Category: Jake and the Dynamo

Order Your Copy of ‘Jake and the Dynamo’ Today!

Right now, Jake and the Dynamo is available for preorder. Featuring brand new cover art and the same fantastic, full-color interior illustrations, this revised and definitive edition is the must-have introduction to the JAKE AND THE DYNAMO saga.

Celebrate with this free wallpaper, courtesy of Barbusco Comics and Nodsaibot.

The novel will release worldwide on .

Jake Blatowski can’t wait for high school—basketball, calculus, and a cafeteria that isn’t under investigation by the health department.

But he’ll have to wait: A computer malfunction has assigned him to the fifth grade!

It’s bad enough that he bangs his knees on the desks or that Miss Percy is going over long division . . . again . . . but Jake has to sit next to Dana Volt, a perpetually surly troublemaker determined to make his life a living hell.

Worse yet, Dana secretly belongs to a coalition of girls who protect humanity from the horde of deadly monsters plaguing the city—monsters that have chosen Jake as their next target!

Jake’s no hero; he just wants to make it to varsity tryouts. But now the impulsive and moody Dana is the only one who can save Jake from certain death—and Jake is the only one who can save Dana from herself.

Order Now

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If you preorder today, you pay only 99 cents for this DRM-free eBook. However, the price will rise after the book becomes available on August 1st.

The eBook will also be available on Kindle Unlimited for three months, and that means it will be an Amazon exclusive for that timeframe. After that, it will be available on other platforms.

The paperback will also become available on August 1, both through Amazon and other publishers. Stay tuned for details.

‘Dead 2 Rites’ Is Good to Go

Obviously, I’m still absorbed in my projects over here. I worked with Barbusco Comics and Nodsaibot to fix the issue with the cover of Dead 2 Rites. They were both very accomodating.

As you can see from the post’s eye-catch, I’m looking over the previewer on Amazon’s KDP module to make sure the paperbacks look the way they are supposed to. Once that’s squared away, I can look over the eBooks.

I can see that Vellum, despite its gigantic cost, has saved me any number of headaches. Since this is the first time I’ve done this, I now know I did a few things in the wrong order—for example, I should have already uploaded the manuscript and reviewed it before commissioning the cover art. Fortunately for me, Vellum’s presets are built to accommodate Amazon’s requirements, so, for example, my inside margins aren’t screwed up. If I had to widen those, that would throw off the page count, which would then throw off the cover art again …

Anyway, it appears my first-time, amateurish disasters have been largely averted so far. I learned a few lessons, but they have been mostly pain-free.

Also, Amazon’s software is more user-friendly than I expected, at least when you have all your files pre-built. (I understand that trying to build your paperback from a Word file using Amazon’s software is a major headache.) It automatically checks the margins on everything, and it automatically requires a deeper gutter for Dead 2 Rites than for Jake and the Dynamo because the former is considerably longer.

At least for now, it seems that the greatest difficulty comes from the requirement that the cover—front, spine, and back—need to be a single image, which means the book dimensions have to be set in stone. On the other hand, that makes wraparound covers a possibility, and that’s what we have for these two books.

Volume 1 Is Fine; Volume 2, However …

Looks like the cover for volume 2 has been rejected by KDP because the dimensions are slightly off. Looking back over the files and prep, I’m pretty sure how it happened. I’ll be going back to my artists to get this resolved; I think it’s fixable, but I’ll keep you all posted.

Preparing to Publish

I am currently wrestling with the Amazon’s esoteric system in an effort to get Jake and the Dynamo published in the new edition. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the preview and realized that I and the artists had, in fact, got the dimensions correct. There is just the slightest error here, easy to repair—and props to you if you can spot it.

Looking at the interior, it appears also that Vellum, the software I’m using, behaves as advertised: I haven’t been through the whole thing, but so far, it appears that the formatting is correct with now weird artifacts or margins. I believe this new version will be even more attractive and readable than the original paperback publication, which I was already quite pleased with.

Pretty Dynamo’s New Emblem

Shock my heart!

The logo artist Nodsaibot is steadily working on finishing up the cover art for the first two books of Jake and the Dynamo. Unbidden, he generously produced a new version of Pretty Dynamo’s emblem, originally designed by another artist (whose name, unfortunately, I do not have with me to credit, as he was hired by the publisher).

I’ve become quite fond of this symbol, as you can probably guess. It is very different, but much more aesthetically pleasing, than what I pictured in my head when I described Pretty Dynamo’s wand as topped by a lightning bolt crossing a heart. In fact, I originally—and foolishly—pictured the heart as pink even though that does not go with Dynamo’s overall color scheme. Visual arists wiser than I quickly intuited that Dynamo’s dominant colors are blue and gold, and that her emblem should therefore be blue and gold.

I love the way it looks because it nicely captures Pretty Dynamo’s nature. She has electrical powers, of course, as indicated by the lightning bolt, and she is also a tomboy, as suggested by the angular look and color scheme. But she is still a magical girl, which is a girly sort of thing, as suggested by the heart shape at her emblem’s center.

At the top of this post are the two versions of this emblem. The left is the original and the right is the new version. As you can see, both have elements to recommend them. I admit I don’t have a preference, but the higher resolution of the new version is a plus, as that will make it easer to manipulate in various covers and in other places. It could even be translated into vector art and would then make a perfect website logo. I do, however, like the slight curve in the lightning bolt on the original version, as it gives it a sort of retro feel, perhaps reminiscent of the Art Deco that fills Urbanopolis.

One More Update

I know I haven’t posted much of anything lately that isn’t about my own projects, but I ask for your patience. I’ve put things together for a logo artist who does impressive work, and though I haven’t quite sealed the deal yet, I’m optimistic that this exchange will result in completed book covers

Once that’s done, we will have two books ready to go with a third on the way. The publication date will depend on the logo artist’s ETA, so I won’t presume to give that final date yet.

It’s coming, though, slowly but surely.

Sneak Peek: Jake and the Dynamo’s New Cover

Here is a detail from the new wraparound cover that will grace the re-release of Jake and the Dynamo. It still needs to go to the logo artist for title graphics and the blurb and so forth, but it is otherwise complete, thanks to the impressively fast work of Eduardo Moura Barbosa.

This (finally!) captures the image I have long wanted of Jake and Pretty Dynamo together: Dynamo flying on her board with a panicked Jake hanging by his fingertips. Although not precisely like any particular scene, it captures the relationship between these two characters in the early chapters.

Editing and Formatting

I’ve almost finished plugging Jake and the Dynamo into Vellum. I’m still deciding whether I actually want to commit to this software’s steep asking price. It doesn’t offer a lot of customization, but it does remove a lot of major headaches. I’ve got pretty much the entire text and the illustrations plugged in and now just need to clean up a few artifacts from the reformatting. I admit it looks really clean, and it shows how it will come out both in print and on several devices.

My only serious complaint at the moment is that I can’t add a caption to a full-page image. I can insert illustrations with captions, but then I can’t make them as large as I want.

Experimenting with Vellum

I am currently in the “completely bewildered” stage of preparing to self-publish my work, with the goal of releasing no less that five (three, absolute minimum) books next year. I’m considering several options, thinking about services I might need, looking at necessary or unnecessary software, and so forth.

I have just finished (?) editing the first volume of Jake and the Dynamo. This may sound like unnecessary fiddling, since the book has been edited and even published previously, but I am treating the next release as if it is the first, a complete start-over, and I want to present readers with the best, cleanest, most professional text I can. This new version is, at present, almost 3,000 words shorter, entirely because of improvements in style and grammar.

One thing I’ve thought I would likely do is purchase Vellum. Although it’s enormously expensive, it is more or less the only software that prepares a manuscript for multiple formats with minimal hassle. Its creators allow you to download it and use all its options, forcing payment only when you’re ready to generate the files.

Thus, I have been sitting here sipping a gimlet (one part gin, one part Rose’s lime juice, and nothing else, as Raymond Chandler explains) while familiarizing myself with Vellum and getting a handle on what it can—and can’t—do.

It is as user-friendly as it claims to be, but that seriously limits its abilities. Some formatting I have in Word, formatting I thought was quite minimal, has been stripped out of my Vellum file. For example, it doesn’t allow lettered lists:

Lists in Vellum.
An unordered list in Vellum.

This is a little disappointing, but I can easily envision a reason for it: The idea is maximum compatibility across readers and file types. I found some software previously that allowed for edting EPUB files in XML, and I originally thought that put me on easy street since editing XML is something I can do, but I soon discovered that editing files by hand was time-consuming and also produced unexpected results in different types of eBook readers.

Vellum, despite the claims in its advertisements, feels very limiting. It offers only a handful of styles with minimal customization, few fonts, and few layout options, but it also keeps you from inadvertently creating messed-up files that don’t work on major platforms. The few layouts it allows look good. Sme things I want, such as handwriting fonts in a few spots, aren’t possible—but then again, that’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t show up on most e-readers anyway, and eBooks are where I can expect the most sales. Kindle, for example, strips out all custom fonts and uses Amazon’s proprietary font in their place.

Also, in this first run, I experimented with Microsoft Word’s styles to produce the cleanest, lightest manuscript I could. A lot of what I did transfered straight into Vellum, and Vellum was even able to intuit some of the document’s features (most especially, its section breaks). Some things, however, did not transfer—particularly, text that was set to be in all caps (rather than typed in all caps by hand). To make sure everything is kosher, I probably need to make a few more tweaks to my DOCX file before I import it to Vellum again.

Self-Publishing: The Legend Continues

I am planning to re-release Jake and the Dynamo in the near future and to release its sequel soon afterwards. To that end, I recently purchased the cheapest refurbished MacBook I could get so I could download and buy Vellum, the software generally agreed to be about the only program for formatting self-published books for all platforms, and also the only eBook editing software that isn’t aggravating to use.

It’s darn expensive, though. I’m thinking I might offer to format others’ self-published books for them to make back some of the cost. I offer reasonable rates.

Anyway, I still need to get new cover art, so there is still no projected release date. I am also revising the text, and though this might seem like excessive editing, I want people to get the best, and a somewhat different, product from what was released previously. Interior illustrations will be the same as in the previous version.