Sunday, 20 of May of 2012
Home of the Llandra Blog
Another chapter down.
I let my wife read the chapters as I finish each one, and she always immediately pressures me to start the next chapter. This one in particular, however, has driven her to fits and I have been banished back to the office to get started on the next one post-haste. 
Kickstarter project for the 2nd book’s cover.
Starting a Kickstarter project to help get the 2nd book’s cover art funded early, so that there’s not any lag time from the completion of the writing to the publishing. It took Alexander about 3 months or so to finish the last cover, so I’d like to get him started on the next one as soon as possible. Please consider contributing; even $1.00 helps! There are perks for higher contribution amounts. Please click here and contribute!
Got me a new work area with a bit of privacy. Cindy went out and got me cokes, orange slices, and combos. Writing is going swimmingly 
Got a solid 2500 words down today. I’m liking the new writing area. I can be a lot more productive, even if it does keep me away from the family.
Chapter 2 is pretty much wrapped up.
February was pretty much a bust in terms of writing. My grandmother passed away, and I moped around most of the month and didn’t get much writing accomplished. But I’ve shaken off the blues and gotteb back into it with a new sense of purpose. I’ll be sure and keep you all updated!
I scored 901wpm, or 260% faster than the national average. I always knew I was a speedy reader! 
The speed reading champ, though–4500+ wpm! Crazy!
I Source: Staples eReader Department
I just finished the first chapter of the second book. I have a working title, but I’m not going to post it yet.
Randall and Berry are back together, and having exciting adventures on Tallia. I can’t wait to share them with you!
My book’s been up on Kindle for about 2 months now, and I’ve had pretty decent sales in the US and a few in the UK as well, but the extended Kindle markets (Germany, France, Italy and Span) have been totally impenetrable. Not surprising, as I have no non-English translations available.
Today..I sold two books in France! I love knowing that people so far away are sitting down for a nice quiet read and it’s my book on their Kindle
Let’s talk a bit about chapters. Formatting chapter headings is a little more complicated than just hitting “page break” and moving on.
Take a look at a print book. Any one in your library will do. Find a chapter that ends on an odd-numbered page (the right hand page). Notice how the very next even numbered page is blank? If you want to look professional, your book should do the same: all chapters should start on an odd-numbered page. Now, you could insert two page breaks in your file to get the same effect, but I’m going to tell you the golden rule: never use page breaks in your document! What happens if you change your story, and the page count changes? Now you’ll have to go through your entire book, and ensure that each page starts on an odd number, and you’ll have to do that every time you modify your story. Plus, it’s a big pain in the kiester to make sure the blank pages are truly blank (no headers or footers) with this method. There’s an easier way. Section breaks.
In addition to make your life easier when it comes to the start of chapters, learning to use section breaks will also make your life simpler with page numbering, and headers and footers (which I’ll cover in a later article). The section break is much like the page break, but it is much more versatile. It can be found in the Page Layout tab in Microsoft Word. The section break we want is called “Odd Page” as shown in the photo below.
If you replace all of your page breaks between chapters with this kind of break, Word will automatically format it so that there is a blank page between chapters if necessary, just like in every professionally printed book on your bookshelf. And, again, when we later talk about headers and footers, you’ll already have half of the work done for laying those out professionally, too!
Take another look at that professionally printed book I asked you to get off of your bookshelf. Whether or not the chapters are numbered (“Chapter 1″, “Chapter 2″, etc) or if they have interesting chapter names, chances are your chapter header starts a few lines down from the top, and is in a larger, bolded font. Here’s an example from my book, A Touch of Magic.
To get this same effect, you could hit enter a few times, and hope you use the same number of carriage returns at the front of every chapter. But that is such a pain to deal with, and there’s a much simpler way. Remember back in part 1 when we set up Word for the “Normal” font style? We’re going to do the same thing with chapter heading fonts! Find where you have your first chapter header (“Chapter 1″, etc), right-click the text and choose the “Paragraph” option. The familiar paragraph-option dialogue should appear.
These are the settings I used I my book. The “Spacing Before” section defines the big amount of white space before a chapter heading, and the “Spacing After” denotes the small amount of space between the heading and the start of your chapter. Once you have formatted your chapter, set it’s font. Since I used Garamond 11pt for my body text, I found that Garamond 14pt bolded text to work perfectly for chapter headings. After your chapter heading looks perfect, look on the home tab of Word, and find the “Heading 1″ style. Right click on it and select “Update Heading 1 to Match Selection”.
Now, simply select the chapter header at the start of each chapter, and click the “Heading 1″ style, and it will be perfectly formatted, every time. Using styles in this way will make making your Table of Contents so much simpler (which we’ll discuss in a later article).
At this stage, you’re almost half-way done with formatting your book for print! My next article will discuss headers and footers.
