Five Days Until Book Launch

With my new book, How The Cookie Crumbles, launching on October 1st, I thought I’d feature an excerpt each day leading up to the launch. It’s such a long book that I could probably excerpt it for a year and still not have everything up! Did I mention it's 150K words? That's actually the length of two books, so it's a chance to get lost in a world that's funny, exciting, and romantic.

Our heroine, Frankie Taylor, is happily celebrating the end of her third-year university, by eating yummy doughnuts in the park. Suddenly, she’s brought down to earth by her boyfriend, Matt. He’s decided that it’s his last summer to have fun before he joins the real world of work. And his idea of fun does not include a steady girlfriend. Frankie is completely blindsided by the break-up, and limps back to her parent’s house to recover:

Frankie Taylor

I definitely looked sadder now, but maybe nobody would notice.

My mother was already in the kitchen cooking dinner. I could smell tomato sauce and hmmm, chicken with rosemary roasting. I reached into the cookbook cupboard and pulled out the recipe box.

“What are you doing, Frances?” my mom asked curiously.

“I thought I’d make something for dessert. Maybe some brownies?”

“I was going to serve ice cream, but that would be nice, dear.” She gave me a suspicious look. “Isn’t Matt staying for dinner?”

“Um, no, he had to go.” I grabbed an apron and started pulling out the flour, sugar and cocoa. “Oh Mom, not Frye’s cocoa, didn’t I tell you to get the Dutch processed cocoa? It’s way better.”

“Well, unfortunately they don’t have it at the Superstore, and I don’t have time to search for it everywhere.” Mom was a great cook, but she wasn’t into anything too gourmet or too trendy.

I started measuring and sifting and creaming. Whenever things bothered me, I liked to bake. There was something comforting about the way that measuring precisely and following directions in a recipe meant things always turned out perfectly. Baking was so unlike life.

I would admit that I wasn’t the most spontaneous person in the world, but Matt had basically told me that I was boring. And it’s not like we had stayed home every night, we went out to parties, clubs, and friend’s places. I loved to entertain, but Matt enjoyed that too. He used to tease me about being a domestic goddess, but he never complained about all the creature comforts that went with that. Plus, I had thought that our sex life was great. Just seeing him undressed was a total turn-on for me; he had this amazing muscle definition and an actual six-pack. And Matt was experienced, so sex was way better than with Adam back in high school. Adam was clueless when it came to female anatomy. He should have been paying attention in Health instead of writing song lyrics in his notebook. But whatever, my sex life was over now.

I sighed quietly to myself so my mom didn’t hear anything.

I finished mixing the brownies, poured them into the greased and floured pan and popped them into the hot oven. Then I started creaming more butter for the icing. My older brother, Glen, walked in and stared at me.

“Did you break up with Matt?”

“Glen!” My mom admonished him. “Don’t pry, I’m sure Frances will tell us when she’s ready.”

I burst into tears. “Why does everyone know what’s going on with me? Am I so boring and predictable?”

My mom came over and hugged me awkwardly, since I was waving a buttery wooden spoon around. Glen came over and made it a group hug. “Sorry Franny,” he said, “It’s just when you start randomly baking, you’re usually upset about something and Matt had left, so I figured.…”

Poor Frankie! Will she ever recover, or will she be forced to drown her sorrows in Belgian chocolate? Stay tuned for a daily excerpt and be sure to mark your calendar for October 1^st when How The Cookie Crumbles will be available for download.

Will your team win it?

Well, my new book is in its final stages, I've sent it out to my lovely beta readers to make sure that it functions on their ebook readers and for now, I have nothing to do except watch preseason hockey. (And of course, do all the things around home I ignored while finishing my book. But the vacuuming can wait, the vacuuming can always wait!) Probably I should be marketing or something, but I feel that hockey romances have a pretty limited audience. As the saying goes, "If this is the sort of thing you like, you will like this thing."

So, since the season hasn't even started, let's talk about the Stanley Cup already! Here are the current odds that every team will win the Stanley Cup, courtesy of Bodog Sports:

	Chicago Blackhawks	6/1
	Pittsburgh Penguins	15/2
	Boston Bruins	10/1
	Los Angeles Kings	12/1
	St. Louis Blues	12/1
	Detroit Red Wings	16/1
	Vancouver Canucks	16/1
	San Jose Sharks	18/1
	Minnesota Wild	20/1
	New York Rangers	20/1
	Anaheim Ducks	22/1
	Edmonton Oilers	22/1
	Ottawa Senators	22/1
	Philadelphia Flyers	22/1
	Toronto Maple Leafs	25/1
	Washington Capitals	25/1
	Montreal Canadiens	28/1
	New York Islanders	33/1
	Carolina Hurricanes	40/1
	Colorado Avalanche	40/1
	Columbus Blue Jackets	40/1
	Dallas Stars	40/1
	Nashville Predators	50/1
	New Jersey Devils	50/1
	Tampa Bay Lightning	50/1
	Winnipeg Jets	50/1
	Phoenix Coyotes	66/1
	Buffalo Sabres	100/1
	Calgary Flames	100/1
	Florida Panthers	150/1

If the ranking of your favourite team makes you sad, just think: how the heck do they calculate these odds? The team rosters aren't even finalized, and there is a lot of uncertainty with the lower salary cap. Many talented mid-level players don't even have contracts yet. And of course, injuries – the great leveller – are already beginning in the pre-season. It's a long way to the Cup, but the ride will be an exciting one.

New And Improved

One thing that made me very sad was that changing the title of my book to How The Cookie Crumbles meant I couldn't use the original cover I had created. I really loved that cover, mainly because the doughnut looked so yummy. Last night, I was looking at Joel Friedlander's site, he's a professional book designer, and once a month he judges all the book covers sent to him. There are winners, and there are not winners. Frankly, some of the covers are lousy, but I admire that the authors or designers were brave enough to submit, since I'm not. But reading Friedlander's comments is like a crash course in cover design. The main message I took is that covers need to look as professional as possible.

So armed with my new design knowledge, I took another look at my cover and sighed. The most amateur part is the photo. I took the photo of the cookie myself, and I have to admit–it looks a little green and unappetizing. It also floats weirdly on the page, since I didn't add a shadow. While I'm sure I could fix that in Photoshop, I'm also sure it would take me ten hours to figure out how, given my learning curve in creating the covers. So, I headed over to my favourite free stock photo site, Stock.xchng, and managed to find a better cookie photo. It has colours similar to the doughnut I loved.

So, here's the original doughnut cover. Nice, eh? Well, I think so. Expert opinions may differ. It's probably the photo that makes it, since everyone loves doughnuts.

And here's the cover I did with my own cookie photo. After publishing my first book, I added the grey border because otherwise the cover disappears on the Amazon website, and I also made the hockey sticks a little more visible. I preferred the subtler sticks, but they completely vanished when I looked at them on an actual Kindle.

Now, here's the new cover. I added the new photograph, and put the font in the same colour as the cookie. I thought it looked way better, but the combined colours were a little too Barbie.

So, I tweaked the cover: shrinking the cookie (and thus its calories) and making the font colours closer to the original doughnut cover, but keeping the new "cookie pink" colour in the subtitle. Voilá!

Another thing I like about my cover design is that it's a template, so I can easily create covers for all my zillions of books, by choosing a new photograph. Now I just have to write zillions of books.

Now, what do I think Joel Friedlander would say about my cover? Probably that I need to look at book covers in my genre, and make it look more like them. So, if it's a romance book about hockey, it needs a ripped male torso and skates, or two people making out. But I would argue that my books are not typical romances, they are Frankenstein hybrids of chick lit/romantic comedy/hockey story–and therefore the covers should look fun and different. And then Joel would shake his head and say, "Mel, I give you expert advice worth thousands of dollars and you insist you know better. You're an idiot."

What do you think of the cover? I have to admit, I have a background in arts and design (but not Photoshop!) so I have pretty strong views, but I am willing to listen to the opinions of people who actually read my books. Oh, at first there'll probably be crying and ripping of t-shirts, but then I will take your criticism into consideration. Maybe.

The Thrill of Destruction

For me, the fun part of a book is writing it. I like carrying the characters around in my head, writing up their conversations, and thinking up funny predicaments. I also like making the covers, which in my case means thinking up new twists on the basic design, and then spending way too long trying to resolve photoshop issues. (Like why does the background look white on some books and gray on others? You can see for yourself I haven't resolved that yet.) And like every author, I enjoy tracking my sales online.

The parts I don't enjoy are editing, proofing, and formatting the book. If there was a little fairy who could come over and do all this, that would be excellent. However, errors and inconsistencies in books drive me crazy, so I realize that good editing and proofing are vital for the reader's enjoyment. This time I did find a way to make editing more enjoyable. I printed out the book–yes, all 150,000 words of it and blew out a printer cartridge in the process– and then edited by hand with a red pen. Old school, but it was immensely satisfying to input the changes and then shred the pages. Why is destroying stuff so much fun? 

But hooray! I've finished all the edits now, passed the book on to my lovely and talented editor, and  it looks like I'm right on schedule for my launch date of October 1st. After I finished last night, there was a celebration when someone sweet got me ice cream treats. It does seem fitting to celebrate a book that's about food with food. Destroying stuff, ice cream, and a whole day off before I have to start inputting the editorial changes. Woohoo.