Chapter One

As promised:

CHAPTER ONE

The South Coast
by John H Matthews
COMING SOON

The man fell to his knees in the warm surf of the Gulf of Mexico. The salt water struck his skin abruptly, momentarily easing the pain. His thoughts were not of his wife or his children and his life did not flash before his eyes. He thought of the last face he had seen and how little expression it showed. He thought of the sound of the gun and the few moments that he thought he hadn’t been hit, that the bullet had missed its target.

     As the rush of blood from the hole in his stomach drained him, he collapsed into the water.

Copyright 2013 John H. Matthews

The First Word(s)

I follow several writing and author discussion forums. I'm mostly a stalker, watching what others ask and then following as the next fifty posts go from informative and morph into self-promoting then finally descend into combative. Pretty much like every other discussion forum and message board on the internet.

The last week I've been watching one that asked about prologues in a book, and if they are acceptable or not. I generally find questions like that to be fishing, just hoping for someone to say of course they are since by following the posts it seemed the writer has no intention of removing their lengthy prologue from their manuscript.

But this got me thinking about the most important words of a book: the first words. If the first sentence doesn't capture you in some way to read the second sentence, then the book will likely not be read. Think of some of the most famous books and their first lines:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." - Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

"Who is John Galt?" - Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." - Lolita, Nabakov

Great first lines, indeed. Each get you to think about the literary journey ahead of you. 

I have two favorite books: The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. But my favorite opening line/paragraph is courtesy Ms. Kingsolver:

"I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign." 

The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver

How can you compete with that? The imagery and suspense from one short line, mixed with the unique name of a minor character make you want to keep reading. And I did, and have read the book at least a dozen times.

In my next post, I will share the entire first chapter of The South Coast.

OneThing Leads to Another

I've spent a few years writing my book, with many stops and starts. During that time I've done a lot of research into the brave new world of self-publishing. Well, it isn't a new world, but the electronic version of it was born with Kindle and all the eReaders that have followed.

In doing the legwork for going about publishing my book I learned a lot about the process as well as the do's and don'ts. Already having my background in design and web development, it seemed a perfect fit to start and now announce:

You Write, We Do The Rest
www.bluebullseyepress.com

Bluebullseye Press 
www.bluebullseyepress.com

BBEP is a one-stop shop for most of your needs to self-publish your book. There's only about two parts we won't help with: writing the book and publishing the book. Everything in between, we've got you covered pretty much.

Book Covers
One area where most self-published books fail is the cover design. People with no design background and perhaps without the correct tools hack together a cover that they might like, but won't catch the eye of possible readers, or worse yet, turn them off from it completely. We can work with authors to create a professional level book cover for both eBook and print versions.

Video Trailers
This is a new-ish area that I posted about last week. Video trailers for books have become a great marketing tool and a way to draw readers in to the world of your book and get them to buy. Like the book covers, there's many bad video trailers out there. We can create great video trailers with music, professional voice over artists, video, still photos and text for authors.

Book Formatting
The interior pages of a book must look good, too. We can work with writer's on a Word Doc template to write in or to take a finished manuscript and format it to a pleasing layout that works for eBook and printed versions.

Author/Book Websites and Blogs
Just like this one! We can use a solid foundation such as Blogger.com or WordPress and create a custom theme to fit the author or book or we can create an all new website from scratch.

Those are a few of the offerings we'll have on tap at Bluebullseye Press!

South Coast Video Trailer

In researching ways to self promote the new book I came across the new world of video trailers for books. It seemed odd at first, but then looking around the web it seems a lot of authors are doing this.

So I'm giving it a shot. Here is the first ROUGH edit of a trailer, not done yet. It happens to be the entire first chapter of The South Coast.

Self-Publishing is the New Photography

Once 'professional' level digital cameras came down to prices accessible to the masses, everyone is a photographer. Just peruse Craigslist for your city and you'll find dozens of people offering portraits or wedding photos for cheap. While competition is great, there is a flip side to this: it devalues the work of the professionals who have put in the time to learn the craft. Add to that the huge number of users of Instagram (largely made of up photos of food, it seems) and the quality of the cameras built into modern smart phones and everyone has a camera with them all of the time.

The South Coast
by John H. Matthews
Coming Soon!

And I'm just as guilty and will say it: I'm a photographer. Though I have two degrees in photography, a portrait studio in my home, and far too much invested in equipment. I'm planning on publishing a book of photography once my first novel is done and out the door.

But this post is about writing, not shooting.

Bowker, the company responsible for selling ISBN numbers, the long string of numbers that accompanies the bar code on the back of a book, reports self-published titles have increased 287 percent in the last five years, account for 43 percent of all print books in the 2011. That's more than 148,000 printed self-published books. And that is just PRINT books.