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Books

More of Ella’s story…the serial adventure

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So here we are, one week into the scheme to serialize — online — not one, not two, but three books: If You’d Asked Me, Ella’s Story, and The Complete Writer.

This little adventure seems to be working on one level: Plain & Simple Press’s Facebook site now has something like a hundred “likes,” which I guess is to its credit. It’s kind of amusing to put dollops of these books online — in the case of Ella’s Story, anyway, it gives you an excuse to look for exotic images to decorate with.

Pretty time-consuming, though. The fiction piece is easy to put up, but the two nonfiction bookoids (If You’d Asked and Writer) require some fairly elaborate HTML formatting. I am not fond of coding. And there seems to be no simple shortcut to set up links for the tables of contents. Because I haven’t come up with chapter titles for the novel, I’m not building a TofC for that — at least not yet. Because…I can’t see how to create a ToC without having chapter titles: the code to set up page jumps from a table of contents entry to a title takes the reader to the line below the target text, so you have to have something to link to that’s above the first line you’d like the reader to see. I suppose I could enter some sort of symbol above the chapter numeral. But??? I dunno…let’s figure that out later.

Anyway, I uploaded Chapter 4 of the noveloid today: a flashback to Ella’s first meeting with Bhotil, in which she learns (to her dismay) that she’ll be living and working on one of Varnis’s two moons.

It remains to be seen whether loading a chapter a day, rotating among the three books, is a good idea. It does get something from each book online each week. This week we’ve seen  two chapters from Ella, two from Writer, and one from Asks. Next week two chapters from Asks and Writer and one from Ella are slated to go online.

This may be uploading content too fast, for a serialization scheme. In olden days when real magazines still existed, a publication like Saturday Evening Post came out only once a week. Pulp penny dreadfuls like Argosy came out monthly. So a serial story appeared weekly or monthly, not daily. It’s possible that daily publication is more than the market will bear.

On the other hand, it’s a different market and a different medium. Publish the stuff too slowly, and people may forget about it.

Then there’s the issue of keeping up with the schedule. Writer and Asked are complete, so it’s just a matter of copying and pasting existing copy, some of it already camera-ready, into web pages. But Ella is still in progress. To crank a chapter a week will be a challenge. Especially since I have no idea how Ella gets out of the predicament she gets herself into on Zaitaf.

This should be innaresting…

New [*FREE!*] chapter online: THE COMPLETE WRITER

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Okay, so far I’ve managed to squeeze in one (count it: 1) productive task around a day of busy socializing and loafing: Posted Chapter 3 of The Complete Writer at the Plain & Simple Press website.

Chapter 3, online now!

Each chapter of three books will appear, one at a time, at the P&S blog, “News & Chat,” and at the same time, each chapter will be added to a separate page, in normal print-book order, so that eventually the entire book will appear on its dedicated web page. Thus…

This weekend was fairly hectic. Saturday morning we had a special coaching session for the All Saints’ choir, engineered by our new choir director, featuring a guest speaker who is an expert on the human voice. It was extremely interesting — in addition to learning a lot about how humans make vocal sounds, we got a whole slew of exercises and advice.

So…watch out, Metropolitan Opera! Here we come.

Sunday morning’s service was fairly long, and handsomely embellished by a rousing sermon from a guest pastor. Our guy is good, very good indeed…this lady was awesome. Plus the women’s chant choir got to sing the Psalm. So that was all highly satisfactory.

Then it was OUT of there like a rocket to meet WonderAccountant. We had tickets to the Phoenix Chorale’s Sunday afternoon performance: Scandinavian music! As usual with the Chorale, that also was pretty awesome.

First, of course, we had to go to lunch at one of our favorite restaurants…thereby piling on another pound for me to get rid of (again). Great food. Two margaritas. She was driving, thank God: for those who live and dine out in Phoenix, Otro serves real margaritas with a full portion of tequila, not frozen bottled margarita mix. Two will put you under the table. 😀

This morning I was reduced to having to pick up the mess preparatory to house-cleaning. This sounds simple but…well…when the occupant is in the habit of simply dropping things wherever she happens to finish with them, picking up the house can be a challenge. This is a lifelong bad habit: gotta quit doing that!

Today: off to La Maya’s place: home-made tamales for lunch! Now am so stuffed I can barely waddle. But very, very happy.

In less than an hour, I want to tune in to Chuck Bartok’s talk show: the emanation of a marketing guru who spends a fair amount of time and effort sharing what he’s learned. This could be interesting.

The day’s two remaining to-do’s — deposit checks and pay bills — will not get done between now and then, meaning little or no time & energy will be left to finish the Ella chapter I’m supposedly writing as we speak. Oh well.

Who would imagine “retirement” could be so effing busy?

Can You Cope with Hard Times?

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So it looks like the economy is chugging right along just now. That’s nice. The skeptics among us, as we know, expect the current administration to bring the whole house of cards down on our heads — any minute now! But even cooler heads understand that what goes up must go down: the economy never stays “up” forever. Eventually it will sag, and we poor little sheeples will lose jobs, see pensions shrink, wonder how we’re going to pay for gas and food…

Well, take heart! Our friend Donna Freedman has come out with a second volume of her excellent frugalist’s survival guide, Your Playbook for Tough Times. She sent me a copy, and I have to tell you: it’s an amazing little book. In just 196 pages (counting the table of contents and lengthy thank-you’s), she covers the bases, even telling you how to find free and low-cost food.

In a sense, Donna argues that all times are tough times, or (if you have a brain in your head) you should at least treat them as though they were. Says she:

The feedback for the first book was interesting. Here’s a comment that really got my attention: “I realized that ‘tough times’ are no longer an isolated event. They’re pretty much like a fifth season, like hurricane season, and (something) one really has to prepare for.”

Some of us have always lived this way, in that we don’t take money for granted. Rather than spend every dime we earn, we put some aside in case something unexpected happens: job loss, say, or illness. And since these days a lot of workers have to fund their own retirements, that means making careful plans for their money.

Yup.

It has a such an array of ideas, strategies, and advice — all of it informed by Donna’s philosophy of “stealth savings” — that it’s almost encyclopedic. It addresses about every personal-finance challenge most of us are likely to face, and does so with common sense.

Check it out!

Major Project DONE!

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At last! The writing book — The Complete Writer — is done, indeed. It’s a MAJOR major project: 433 pages with the index and the back matter in place. I’m very pleased…it has been a huge job, made all the more huge by my having screwed up the page count twice, leading to not one, not two, but three total rewrites of the endless index.

An index is mind-numbing enough to compile without having to do it three times. That’s for damn sure…

Still have to do a wrap-around cover for the print version. I do have one for the e-book incarnation, but have heard nothing from the e-book formatter so don’t know where or if that thing is.

Trudging through that accursed index for the third time (eight single-spaced, double-column pages set in 10-point type…phbhphtbt!), it crossed my mind that the thing has its uses: an index points to a book’s topics in a more succinct and telling way than any table of contents does. Index topics are sharply focused, unfanciful, and succinct.

The marketing strategy for The Complete Writer involves a lot of public speaking: before groups, clubs, classes, whatever I can get. That, o’course, is going to entail coming up with things to speak about. Well…where do I have an eight-page list (two columns, 10-point Alegreya)? Mwa ha ha! Scan your eye down the index of a book on any subject you know well, and lo! You see a gold mine of subjects you can turn into dog-and-pony shows.

writing-scamsMatter of fact, I have to give a presentation on Thursday. Believe its subject will be “Scams for Writers…and How to Avoid Them.” The index points to everything I need to address, and it also refers me to web pages where I can download some handouts.

Hot diggety.

Donna Freedman is in town. It was good to see her yesterday…we had lunch at a favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint and then killed an inordinate amount of time chatting. That was fun! 🙂

She’s looking to market her blog writing course and also has been hustling up a lot of writing assignments. I’m reminded of how lucky I was to have a working husband when I was covering the earth with copy as a freelance writer. Keeping the pump primed takes an enormous amount of work, and you dare not pause. The minute you quit drumming up work, the pipeline runs dry.

Today is gray and damp and vaguely chilly. I’ve spent half the day wrestling the last of the index into place and another several hours scrubbing up and battling dog hair. The dogs and I are now ensconced with an electrically heated throw atop the bed, there to loaf the rest of the day away.

And so it goes.

Happy New Year to you!

Budget and a Book

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Yay! It’s August 1!

Another day closer to fall, lhudly sing huzzah. But more to the point, I’ve survived the first month on the (re)budget! And I came out only $274 in the hole.

Not too bad, considering how feral my financial garden has gotten. Without the bill from WonderAccountant, I’d have seen only $72 worth of red ink, and that’s despite the $175 I diddled away on the art class.

Art class starts tomorrow…this should be interesting! It’s an indulgence, no doubt of it. But one could also regard it as an investment in sanity. I really, really need to spend more time around some human beings.

This August looks pretty positive, providing no really big unexpected bills occur. Though my estimate of $400 for summertime utilities was just about right on, gasoline cost nothing like the expected $50±. The initial $22 I spent on the first of the month lasted three weeks! I filled the tank last week, and it’s still almost full.

So if that fill-up lasts another ten days to two weeks, the gas card I have to buy this month from Costco may amount to just $25 or $30!

What that suggests, I’m thinking, is that I may only have to buy a Costco cash card to use at the pumps about once very six weeks, which would mean some months would have (wowzers!) $0.00 upfront cash outlay on gasoline.

The grocery bills were much attenuated by the charity handout at the start of July. Those people will be back at the church next Saturday, and you may be sure I’ll be first in line when they open at 7 a.m.

The grocery store bills came in $50 over budget, despite my hardly having to go into a store. But that’s still $100 less than the average $400(!!!) I found I’d been spending over the prior six months. If I can push it down to under $300, I’ll be happy…but think that’s unlikely because this month I haven’t had to buy any meat of any kind, thanks to the gigantic Costco stashes in the freezer. Well, except for meat for the dogs.

In that department, the dog food situation also devolved into a pleasant surprise. The amount I paid out for a giant package of cheapo pork and a package of chicken thighs on the fifteenth bought enough to last the dogs much, much longer than expected.

I cut the pork into easily cooked chunks and stored it in three huge Ziplock bags. We’ve used one of those and half the giant package of chicken. Still have about a day and a half of dog food from that. This afternoon, though, I’ll cook up another packet of the pork for them (mixed with other nutritional goodies). That means we’ve used less than half of the dog meat in two weeks! Significantly less. There’s a good possibility that what I have on hand will last longer than a month.

A miracle!

My plan is to make a Costco run a little later this week, maybe, and while there buy one package of chicken, which is cheap. That will insure that we won’t run out in the next month…and mean that instead of $55, in August I’ll spend about $13 on dog food. With half a bag of frozen dog veggies left, I shouldn’t need any more of those. Everything else that goes into dog food is either on hand or extremely cheap.

The power and water bills this month are going to be astronomical. I expect they’ll far exceed the allotted $400, so the limited spending on gas and dog food is a blessing. That should take up the slack, I hope.

Progress is being made on the writing & publishing book. Despite adding a couple of chapters, I’ve managed to cut the page count to under 400. Alas, though, I still have two more chapters to write. However, there’s still some unduly bloggish material that can go, so I think the final page count will be about a wash.

That’s in the current template I’m using. Its trim size is 5.5 x 8.5 inches, a standard trade paperback size. However, The Essential Feature was 7 x 10 inches.

If I set the copy in that trim size, that alone would cut the page count. So I’m thinking I may buy a another Friedlander template in the 7 x 10 trim size — he has one with the same font and overall design. That would be a lot easier than me trying to figure out the page setup, and the cost isn’t THAT much.

Only problem is, reflowing the copy into a new template will take time. And, of course, it’ll create the usual hair-tearing hassles.

However, it will take time to get speaking engagements, so there probably is time to address a new template. I need to start working on that right now, come to think of it.

Yesterday I learned that WonderAccountant’s sister works at the Small Business Administration’s downtown education center! So: a contact! Hallelujah brothers and sisters. I’m going to call down there and see if they’ll let me do a presentation — if I’m not mistaken, they have a regular roster of speakers who come in on a rotating basis. If by some miracle I could wriggle my way in there, that would soon start to create some new editorial clients.

Also need to rejoin the Chamber (argh! the time suck! money suck!!) and schmooze enough to justify asking if they’ll let me speak. Someone else suggested calling all the BNI groups in town.

Before I do that, though, I’ll need to have the dog and pony show prepared and rehearsed. And…to get the damn book in print.

Since I think it’ll only take another week or two to finish the book & its print layout, I’m prioritizing that chore. Then will get down to work on a professional presentation, which will be a project. I’m pretty comfortable speaking in front of groups, because of all the classroom experience…but because of all the classroom experience, I tend to speak off the cuff a lot. That won’t do for what I have in mind.

So, onward!

The (not-so-much!) Joys of Amazon

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I’ve about had it with Amazon. Honest to God, every effin’ time I try to do anything with any book on Amazon, I end up with my hands full of sh!t. This time? Well. Sumbeach, that’s about as articulate as I can get right this instant.

How about a couple of pictures, each worth a thousand words?

Cookbook

Naughty June 2016

I’ve posted these things, plus promotional copy and links, on websites, Facebook pages, Facebook Groups, and Twaddle from here to Hell and onward to Gone, day after day after brain-banging, mind-numbing DAY over the ten days or two weeks.

NINE Facebook pages and groups plus Twitter have been urging people to hurry on over to Amazon and buy these astonishingly wonderful books as dawn cracks on Thursday, July 21. Posts at these nine sites have gone up every single day, along with associated posts that gave me a chance to mention the alleged sale, EVERY DAY for the past day after day after endless day.

Understand: because no two FB pages or groups seem to post the same way, you end up dorking and dorking and dorking around to get them to do what you want. One page will respond to an inserted URL by inserting the web post with the image that appears closest to the top. Another will try to insert ALL the images in the post. Yet another will slap in the images in the righthand sidebar, which bear no relation at all to the content you’re trying to plug on FB. And still another will insert nothing. So for about 99% of them, you have to delete incorrect data and then go into your computer, track down the correct images, and  insert them. Then at Twitter you have to write all new promo copy, because of Twitter’s frustrating word count limitation, which is crimped even further by the need to add hashtags. And by the fact that Twitter reduces the character allowance to account for the size of the attached image. To minimize that, you have to convert your URL to Bitly, another time suck.

At one point, I figured the average number of time-wasting search-and-clicks per Facebook posting was 8. So 8 x 9 = 72 endless click-search-click-search-search-clicks per posting!!!! PER AD. There are two ads involved here.

Even if you’re pasting the promotional copy into each Facebook page/group (which cannot do for all of them), this process adds up to about two hours of mind-numbing computer diddling-around. Per session.

Multiply that by ten days, and you come up with a conservative(!) estimate of about 20 hours spent on this annoying, excruciatingly boring task.

So comes dawn’s early light today, I go on Amazon to check…because, you know, during this whole exercise a still small voice in the back of my mind has been nagging, whaddaya bet? whaddaya bet? Well. If I were a betting woman, I would’ve bet that Amazon would once again give me the shaft.

And I’d have been right.

Naturally, not one of the six books I’d set up for the Amazon Countdown Sale promo program offered any kind of markdown.

Well, except for the “take it for FREE” offer for those who subscribe to Amazon’s free borrowing program. That’s the one where Amazon spies on you to see how many pages you’ve clicked through. If the reader doesn’t “look” (snark!) at enough pages, the author doesn’t get paid. Yeah. Readers “buy” the book but the author doesn’t get paid.

Not that you get paid much in the “borrow” program anyway. You get a fraction of what you’d get if the person bought the book at the ludicrously tiny amount you can get away with charging for an e-book.

IMHO, Amazon is the single worst thing that has ever happened to publishing and to creative work.

Yes, it lets every would-be hobbyist writer get his or her work in front of a (mostly imaginary) public. And yes, it lets everyone get around the gatekeepers at real publishing houses.

But you know: those gatekeepers served a purpose. They knew (still do know) what sells and what doesn’t sell. When they decided to accept or reject a proposal or a manuscript, it was based on some real insight not just into the intrinsic quality of the work but also into its marketability. Even with those gatekeepers, if you’ve ever gone to a charitable book sale or a used book store, you’ll see that the market is simply awash in books, books, books, and more books: many more books than any single reader or even a group of readers could reasonably keep up with.

But now the market is more than awash. It’s DROWNING. It’s fuckin’ SUBMERGED in dreck! I just read a “published” book by some wannabe Great Writer of the Western World that’s full of punctuation errors, spelling errors, and…oh hell. The idea is good. It’s a salable concept. But the published bookoid is a mess:  the copy has apparently never been graced by either a copyeditor or a proofreader.

Both of those, BTW, were provided as a matter of course, free to the author, by real publishing houses.

Amazon single-handedly has degraded the overall quality of literature available to the public, destroyed the publishing industry, and further impoverished the lot of writers and artists.

And if you weren’t already wasting your time “publishing” (le mot juste is something more like “posting”) books that no publisher’s editor in hir right mind would look at twice, you get to waste it anyway jumping through Amazon’s endless “promotional” hoops to no avail.

“Disruption” is just a techno-euphemism for “destruction.”

Here’s what I’m gonna do:

I will leave the 40 or so books we have on Amazon there, since they generate all of about $12 a month…well, in a good month.

But meanwhile, I will convert them all to ePub (which I should have done in the first place!) and post them all on Smashwords — assuming I don’t have to pay through the schnozzola to get an e-book formatting expert to do the formatting so that SW will accept it. If I can’t, then I will post them all to Barnes & Noble. And I will post the Camptown Races bookoids at an online retailer that specializes in “romantic erotica” (no kidding: who knew?).

Then I am going to forget about it. If they sell themselves, bully. If not, WGAS. All of the energy and all of the time I’ve spent on trying to create and sell books? That will be fully diverted into trying to sell editorial and indexing services.

The Copyeditor’s Desk has been supporting this folly. It’s about time it started supporting me, instead.