Tag: indie writer

The Firstborn

On By dphauthorIn Through Sweet Like Sugar, You See Me2 Comments

Being the youngest child in the family, I don’t know what it feels like to be a firstborn. Having no live children, I also don’t know what it feels like to have a firstborn.

But I do have 2 baby books, and might be able to share my experience of giving birth to the firstborn and watch her grow.

First, I must admit that I sometimes forget my firstborn. Or maybe forget is the wrong word. ‘Give up’ sounds more like it, and it does sound more cruel, doesn’t it?

Here’s the thing. I went into labor without any help, as far as marketing went. All I had was my own guts and a naive imagination of what life would be after giving birth to my first book. None of which helped, of course, and the latter didn’t even come close to the reality.

I did not have any beta readers for my first book. All I had was my mother/editor/alpha reader. I’m not saying this is a mistake; some people might be good enough not to need any other help but from an editor/one alpha reader. My problem was (one of many others) that I wrote about something I didn’t know.

The setting for my first book is Louisiana, USA, and I’ve never been to USA, let alone Louisiana. So I should have probably hired a local editor from that state. I didn’t, simply because I didn’t have the money. I was sane enough not to think that I would strike it rich with my first book, so I didn’t want to spend any savings for something I haven’t tested. And yet, in doing so, I probably just made things worse.

Having no beta readers mean that there was no one to tell me if there was something wrong with the story. I trust my mom/editor, but she is just one person. Sometimes we miss things. The advantage of having several beta readers is that one of these people might catch some oddities you/your editor don’t. Again, nobody told me about this before, so I went into the water without any beta readers.

Which also meant that there was no one to give me those ‘crucial’ reviews/testimonials/endorsements when my book just came out.

Imagine this: you see a nice looking book, read the preview at the back & got a bit interested, and try to find out if anyone has read it/if they liked it… and you found none. You read the author’s name again, and realized you’ve never heard of that person before. As you try to look for more info about the author, you found nothing either! What would make you invest your time and money to read a book no one has ever heard of, by an author no one has ever heard of?

Nothing.

And I learned all that only after my firstborn book was out. I thought I was prepared for everything and ready to sell. I waited in anticipation and religiously checked my sales report, while trying my best to market it on my social media platform (which also had no followers as yet). I’m sure you know where this is going. Yep. Downhill.

I won’t lie. I felt that slap in the face, hard. And I noticed I wasn’t the only one. Some people made the same decisions (again, not mistakes) and one by one, I saw them disappearing from the same social media platform, pulling back their books from the circulation at the same time. The authors and their books ceased to exist, just like that.

I thought of doing the same, many times. But I thought I’d stick around just a little more, and resorted to plan B, which in my opinion is also a sad fate for self-published authors: have a free promotion for the book.

Trust me, when you’ve written a book, pour out your heart & soul to it, the last thing you’d want to do is let people read it for free. And they shouldn’t, in the perfect world. You should know your worth, and your book is your artwork, and that is priceless.

But we don’t live in the perfect world, do we? And sometimes, you need to–ugh–beg. By begging, I mean do that f-in free promotion, in the hope that someone, somewhere, will read it and give your book a review (I didn’t even care what review, good or bad was all welcomed!). At least this way you’d know that the review is based solely on your book, not a sugar-coated version you’d get when you pay for a review.

To my surprise (I mean really, it did take me by surprise), the reviews did start to come… and none of them were as bad as I thought.

So I did this begging technique a few more times, especially since a year after my firstborn was out, the lockdown had just started everywhere. I thought that was the perfect timing for people to start reading, and if I could help in any way to ease up their days (with a free psychological thriller book, no less), then why not?

This was when I started to get even more surprised.

By this point, I started to notice how some reader, instead of using the free promotion, decided to purchase my book instead. Was it because I already had a few reviews for it? Was it because of the friends I made in the social media? Was it just because of the book cover (which I also really love)? Whatever it was, it was working.

Finally, my firstborn started to stand on her own feet.

When my second book was born, I decided not to have a free promotion. At least for now, I want to keep my self-worth and put a price to my books. I put everything I learned from not having a successful firstborn to launching my second book baby, and was ready to reap the profits.

At first, that was what it looked like. I got better & quicker sales than I did for my firstborn, reviews poured in quicker too, and all of this was without doing any free promotion. Feeling like I knew how to do it properly this time made me concentrate completely on my second book baby. I neglected my firstborn and, like I said, gave up on promoting it in any way.

But my firstborn is smart. I’m still not quite sure how she does it, but just when I gave up on her, she started running around the world barefeet.

Whenever I put both of my books for a countdown sale, my firstborn somehow convinced people that she was worth the read, too–sometimes even more than my second book. When there isn’t any promotion going on, she manages to make people read her on Kindle Unlimited, or even buy her for the full price.

As a mother, I am pleasantly surprised. To see that some new readers notice the book I had given up on, read it, and even put some reviews for it… there’s no greater feeling than that.

I guess in a way it’s my firstborn’s way of saying, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

And I am a proud Mama. Truly.

Thank you for giving my firstborn a chance, even when her own mother had been neglecting her.

Keep Writing

On By dphauthorIn You See MeLeave a comment

Why do you write?

Ah, the million dollar question.

Once you pronounce yourself a writer, you get this question a lot. The answers vary among writers and authors, but I’m here to tell you about mine in the hope that I’d get to convince you (yes, you!) to keep writing, no matter what.

I’ve written short stories from when I was a kid, in my native language. I seem to have lots of ideas back then & if I didn’t write them down, I’d draw them as comics. But my ‘real’ writing experience didn’t start then.

It started when I had my very first bad heartbreak. It was my first year of uni and I was unprepared for the reality that this person was not waiting for me. I became obsessed for a while, couldn’t think of anything else but him and how to get him back. It was unhealthy.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t watch any movie, because everything would just remind me of him. (I did read Harry Potter though, the 3rd book just came out. It was rainy and gloomy, perfect for my mood that time.) Music was the same. It was hard.

It went on for a few months, until I finally picked up a notebook and started writing… to myself. I started with something along these lines: ‘One day, my future self will look at this moment and laugh, maybe because we’d be together again, or maybe because I’d realize how ridiculously hopeless I was.’

I was still hopeful when I started writing into that notebook, treating it as unsent letters to him. After a while, the hopefulness changed into frustration, and afterwards, anger. It was ugly, full of downs and more downs. My handwriting was sometimes neat, sometimes jagged and the paper dented with the pressure I made while writing the angry words. Some pages were crumpled and dog-eared because of my tears they caught.

More months went by, and for whatever reason (maybe I was running out of pages), I started reading the notebook from the beginning again… and that was when I realized how silly I was for clinging on to him and our non-existent future together. 

After many times of doing this on repeat (writing, re-reading, writing, re-reading–my real life was pretty much on pause during those times), it was time for me to move on to the next stage.

I let it go. I let him go.

No one else has ever read those notes. I don’t even have them with me anymore, but that was a turning point for me. Why? Because I wrote it from the deepest corner of my heart. And what did I get out of it? Relief, mostly. I felt like I was healed.

That was when I knew that writing, for me, will never be for pleasing or impressing others. I do it to express myself, even when no one is around to read it.

Why should it be any different now when I write books? Why should I care if anyone read my books? It shouldn’t. It’s just a lovely bonus if someone did, that’s all.

The most important thing is that I’ve expressed what I wanted to express, let out what I wanted to shout from my heart. I know this sounds like a cliché, but ever since that ‘turning point’, when I write my stories, I pour my heart out to it. Like Voldemort and his Horcruxes, I put a slice of myself into my books, always.

To me, writing is personal. It’s a journey, much like life is, for each and every one of us. Some people let their journeys be shown to people, and in this case, they become the writers we know. Some journeys touch us, some are inspirational, and some don’t come anywhere near us. But that’s life. And even if these ‘invisible’ journeys don’t touch us, their journeys don’t end there.

Now, with 2 books out and a new Work In Progress (WIP) brewing, I can’t tell you how many times I thought of quitting. I don’t get enough sales, I want to quit putting my books out there. I read someone else’s book that is so good it makes me feel like an impostor, I want to lock myself in a room and mope. I get a less than 5-star rating for any of my books, I want to stop writing altogether.

But then I remember the question at the beginning of this post and ask it to myself. Why do I write? If I said I write to express myself, then what does all of the above (paragraph) matter? That’s right, it doesn’t. Those things: the sales, how my writing is perceived by others, the ratings/reviews–they are but a bonus. When I remember how ‘far’ I’ve come from only writing to myself to self-publishing 2 books and actually selling them to more than just 1 person, and even getting any ratings/reviews at all… this is much, much more than I ever dreamed of achieving from my writing journey.

I was here, and I wrote. I am still here, and I’m still writing.

And so are you. You were here, and maybe, you’ve written something. You are still here, now, and I hope you are still writing. Maybe, one day your writing will touch me, but even if they never will, at least they were written and you’ve expressed yourself through it. I’d like to think you’ve let yourself get healed this way.

So please, keep on writing. Do it for yourself.

Covering the Covers, Part 2

On By dphauthorIn Through The Invisible Ones, You See MeLeave a comment

And I’m back to talk about the behind-the-scenes of making my book covers!

If you haven’t known it already, my second book that was supposed to be suspense and dark drama turned out to be yet another psychological thriller (I promise I didn’t know the genre until after I sent out the manuscript to my beta readers… more on this on my next posts!). So the same rule I used for my first novel–no person/silhouette of a person running/walking away from the reader on the cover–applies here, too.

At first, I was thinking of using a picture taken by my late brother-in-law. He was a talented photographer with an eye for raw and ‘just as you are’ scenes, who mostly took monochromatic pictures of Jakarta and its people, and he usually developed his own films, too.

Since my second book, The Invisible Ones, is set in Jakarta and Bandung, it would’ve otherwise been so perfect.

But as the writing progressed and the title came up (the book title always comes up at the latest stage for me), it was clear to me that I wanted a different approach.

For a moment, I even thought of just putting the title on the cover & that’s it. No images, no pictures, done. Imagine how eye-catching that would be, ha!

But I couldn’t do it. This ‘immaterialized’ book begged for a cover with something else, I had resolved to do it, so do it I shall!

I started doodling again on my trusted notebook. This time, I knew what color palette I was going for (monochrome plus blood red), but putting together a picture would consume too much time and energy… and I’m not even a good photographer.

That means I had to use my other hobby: drawing. I was thinking I could choose several items/events in the book that are significant, and put images of those in the cover. But when my husband saw it, he thought it reminded him too much of Ozark, so I didn’t go through with it.

And then I started thinking of symbols. Things that go on in the book, but put in a way that’s not too obvious. The first thing that came to mind was an onion, because of the way the female main character of my book tells her story. We’re peeling layer upon layer of her story until we get to the very core of herself as we move on throughout the book.

But as I thought of the layout of the book cover, imagined it with an onion at the center, it made me think of a recipe book instead. And that wasn’t a good idea. How could I make it work? I figured I needed to look around for ideas. How do other book cover designers/illustrators illustrate book covers in a not too-obvious way? How do they decide what to show on the cover?

While I went through other authors’ gorgeous book covers to search for ideas, I suddenly got reminded of my other past-life obsession: tarot cards.

Ever since I was a teenager & got my first tarot card deck, I had always dreamed of making my own deck. I was intrigued by the many hidden symbols in one single card, when I finally got the meaning of one thing it was like decoding a secret world.

It suddenly clicked in my head that that was what I was gonna go for. Make my book cover look like a tarot card, with all kinds of symbols for everything that goes on in the book. When the readers decode it (and I hope they do), I imagine giving them the same satisfaction as I got from decoding tarot cards.

Since the story takes place in Indonesia, I wanted to make all the symbols and style distinctly Indonesian, or even more specifically, Javanese. What would be better than Javanese batik and wood carving style?

The ‘two of everything’ continues all the way to the cover. Each main character deserves their own illustration, so I made 2 separate ones to be combined in the end.

The bulb and flower for Maya, the clouds and rain for Indra, my other main character.

The clouds are drawn in the style of Indonesian batik pattern called ‘Megamendung’. I can’t even begin to tell you how these clouds depict Indra so well (other than the fact that his name means ‘god of lightning & rain’), so you can google the meaning of the pattern if you’d like.

Maya’s is the onion, as per my original idea, drawn also in the same style of Javanese batik.

I used licensed Photoshop for commercial use again to edit the illustrations.

This time, I wanted the font not to only tell readers/viewers what the title of my book is, but to also show it. I chose a font that has multiple thickness to create a sense of invisibility to the ‘invisible’ word.

In general, I like my book covers to have matte finishing. However, having a black book cover was something I never tried in matte finishing, and I was slightly worried about how it would look. This was where the author’s proof copy came in handy.

If you’re self-publishing a paperback, I highly recommend getting the author’s proof copy before you actually publish it. For me, it was great to see if all the tiny white outlines of my illustration were visible enough and to know just how dark black the book cover would look like in real life.

Once everything was done, it was time to publish the book!

Just like with my first book, I love my second book cover. It’s me, it’s perfect for my story, and it’s something I won’t be embarrassed about no matter how long I see into the future.

If you’ve read my book, how many symbols have you found in the illustration that you could make out from the book? Remember, everything means something there in the book and on the cover design. Nothing means nothing.

It’s Time

On By dphauthorIn I See You, The Invisible Ones, Through The Invisible Ones, You See MeLeave a comment

The time has come for Maya and Indra to welcome you to Indonesia. 🧍🏾‍♀️🧍🏻

The Invisible Ones is going to come out on July 15th! 🥳🤩🙈👀

My proof print came yesterday and I couldn’t contain myself. Though this is my second book, seeing my words coming into the shape of a real book is just priceless. There are still some minor things to tweak, which is why a proof print is always good to have. Yet I am confident that I will be able to get the book out by 15th. 😊👌

I’d like to share the lovely endorsements I got from my beta readers, printed on the back cover of the book. These are their honest opinions and I am so incredibly happy to know that they liked my book. When you’ve spent so much time to write a story and lived in it for so long, it’s sometimes hard to believe that other people would actually read and understand your work, let alone like it. Having these words printed on my book will certainly remind me of this achievement, no matter how small it may seem to others. To me, it means the whole world. Thank you ever so much, dear beta readers! 😘💕

There will also be something fun starting tomorrow, just to while away the days until the actual launch of my book. Stay tuned!

Selamat jalan ke Indonesia! 🛫Semoga selamat sampai tujuan. 😉

📸: Victor Lumunon.

PS. Visit my Instagram for more exciting news, updates, and an ongoing giveaway contest (from 12th to 14th of July).