I have decided to produce a large print edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror for the visually challenged. I don’t know when it will be out, hopefully soon.
The mechanics of converting to large print are simple. Changing the font to 18-point vs. 12 was easy enough, but now I have to contend with the font that was larger than the original 12-point and the space between paragraphs. What size do I want to make them?
The larger print, of course, means more pages, so the price will have to increase accordingly, but I will keep the increase to a minimum. I will also have to review the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines and ensure that I am following their advice. This means I may have to change the font from a serif to a non-serif and make other minor adjustments.
Once I have accomplished changing A Tale of Hell… I will look at adapting Click, The Scent and Other Stories, and Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover to large print as well.
I have decided to produce a large print edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror for the visually challenged. I don’t know when it will be out, hopefully soon. Changing the font to 18-point vs. 12 was easy enough, but now I have to contend with the font that was larger than the original 12-point and the space between paragraphs. What size do I want to make them? The larger print, of course, means more pages, so the price will have to increase accordingly, but I will keep the increase to a minimum. I will also have to review the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines and ensure that I am following their advice. This means I may have to change the font from a serif to a non-serif and make other minor adjustments.
Once I have accomplished changing A Tale of Hell… I will look at adapting Click, The Scent and Other Stories, and Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover to large print as well.
I have decided to produce a large print edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror for the visually challenged. I don’t know when it will be out, hopefully soon. Changing the font to 18-point vs. 12 was easy enough, but now I have to contend with the font that was larger than the original 12-point and the space between paragraphs. What size do I want to make them? The larger print, of course, means more pages, so the price will have to increase accordingly, but I will keep the increase to a minimum. I will also have to review the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines and ensure that I am following their advice. This means I may have to change the font from a serif to a non-serif and make other minor adjustments.
Once I have accomplished changing A Tale of Hell… I will look at adapting Click, The Scent and Other Stories, and Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover to large print as well.
I watched this last night. It’s a terrific video on what makes a bestseller. The speaker is Jonny Geller, who was the agent for Tracy Chevalier who wrote Girl with Pearl Earring. This is a fascinating analysis by a man who has spent his career trying to determine what makes a bestseller.
I have decided to produce a large print edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror for the visually challenged. I don’t know when it will be out, hopefully soon. Changing the font to 18-point vs. 12 was easy enough, but now I have to contend with the font that was larger than the original 12-point and the space between paragraphs. What size do I want to make them? The larger print, of course, means more pages, so the price will have to increase accordingly, but I will keep the increase to a minimum. I will also have to review the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines and ensure that I am following their advice. This means I may have to change the font from a serif to a non-serif and make other minor adjustments.
Once I have accomplished changing A Tale of Hell… I will look at adapting Click, The Scent and Other Stories, and Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover to large print as well.
I have decided to produce a large print edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror for the visually challenged. I don’t know when it will be out, hopefully soon. Changing the font to 18-point vs. 12 was easy enough, but now I have to contend with the font that was larger than the original 12-point and the space between paragraphs. What size do I want to make them? The larger print, of course, means more pages, so the price will have to increase accordingly, but I will keep the increase to a minimum. I will also have to review the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines and ensure that I am following their advice. This means I may have to change the font from a serif to a non-serif and make other minor adjustments.
Once I have accomplished changing A Tale of Hell… I will look at adapting Click, The Scent and Other Stories, and Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover to large print as well.
I have been in the marketing/publicity mode for Shadows and Stars tonight, so in addition to my new Twitter banner, I also designed one for my LinkedIn page. I downloaded the background image from Pexels.com, where you can get high-quality, royalty/fee-free, public domain images.
I have been in the marketing/publicity mode for Shadows and Stars tonight, so in addition to my new Twitter banner, I also designed one for my LinkedIn page. I downloaded the background image from Pexels.com, where you can get high-quality, royalty/fee-free, public domain images.
As I mentioned yesterday, four of my flash horror stories I have been accepted for publication in Ezine 51. The publishers have also offered to run a full-page ad in the issue for a very reasonable $10. I have submitted the ad shown. Let me know what you think of it. I will use it again as the opportunity arises.
Sirens Call required that the ad be 1100 px x 850. This did permit me to use only the painting, because the text would cover too much of it. Therefore I shrunk the painting down on Pixlr E and filled the background with black so that the painting would appear to be coming out of the darkness, which is appropriate for Hell. It’s like you are looking through the smoke and darkness to see the fight. It also allows all the other colors to appear bright.
The most important text was the book title, particularly “A Tale of Hell” since that carries the most impact and with the painting conveys in an instant the most important emotions and archetypal ideas the book conveys. So I made that the biggest text in white to stand out the most against a dark background. I was trying to give the ad a three-dimensional feel. Then of course I put the remainder of the title in white but smaller. I lined it up so that it didn’t cover the faces of the figures behind it. This also gives the title a feel of hanging out in the air as you watch the fight and the people and demon behind it. People’s vision and attention key on faces, so it’s important not to cover those.
The next most important text I put in yellow.
I put my own name in red and rather small, so that it doesn’t detract from the fight, but is still well visible yet almost blends into the background.
I used Pixlr E to make the ad and chose the fonts from there. I wanted the title to pop out like a movie title and to have a feel that it might be used on a sign in Hell so I chose a font that is more formal, something that looks like it was made by a professional. For the yellow text I chose something that would look like it might be found scrawled on a wall in Hell. Not using the same font as I did for the title makes it stand out more from the rest of the text. I chose a simple, narrow font for my name, so that it would stand out from the other text, yet it would be quite legible.
I found out just now that Siren’s Call accepted the ad. It will run in their Fall/Halloween issue.
Many heartfelt thanks to Siren’s Call for both publishing my works and my ad.
On Sunday night, I sent six works of flash/micro horror fiction to Sirens Call Publications. I received an email just now that they will publish four of them. Three in their Halloween issue and one for their December issue. These are just works I came up with on the spur of the moment when I was experimenting with how fast I could write flash/micro fiction.
Of course, I won’t publish the stories here before Ezine51 does, but I will give you their names as a teaser. “Walking Through Downtown”, “River of Lost Souls”, and “Shadow Men” will be published in their Halloween issue. “Dirty Phoenix Rising” will be published in their December issue.
After these have been published, I will add them to a new edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror. I have anything else published by December, I will add it too.
I may try to come up with more flash horror to submit to other magazines. While this magazine does not pay anything (and most don’t), flash fiction is easy and quick to write (at least for me) and, in terms of publicity, it keeps my name out in the public view depending on the readership of the accepting publication. Ezine51, I believe, has a readership of 35,000.
The cover for the second edition of The Scent and Other Stories.
I have decided to put out a second edition of The Scent and Other Stories.
My primary reason for doing this is because I don’t like the cover any more. It is too dark and bland. When I initially created it, having been a (film) photographer at one point, I thought a black and white photo of a woman looking at the reader would be intriguing.
However, when I searched Books-a-Million to see if they carried my works (and they do), they came up with only four, of which The Scent… was one. It looked very dark and bland and ancient on their website. It was nothing to entice a viewer. Therefore, I have developed a new cover, which you can see here. It’s much more eye-catching, which is important when it’s laid out side by side with a dozen others on a computer screen.
I started thinking about a second edition some time back. I wanted to include another story entitled “Bye-Bye”, which was previously published by Fictionontheweb.co.uk. After I added the story to the current manuscript, I discovered that I had 90 pages. In the Amazon printing world, they can print the title on the spine of the book so long as the book is 100+ pages. I really want the title to be on the spine to make it more marketable in bookstores. So I have another 10+ pages to add.
I searched my electronic files and found a story entitled “American Dream” which I started a few years ago, but never got more than 40%-50% done. I calculated the number of 6×9 pages the story would be currently to eight. So I decided to finish it and include it in the second edition. I am still working on it. Once finished, it will probably be more like fifteen to twenty pages in length. Maybe one day, if I write more stories along this line (and I hope to), I will put out a third edition and include those.
The San Antonio Riverwalk
The story so far is that a rather wealthy and bored, young wife named Laura is waking up in her bedroom in Corpus Christi while her husband is out of town on business. She is trying to decide what to do for the day. She thinks about the nightlife she enjoys and the lovers she has had (her husband is frequently out of town) as a result. She wants to call up her current guy on the side, Malcolm Flynn, but he is up in San Antonio for the weekend with his girlfriend. In a little while, a friend named Jill calls and asks Laura to go to San Antonio with her. She agrees thinking that San Antonio is a big town and she probably won’t run into Malcolm there. Of course, Laura and Jill spot Malcolm and his girlfriend in a cafe on the Riverwalk.
That’s as far as I have gotten. I am still toying with ideas for what happens next and how the story ends.
One side note on the story is that it includes Malcolm Flynn. Malcolm is a character in the novel I am planning to finish after Shadows andStars: The Man Who Escaped from Hell. I also have plans to include Malcolm in some short stories. He is one of my varied alter egos that crop up in my work from time to time. Malcolm won’t be the protagonist in The Man Who Escaped from Hell (that’s Jake Brody), but he will be a close friend of his.
Let me know what you think of my plans and if you have any questions.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 