s the moment where absolutely anything is possible.
• Are you a planner or a pantser? Definitely planner. I will never finish if I don’t have an outline. The creativity just dries up if I don’t know where I am going.
• Writers block, how do you cope with it? Many say writer’s block doesn’t exist and I am inclined to agree with them. If you just start writing, the words will come. Even if it is a heap of garbage.

About the Author:

• Be honest, do you judge a book by its cover? Yes, which is why I feel indie authors should outsource or spend some extra time on their cover designs. I designed mine alone, but they went through several versions before I settled.
• If you had the power to unread a book, which book would you choose? Why? Flood by Stephen Baxter. I very rarely have to put a book down, but I think I stuck with it longer than I should have. It wasn't for me.
• Who has been your biggest inspiration so far? Mitch Albom, Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson have inspired me a lot over the last 12 months, but other indie writers inspire me too.
• If you could tell your younger writer self anything, what would it be? To believe in myself and not to slow. Writing needs motivation and dedication. It took me longer than it should have to focus my energy on writing.
• If you could put any book in the high school curriculum, what would it be? Why? There are a lot of books I believe should be read in schools. I can't pick just one. I think to some extent students should be able to choose their own, providing it suits the topic of study and is appropriate.

• What’s one thing you said you’d never do as an author? Have you? I haven't said this on my website or officially, but I don't think I would ever write erotica. So far I have dabbled in romance but have not published anything more than a short story.
• What does author success look like to you? Have you achieved it yet? I think authors make their own success and that each goal we meet is a success in itself. We should be celebrating our new book covers or our 1000 sales markers or our 2000 Twitter followers because each of these are new experiences we have worked to achieve.
• What is your ultimate author goal? What are you doing to make it happen? Or is something awesome already in the works? I think we all dream of writing full-time but it's very difficult. I'd love to be on the NY Times Bestseller's list with a high fantasy novel, and I'm working on one at the moment. I'm even learning to make maps, which is so much fun.
• Do you read your book reviews? If so, how do you react/cope with them? I read all of my book reviews because the readers took the time to write them, so I should take the time to listen. I try not to take negative feedback personally – you can't please everyone, and I note down the points I clearly need to improve on.
• Do you Google yourself? What’s the funniest thing you’ve found? I do sometimes just for fun, and everything I've found is fairly standard. Just links to books and images of me.

Every now and then, I like to take a moment to introduce an author to all of you! With this interview series, I've come to know an amazing group of writers and I want you to know them too!

For today's installment, I've had the pleasure of interviewing author Sam Campbell! According to his website, he's a YA and a Multi-Genre author who specializes in "creepy and twisted."

Of course, I know we all want to know more than that! That's why I've sent him an in-depth questionnaire with 75 of the most intriguing questions I could come up with! And since Sam is an incredible interviewee, he took the time to answer almost all of them! So not only do we get one interview with Sam, but we actually get two!

I promised I’d be back, and here I am. In the first part of this I went through the creative process behind creating a book cover. The steps and thought processes involved in what makes a good cover. It’s a good starting point for how to conceive the outside for your hard labor.

If you missed the first instillation of this series, you can check it out here.

Now, let’s get technical.

When you write, it’s not all creative. There are just as many technical aspects behind what you write as what you think. On a smaller scale you have sentence structure, punctuation, and pretty much every aspect of grammar. Then, on the larger scale, there is character development, tone, and all the other elements of storytelling. If you know how to put all that together, then you have the means to create a novel.

And you also have the means to create the actual book. Unlike the first part of this series, which put everything on a mental level, this one involves other tools. For a professional designer, those tools likely come from Adobe, but you don’t have to have a subscription to Creative Cloud to produce a book. Most word processors have options to output a press-ready file to varying degrees. Do a little research on the what and how of what you own. Learn those tools. I’m not able to tell you how they work. I’m just going to give you pointers on what to do with them.

Let’s work from the inside out.

The interior of the book is the actual structure of the novel. Like sentence structure, you have to build it in a logical manner that is clear and easy to understand. It might look intimidating, but you need to break it down to its most simple form: a page. Don’t think of it as building a whole book. You are putting together a page. Just like you take one sentence and add those together to create your novel, taking the pages one at a time add up to a whole book. Like a sentence, a page has structure. The subject of the page is called the live area or body. It’s the heart of the layout and where you put all of your novel’s text.

From a sentence structure perspective, the area around that is the predicate. It’s what creates the action by focusing the eye on the subject. Designers call the part towards the spine the gutter, and the part on the outside, top, and bottom is the margin. You need to keep enough margin so that the body of your book is clear of the edge. Your word processing program likely has pre-set margins for a page. These are generally meant for printing out on a 8.5” x 11” piece of paper. You will need to adjust them for the printing press so that the on odd numbered pages, there is a larger margin on the left-hand side of the page, and on even numbers, you move that to the right. There is probably a setting for this in your program. Look for a tutorial on that specific program and put it to use. Note: if you are laying out for an ebook, this isn’t as important. Margins for an ebook are the same on all four sides of the page.

The last part you need to worry about for the internal layout of your book is punctuation. For layout, this is going to be your font choice and paragraph formatting. While you can probably name a half-dozen fonts already, there are only two types of fonts you need to concern yourself with: serif and sans-serif. Those fonts that have a little “tail” on the letters are called serif fonts. Which makes the ones without those “tails” to be the sans-serif ones. The rule here is pretty simple. If you are doing the book for print, use a serif font. Research shows that reading serif fonts on paper is easier. For an ebook, it’s the opposite. Use a sans-serif font, for the exact same reason—research says it’s easier to read.

Paragraph formatting is a little trickier. You’ve likely seen the line-spacing option on your word processing program. Generally that’s listed as single, double, etc. In a design sense that is called leading (pronounced led-ing, by the way). I’m going to go back to story structure to describe this one. You can’t have a book where the only thing that happens is a fight scene. Three hundred pages of fight scene will appeal to no one. Even if that is the core of the story, you have to give the fight scene some room to breathe. Do the same with your paragraphs. Let them breathe. And not just the lines of the paragraph itself, but allow for a little extra space between the paragraphs. The one other thing I want to touch on for the paragraphs is the alignment. For print, you will want to use left-aligned text. That’s the text that looks like it has a jagged edge on the right-hand side, but everything is straight on the left. For ebooks, use justified text. That’s where the text lines up not only on the left, but also on the right.

Now, I’m going to go outside and touch on the cover for just a moment. There are three parts to the cover of a book: the front cover, the back cover, and the spine. The two biggest things that you need to keep in mind from a technical point of view correlate to character development and tone. The character development of your cover is, once again, the font. This is what will give a tone to your book just by reading the title. A font that drips blood screams horror. A font that looks like it is made of metal makes you think it’s science-fiction. Hand script fonts are romance. Choose a font that tells people what they need to know before they open the book. This, however, isn’t the important part. When you build a character, you want people to understand the character—even if they are supposed to understand that the character is impossible to understand. Which, in a design sense, means, above everything else, make the font readable. It doesn’t matter how cool you think the font looks, if it isn’t instantly recognizable it fails. People don’t linger. They move quickly. You have two seconds to get them. Use it wisely.

Now, to that end, the tone of your book is color theory. How you set up the cover and move it along is the tone, and nothing does that more than color. Colors are associated with emotion. Blue is calm. Red is anger. Purple is mysterious. Yellow is happy. Use these colors to set up the initial impression of the book, but also the underlying tone. Color theory is the way that colors interact with each other. So use those colors in the right combinations. Complementary colors stand out from each other, and will create a more shocking effect. These are the colors that are opposite each other on a color wheel. Analogous colors are ones that are next to each other on the color wheels and they create a more subtle feel. Let those colors set the tone of your whole book.

There’s a lot more to it, but hopefully just looking at the pages in a new way will help. I will say again, you can do this yourself. If it gets overwhelming, however, get help. There are plenty of people who will give you free advice and help. And if that doesn’t prove to be enough, hire someone. At the very least you should be able to give those designers a little direction.

Guess what time it is?! Yup, time for my weekly writing and reading recaps! Check out this week's stats and see how my current projects are coming along! And as always, get a little insight into my life :)

Every now and then, I like to take a moment to introduce an author to all of you! With this interview series, I've come to know an amazing group of writers and I want you to know them too!

For today's installment, I've had the pleasure of interviewing author Jennifer Acres! According to her website, she's a "YA and A multi-genre author who loves complex characters in emotionally moving stories."

Of course, I know we all want to know more than that! That's why I've sent her an in-depth questionnaire with 75 of the most intriguing questions I could come up with! And since Jennifer is an amazing interviewee, she took the time to answer every single one of them! So not only do we get one interview with Jennifer, but we actually get three!