Houses of the Broken and Other Stories

Latest

Createspace on your shelf for me!

See what I did there?

I’ve been sitting on pins and needles since the launch of Houses of the Broken last week. To put it mildly, I’ve learned a lot. It’s been interesting watching how Createspace and Amazon handle the publishing, and sales. And torturous as to how long it takes for sales to report from the various outlets.

Every day I check my ‘sales’ list, and my Amazon ranking. Some days I’m happy, some days I’m said, some days I’m just plain confused. I need to get a better media blitz together, but it’s difficult when no one returns your inquiries… I could argue back from a ‘no,’ flat out ignoring is a lot harder.

In many ways, it’s what I expected: It’s a lot of work. It’s a leap of faith. It’s not great for immediate gratification or questionable self esteem. And Kindle formatting… good grief. Don’t let the ‘it’s easy as pie!’ sales speech from CS or Amazon fool you. If you have a formatted file for a print book… be prepared to completely reformat it. This is still a work in progress and I even have people to help. I’m already wondering if the $69 fee to convert it in CS might have been worth it… but I’m the stubborn sort, and I like to know how things work for myself. So… Kindle version will be out… eventually… Besides, spreading out the action should be good… I think.

For now, I’m keeping an eye on the sales numbers vs. the number of copies that are showing up in people’s hands. If they don’t match, I’m not going to be a happy camper and that will lead to a whole other series of blog posts in the future. But for now… I must wait.

Take a chance on me!

Posted by  |  July 3, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Houses of the Broken

Now available in print, and soon in Kindle format, Houses of the Broken.

Anna Shaw never intended to go home again. On the run from her demons since an early age, she never looked back to her sadistic father and the family she left behind to suffer at his hand. But with age comes the nostalgic longing for the familiar, and after years of distance from her estranged family, the only contact remaining to Anna — her sweet baby sister Lacey– uses their mother’s illness to lure her back into the fold one last time.

What starts as a bittersweet family reunion with her ailing mother and four of the younger siblings Anna so willingly abandoned as a teenager soon becomes a snare of animosity and deceit, proving once and for all that the perverse legacy of their father is more than just skin deep. And when the handsome stranger Anna met on the arduous journey back to her family shows up on Lacey’s doorstep with her vagabond sister, Silver, Anna discovers that her gruesome tendencies are not just hers alone.

With no one left to lead the family, Silver and Anna fiercely struggle for control of a twisted birthright. Anna must face a difficult reality that gives her only one choice to stop the fraternal darkness from spreading, setting off a chain of events that will leave her an unsure fate and no place left to call home.

Houses of the Broken is currently available at the following outlets:

Houses of the Broken on CreateSpace

Houses of the Broken on Amazon

 

Posted by  |  June 24, 2013 | Categories: Blog, Houses of the Broken, News, Works | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bio.

Katherine Alton is a professional designer and an amateur herbalist who enjoys burying things in her garden. An avid fan of dystopian literature, she was drawn to the bittersweet and the macabre at an early age. Unable to shirk the unrelenting gray skies of the Great Lakes region, Katherine has been working on finding more constructive outlets for her creative impulses.

That don’t involve digging.

Posted by  |  June 24, 2013 | Categories: Katherine Alton | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Burden of Proof.

It has arrived. Snuck right up behind me, in fact, a day early. My hands trembled in excitement as I tugged at the packaging. In a moment, the reveal. Glossy cover, straight spine, not a bad heft… my PROOF is here.

I flipped through the pages, surveying what I could at a glance. Text right? Check. Images formatted? Check. Any obvious glitches? Nope. So far so good. Closer inspection… where did that ‘s’ go… gah, there’s another one missing…

Yes, there are typos. After all the eyes and editing, there are still typos not willing to reveal themselves until they’re in glaring black and white. But I’ll find them., as many as I can. I still have time.

There will be tweaks inside and out. Little things. Picky things. Things to add more polish and shine, but overall I am very very pleased. And soon it will be ready for public consumption.

But will the public be ready?

Posted by  |  June 18, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

If at first you don’t succeed… do it again.

This is the theme of the week and this potentially wine laced tirade. Nothing has worked right the first time, but perseverance is paying off. I hope.

I bought ISBN numbers. Or at least I thought I did. A few hours later my celebration was cut short by a note from customer service… somehow I had managed to log in to their site during a test phase. So neither my account, nor the numbers I bought were valid.

Try, try again.

ISBN numbers re-claimed, profile re-established, onward to the final phase. Createspace and uploading! *the crowd goes wild* The proof comes up, I start to page through it. The few minor image issue flagged aren’t really important until…

Where did my header go? *crap*

I had wanted blank pages in the front of the template, which CS hadn’t provided. Apparently in my previous attempt to insert them, I manage to scrub out the header information in the entire file. Not good news. Thankfully there was a formatting fairy to the rescue, and I was able to get the doc fixed to re-upload. On to the cover.

Oh, we only take PDF not JPEG. *sigh* Ok… cue email to my friend doing cover art. //facepalm.

It’s taken 2 tries on everything this week, but things seem to be working… now I wait to hear from CS and see if my info and files are all up to snuff.

And now we wait, until the morning…

Posted by  |  June 12, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

On the cusp.

The coffee is coursing through my veins this morning. I guess that’s what happens when it’s a freshly opened can. I want to do everything and nothing, all at the same time. Or at least, everything I want to be doing is nothing I ‘should’ be doing right now, which happens to me more than I’d like to admit.

But I bit the bullet. Made the leap. Bought some ISBN’s. After all of my fussing and fretting I went with the 10-pack. Now I get to figure out how the whole process works as I finalize my interior file. This is turning into a busy week, iron after iron plunging deep into the fire. Photos to edit, files to upload, design meetings to be had, social media marketing to post…. and then there’s my day job, which try as I might, does not appreciate being ignored for shinier, more exciting (to me) things.

I’ve come to realize in recent years that the Universe loves to subject me to the ‘all or nothing’ approach. If I’m doing one thing, 10 more pop up. If I have nothing to do, I can’t stir anything up to save my live. I guess it averages out but it’s like having your cake and getting the batter jet pumped straight into your bloodstream.

Folgers don’t fail me now…

Posted by  |  June 11, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

ISBN = PITA

Getting close. So close I can taste if. If that would be a normal thing to do with a book, of course.

Wrapping up the odds and ends, formatting. Dotting T’s, crossing I’s… and maybe getting a little punchy in the process. I spent a good part of the past two days trying to decided what I want to do with my ISBN. I know I can’t use the free one and do what I want to do, but then I start looking at options like buying your own, buying blocks… etc.

I’m the frugal sort. I like to buy in bulk. Do I really need a block of 10 numbers? It’s a crapshoot.

My heart sank for a moment today when I read that I needed a separate number for the e-book as well. I think I may have audibly hallucinated some antique cash registers chiming in the distance. I’m not afraid to put a little money out for the product, but I want it to be a reasonable risk/reward. What it comes down to is I want to be prepared, but not over do it.

The short version is, for what I want to do, I don’t need a 2nd ISBN. Bullet dodged, but not easily. Most of the answers fell in the category of well-you-can-if-you-want-but-you-don’t-have-to-but-it-might-be-best…. or not. InterwebFAIL.

I still have a little time to decide but not for long.

What’s the worst that could happen?

Posted by  |  June 4, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Formatting the Beast.

I’ve been in a bullet biting mood.

I unceremoniously sat down this past week to start formatting Houses of the Broken for CreateSpace. I was in the mood, which is something that has not happened for a very long time. ABNA helped me in a few ways. I made it a few rounds, got some good feedback and most importantly… was faced with a deadline to get my stuff together.

It took an hour. No lie.

Well, for the first blush at least. Before I knew it, I had a nicely formatted novel looking document sitting in front of me in Word format. Immediately I learned a few things….

My manuscript program sucks for grammar and spell checking. So does Google Drive. Word is where it’s at. This was a bit disheartening at the time. I’ve been using Scrivener, which I really like for formatting and ease of story organization but good grief… the amount of errors that flashed up on the screen once I copied it in to Word was just plain disconcerting, given it was something I thought I had made a substantial amount of read-thrus on.

I’m not sure how to rationalize my work flow now. I like the way the manuscript program organizes, but if everything ultimately ends up in Word… why waste time going back and forth? It seems like extra busy work .

Very soon we’ll be wrapping up the graphics portion of the document and then it will be proof time! I can’t wait to get a copy in my hot little hands, though I’m sure the minute I open it up I’ll see 20 more glaring mistakes that mysteriously weren’t there the last 30 times I looked.

But it’s getting close… so close I can almost read it.

Posted by  |  May 29, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

May Day

I disavow any knowledge of April. It’s dead to me. Water under the bridge. A pillar of salt in the rear view mirror, if I was to look…

ABNA was the least of my obstacles this past month. (There I go immediately talking about what I just swore I wasn’t going to talk about…) April really doesn’t deserve a recap, so it’s not going to get one. I will just bask in the sunny glory that is May for today, and savor it. The light is at the end of the tunnel and a little mental recoup is hopefully on its way.

It finally quit snowing… for a few days… I’ll take what I can get at this point. Any day I don’t have to scrape off my windshield is a good day at this point. All of this may have been telling me that I need to revisit my first complete NaNo (that rarely gets talked about and/or admitted to): Mother Nature, Inc. It’s been sitting in the shame pile for a couple years now but never quite quit nagging at me. Might be time to give it a fresh look and a serious scrubbing.

As always, too many ideas, not enough time. But now I can make espresso at home… who needs sleep?

Posted by  |  May 1, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Self-publishing, it is!

I’ve taken the better part of the day to mull over my thoughts on this morning’s list.

I didn’t make the cut.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was a complex mixture of disappointed, unsurprised, and relieved. In my mind, I made it about as far as I expected/hoped to go. The feedback was fairly positive overall, even my final review. Sure, I’ll wonder why I didn’t make it and why others did. That’s human nature, but really… it doesn’t matter. It was a lesson that gave me nothing to lose.

There is no negative outcome for this, which is the great part. I made it far enough to get some decent feedback, and I didn’t have to pay a cent. Complete strangers told me what my close friends had been trying to get me to believe all along. And I won’t lie, it felt good.

Maybe I was a lucky one, even in losing. I saw some of the reviews that came in… there was some tough loved dished out here and there. I had my critiques, but they weren’t unfounded.

Well… except for the one that said I had a foul mouth. *mwah*

Within 10 minutes of getting the news, I was letting my dear photographer Shane know to put the new book cover on the top of his to-do list. Problem is, I’m too much of a designer and I have a vision for this production. Sure it would have been great to be published, but I have ideas… bigger than just pages and pages of text. I’m not sure I would have taken well to middle management telling me ‘Oh yeah, that’s sweet that you have cover art all worked out, but this is what you’re getting.’ Not for this one, the next one maybe, but not this one.

This one is mine.

Posted by  |  April 16, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments