CreateSpace Creates Ease For First Time Author

By Nancy K. Crevier

Not only is Newtown resident Diana Baxter a new author, she is also a new writer.

“I’ve always been a story teller — and let me tell you, I got in trouble for that growing up — and people have been telling me for years that I need to write a book. But I never thought of myself as an author, until this came along,” said Ms Baxter.

“This” is her first novel, DuBois Manor, published this month by her company, Ethereal Wing Books, through Amazon.com. The story was inspired by an abandoned mansion she stumbled upon during a vacation in North Carolina in 2009.

“I came home and the novel began to pour out of me,” said Ms Baxter. “The characters just came alive.”

But her interior design and decorating business was still going full steam, and after the initial burst of words, Ms Baxter, who has spent her entire adult life painting and decorating, set the book aside. The manuscript kept falling off of the shelf where she was storing it, though, frequently enough that a year ago she picked it up one day and decided to finish it.

“I was done with the decorating business, and this book just needed to be written,” said Ms Baxter.

DuBois Manor is the first of a trilogy that is “a little bit of everything. There’s murder, mystery, love and betrayal, with some paranormal undertones,” she said. In this first novel, readers meet Annabelle and Olivia, members of a family of shipping merchants, living in a fictional waterfront town in North Carolina in 1890. The story follows their lives and the family curse that plagues them.

 “Olivia Marie DuBois, age 36, was the oldest of their two daughters. Her hair was a dark, alluring auburn, and she was shorter in stature than her sister. Olivia had a few freckles from the Carolina sun and a voluptuous figure she enjoyed showing off. Her full lips, seductive smile and pointy nose enticed most men… Her fearlessness and attitude told you who was in charge. Olivia was demanding, knew what she wanted and always won in the end, no matter the cost.

“One would never guess that delicate Annabelle was Olivia’s sister. Annabelle’s long blond locks shone like corn silk. Her skin like porcelain, she was an angelic image of her mother, but taller than Olivia, and lanky… Annabelle loved to fantasize about life and love. She wrote countless entries in her diary, longingly describing her dreams of romance and love, along with more matter-of-fact accountings of her daily activities.

“William DuBois had the manor home built to overlook the Brine River as a reminder of their good fortune. Growing up they lived an opulent, yet sheltered life.”

“Everything is handed to them, but their lives are chaos. It’s about how you can have everything, and have nothing,” Ms Baxter said. “Their lives are like the river that they live on, full of twists and turns.”

The book will have appeal to women readers mainly, she suspects, primarily those between the ages of 30 and 70.

“Different women reading this will relate to the two sisters in different ways. Olivia is a very strong personality, and Annabelle is a quieter woman. Some readers just love one or the other,” said Ms Baxter, who has been pleased with the reviews posted so far on Amazon.com since the book went live on June 16. “I’m also amazed that I’ve already sold 14 books in under a week,” she said on June 20.

By the time she was nearly finished with DuBois Manor, she had already planned out the second book, Windswept At Sea, and the third book, Tainted Glass, each one building on new generations of the family introduced in DuBois Manor. Both books are completed now, she said, and ready for editing.

The Craft Of Writing,

And Publishing

Having never written before, Ms Baxter admitted that there was a time when she stalled out after an early reader criticized her sentence construction. At a writer’s conference, however, she was relieved to hear that her job was to write the story, and an editor’s job was to worry about the grammar. After that, the words began to flow easily again.

“I did a lot of research for these books, and I learned to use my senses. When I was on a river or on a boat, I would close my eyes and think about what I was hearing, what I was smelling. I thought about how my hands felt gripping the rail of the boat. It’s been a fun experience,” she said.

Learning to master the craft of writing has been an exhilarating experience for Ms Baxter, as has the experience of getting published.

When DuBois Manor was finished, Ms Baxter began to shop around for an editor, and found Dawn Handschuh, in Newtown.

“You need a second person to catch those little things that you miss,” she said. “I wanted someone I could meet with, face to face, and someone I felt comfortable with. I didn’t want to mail my manuscript to an editor in another state, that I hadn’t met,” said Ms Baxter. “Dawn has been amazing. She can take what I’m seeing and pop the right word in there,” she said.

Finding the right editor is the most important piece of publishing, she believes. “You want someone who can ‘read’ you and make you a better writer, but still leave you sounding like you,” Ms Baxter said.

When Ms Handschuh was finished, the novel had been edited down from 525 pages to 420. Then, it was time to get it published. What Ms Baxter found was that without a previously self-published piece or a name with panache, traditional publishers were not likely to take on a new author.

“I decided not to waste my time, and I was seeing what writers were doing with CreateSpace,” she said.

CreateSpace is an Amazon company that provides writers with the tools they need to self-publish books, on demand, through Amazon and Kindle.

“They do get a small percentage of each sale, and you can pay and they’ll do the whole thing for you, but I found out that as long as you have your cover art and have the book in what they call ‘book form,’ it’s free,” she said. “If you are at all good on the computer and have up-to-date software, you can do it all yourself. I think to start out, it’s great,” Ms Baxter said.

In an earlier false start, she had had a copy of the book printed locally, so she was fortunate to have the manuscript in book form, she said.

“All that that means, I discovered, is having it in the right order — like where the acknowledgement pages, the forward, and so on goes. Now that I know, I am typing my books in the right form,” she said.

Receiving feedback as she wrote DuBois Manor was important, said Ms Baxter. She enlisted a local book club to read the manuscript when she felt it was completed, asked them to fill out a brief questionnaire. She then used their responses to improve her story.

“I also utilized my Facebook page to test my cover art, which I designed,” Ms Baxter said. “I would post my art and ask people to vote. It helped me come up with what I think is the best cover,” she said.

Finding CreateSpace to publish her novel has been a positive experience, she said. “People need to know that there is a way to publish and to get started,” Ms Baxter said, and CreateSpace and Amazon provide authors with the means to get their works out into the wider world, in a very affordable manner.

“It’s free on Amazon and free on Kindle,” she repeated, “so long as you have the art work and manuscript in the right form. My rep at CreateSpace was very helpful in getting me started.”

The service offers very inexpensive marketing packages, but self-publishing does mean an author must be willing to put in some effort to market their work, she said.

“You can buy an ISBN for your book here for just $99. Or,” said Ms Baxter, “you get it for free, until you decide to pull your book. Then you have to purchase a new ISBN for it, and the book has to be published as a second edition.”

The International Book Standard Number (ISBN) is a 13-digit, country-specific book identifier assigned to each edition of a book. While an ISBN is not required, most booksellers handle only those books with an ISBN.

“With Amazon, you don’t have to buy a tax number for every state in which you want to sell, like you would if you went with a publisher that required you to buy a certain number of books and sell them yourself. I’m not running to the post office, packaging books, shipping them out, or any of that. I don’t have to keep stock on hand,” she said. She can, if she wants, purchase books to sell herself, such as for book signing events.

CreateSpace also allows authors to continually update and edit their books, she said. She has already added subtle changes to DuBois Manor, such as font size on the back cover.

The worldwide exposure that her book is receiving through CreateSpace and Amazon is not something she could have done on her own, she said.

“This gives you a chance to create a following. Traditional publishers can see that you are serious,” Ms Baxter said.

“If you have the time and computer skills, you can do it,” emphasized Ms Baxter.

Her trilogy is essentially completed, she said, and now it seems like she cannot stop writing. “It seems everywhere I look, there’s a book to write. It’s ridiculous!” Already underway are two novels very different from her trilogy, she said, one based on a murder that happened in Massachusetts, titled Mosaic Mermaid, and Blueprints, “involving a designer, a terrorist, and the FBI,” said Ms Baxter.

Still reeling four days after the book appeared online, Ms Baxter said, “I’ve had to digest this whole thing! It was huge, but so much fun. I’m so happy, it’s indescribable, to be on my new journey. When I had that paperback copy in my hands Friday night [June 15], I held it up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh! I did it!’”

DuBois Manor, by Diana L. Baxter, is available at amazon.com as a paperback for $17.99 or as a Kindle e-book for $6.99. For more information about DuBois Manor or the author, visit www.EtherealWingBooks.com.