There's a couple different routes you could go.
I've not used it myself, but Vellum is spoken of as the one of the nicest options. It's also quite pricey, but you could easily pay somebody to format it for you if you don't want to shell out the hundred or so bucks to have the program yourself.
Scrivener is another app that is spoken of highly. I've used neither of them personally, so take that with a grain of salt.
You could hand format it. Salacious Stories made a guide for erotica shorts, but I would imagine it would work for novels. It has the added advantage of Sal being a moderator on here who chooses to spend his free time being super goddamn helpful, and so if you have questions you can ask him directly.
The easiest route would be downloading it as a docx, ands chucking that into Kindle Create.
I'm not a formatting guru (though there are quite a few who hang out here), so I can only be of limited help, but that's the advice I'm capable of giving.
Congrats on getting your first novel done! Here's a celebratory tune I wrote just for you.
♪ Those smutbux will be coming round the mountain when they coooome ♪
♪ Those smutbux with be coming round the mountain when they coooome ♪
♪ Well enough with the chatter ♪
♪ Give me my happily ever after! ♪
♪ Those smutbux will be coming when they cooooooome ♪ ♪
It's a phrase used by Debra Dixon--but I use it as a rough outlining method. A character has a motivation, which results in a goal, but there's some sort of conflict--which changes the motivation, which changes the goal, but there's another conflict... And so on.
This is a neat list, but I agree with some of the other commenters--I think it's easy to mis-use this sort of list as an excuse to slip into lazy writing.
Personally, I suggest Angela Ackerman's book "The Emotion Thesaurus." I like her book because it focuses on the psychological aspects of human emotions, and the physiological effects they can possibly have. She doesn't just list a bunch of physical actions, but rather takes the time to delve into what sort of character would use a certain set of actions, and when might be appropriate to include them. It's only a couple bucks on Amazon, if you want to check it out: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00822WM2M/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1#navbar
It's super easy to learn, honestly I would recommend anyone who self publishes to learn this part of the process because it is best to have fine control of it.
So learn up on some basic CSS, read this book but instead of doing all the stuff she says about formatting the text in word (search and replace), copy and paste your word document into this tool and let it do allll the work for you.
Otherwise, play with different CSS on your title pages (look at other authors for ideas), learn to embed custom fonts (fancy), and learn how to code a TOC from scratch (not hard! it's basic css).
I use Sigil personally because it gives me fine control of everything. You can use Calibre as she instructs, but Sigil is XHTML and will get pissed off if you screw anything up so it's a bit safer to me.
Why hand formatting instead of just grabbing Vellum and formatting for people? Vellum doesn't teach you shit, and you'll give people a better KENP by doing handformatting. You can do all that fancy Vellum shit with handformatting, and you can squeeze more pages out of it which is what everyone wants. How many more pages?
Some more schmuck uploaded this long ass story from a word document to Amazon and got 200 pages out of it. Using proper formatting, it went to 600+ pages. That is an uncommon example, but handformatting is nearly always better.
OK, I'll start things off. I had a pretty good week - sales picked up from the previous week, and my latest stories are doing pretty well.
The most important thing though is that yesterday I successfully hand-coded an ebook! Using the great guide "A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress" as well as Guido Henkel's guide, I was able to reformat an existing book, add in all the backmatter, convert it to an epub file, upload it to Amazon and test it out on my new Kindle - and it looks great! I strongly recommend both those guides to anyone who is thinking about starting hand coding. I was helped by the fact that I'm very computer savvy, but I think anyone could get the hang of it with some practice!
So this week the goal will be to reformat a bunch of my existing books, starting with the newest books and the top sellers. Extra smutbux, here I come!
I read a helpful book on this subject recently: "Write to Market" by Chris Fox. It is not specific to the romance genre, but it IS pretty specific to Amazon, explaining their ranking system, how to research, etc. etc.
If you have a KU subscription, you can borrow it and read it for free.
https://www.amazon.com/Write-Market-Deliver-Faster-Smarter-ebook/dp/B01AX23B4Q
Another amazing reference for learning how to show character feelings is the Emotions Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. They have a whole series of similar books on other subjects, as well as a website - One Stop For Writers - that are also awesome resources.
Looking at a tool like the Snowflake Method might help you hone in on a more concrete plot. You can also find the book on Amazon.
There's a really great book that explains this and gives you some tips about going about it - and it's permafree! It's called "Reader Magnets" by Nick Stephenson. You can find it on Amazon here.
ETA a word I left out.
As a general rule of thumb, keep dialogue concise and to the point. Don't include anything non-essential. No conversations about the weather, or what they ate last night, unless it's relevant to the plot.
Obviously there's many more points to cover. I'll throw out this book recommendation as it really helped me out a lot.
I have a PO Box away from my home from before I started writing, so I use that one. I've seen one or two people say that they just use their home address. I guess it just depends on how comfortable you are with having it out there. The minuscule chance of some deranged person knowing where I live is enough for me to not want to use my home address but maybe I'm being paranoid. Still, I figure better to just pay for a PO Box than have to move to avoid stalker obsessed with me and my beautiful prose.
Personally, I haven't seen huge returns from my mailing list--I only have about fifty subscribers so far. But from everything I hear and read they are an enormous resource and one of the few things you should definitely have.
I mean, imagine being able to email a group of people who are specifically interested in your work every time you release a title--and then get a bunch of sales from them, and then get the boost in rank for you book that they would give.
I wouldn't let not having a mailing list keep you from publishing--if it is. But I'd say it's worth setting up. Check out <em>Reader Magnets</em>. It's free on Amazon and it sells the importance of a mailing list better than I could.
A PO Box is definitely an expense, but if you're planning on doing this as a business--as a career--rather than I hobby, I'd say basically: suck it up, if at all possible. It's just one of those things you need to spend money on. Lol, I feel like my dad saying, "suck it up."
Romance is actually very simple. All romance novels follow a similar formula. To write effective romance, you need to understand two things: romantic story arc, and how to write emotion and conflict.
I’m going to point you to two resources I recommend to all my romance writer clients:
First is a book called Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes (a fellow romance editor). It costs less than $6 on Amazon and you can read it cover to cover in less than an hour. RTB will explain the formula for romantic story arc. Once you understand that, you can just plug your chosen setting, characters, etc. into the formula.
The second is Writing With Emotion, Tension, and Conflict: by Cheryl St. John (a romance writer). This book will teach you how to take your emotional conflict to the next level to really gut-punch your readers right in the feels.
Now go wrench some hearts, little fledgling romance writer. You got this. 👊🏼
What are you describing? Are you describing emotions? Physical characteristics? Location? Action? Amazon has all kinds of books that focus on particular subjects and how to describe them; for example, The Emotion Thesaurus and Writing Vivid Settings. If you take a look at those two, it will lead you to other books that focus on how to write descriptions.
Rachel Aaron/Rachel Bach. She writes several thousand words per day and, since 2010, has written thirteen novels and other various works.
This! I have been having the same issues lately. My biggest suggestion is to read, of course. I also recently finished this book which helped put the structural mechanics of writing into perspective: https://www.amazon.com/GMC-Motivation-Conflict-Debra-Dixon-ebook/dp/B00DZ01FRY
Writing buddies help, too. They'll ask questions that allow you to search for answers that frequently lead to more plot development.
read authors who are great at dialogue. Robert B. Parker, Janet Evanovich, Lawrence Block, Gregory Macdonald, Douglas Adams, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, etc. notice what they do.
as a general rule you're gonna see each character (at least the major characters) has a distinct voice. such as different sentence structure and vocabulary. some will speak in longer flowing sentences that are grammatically correct, others speak with more slang and sentence fragments.
you'll see a lot of conflict and tension in the dialogue. disagreements, clashing agendas or goals. the TV show Psych is also a good example, everyone's squabbling or disagreeing all the time about almost everything.
you'll see a lot of back-and-forth, not paragraphs and paragraphs from the same character without interruption. Evanovich has a guideline that characters never speak more than about 3 sentences of dialogue before it changes or an interruption.
you'll see limited use of even 'he said' or 'she said'. you'll see more use of descriptive narrative to indicate the speaker and add depth to the story at the same time. rather than this:
>"It's difficult to explain," Janet said. "I can't find the words."
you'll see:
>"It's difficult to explain." Janet stopped speaking, eyes clouded in concentration. "I can't find the words."
James Scott Bell has a good little advice book on this topic, summarizing dialogue tips with examples. https://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Dazzling-Dialogue-Manuscript-ebook/dp/B00KN0JEYA
I don’t mind but you should work on writing one as it will help with you writing ability.
You might also check out Snowflake Method it gave me lots of good strategies for writing.
Good luck
Here are a few things to examine:
1) Are you marketing the books? Do you have a reader magnet/free book? Do you do book promotions with other authors on Bookfunnel or Prolific Works to get subscribers for a newsletter? Do you have a newsletter that you use to market to an audience of subscribers? Do you do newsletter swaps with other authors in your genre? Do you schedule promotions? What is your book pricing? Have you tried releasing at 99 cents?
2) If you are doing all of number 1, have you had beta readers look at your books to give you feedback?
3) Are your books written to market? I suggest reading this book if you haven't already on how to research what sells. https://www.amazon.com/Write-Market-Deliver-Faster-Smarter-ebook/dp/B01AX23B4Q
Have you read Romancing the Beat? It's very helpful and shows the different stages of the romance. Usually both the hero and the heroine have a problem with love that has kept them from finding anyone. The first 0-15% of the book is set-up for the normal world and everything changes at the inciting incident. You can still have the meet-cute in the set-up but you are showing their normal world. Does that make sense? Here is the book. https://www.amazon.com/Romancing-Beat-Structure-Romance-Kissing-ebook/dp/B01DSJSURY
Can you think of any profession in which purposely avoiding the best in the field is a good idea?
​
Studying other successes in your field is a very good way to improve.
​
You might also want to read "Write To Market" by Chris Fox.
>I also noticed the show scripts are written by an all-woman team.
The showrunner responsible for the first two seasons of the Netflix adaptation (Chris Van Dusen) is male. He is the creator and primary writer for the first two seasons of the show. Jess Brownell will be leading the next two seasons.
Men can write about, and for, women just fine -- there are a lot of male romance authors out there writing under female or genderless pseudonyms because doing so is part of their marketing approach (they sell better). The reverse is also true, women can write men in a way that is completely believable.
Writing is a business as much as it is a craft. It's important for writers to know who they are marketing to, and to write for expectations of that audience. That means market research. That means writing in the correct voice. Hitting the correct beats (romance readers can be ruthless if this particular need isn't met, hence popular primers like this).
If skilled writing feels gendered, then there's a decent chance that it's meant to -- because that's what sells the best to the audience it is intended for.
All those dialogue tags are generally considered 'invisible' in text form and most instructors or creative writing books tell you to include them liberally. In prose, readers' eyes just glaze over them and it doesn't interrupt narrative flow, but they do prevent the reader from becoming confused. That's a good thing.
Most authors are writing their books to be read as prose, so they should and do include these dialogue tags whenever there would be any doubt about who is speaking.
Audio is a completely different story. In audio format, dialogue tags are not considered invisible and can be distracting to the reader.
The only real solution is to just go through the manuscript before the audiobook is recorded and replace those dialogue tags with narrative directions. That way the narrator knows what character voice to use, and that is utilized for distinguishing characters instead of dialogue tags. Audio publishers do this to varying extents, some more and some less.
>"I will kill them with my sword," Darren said.
becomes
>"I will kill them with my sword." {Narrative Direction -- Darren's voice.}
Or something like that. The narrator uses the narrative direction to inform their voice acting for the line of text.
Unfortunately there's no real solution for the text to speech crowd. Removing the tags would hurt the prose, which is what the text to speech software is reading from. Maybe at some point there will be better text to speech software that can recognize these tags and skip them. Otherwise, it's just one of the benefits of audiobooks over text to speech.
If anyone is interested in learning more, my How-To recommendation is How to Write Dazzling Dialogue by James Scott Bell.
Rachel Aaron wrote a book on writing 2k-10k words a day. Her books are pretty well-liked according to her GoodReads reviews as well, so... not automatically crap like others here are suggesting.
If you want to do it really crazy you write backwards...backwards! You write it from beginning to end but explain it to interviewers zach galifianakis style like your are deep genius
Seriously tho
writing from the middle is better
I think there’s a book about backwards somewhere too. Especially for stories that are convoluted and you care about maximizing foreshadow and minimizing plot holes
I found this book very helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Romancing-Beat-Structure-Romance-Kissing-ebook/dp/B01DSJSURY
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00822WM2M/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
If I implied it's free, that was a mistake. I bought it and have the kindle version bookmarked.
I'm sure there's a ton of great advice here, but I'm just going to drop a book recommendation. This book made me really internalize how to craft characters (and goals and conflicts) that have no choice but to do what they do. You'll understand what I mean if you read it. Not a shill or anything, just very passionate about craft books which have seriously leveled up my writing game.
This book is a good resource for possible body language. This page is also worth checking out. Keep in mind that this sort of thing doesn't have to be in your first draft if writing it doesn't come easily to you. You can add it in later when you edit. I would also suggest paying attention when you read books and note how different authors handle it. You can glean some interesting possibilities from that.
My favorite Romance writing resource is Gwen Hays Romancing the Beat. It's a very quick read. I'd give even odds that you've already read it, but if you haven't it might be worth flipping through on your vacation. I know you enjoy writing craft books.