Tag Archives: self-publishing

On writing Fan Fiction and Original Fiction

Writing, , , , , , ,

Is it better to write fan fiction or original fiction? What does better even mean in this context?

After having written both, I don’t have an answer. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. One thing’s for sure—you won’t get rich either way.

Let’s start with fan fiction. To some extent writing fan fiction is easier. The world building has been done for you. The major characters are there for you to use. The cost of this is that you have to remain within the original continuity, and this can make plotting more complicated than it would otherwise be. You can’t change existing characters in any major way. Mind you, there’s a way around this. You can label your story AU, indicating that it takes place in an alternative universe. For example, I wrote a fic called Western Castle which takes the characters from the TV show Castle and plops them into the wild west. That was fun.

Writing fan fiction can be a very sociable activity. You end up making online friends with other writers. Your stories reach lots of eyeballs. In my case, many more eyeballs than peruse my original fiction.

When writing original fiction, there are no rules. Well, except for the norms of whichever genre you’re writing in. You can use any setting, any characters, at any point in time—past, present, or future. In my experience, writing your own stories isn’t as social an activity as writing fan fiction. You can always join a writing group, of course, but I haven’t gone that route because for me, writing is and will remain a hobby, not a putative profession. I write sporadically, sometimes with only a paragraph to show for myself after a week. Hmmm. That could be why my last novel took three years to write ….

The reality is, there are many thousands of self-published authors and it’s almost impossible to get noticed. Whether or not that’s okay depends on your motivation for writing in the first place. For me, getting my book up on Amazon is the culmination of that writing project. One hopes for many readers, but, at least in my experience, many readers are people who know you in real life and are kindly supporting you.

To close, I have to say that I enjoy writing both kinds of fiction. Most of my writing these days is original. My last fanfic was a Doctor Who story that I’d been saving up in case Big Finish asked me back. They haven’t—at least, not yet—so I wrote it anyway and the good folks at The Doctor Who Project posted it for me.

Much to my surprise, I currently find myself taking a break from my next novel and writing one more Castle fanfic, just when I was sure I’d written my last one. I’m enjoying it immensely. I’ll post about it when it’s done. Until then, happy reading and writing!

Self-Publishing: Some Lessons Learned

Culture, Writing, , , ,

If you’ve been reading my blog or following my Twitter posts, it won’t have escaped your attention that I’ve recently self-published a collection of short stories called Something Special. It’s available at Amazon in eBook and paperback formats.

One of the first things I learned along the way was the difference between anthology and collection. An anthology contains stories by multiple authors. A collection contains stories from one author. Something Special, then, was going to be a collection.

Lets start with some lessons learned from publishing the eBook version.

One of the first things that surprised me is that, even though you’re the author of the eBook, you need to purchase it like anyone else to get it into your Kindle library. If I’m mistaken, let me know, but I couldn’t find any other way to do it.

If you use Kindle Create to put together your eBook, then you must never, ever, compose text within that tool. Ever. Instead, write text in a word processor and then copy-and-paste it into KC. Why? KC does not have a spell checker. My published eBook ended up with a typo on the dedication page. I mean, of all places ….

I was concerned with making the text as perfect as possible before publishing. However, in the back of my mind I thought that, even if there was a mistake, I’d be able to upload a corrected manuscript and that my readers would receive an update. That’s not the way it works, unfortunately. Amazon seems to keep track of which version of the eBook you purchase, and even if you delete your local copy and re-download, you end up with the same version you started out with. My early readers, then, are stuck with the version that has the typo in the dedication as well as some other formatting glitches. As the author, I wanted the corrected version but couldn’t get it. I’d even permanently deleted and re-purchased the eBook, and still had the original version. I had to contact KDP support so that I could get the corrected version in my Kindle library.

And now some things to consider when publishing a paperback on Amazon.

In preparing the paperback, it would have been very helpful to be able to get a copy and review it before it went “live” and was available to everyone. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, and being in Canada, I got my copy after some others in the US had already received it. And as it turns out, I wasn’t completely happy with my first go at it.

But let’s start with Microsoft Word. It’s best to use that tool since the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) site has detailed instructions on how to configure a Word document. I’ve had a lot of experience with Word, off and on over the years. As is the case with many of you, my relationship with it can best be described as love/hate. While preparing the paperback version of the manuscript, I would have sworn on some occasions that Word gremlins were busy making changes after I closed the document. Section breaks that were to begin on the next page became continuous breaks, headers that had been disconnected with the previous section’s header were suddenly connected. It was maddening. I had to make a lot of passes through the document to get it (mostly) right.

One of the things about the paperback version that was tricky was the gutter margin. This is the inside margin of the page that is bound to the spine. The first version of the paper had too wide a gutter margin. In the end, I’ve gone with half inch margins on the left and right plus a quarter of an inch extra for the gutter. This for a roughly 300 page book. I’m much happier with how that turned out. I did something a bit different for the front matter, eliminating the extra margin space altogether. For those few pages, the space lost to the binding was negligible and, with the change, the text that was meant to be centred actually look like it was centred.

Speaking of centring text, here’s something I learned about centring header text. They default style, Normal, includes a paragraph indent on the first line. Unfortunately, as I learned the hard way, Word centres your text in-between the start of the indent and the right margin, and not between the left and right margins. You have to manually remove the indent (or apply a different style, I suppose) for the text to be centred properly.

Although this post is basically a collection of “gotchas”, I don’t want to leave the impression that it was a negative experience. On the contrary, there is nothing more magical than holding a book you wrote in your hands.

That’s about all I can think of at the moment. I’ll update if anything else comes to mind.