Picking Covers and Inside Content

Keeping with the theme of pulling back the curtain on my writing process, I thought we could talk about something that isn’t really writing, but an important part of the publishing process nonetheless. 

To start with, I’m going to go into more detail about how I pick my covers and how I edit them. Usually, as I’m writing, I have a general idea for what I want the cover to be. Sometimes, it’s just a vague idea, but other times, I know exactly what I want while I’m writing. For example, I’m in the middle of writing a modern cowboy romance, and I know exactly what I want for the cover, even though I’m less than halfway through it. As for the Healing x3 Trilogy, I knew I wanted one of the lads on each other of the covers, but other than that, it was pretty much left up to what I could find on the copyright free website I use. I talked about that website a few posts ago, but I just search their database for someone that looks like my characters, and go from there. 

Once I find a cover I want to use, I spend some time tweaking the picture to fit the vibe that I’m going for. I’ll play around with the colours, the light going across it, and sometimes I add filters to it. Basically, I’m just trying to make it look like some effort went into it, and not me just picking a random picture and slapping it on my cover. 

As for the back covers, those are usually a bit easier, since I tend to put a picture of a couple on the back that looks like my main characters. That, or I just do a blank page that’s the same colour as part of the front cover, which is common when I have the front cover drawn for me. 

Speaking of which, quick shout out to my best friend, who drew the cover of “Love Through Agony” for me. It’s my favourite cover, and is exactly what I asked from her. 

Sometimes, when I can’t find a good picture online, I resort to taking my own pictures for them. Only one of my published books has a picture that I took, but going back to the cowboy novel I mentioned earlier, that will be a picture that I take. I’m not much of a photographer, but when you want something incredibly specific, you do what you have to. 

As for inner content, there isn’t much to tell. Like I mentioned a few weeks ago, I make my own table of contents. I’m pretty sure there are programs that do it for you, but I like doing it myself. I write all of my chapter titles out, and then, using both my tablet and my laptop, I go through and add the page numbers that each chapter starts on. The reason I use two devices to do this is because I use the outline feature on my laptop to quickly jump around to each chapter, and then I add the page number on my tablet, just so I don’t have to bounce around as much. 

One thing that is surprisingly difficult when you’ve published eight books is to come up with who to dedicate the novel to. Now, I know this isn’t something I have to do, but I like doing it, even though sometimes it takes me a minute to come up with who. So far, I’ve dedicated my books to my mom, my sister, one of my grandmas, and a couple of my friends. However, I make sure to mention more people in the acknowledgements, and I’m sure no one reads those, but I like having them in my book. 

So, this is really just building off my post from a couple weeks ago, but I wanted to use August to show y’all some of the back end of writing, and this was a part of that. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C

My Publishing Process

Since I’ve just recently published a book, I thought I would let you in on my publishing process, just because I think this is a side of writing that isn’t talked about much. 

The first step in my publishing process is finishing the novel I want to publish. If you’re interested in my writing process, I made a different post about that a while back. Picking which novel to write and finish is more challenging than one would think, but once the novel is done, the publishing process can begin. 

I always try to leave my finished manuscript for a while before I start editing it as a way to try to make myself as impartial as possible on the content I’m editing. I will say, I do like having deadlines for my editing, and I’ve recently discovered that I would rather sit down and edit three or four chapters in one sitting once a week as opposed to editing one chapter every couple of days. 

My first round of edits is me reading the book, and making comments on anything I think I should change, whether that be grammar, any inconsistencies, or if a sentence reads badly. I’m not actually making any changes to the novel at this point, I’m just leaving reminders for myself of things that could change. If you annotate books you read, it’s like that. 

My second round of edits is me going to all of the comments and applying them to the novel. This round of edits requires the least amount of focus for me and takes the shortest amount of time, since I’m just applying my comments, and not looking for any problems.

My third and final round of edits is me doing a final readthrough of the entire novel. Just a final sweep through the novel to catch any additional mistakes, and to tweak sentences that could look better. I also make sure that the lines of text look good, and what I mean by this is making sure that the above sentence is long to cover the indent of the sentence that follows after it, because I actually hate the way it looks when it doesn’t. 

Once the main content of the book is done, I move onto the synopsis and cover. For my latest book, I actually had to do these first, since I needed them for a writing festival, but I normally do it after my editing is done. Now, writing a synopsis is really challenging because you want to share enough about the book to catch people’s interest, but not enough that you’re giving the whole thing away. Of the eight books I’ve published, there have been three that I really love, and felt like they were flowing nicely. The cover is an entire other ballgame. For almost all of my covers, I use a copyright free website where generous photographers upload their pictures, and people like me can use them for whatever purposes they want. I always edit the pictures by messing around with the colours, contrast, and light leaks, but that’s where the pictures come from. There will be another post coming soon about picking covers, so stay tuned for that. 

Next comes the playlist. Now, I’m the type of person that loves it when books have playlists in them, so I decided I was going to do that for my novels. If you’re interested in listening to those, check them out here: Book Playlists . Most of the time, the playlist is already made, but I use Apple Music, so I have to add them to Spotify so more people can listen to them. I usually include a partial breakdown in the back of the book about the playlist, so keep an eye out for those. 

My next step is all of the extra inner content. What I mean by this is the table of contents, dedication, and acknowledgements. The table of contents definitely takes me the longest, but I prefer when books have them, and so I will continue to make them. The dedication is quite easy once I figure out who the book is dedicated to, and the acknowledgements I copy and paste from a document on my computer and tweak as needed. 

The final step is to upload everything to Amazon. Since I’ve done it eight times, I’m quite proficient at picking everything from their settings to make my book look exactly the way I want. However, Amazon reviews your book before it’s published to make sure it isn’t filled with hate speech or anything horrible like that, and this can take up to seventy two hours. “Cora” and “Jack” both took nearly seventy hours, whereas “Love Through Agony” and “Healing x3 Part One” took around eight to twelve. That’s why if you look at the publication dates of my novels on Amazon, they’re rarely the day I say the book is actually released. I make sure to upload the files three days before I say the book is ready to be purchased just in case. 

I’m sure this was incredibly technical, and maybe not something you’re interested in, but I thought I would share it with you nonetheless. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C

BTS of Healing x3 Part One

Before we get into this post, I want to share with you what I’m doing right now. I’m currently waiting for Amazon to load so I can order two copies of each of my novels for a local business (which is sixteen books), and freaking out a bit, because that is really exciting. I’m also raving to Lewis Capaldi and forcing myself to write my blog posts. 

This post in particular is exciting, because it’s all about my newest novel, “Healing x3 Part One”, which is available now! (Healing x3 Part One) In honour of my latest child being released, I thought I would pull back the curtain a bit on this project, and share some of my inner thoughts on the project, as well as a bit about the process of writing it. 

Let me take you right back to the beginning of this project, and how I got the idea of it. You see, this was October of 2022, and I was grieving the loss of a romantic relationship. I vividly remember sitting in the backseat of my dad’s car, and thinking about the idea of writing a reverse harem novel (to put it simply, where the female main character has multiple boyfriends at once), which is something that was really interesting to me. I came up with the names of the main characters, more on that later, and started really thinking about what this novel would entail, and what it would be called. The next day, I started the Whimsy Document, which is where I write down each and every idea I have for the project (if you’re curious, this one is four pages long; they’re usually around one to two). And thus, “Healing x3” was born. 

Brief interlude about the title before I get into the characters. When I was in my dad’s car thinking about this novel, I remember thinking about how her having two boyfriends was a lot easier, but I wanted to do three to challenge myself. And when I started writing out ideas about the project, and realized the female MC would be doing a lot of healing, I thought that “Healing x3” was quite witty, since she has three boyfriends who are helping her heal. 

Now, onto the characters. Before I even wrote any ideas written down about the project, I came up with the archetypes for the male characters. This is word for word what the Whimsy Page says, “Olliver--her gentle giant; Flynn--her fierce protector; Vance--her saucy manwhore; Reese--her not so great ex.” Don’t worry, I changed Vance’s description in the synopsis, since I thought that might not market well. As for how I got those names…Olliver and Flynn both came from short stories I wrote years ago, because I loved the names and wanted to use them in a way that more people would see. As for Vance, I knew I wanted a name that started with a V. Around this time, I was really obsessed with Thomas Sanders’ series “Sanders Sides” on YouTube, and one of the characters’ names is Virgil, hence my want for a V name. I didn’t want Virgil or Vince, but Vance seemed to fit. As for Reese, I am a simple woman, and the first letter of his name is the first letter of my ex’s name. I’m not ashamed. Nora’s name…I don’t really remember how I came up with it, but I remember being worried that it was too similar to Cora, which is another one of my protagonists’ names, yet also decided I didn’t care. 

Now, if you read the title of this post, you’ll realize that I’ve referred to this project as “Part One”. While I was plotting the first book, the one this post is about, I realized that I had too many ideas for the project, and that I would have to split it into two novels, and I found a natural place for that, so it was fine. Then, I was sitting in one of the common areas at my university, and decided that I wanted to add on my chronic illnesses to Nora, so I would have to make the series a trilogy. Which is actually really fitting, since there’s three boyfriends and three books. So, I wrote the ideas out for what I could pursue in the third book, decided there was enough, and started plotting it. Spoiler, I am still in the process of plotting it, but I digress. 

Here are some unique things about this series. 1) I learned that when plotting a duology (since that’s what it was at the time), it’s easier just to plot both books at the same time, straight through. 2) The playlist for this project is different from my normal ones, but you’ll get more details on that later in the month. 3) This novel is the one with the most sexual content, and the most graphic sexual content. Let’s just say this one is 18+, and ignore the fact that I will never be able to look my grandmother in the eye again. 4) Each one of the covers in the trilogy is a different one of Nora’s boyfriends (Part One is Olliver, Part Two is Flynn, and Part Three is Vance). 

Now, time for some statistics that no one cares about but me. Part One is 191,165 words, 660 pages, 1,000,245 characters (the amount of numbers and letters, I didn’t add a million characters to this novel), and I wrote it in 137 days (4 months and 17 days). 

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and that you read the novel. I am sorry that it’s so long, and someone needs to take my keyboard away from me. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C

 

Quick Links to Everything

 Hi, y'all. I wasn't planning on posting today, but after finishing writing all of my August blog posts, I thought I would share quick links to everything, in case you're curious for finding me on Instagram or being taken directly to my books on Amazon. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C

Timing: Timing 

Selena: Selena (book one of The Cora Anthology) 

Cora: Cora (book two of The Cora Anthology) 

Jack: Jack (book three of The Cora Anthology) 

Leo: Leo (book four of The Cora Anthology) 

Love Through Agony: Love Through Agony 

I Hate My Roommate: I Hate My Roommate  

Healing x3 Part One: Healing x3 Part One

Spotify: Book Playlists 

Instagram: C Hilts (@c.hilts.books) • Instagram photos and videos