We're Back!

The trip was great! We put in 1,100 miles exploring Washington and saw trees, mountains, rivers, lakes, falls, clouds, hamlets, towns, cities, one of a kind shopping venues, elk out our hotel window, and the Mariners beat the Phillies in a great baseball game. We loved it.

During an excursion to a remote beach recommended to us by a cute waitress from Russia, we ended up driving through Forks, WA – famous from the Twilight books. We saw a tour bus offering a three hour Twilight Tour in a town that didn’t take three minutes to get through end-to-end. We thought it was amusing, but it still brought home how much influence some books can have on people’s lives.

Speaking of influential books, did you hear that J.K. Rowling is going digital? She’s planning a site called Pottermore that will not only provide fan interactivity but will be a portal for eBook versions of her classic Harry Potter volumes. We’ll certainly purchase electronic versions to go with our paper ones. Suddenly it seems a lot less lonely being independent eBook creators.

Which brings us to what we hope is old news for all the fans of our blog. Our first eBook, Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain, has been released. Currently it is available at our own sales site, Amazon, B&N, and Google. Apple, Sony, and Borders take forever to get it up on their sites. The easiest way to link to any of these distribution outlets is to go to our eBook portal www.le-kain.com. We hope everyone will get the chance to read it and tell us what you think of our efforts.

Well, it’s now back to the grind. We are working on a second eBook we hope to release before summer is over. This time it’s a romantic comedy with plenty of mischief and a hint of mystery. We hope The Valentine’s Game will be available in August, which will give you plenty of time to read The Mark of Kain and tell us what you think.

Thinking About Trees

A couple of years ago we took an extended Thanksgiving holiday and drove from San Francisco to Portland and throughout western Oregon. The impressions from that trip made it into Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain, which is set along parts of the Columbia River we found so fascinating. Next week we are picking up from where we left off. We’re flying to Portland and plan to take the long way to Seattle by circling around Mt. Rainier. We wouldn’t be surprised if this new scenery makes it into the Bobbie Titan sequel.

It’s not just the people and how they live in that part of the world that is so absorbing. It’s also the trees. While there are almost as many trees in Oregon now as there was at the time of Lewis and Clark, most of these are in managed tree plantations. But there are still almost 3 million acres of ancient forests in the state and when you walk through any of these magnificent groves, even if it is along a paved path next to a highway, the majestic feelings you get from these unimaginably old living creatures is undeniable.

We want to capture the spirit of the trees like these into a story. Before we wrote about kids with super powers we wrote a fantasy adventure with kids and dragons. In that story the trees come to life and play an intrinsic part in resolving the conflict. The story was too long for a typical young adult novel and spent too much time world building. Still, we are anxious to get back to it and see what we can do to make the ideas of heroic kids in an imaginative world come alive for young readers. And we want to give voice to the tree, ancient beings who see the world not second-to-second but decade-by-decade. We’re hoping our vacation to the Great Northwest will inspire us to revisit the forests of our imagination so we can reclaim a story worth telling.

Butts Mean Business

This week’s picture has absolutely nothing to do with the blog post topic. It has everything to do with the fact that last week we had twice the visitors to this site. While we would love to believe this is due to our incisive descriptions and our sterling wit, we’re pretty sure this isn’t the case. In the last post we highlighted our eBook cover which featured a comely rear end with a butterfly mark. In order to keep your interest, we’ve included a few more bikini clad butts while we discuss eBook publishing. Hopefully the accompanying photograph will keep you awake long enough to finish reading the post.

All major online eBook sales channels (Amazon, Apple, Google, Barnes & Nobel, etc.) accept independent authors. If you have the time and patience to deal with all the unique formatting and uploading rules, you can get your eBook out to everywhere someone is likely to find it. Since there is a pretty steep learning curve to figure out how to meet all the requirements, it’s natural that third party eBook publishers and distributors have started to provide a “one stop shop” for the independent author to get their eBook on the web.

We definitely knew we were going to go with an independent eBook publisher rather than do it all ourselves. We just needed to decide which company to go with. We initially looked at Smashwords.com because we really like their business model. There is no upfront cost. Smashwords makes all its money on a percentage of the revenues coming back from the book distributors.  Unfortunately, “smashwords” is an all too literal description of the eBook formatting results. They rely on a software program they lovingly refer to as the “meat grinder” to turn an MS Word document into multiple eBook files. The results aren’t uniformly consistent and they frequently turn out truly ugly products. Smashwords is also abysmally slow. This is no doubt due to their popularity. Smashwords does seem to have good business relationships with a large number of eBook distributors including all of the major players. Still, with their “anything goes” philosophy it looks to us that it is becoming the home to the “great unwashed” and it is now frustratingly hard to find a well written and edited eBook worth reading from their collection.

After experimenting with Smashwords we decided to find an eBook preparer and publisher with a more hands on approach. We looked at eBookit, Publish Green, and Book Baby. We eventually decided on eBookit because they seemed to have all of the bases covered. They brag about their attention to quality and are reasonably priced. Publish Green looks like it offers more and they maintain a very professional site, but they cost six times as much to get the eBook out the door. Book Baby is a spinoff of the famous CD Baby music distribution business and it looks like it has potential. The terms are more favorable to the author than eBookit, but they don’t distribute to as many places and don’t offer as many services yet. Still, the company seems to understand digital distribution so we will definitely check them out again when it’s time to release book number two.

So this morning we uploaded Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kane to eBookit. They say we’ll have a proof to review in two to five days. After that, they’ll distribute our book to all the major eBook outlets. This means there aren’t going to be too many more posts before the one asking you to buy our eBook. Maybe we better start hunting for the perfect butt picture to accompany that announcement now.

EBook Cover Butt Art

We’ve noted before that going independent means that you get the opportunity to do everything required to produce, publish, and distribute your eBook. One of the funnest things we’ve done during this process was produce a book cover.


Book art is still an important marketing tool and every major eBook distribution channel requires a digital book cover to be uploaded with the manuscript. There are even independent eBook cover designers plying their wares on the Internet. We thought about paying a professional, but when we thought of a cover idea that would convey some of our story’s major themes, we decided to see if we could make our thoughts into reality.

The first thing we needed was a butt. Not just any butt, mind you, but a teenage girl butt. Obtaining a suitable gluteus fell to Lynn since Evans kept picturing girls screaming and being questioned by the police no matter how innocently he phrased the request. When Lynn not only easily obtained a willing teenage rear end but also a couple of student photographers to capture the image, it made Evans wonder what services are really offered at the PHS Student Services Office.

The next thing we needed was a gun. Lynn asked a few of her redneck friends but it turns out they didn’t have the kind of gun that would work in the picture. The next place to obtain a gun was the drama department, and sure enough, the teacher came through. When it was time to shoot the picture at lunch, however, Lynn had a heck of a time walking across a crowded campus, giving out hugs to students with a gun stuck in the waistband of her pants.

Next came choosing the right picture after the photo shoot was completed. Scrolling through shot after shot of a bikini clad rear end is surprisingly hypnotic. It made us wonder how people who do that kind of work every day manage to keep from going crazy. Then it was time for playing with the image using photo manipulation software and adding the title and byline. It was hard to figure out where all the words should go without ruining the picture’s composition. The “ah ha” moment came when Evans proposed cutting away a third of the original picture and Lynn suggested enlarging the remaining backside to use like a billboard for part of the title.

Producing our first eBook cover was a fun, strange, and rewarding experience. We hope you enjoy the results. Let us know your thoughts!

The Unexpected Trials of Going Independent

We spent months working hard to produce a unique, well written, and entertaining story. Since then we’ve made an effort to produce a quality eBook. Too often independent writers stop after the first part. We can understand why. Your heart is in the story and you want to share it with the world. But as readers we are often saddened when the package the story is wrapped up in doesn’t do justice to the author’s creativity.  That’s why we took the time to get it to readers and are paying to have our first release professionally edited.  Sometimes, however, it seems like the book gods are stacked against the independent author.

We are just a few short weeks away from releasing our first eBook and now suddenly we feel compelled to make some extensive changes. Our eBook was titled Bobbie Pharaoh and the Mark of Kane. The play on words will be obvious by chapter two. Unfortunately, just this morning we discovered that our title could be confusing to the large number of loyal readers of Rick Riordan. He’s the talented author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. His latest work is based on siblings named Kane. This time he’s using Egyptian mythology and legend as the background for the supernatural, so of course there are pharaohs involved. There is even an important secondary character with the same name we chose for the person who discovered the cure to the disease that our protagonist has, a cure whose application has such unexpected and life changing side effects.

While both our works deal with young people and the super natural, the two works are not remotely similar. Mr. Riordan’s falls squarely within his sweet spot of mythology brought to life. Ours might best be described as Hogwarts meets Marvel Comics. Still, our protagonist’s name needs to change as does the spelling of the scientist who discovered a cancer’s cure that causes super powers in teenagers. So now the title of our eBook is Bobbie Titan and the Mark of Kain. In some ways this actually works better. Our scientist is of German heritage so spelling his last name the way they do in Germany isn’t so bad. And of course our friends at Poway High School will know where we came up with Bobbie’s last name.

We really hope there isn’t anything else like this that is going to bite us. We did searches this time on everything related and we don't think anyone will inadvertently confuse our work with someone else’s. We are proud of our unique twist on the super teenagers and paranormal boarding school genres. We really want the reading world to like us for ourselves.

Saturday Breakfasts

It all started with Saturday breakfasts. We have always been busy people, but right from the beginning, Saturday mornings were reserved for catching up. During the broke college years, going out to breakfast was the one restaurant meal we could afford. So, over eggs and waffles we told each other the events in our lives and planned our next shared adventure.

Saturday breakfasts were an absolute with the kids. While we waited to be served, Evans would invariably look at each girl and say, “Tell me a story.”  The children would respond with an interesting anecdote from the previous week. They learned the art of good narrative and both grew into outstanding communicators in a wide variety of situations. Their friends didn’t always find the ritual as enjoyable. One of our favorite memories involves hearing the quiet best friend of Laura, our older daughter, tell a wonderful tale of a school mishap the pair had shared. Tricia sometimes struggled to put her very energetic and rich character-filled life into words during the weekend story ritual. She was all smiles after the praise for her marvelous rendition. When it was Laura’s turn to tell us a weekly tale, her brief response was “Tricia dibbed the only good story thing that happened this week.”

Saturday morning is now the time for our collaboration. These days it’s oatmeal instead of biscuits and gravy, but the mental exchange is the same. EBooks are born at the restaurant we’ve been going to for two decades, where we’re treated like family, and the employees still ask about the girls. This is the time when we rearrange plot and create new characters. This is where the world we invent comes alive and where people who have seen us grow gray still wonder what we are laughing about.

And, on this Hallmark holiday, we’d like to wish a Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there!

Creative Fundraising

We were excited when we finished the last edit of our first eBook and found a professional editor to polish it up. Then we sat down and made a list of what we needed to do to make Bobbie Pharaoh and the Mark of Kane available for our readers. When it tallied forty-one more things to accomplish, we decided to make this week’s post about the reason we are doing this in the first place in order to keep our spirits up.

As we’ve indicated previously, Lynn is devoted to Poway High School. She is particularly dedicated to the Student Services department she created. This office is dedicated to the mental and physical health of the young people who attend PHS. They provide mentoring, tutoring, tobacco cessation and drug prevention education, support groups, grief counseling, leadership training, and conflict mediations. Lynn provides doctor’s hours for a teacher’s wage (one time we calculated her hourly rate and it was depressing). Her pride and joy are the Peer Counselors she supervises. From all walks of life, Lynn’s eighty-eight student-angels offer guidance in a language young people understand and are trained to realize when the problems are just too great for the student to get through it without a caring adult. They are truly an amazing group of kids.

Like everything these days, Student Services is chronically short of funds. Inspired by a truly creative money raiser the year before, Night at the Opera, Lynn and Evans wanted to do something fun and challenging to help fill the Student Service’s coffers. Since they were already collaborating on writing novels, they decided to push their other efforts into the background and develop a young adult adventure that her kids could promote for the office where their hearts lie.

We finally have a story we’re proud of and now there are only forty-one more steps to complete before you can help us help the office that helps the kids.

While we have your attention, this year’s Night at the Opera is on Saturday, May 7^th at 7:30 p.m.in the Poway Performing Arts Center.  It is directed by Ruth Lopez-Yanez, a parent of two PCs and an opera teacher at Palomar and Grossmont Colleges.  Ruth has lined up two professional opera singers, two Palomar chorale groups, a brass band from UCLA, and the PHS principal, Scott Fisher (for comic relief).  We’d love it if you could come!  Tickets are $50 for gold donors (includes a reception with the artists), $20 for adults, or $10 for students.  If you can’t make it but would like to donate, we have a donor who will match your contribution! Contact Traci at tbarkerb@powayusd.com for more information.