Recap of Formatting Interior Text; Introduction to Graphics. The two biggest tasks in publishing your own book are (1) formatting the story (interior text) and (2) creating an effective cover or marketing image. This will take several articles over the next few weeks, but when we look at historical examples we are shocked to see how simple an *effective* (sells books) cover can be. For example, many editions of Erich Segal's 1970 bestseller had a cover that consisted largely of the title (Love Story) and the author's name. It's not for every book, but it's a start for your cover design aspirations…

   John Locke, Author & Self-Publisher.. This week's featured self-publishing success story is that of John Locke, auhor of the Donovan Creed thrillers and other fast-paced, gripping series. In this issue of PIN, we feature John Locke and several of his catchy cover images. Take a look at his website for a lot more info about his exploding writing career. We know little about John Locke (if that is his real name) the man. There is a sense about him, from his photo(s), that he wants to keep things private, and may have some secrets to hide. Maybe he was a CIA agent. Maybe…well, we can speculate, but that is part of the marketing genius that has made him the first self-published novelist to broach the milllion-sold mark at Kindle, a very exclusive club to which fewer than a dozen best-selling authors of the New York Big Six belong. In other words, John Locke has the flair for self-promotion that most of us need to reach the stratosphere in sales and name brand recognition. We know (or think we know) that he lives in Kentucky with loved ones. And he's very good at story telling. As we study history's famous authors, focusing on those who were forced to self-publish, we find certain broad patterns. Noticeably, in the case of Beatrix Potter, Stephen Crane, John Locke, Amanda Hocking, and others, they were forced to publish their own work because the mediocre establishment bureaucracy rejected or even ridiculed their work. But then, what often emerges, is that these authors quickly shot to enormous success. In the modern bifurcation between print and digital, it seems predictable that a successful self-pubber will be courted by the Big Six, what survives of them. It is much easier for a novice author to bypass the fossil print industry, with its tiny pipelines dedicated largely to pet authors, and its many gate keepers from the point of acquisition to the store shelves, and start out in the highly accessible digital medium. So far, while Amanda Hocking has found Big Six and film deals, John Locke seems to have stuck with his POD and digital origins at Telemachus Press.

   Formula for Success? Or Simply Recipe?. John Locke has published a how-to book on how he achieved his stunning success. It's available on his website, and purports to tell you step by step how he did it. As soon as it becomes available for Nook, I'll buy it. It sounds intriguingly like he tried everything, and then found a shining path through the wilderness. At a guess, he discovered what authors have learned over the past several centuries: offer readers something they can't say no to. In his case, it's a winning combination of humor, adventure, and appealing characters, lubricated with a high-pressure nozzle constantly squirting sheer terror. I'm sure John Locke would tell us that there is no formula, or if there is one, he hasn't found one. But there are recipes, if you will, that can be found in any good how-to-write book. His books are what is recommended here: a gripping, polished Package that effectively turns into a fire hose of word of mouth and unhyped sales. He's good at self-promotion, but his career needed the same fast start as any other, by attracting readers the way a carrot festival attracts bunnies.

Are there any formulas? The late literary agent Scott Meredith promoted the idea (and himself) that there is not a formula but a predictable, all-purpose plot skeleton on which you can and must hang just about any story line. I believe in that very much, although every author has a unique and personal approach that adds more to the conversation. I think back to such things as my nodding acquaintances with music, martial arts, and other things I tried along the path of life. I learned enough about those things to understand some of the basics, and to see certain commonalities. Here's one commonality: You can spend hours or days reading about martial arts in a book, but you won't be any more able to defend yourself in a situation. That's because it is a set of skills, instincts, reflexes, conditioned responses, that your body must learn from long practice and study. It's the same thing with writing fiction. You can go to lectures, watch videos, read books, talk to authors…and you'll be no closer to the goal of being a novelist than if you'd simply gone fishing. Writing is a skill picked up from thousands of hours of practice, coupled with study, reflection, and lots of reading (fiction). Somebody famous once said: "The first 2,000,000 words are just practice." For most of us, that's the truth. That is the equivalent of about ten Charles Dickens novels before you can write one effective, functioning novel. There are two aspects to writing fiction, as in making fine furniture. A Shaker chair is at once a work of craftsmanship, and a work of art. To make a fine chair or write a fine book, you have to master the craftsmanship first, and maybe then, if you have sufficient gift, you can make the leap beyond craft to actually creating recognizable art.

Most of the authors we observe in these pages have shot quickly to success, sometimes within a year or two after publishing their initial work. Howard Fast was a successfully published author by his 20s, whoc was later silenced by the McCarthy Terror in the 1950s, but emerged again in the 1960s after self-publishing under pseudonyms for a decade. The vast majority of 'self-published' authors, like their 'published' peers, never emerge from obscurity, but have the satisfaction of having reached some smallish readership. (Those who bang at the door of the Big Six, or seek agents, book doctors, witch doctors, and other absurdities and macabre oddities of the old print industry, will most likely be barred from ever reaching any readership at all.)

Others, we may guess, have lingered in the doldrums before gradually reaching the top. Such a tale has been told of John D. MacDonald, famous mystery and SF author, anecdotally by another famous author (I won't name names), who claims that MacDonald was purposely kept in the low-visibility midlist for some twenty years by his publishers, who feared that if they spent a front-list advertising budget on him, he'd tank. I have no idea where that reasoning developed, in the gray, tall buildings of Manhattan, but MacDonald's career hit the big time when his Travis Magee (Color/Title) series took off of its own trundling gravitation and massive reader demand. Whether it's urban lore or true, it illustrates how publishers often get in the way rather than help (themselves, the reader, or the author). John Locke has been a rocket of self-publishing success, and we'll watch to see what further trails he will blaze for all of us to emulate. But the lesson we must take from the quick success of many self-publishers is this. If you produce an *effective* (sells books) Package, which takes off among readers by word of mouth (the most powerful marketing tool of all), you should be in the stratosphere sooner rather than later. It makes the case that we really have to start marketing from the time we start writing

   The Guy, The Girl, The Gun. In this week's issue of PIN, we start discussing graphics—both exterior or cover art, and interior art such as one mostly finds in nonfiction books (but also on websites, which every author should have, at least as a calling card, and the same files can be repurposed for multiple uses. John Locke's fiction starts out explosively and comes at you like a freight train out of control. Likewise, his cover art reflects a pleasing mix of whimsy, traditionally understandable cues, clues, and themes. Having long ago made a study of movie posters, I came to a conclusion that has remained with me. Of course, I was most likely to watch a James Bond movie or other thriller (Marathon Man, Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, am I dating myself yet?)—not a giggly-weepy romance, though I was open to serious dramas from Lord of the Flies to Chariots of Fire.

In all of that, I came to the conclusion that a successful movie was likely to have a studio poster featuring three essential things: the Guy, the Girl, the Gun. I see a lot of traditional elements in John Locke's covers, which leads me to think that his fiction is so successful in part because he returns to fairly traditional themes. He writes thrillers and westerns. Now in those posters, each of the elements will often not be spelled out explicitly. For example, on the cover for Lethal Experiment, we have an attractive young woman holding a gun, and showing quite a serious expression. In crime dramas well into the 1960s, when women's rights came into open discussion, it was normal to have a female character who was always called 'the Girl.' She rarely had much of a personality, but was your stereotypical sex object that helped move the hero along his violent, noir path or plot. I offer these observations in the spirit that this week we begin a study of graphics, including covers, and John Locke's book covers (marketing images on the digital side) bring us back to traditional tropes that always seem to win.

This is not to say that you should think of these elements literally as you create your cover image for your book (see this week's article). But consider: in the elemental lizard-brain recognition patterning of our brain, we do see the Guy, the Girl, and the Gun. Her possession of a gun, okay, rationally in a feminist-adjusted world, could represent the inner rage many women justifiably feel at having to live in fear of men who prey on little children and on women. But in a more global sense, it is just as likely that the gun represents a male presence in the story. Images of a gun and the girl have been common for many generations, and imply the presence of a strong lead (today just as likely to be a female cop, soldier, medical sleuth or whatever, while the male is now a more recipient love interest). The point is not, at all, how we rationally interpret and analyze this to death. The point is that, in our primordial eat-drink-f*k-kill-sleep brain stem, these are images that arouse pre-Cambrian cascades of electro-chemical activities on our cortical lobes. You may decide to do a cover of, literally, a guy, a girl, and a gun. Or you may decide to just use letters, or a rose, or a town square in some heartland fantasy land (loaded with hidden meanings and secrets). But the effective cover that sells books will send whatever message it needs to send to its intended audience, and the secret of that is what you need to find for your own book. Learn to browse books in new ways, seeing them as a cover artist and cover designer. Last but not least, I have found that Getty, Corbis, and other stock photo houses are too expensive for my pocketbook. However, for the last year or two, I have used the inexpensive and excellent services of iStockPhoto with very pleasing results. As with all links, I offer this one informationally only, while documenting my personal satisfaction with the images I have inexpensively purchased and doctored for my cover art. Next week: we'll talk more about cover art and interior graphics.