​If you’re not a dog/pet lover, you will probably want to bypass this post. While I’ve been working to get Destiny’s released, I’ve had a few other major emergencies going on in my life. One of them is making sure I have new employment, ever since I’ve learned my job is going away in the near future. The other, is that one of my boys, a lab/border collie mix, came down with cancer and became very sick. Both have recently played major roles in my life and have played their parts in extending Destiny’s release date further than initially planned.
     Not everyone is a dog lover. Not everyone looks at other species as being relevant. Maybe this lack of empathy for other species comes from some humans’ being so tribal that can’t see another race as being worth consideration, or maybe these people lack empathy to such an extreme that they cannot relate to even other human beings outside of their family, city or even country, let alone make the jump of caring about another species. Whatever it is, it’s something that crosses my mind when I see the inhumanity some people have towards each other and the species we share this planet with. It’s a topic that I plan to cover more in books three and four of the Last Paladin Series.
     The biggest thought I had for the series is exploring the difference between long lived species and shorter lived species, and the friendship and love relationships that can form between these different species. The pain that that is felt for the loss of a loved one when their shorter lifespan has ended. The joy and wisdom that is shared and given from that shorter lifespan relationship that goes beyond the precepts of one’s race and culture. The relationships that can be formed at times between that of simply two souls. In this way I would like to keep the life of Kanchen alive and share his story, but in an Urban Fantasy style.
     Kanchen and Rowin are two brothers who became part of my life after hurricane Katrina swept through Florida in August of 2005. At the time they were only around twelve months old, a guesstimate given by the vet who first gave them their shots after my friend Mike’s Mom found them running around in the middle of a major highway the day after Katrina came through. I instantly fell in love with them and they became a part of my life as of that time.

     ​This time period was just after my epiphany that allowed me to leave the abusive relationships I’d been a part of for all of my life, up to a point shortly before that in time, and to make life into something amazing and special that I lived every day. Between traipsing all over Florida to traveling to Europe and visiting France, Germany, Poland and Hungry, together Kanchen, Rowen and I had one fantastic adventure after another and just enjoyed living life. While both brothers stole my heart away, Kanchen was always at my side and loved me to death. Except for a very short time period during their teenage years, I never needed lines for them. I’ve always communicated well with dogs, but the shared understanding I’ve had with Kanchen and Rowin bordered on telepathic.
     In many ways our relationship is part child, part best friend and part life companion. No matter how old or full of gray hair Kanchen and Rowin are, they will forever be my babies. Most people cannot believe how intelligent and personable they both are when they meet them for the first time. How much they are like little people. But then, I’ve never treated them other than little people.
     Right now I worry that Rowin will be too depressed without his brother. They’ve always have been together for their entire life. The longest they were separated was when they flew to Europe. All that we can do is give Rowin lots of love and help him through this difficult time in his and our lives.
My family and I thought that Kanchen was on the upper side of the curve for surviving his cancer. Our recent CT scan showed that the tumor was shrinking and responding well to the chemo treatments we’d been giving him. Unfortunately, yesterday a vein burst in his tumor and he died shortly thereafter. I was covered in my baby’s blood as he bleed to death and there wasn’t anything I could do to save him. Needless to say, yesterday and today have been rough for us all. I spent the day looking over some of the old pictures of Kanchen with my wife as we remembered and missed him. For those of you who are interested I’ve attached them below.
     I’d hoped to get most of Flight cleaned up this weekend. I want to have a cleaned up copy uploaded before I release Destiny. I did have a chance to work on this a lot last week, but so far this weekend has been a bust. Maybe tomorrow and Monday I can work on it some before I have to head back to work. If anything it will help distract me from the ache in my heart. Either way Destiny will be released in April. For those of you whom are anxiously awaiting the release, I’ll do my best to make it sooner rather than later. Hope everyone has a wonderful Easter. 
       ************ I love you Kanchen and you will be missed. ************

​     The whole process of getting the cover of your book “print ready” for Amazon is one of the more difficult and convoluted processes in the whole self-publishing process for new authors; besides, of course, the actual writing of the book and getting it properly edited. Even knowing which size template to use for a mass market paperback is difficult to understand. While there are a lot of author websites and blogs that talk about different aspects of the process, none that I ran across in my searches warned you about the typical pitfalls of the self-publishing process that a new writer should be aware of. Luckily this gave me a lot of material to write about for my blog. With Destiny’s release I plan to post as many of the points I missed the first time around.  
     When you first go to https://www.createspace.com to start the book creation process, one of the first things you need to make a decision on is the size of your book. Well, that and whether or not you to use an ISBN or an ASIN number. You can check my previous blog for that whole option here: http://www.thecheekyfellow.com/home-blog/what-are-asin-and-isbn-numbers-and-why-do-i-need-them The short of it is to just go with the free ASIN and save yourself the cost, but back to our “print ready” cover. Even if you want to only have an eBook at https://kdp.amazon.com, Amazon requires that you first create a print book and format it properly. Only then does Amazon allow you to convert that printed book into an eBook, so no matter what you are forced to build two separate templates; one template for your physical book and one for your eBook. Also, each different size book requires you to reformat your text to fit the new template you choose to additionally use. This includes restructuring the cover for your book. The one good thing is that the cover template for the physical book and the eBook can be used without changes, but that total text restructuring between the two types of books is time consuming. One additional side note: when you go with an audio version of your book you’ll need to reform the cover for your book to fit the audio book’s unique requirements, which are very different than either the physical or eBook formats.
     Another annoying point I ran into with the release of Flight and something that I couldn’t find any information about at the time was that the smallest book you can go with on Amazon is the 5.06 X 7.81 template, which is as close as you can get to a normal sized mass market paperback that we all are familiar with when self-publishing through Amazon. It’s confusing when you get to the template choice for your book and nothing fits what you’re expecting as you measure one of your paperbacks at home and compare it to the selection that Amazon gives you for templates to choose from, so hopefully this part of the blog helps you at this point especially. After much research I discovered that Amazon doesn’t allow you to self-publish a normal sized mass market paperback book. One additional FYI on this point, the 5.06 X 7.81 template is slightly larger than a normal sized paperback book.
     A slight rant: I guess Amazon wanted their paperback to stick out slightly on any bookshelf. While a part of me found this to be annoying, I will say that at least I found the quality of the physical books from Amazon to be exceptionally good. Something that makes you proud to hand out/sell when friends and colleagues question if you’re a “real writer” or do you actually have a “physical book” of your work. For some reason, if you only had an eBook published people think that’s quaint, but if you actually have a printed book in the hand, you’re taken more seriously as a writer. It doesn’t make any sense. Most of your sales will be eBooks and not physical books, but that doesn’t matter, people will still judge you on having a “physical book” of your work. 
     Carrying on with the publishing process, once you download the template you’ll have one for the cover and one for the text. The cover template looks like this:

​Now you need to have your base image that you’re going to use for your cover. I have several posts about cover creation process and this is the only area where I outsourced the work. It costs, but if you’re smart and shop around you can find artists that are good and affordable. Also, it’s the only way most of us can get a truly high-quality, professional image for our work that we can use to compete with a normal publisher’s cover art. Some of my previous posts on the importance of a good cover is here: http://www.thecheekyfellow.com/home-blog/self-publishing-finding-an-artist-for-your-book and here http://www.thecheekyfellow.com/home-blog/cover-design-and-book-twos-artwork The basic image file I received back from the artist Leoblack is the PDF below. He also gave me one that was just a pure image, but I chose to use his title design this time around because it just rocks.

     One of the things I requested from the artist I’m working with is to have the option to remove the text that they’ve inserted to be able to replace it with my own design and format. On both of my books the title has been slipped behind parts of the main character, and I need that graphic layer available to be able to make any future changes I desire. On the image for Destiny, I really like how DLeoBlack did the font for the Title and my name, so I kept his design. I also made sure to ask DLeoBlack for the name of the font he used ahead of time. This is important for the creation of the rest of the text on the cover, since sometimes it’s hard to know just by going through the lists of fonts which one your artist actually used. Having the same font used throughout the text on the cover is an important design concept in graphic design. Not using multiple fonts on your cover design will help give your work that “professional look” to its overall layout and design. While I didn’t keep the exact “title” that DLeoBlack used for the back cover of the book and the spine, I did keep the same font and the general drop shadow and bevel/emboss stylized look that he used on the front cover’s title.  

     While this post is not a tutorial on how to work with Photoshop and the program’s various effects, I would like to point out the design concept of using multiple layers so that you can keep each of your text, their effects and position separate. It makes moving, resizing and finding the text in question a lot easier at this point in the process. You don’t need to use Photoshop for this process. Paint Shop Pro was an old standby I always used before I was able to get a copy of Photoshop. At the time layers weren’t part of the program, but now must graphic applications have layers. The good thing about Photoshop is that it imports nicely into Illustrator, which is kind of important for the “Print Ready” graphic that I want to have produced at the end of this process. I’m sure there are other applications out there that could do the same thing, I just don’t know them, so I’ll be showing you my process using Illustrator.
     Once you have the image looking the way you want it, the next step is to save your work with your multiple layers. You’ll need this for getting the next step correct. At this point in time I make a separate image and flatten the layers into one image. I copy this and then open the template for the cover I downloaded from Amazon inside Illustrator. Just a warning, the template will not automatically open in Illustrator.
     Now paste the image from your graphic program, Photoshop for me, into the template you have open in Illustrator. The image will be huge and cover the template. You’ll want to move the image’s opaque transparency settings down to something like 50% and resize the edges of the image until it is completely covering the outside edge of the template. The semi-finished product will look something like the graphic below, but once you have it in place you will want to set your image’s transparency settings back to 100%.

​     At this point you will see this black outline of a square on top of the image. In Illustrator this is the print area. This is easy to change by dragging the outlines of the print area. One way is to click on File, Document Setup and Edit Artboards. Another is to click on effects, artboards and selected images, but either way you will want your artboard to highlight this image only. You can confirm your print selection in the print preview options.   

     Once you have this selected properly you are ready for the next very important step. It is essential that you do not “print to PDF”. Print to a PDF will not work for a “print ready” image and will leave a white boarder around your image that Amazon will deny for your “print ready” graphic for your cover. The trick here is to File, Save As and select the output to be a PDF and not an AI extension for Illustrator. At this point you can select the settings that are in the instructions for formatting the compression of the image. Settings like the Compatibility to be Acrobat 4 (PDF 1.3) and the Standard to be PDF/X-1a:2003 and setting your compression on the image. 

​     If you leave your Color Bitmap Image & Grayscale Bitmap Image compress at 150 ppi & 225 ppi you’ll get an image that’s around 5 to 6 MBs in size. If you up these settings to 300 ppi & 450 ppi you’ll get an image around 18 to 20 MBs in size. Doing zero compression will leave you an image size approximately 50 to 60 MBs in size. In the past I’ve used the 5 to 6 MB sized files, but this time I might try the 18 to 20 MB sized file for my image. Once you “Save PDF” you’ll see your PDF image has no boarders if you did everything correctly. It should look something like the image below:

     ​While this looks finished, I’m still tweaking the back cover’s hook. Interestingly enough, when you print out the image and share it with your friends in this format you end of getting a lot of good feedback. There is something about having the image in your hand that allows you to see mistakes or areas to improve better than on the screen. As you can see I’ve justified the text for the hook, lined up the spine’s Title and Author name a little better and corrected some of the spacing issues between the edge of the book and the spine. Since I’ve documented the whole process, this will be a piece of cake to jump back into Photoshop to make the needed corrects and then recreate the images I need via Illustrator. I probably could have done much of the text work in Illustrator, but I’m better in Photoshop and there seemed to be a lot more built in effects to apply to my text.
     I hope this post helps those of you who are working hard to get that first book published. For me this post will work as an excellent procedure to have for future publishing, since by the time I’m pushing out book three I will have forgotten this process again. For now, I’m wishing everyone a great weekend and signing off. 

​     For the last month and a half I’ve been focused on getting Destiny ready for publication. I’ve cleaned it up as much as my limited editing skills allows and I hope some of my beta readers and friends can help with the rest. While grammarly.com has an amazing product, it still misses the finer issues that my grammar experienced friend has affectionately pointed out that afflict all of my works. She corrected the first page of Flight pointing out some of these issues I commonly make, and to be honest, I simply can’t catch them with my current skillset as of this time.  
                It’s frustrating on one level, but at the same time I know practice makes perfect. Every time I write and then correct my mistakes my skills improve. Sadly, I have no desire to wait for my grammar perfect friend to get around to correcting the story before I release Destiny. After much though on this conundrum, I’ve decided to go ahead and go with what I have. I’ll be making a few more additional tweaks and corrections to Destiny’s overall storyline as necessary as I get additional feedback, but once that’s finished I’ll release Destiny.
            The good thing is that I can update the story any time as needed. With Amazon.com I can update the Ebook in an hour, which is where 99% of my sales are. I can also do the regular book, but the process is much more time intensive. As my grammar perfect friend gets around to correcting Destiny, I can always update those results directly to the new release at that time, which allows me to share the story now instead of later. I’m still expecting a March release, but worst case scenario is that Destiny will be pushed back until April.  
            I’m getting a lot of good feedback. Some I’ve decided to not implement, because the story stands on its own, while other things I have included. These points have been important enough that I don’t want to release before I get back a few more reviews from my beta readers. A fan named Aharon was nice enough to give me some excellent feedback on the story. One of his suggestions was to put in a Glossary of terms and characters, which I’ve already put together and attached to the story. Also he helped me clean up the text where I was referring to High Elves as both Gray and High. While some of us geekier old D&D players know that High & Gray Elves are the same, probably most of my other readers won’t know this ahead of time, which could cause some major confusion in the storyline. To keep matters clear I ended up going with the term “High Elf” to stop the confusion. Another friend/fan, Richard helped me clean up how I structured the chapters, and let me know he really like the overall characters and storyline.
            Over the next two weeks I’ll be getting the cover edited with my overview of the story and other parts of the title and author name stuff that goes on the binder of the book. To answer one of the questions about getting a cover “ready for print”, I plan to take comprehensive notes for how I turn my image into a “print ready image” needed for the final step of publishing. There are separate layouts for the eBook and the actual physical book, which takes time to get everything formatted properly. I’ll be getting both of those ready to go while I’m waiting for everyone’s feedback on the story before publishing. Once that’s completed, I’m going to see if there is any way to cleanup Flight a little bit more, since I’ll be promoting Destiny with Flight and it would be nice if the story is in as good of shape as possible and start planning out the outline for Book three.   
            Of course while all of this excitement is going on, I’ll be dealing with the IRL issues that we all face on a daily basis. One of those is hopefully a new job. A little less than a year ago I learned that my position was going away due to my organization consolidating their HQ’s around the world, so if I want to stay in Germany a little bit longer (which is needed due to some family situations going on) then I needed to find a new organization to work for. Due to my line of work and living in a foreign country, this job change comes with a number of unique challenges. Hopefully I’ve found a new home with a pretty cool boss. Preliminarily it looks great, but I won’t know 100% until I have the final job offer in hand. Until then keep your fingers crossed and wish me luck.  
            The other big issue affecting my family is that Kanchen has been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of nasal cancer. The good news is that he’s over the 90 day hump so to speak, since he’s still alive and the chemo therapy that our doctor came up with is doing surprisingly well. The bad news is that it’s expensive, but what can you do. Hopefully Destiny can help cover some of his medical costs once it’s released. Other than that I’m realizing I need to start hitting the books again to up my IT certifications. I’m going to have to work that into my writing, family and life schedule.
I’m really excited about Book three of the series and can’t wait to get down and dirty on the story creation process. I’m always looking and reading for ideas to integrate into my story and recently I ran into several interesting fight scenes from the movie Sucker Punch. I’ll add in the scene from one of my favorite fight scenes from the movie. There are actually several that I think were awesome, and it was a toss-up between the Dragon and Samurai fights. Still, the Samurai fight scene won out. I don’t know how good the overall movie is. It did get terrible reviews, but the write-up I came across to what the story was symbolizing was actually pretty interesting. Even if the overall story does suck, the battle scenes I ran across on Youtube.com were amazing!    
     Anyway, due to everything going on, my blog has taken a backseat for the time being as IRL takes precedence. Hopefully now that my major editing of Destiny has been finished I’ll have a chance to blog more.