Tuesday, February 7, 2012

You CAN Judge a Book By It's Cover -- I INSIST


Well, there it is. The choice. The very hard decision. The book cover image courtesy of Andrea from Tetro Design. (She needs no introduction.)  I'm happy. Very happy. Pretty excited although trying to be subdued about it. What do you think?

There is a long and interesting market study I did to come to this decision to pick the cover (I was presented with 2 options as you may or may not recall). I'm sparing you the entire story in favour of focusing on the important stuff this morning.

I've done a lot with the manuscript too. Last night I thought it was ready for upload so I put it into the preview program and there are a lot of things to fix. I have this cheeky idea that want it's publication date to be February 29th.

What's the book about? Here is the blurb, the same one I wrote 6 years ago, that will act as my Cover Flap sell, maybe with some edits.

Janey Gillis is a virgin, but would anyone believe it? She’s the kind of girl guys invite for a walk in the bushes but can’t be bothered to take to a movie. Her friends Gillian and Andrea, since hooking up with their boyfriends, have become clingy and whiny, have had twenty-five IQ points vanish from their heads, and now put their friends second. If that’s what it takes to have a boyfriend, Janey would rather stick to being the queen of making out. No commitments. But none of this stops Janey from fantasizing about the big romantic rescue – like some day she’ll find some guy she can save and maybe he’ll save her at the same time.

SO, SAVE ME, (a novel written for young adults ages 15+), is Janey’s hyper-reflective and introspective story about “love and friendship and screwing up.” While waiting to hear news about her friend Marc, who is in surgery following a motor vehicle accident, Janey flashes back over her summer after high school graduation when she’s invited to play softball with a new group of friends. Janey navigates a romantic relationship with Marc, a self professed “good French Catholic boy,” who grieves the recent loss of his mother from cancer in self-destructive ways, thinks nothing of driving after drinking, and pushes for sex as a way to feel emotion. After a period of awkwardness, Janey also develops a friendship with Colin, an injured former junior baseball star and one of Marc’s best friends. The problem? The previous summer Janey had an embarrassing encounter with Colin in the bushes at a bonfire party. And Janey senses there may be something about Colin that she missed out on when she pushed him away.

This is sorta surreal for me. Once I had the book uploaded in Kindle I could see it still has a lot of work needed. The indents are wrong, for one, and they are all over the place through the preview manuscript. I've been fighting with the friggen indents for days in Word. Somehow the table of contents became inactive in the transfer even though they are hyperlinked in the manuscript. Don't know how to fix that. Oh and the author is Unknown. Who the hell is this author?

5 comments:

Kathleen Sauerbrei said...

You have made it this far, you can get to the end....and with the end, a new beginning.

Terri said...

I think the cover represents your book well. Good luck!

christine said...

I like the cover - it was my fave. :)
Is there any type of "help line" that you can contact to get assistance with those problems?
I can't wait until it goes on-line to read it again!!

Kim said...

Thanks Chris. There are forums I think. So far I have found the "help" buttons to not be much help. The TOC issue in particular, I don't know what else to try. I'll keep plugging away.

Kim said...

Solved the Table of contents issue by changing the upload file to .htm However I am still unknown according in the preview.