I’m not doing a regular interview today. My guest on this rainy day in May is Kath Marsh, my critique partner, who writes YA and middle-grade fantasy. She is here to talk about her recent venture into self-publishing and her new YA release, Ascent from Hell: The Blood Angel.
Welcome, Kath. The blog is yours.
KM: I know you’re a coffee aficionado. Could you pour some of your good coffee over ice?
Ally: Sure thing. Coming right up. Carry on!
I know the title sounds scary serious. While my protagonist Abdriel is a pretty bent demon, i can’t write without humor. What does a fierce High Demon do when Blood Angel wings appear and they have a mind of their own? You’d think things would go smoothly once you escape Hell. Think again. Nothing is easy on Earth for a High Demon who changes into the mythical Blood Angel, and becomes the target for both the Dread Lord from Hell, and the Hunter Angels.
Ascent from Hell is my first fully independently published book. I had thought about going independent for a while. When Covid closed down my former Publisher- CBAY Books, it was time. My publisher returned the rights of my two Middle Grade novels ( The Lazy Dragon and the Bumblespells Wizard, and Dragon Bonded) and the three short ebooks: Bubbles and Smush: Closet Monsters, Trick or Treats, and Dragon Rescue. She encouraged me to create new covers and upload my books back on Amazon. So I started with the two Bumblespells novels.
Well, first I took an online class on self-publishing from P. J. Hoover. Since the whole formatting a book thing left me shaking, I took P.J.’s advice and purchased the computer program Vellum. Which does the work to get the files formatted for Amazon and several other publishing programs- like Kobo. Yay!
The next big stumbling block for me was the whole book cover thing. I’m no artist. Ally and my author/artist friend Jill Bauer gave me directions to Canva and free stock photos. I found images that Jill put together into covers. It ended up being fun, except when I used a ‘coloring’ page for one image and it took me four tries and a whole day to color the image. I should have hired a first grader.
Because I am an enthusiastic photographer, I used one of my sunrise photos with a free image of black wings overlaid for the Blood Angel book. I used the free photograph manipulation program Gimp to put the sunrise and the wings together. Oh, and I had to convert .pngs and .jpegs back and forth. There are lots of free online programs that do that!
Since the books CBAY Books had published were already copyrighted, in my name, I only had to register the Blood Angel book. Easy peasy. Copyright.gov. Slowly go step by step. Really. I went too fast on one section and checked off Afghanistan as my country of citizenship instead of USA. Geesh.
I know I’m an author, but while my books were not available after CBAY closed, I didn’t feel like one. I do once again! YAY!
You can find Ascent from Hell: The Blood Angel here:
Kath/ Kath Marsh
kathbmarsh@gmail.com
kath-LettersfromEarth.blogspot,com
kathboydmarshauthor.com