Okay, this is gonna have to be fast because a ton of THINGS remain to be done. But you probably think I fell off the edge of the earth…so…just to keep my hand in, here goes…
Since quitting the teaching job about the four weeks ago, I plunged into a whirlpool of nonstop work, 12 and 14 hours a day: trying to catch up with all the work that hasn’t been done over the past year while I’ve been wrestling with the Mayo Clinic and trying to establish a business framework in which to build the proposed p0rn novelette empire. I’ve gotten a LOT done, much of it entailing technologies and jobs with which I am not familiar. Videlicet:
• The print version of Slave Labor is now in existence.
• The diet/cookbook is finally online!
• Day before yesterday I returned corrections for the print version of Thirty Pounds in 4 Months; while I was at it completely reformatted the endless thing in a new template. Awaiting new page proofs.
• The blog empire is moved over to WestHost but the new back-end guy hasn’t done much to get it organized. Says he picked up a bad bug from his two-year-old’s day-care experience…which is likely, because there is a nasty bug going around these parts just now.
• I’ve about learned how to upload a book-length MS to Kindle and soon will apply to Nook (later!).
• My friend who can fairly be described as the dean of scholarly publishing, referred me to the editor of Johns Hopkins University Press. I wrote a new cover letter and sent the proposal for the Boob Book to him, and he immediately sent it to an acquisitions editor, saying it “looks promising.” 🙂
• I’ve hired a freelance who has written several p0rn0graphic bookoids with more to come; I will fill in with two more after I understand more about how her characters interact. This will give us a seven-story series in a frame story.
• Considering another potential scribbler; we shall see on Friday when I interview the guy.
• Created a contract for hiring these creatures.
• I’ve written two founding stories for series of spicy novelettes, but have had an awful time finding time to write any more around all the other demands.
• The 18 installments of the Fire-Rider series are ready to go; just waiting on the art director to finish the covers (seven are in hand, though…that’ll last the better part of a month if I publish at the rate of one every three or four days).
• I’ve come to hate things technological…what a time suck!
• Finished the last freshman comp course I hope EVER to have to teach. Told the chair I’m taking off next semester.
• Took out a month’s subscription to Shutterstock, which gives me the privilege of downloading up to 750 images.
• Already have found, downloaded, and catalogued about 100. Every time I enter a new set of key words, a bunch more likely candidates come up.
• Found some extremely kewl drawings for the Camptown Ladies Talk blog (which has yet even to be established at Westhost; reference the alleged kid virus), but discovered they’re .eps files, which have to be converted to jpegs and then reduced hugely in size. But still…amazingly kewl.
• Created an awesome cover, using PowerPoint and Preview, for the first installment of the Biker Babe series. Unfortunately it’s a little too racy (read “eye-popping”) to publish on this site, but when the Camptown Races Press site is up, those of you whose sensibilities can sustain a truly lively image will have to come over and admire it.
• Purchased 100 ISBNs.
• Created spreadsheets to suffice (i hope) in the absence of a decent database.
• Edited copy. Advised one distraught author and another who simply plods along and refuses to give up.
• Escaped having to deal overmuch with my neediest client, who thank God ended up with his account at Createspace intact and operative.
• Mocked up a cover in Powerpoint that looks pretty persuasive but have not had the nerve or the time to fiddle with trying to upload it to Amazon or B&N…another day!
• Spent two half-days getting the car’s tires changed.
• Spent half of yesterday today re-learning Windows at the campus’s computer commons; figured out how to get content loaded to Amazon correctly, using a PC not a Mac.
• Approached the college with an initiative the Scottsdale Business Assn has cooked up, by way of offering internships in members’ companies under the SBA aegis. Interesting but tricky.
• Raised Hell, put a block under it, and finally resolved the issue with AMEX about the freeze on my credit bureau accounts. Extracted two new credit cards from AMEX, to kick in after American Express’s contract with Costco expires.
Along the way, I have learned a LOT of stuff, most of it falling under the heading of “dumb tax.” For example:
• Yesterday I learned that Kindle cannot run a table of contents generated on a Mac, no matter what iteration of Word you’re using. It must be updated on a PC or its links will not go through. Period.
What’s the Dumb Tax part of that? If I’d been paying attention when I read the endless instructions for how to upload to Kindle from .docx, I would’ve noticed this little detail… 🙄
• Bowker gives one an opportunity to buy a bar code and UPC to go with the ISBNs you’re spending your children’s patrimony to buy. I declined, knowing they weren’t necessary for e-books. But what I did NOT think about is that they are necessary if you want to sell hard-copy books on Amazon. Or anywhere else. The bar codes are expensive, and I was too cheap to pay for them.
Greed Tax: same thing as Dumb Tax. Now I’ll have to have the damn things printed out on labels and ship any hard copies of the diet/cookbook to Amazon, expensively, from my house rather than having the PoD guys ship direct to Amazon. 🙄
And why not have the graphic artist just add the bar code to the wrap-around cover? Because I’d like to sell these things sometime in my lifetime…
• When using a finely tuned Book Design Template, you have to use styles even if you’re preparing PDFs for print. If you use Wyrd’s italic or boldface function (command-i or command-b), for example, what will happen is that any line with so much as one character of italic or b.f. will take on added leading. So instead of the line being, say, 10/12 (ten point type over 12 point leading), it will appear to be 10/13. Lovely.
Why did I not sense this in advance? Not knowing, I’d hesitate to state, for fear of being erroneous.
My friend the e-book builder had converted Slave Labor to .mobi with far more techie software and expertise than I’m capable of marshaling. When I wanted a print-on-demand version, I just slapped the copy I’d sent to him into Book Design Template’s “Focus” model (very handsome, BTW) — without even thinking about the font formatting. Nor was there any reason to think it would make any difference. The styles are designed to make the files work with Kindle. Oh well.
• Also yesterday I learned that Windows has reinvented itself so many times that to a Mac user it now looks like it was developed on a planet circling Antares.
Should’ve bought myself a cheap laptop PC with which I could continue to use Windows, down through the ages.
That’s only partial Dumb Tax, though: in the past, I’ve found that switching back and forth between the Mac and the PC environments causes a lot of headaches. It’s quite a PITA when you confuse one set of commands with another.
• Because of the TofC issue, I learned that the college’s Computer Commons is dead empty in the summertime and is a HEAVENLY place to work. It’s quiet, it’s air-conditioned to sweater-weather levels, and with no one around, you get the techs’ complete, undivided attention.
I’m definitely going back today or tomorrow to work more on relearning windows and to refine the Fire-Rider tables of contents. If I can get them to let me sign in as a member of the public after my campus credentials expire, then the Computer Commons may become my office-away-from-the-home-office, at least during the summertime.
Honestly, I couldn’t believe how cold it was in there. In the morning, I was sitting here at the Funny Farm with the AC blasting and fans running, and sweat was running off my nose as I was tapping away at the keyboard. I’m not thrilled about burning the gas to drive up to campus every day, but if I get more work done and have fewer conversion problems, it may be worth it.
I think the groundwork for the Camptown Races Press enterprise is now about laid. I sincerely hope so, because wrestling with all this stuff has meant I haven’t been able to write more than a paragraph or two a day for the past several weeks. By the time I’ve finished a day’s raft of To-Do’s, I’m so tired I can’t hold my eyes open.
So I’m hoping that by the end of this week I’ll have the websites updated, announcements of the newly published books posted here and at those sites, a social media expert hired to help peddle the things, and FINALLY some time broken loose in which to do what was the whole point of this exercise: sit down and write for a living.
Now…the only question is, how do I persuade every single reader of Funny about Money to review my astonishingly brilliant and wondrous to read Amazon books???