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Books

Happy Fourth of July! And…next?

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Welp, we’ve made it to another Independence Day without self-destructing. That’s something.

What are you doing for the holiday? Moi, I’ve been invited to a party at the home of some friends who live in a mid-town high-rise. Their place overlooks the Phoenix Country Club and the Steele Indian School, which host the two largest fireworks displays in the central part of the city. And from their balcony you also can see the large show at Tempe Town Lakes and several other smaller shindigs.

An old, halfway-long-lost friend who lives in that apartment building shows up at these evenings, so I’m looking forward to seeing her again. It promises to be a nice evening.

But between now and then:

Students have turned in their “extended definition” papers. In the world of people who recycle their high-school English essays, this means they’ve picked some exceptionally sappy and ill-focused topic such as “what is love” — apparently inflicted on them by  teachers following a required curriculum. The results would be painful to read even if they fit the assignment, which by and large they do not. So {sigh} we have to plod through 23 of those.

Then there’ll only be one more assignment — 2500 words of like drivel — and I’ll be DONE. Never to read another brain-banging freshman comp paper again! 😆

I sincerely hope, anyway.

I’ve started a second racy book — spectrophilia, Ouija board! This should be good. And last night while watching a couple of episodes of some TV show streaming through Kodi, poured another several Fire-Rider bookoids into Friedlander’s Word template. Now am up to book 13, leaving only another five to do. As soon as the cover images are delivered, I’ll be ready to post!

Almost: still have to write “Our Story So Far” blurbs for most of them. And get their ISBNs.

To re-jumpstart the entrepreneurial spirit, I’ve made a list of what I call “foot-draggers”: tasks that need to get done before I can make any headway but that I keep resisting because I know they’re going to be complicated as hell and require some sort of learning curve and I’m just effing learning-curved out. Videlicet:

1. Move Funny and other sites from Jesse’s server to WordPress.com
2. Upgrade WordPress.com service
3. Assign remaining ISBNs to books in progress
4. Buy 100 new ISBNs
5. Buy a month’s subscription to shutterstock. Make a list of general categories for future images and download the maximum allowed.
6. Organize these images on disk and in database by category & book title.
7. Read Friedlander’s template documentation carefully. Figure out how to do the Kindle conversion. Download a Kindle reader app to the laptop so layout can be checked before publication.
8. Learn how to publish epub versions on Barnes & Noble
9. Find the specs for Kindle and Nook covers; relearn how to do this in PowerPoint.
10. Upload diet book to Kindle.
11. Send Slave Labor to Snowfall press for PoD prep
12. Using PowerPoint and stock photo, make Biker Babe cover; create and edit Kindle version. Store to disk.
13. Develop new, more efficient record-keeping to keep track of ISBNs, titles, artwork, and freelances & subcontractors.
14. Develop task flow routine for publication of each book, w/ checklist.

So I figure if I do three of these a day, in less than a week I’ll be up and running.

Which sounds good until you recall that we have 23 student papers sitting on the server right now and another 23 incoming shortly. All told that comes to 58,250 mind-numbing words, the length of a short novel, to be read, commented upon, used as a teaching tool, and assessed. And most of them are high-school papers turned in because the students don’t feel called upon to bother to do the course’s assignments. With just a few exceptions, a total, unutterable waste of the instructor’s time.

But since the instructor’s time is worth less than minimum wage, I suppose no one accounts that as much of a loss…

If I start on the current raft of sea foam today, I won’t get to three of the tasks on the list above today. But if I put it off, it’ll drive me nuts, and whenever I run up against a tight deadline, invariably some student has to make a special case of him/herself and create a major problem. So the only question is, which day would I prefer to have wasted?

Miamifireworks

 

At Last: A little traction!

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FINALLY am getting a little traction on the Boob Book!!! Yesterday was a true Day from Hell, in which I got exactly nothing done, despite arising at 5 a.m. and planning to spend all of Friday on constructive work. Goddamn Wyrd completely crashed my computer…thought I’d lost several days worth of work in files that were live when the system went down. And naturally at the same time a (temporarily) dormant client resurfaced, in a tizzy and seeking rescue.

Now.

Right now.

But today… Just finished Chapter 2 and tossed together the ToC and a chapter outline. So now I’ve got most of the package:

Table of Contents
Chapter Outline
Introduction
Chapter 1: Mammography
Chapter 2: “Something Suspicious”
Appendix A: How to Read a Scientific Article
Appendix E: The Komen controversy and alternatives to donating to Komen

Now all I have to do is write the cover letter and the marketing pitch, toss it all together, and find someone at William Morrow to send it to.

I remembered that my late business partner, Phil Harrison, packaged a book for HarperCollins West. HarperCollins hasn’t got the greatest reputation among writers — in terms of working with them, I mean — but I don’t recall Phil complaining. Anyway, if this bounces from Wm. Morrow I may send it to HarperColllins, since I can say with some truth that “i” (i.e., my company) worked with them in the past. But I also need to dig up an agent. My plan is to pay for access to LMP online and build a list of about a dozen agents and a dozen publishers; then start shipping the package out.

A standard advance for a book like this is about  25 grand. If I get anything close to that, I’m going to stand down off the teaching for a year (actually, $16,800 would buy me out of the teaching job…but I expect that’s what I’d net after taxes on twenty to twenty-five thou, since I’m being forced to do a required minimum withdrawal from my IRA this year, which will really jack up the tax rate). At any rate, if I don’t have to teach, then I should be able to write the book AND work on building the proposed…ahem…racey publishing empire.

At any rate, I’ve gone as far as I can today, because I’m tired, hungry, and have other projects in hand. Food is on the grill. As soon as I finish lunch/dinner, I’m going to start writing outlines of the zingy (if that’s the word…) stories downloaded from Amazon > Books > Erotica on the current free trial subscription to Kindle Unlimited. Actually I’d better download a few more, too.

From there I’ll create guidelines for writing the…uhm, what we might call the “quickies”…so that they can be turned out in a uniform way and with any luck speedily.

Believe it or not, three people have actually volunteered to write these kernels of p0rn!!!!! One of them, o mirabilis, is magnificently gay and highly creative.

Things are beginning to shape up (heh) in budding p0rn empire.

I’m out of money and out of food. So tomorrow, when the new AMEX billing cycle starts, I’ll have to spend most of the day running around town restocking the pantry and the fridge; then cook another week’s worth of dog food (Ruby and Cassie out out of food, too). And then it’s off to some friends’ house for father’s day. While I’m chasing around, I’d better pick up a gift and some wine for him.

And Monday: student papers. Two have turned in their essays early, but that leaves another 21 to trudge through…

All of which is to say it’ll be next Tuesday before I’ll get to the next phase of the Boob Book project: write the cover letter and marketing pitch, unearth the names of new editorial staff at William Morrow and HarperCollins, and send the proposal package off.

Profit & Loss in the Micropublishing Biz

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Using the new Word templates that my little micropublishing business contrived to purchase for a modest price (one was under $50 for a permanent, no-holds-barred license!), I now have hard-copy layout for Slave Labor done and in PDF for the printer (I hope). Friday I met with the beloved graphic artist, who thought the result was pretty decent. He’s going to do a wrap-around cover for the desired trim size, accommodating the present cover art and cover-4 copy. Then it’s off to a local print-on-demand outfit.

If your bookoid is low on images, or if you’re willing to print the images in black & white, the cost for print-on-demand services is amazingly low. To put the whole thing together and perfect-bind it will run $3.33/copy for 10 copies. Per-copy price stays the same at print runs of 100 and 1,000.

This is good, because we would all be mightily surprised if Slave Labor sold even ten copies, to say nothing of enough to create an economy of numbers.

Slave Labor, being my sandbox project, is costing something but not much: I traded out the e-book design in exchange for editing the designer’s upcoming book on marketing e-books. So the only cost has to do with the cover design and with the experiment in Wyrd layout — I did have to pay something for the template. But not much.

How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, the diet guide & cookbook, is now in what we might call rough-draft layout. All the content is poured into the template, and now I need to go through and polish all the formatting, write the back-page bio and the cover copy, figure out how to make the table of contents function work, and make one version for e-book emanation and another for print-on-demand.

We might call 30 Pounds the stage-two sandbox. Every time I work on this stuff, I discover something new. No doubt at all that mounting these things in digital and hard-copy print will add up to a marathon learning experience.

So I regard the costs for these two books as tuition for Micropublishing U. Once I’ve done a couple of the things, it should be pretty easy to put the rest of them online.

And I do have a “rest of them”!

As soon as Slave Labor goes off to the printer and 30 Pounds goes to Amazon and to the printer, I’ll start working on packaging the eighteen books that Fire-Rider has lent itself to serializing. These I hope to put online at the rate of one every week or two.

And that will put 23 titles (including the three that have emanated from real publishing houses) on Amazon  under my name. How amazing IS that, anyway?

The people at Romance Writers of America claim you start to make a noticeable income after you’ve posted about eight titles — of any genre, fiction or nonfiction. So they claim. We’ll soon see if that’s true.

I had to stop working on the Boob Book and the Revived First (Awful!) Novel when an exceptionally difficult project came in from a new client. Lordie! It truly is the single worst, MOST difficult editorial project I’ve ever had the misery to work on. And as  usual, Author is a graduate student with no concept of what other people’s time is worth. She wants it back in 10 days. I figured I could get through my part in four or five days by reading 28+ pages a day; then pass it along to The Kid to do the References section.

Well. Each 28-page segment took five or six hours to plow through. By the time I was done, my brain cells were effing FRIED. One of the reasons the formatting has gotten done over the past week or two is that I simply could not do anything that required more than manual fiddling.

Ugh. How do I need to have this enterprise fly? Let me count the ways!

And it doesn’t have to fly very high. Hell, I’d be on Easy Street if it earned $30,000 a year, to say nothing of 30 grand a month.

To replace the teaching income, I’d need to net $1200 a month on book sales. To replace what I’m making on editorial work would require net $833 a month. Two thousand thirty-three bucks a month, about $2440 gross: how hard can this be?

By God. If it requires cranking out 5,000-word Fifty Shades of Gray knock-offs from now until I shuffle into the grave, I’ll do it!

 

Another Day, Another Dollar

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…or a tiny fraction thereof. The dollar, I mean. It’s 8 a.m. and I’ve been working since  5, so I suppose a substantial fraction of the day has come and gone.

Visit to the Cardiodoc later this morning. That meeting, I hope, will put the whole blood pressure question to rest, once and for all. After another entire month of twice-daily bicep-pinching, the average comes to 124/74, not bad for a seventy-year-old broad who drinks a lot, doesn’t exercise enough, grinds her teeth in frustration until her jaws hurt, and most days consumes meat decorated with butter. I would like very much not to have to hear anything more about that!

Yesterday a very nice little discovery came my way: Joel Friedlander, a graphic designer who blogs about self-publishing, has come up with a whole set of Word templates tricked out as book formats for various types of fiction and nonfiction. Once you pour your copy into one of these and tidy it up a bit, you can convert to a PDF that any printer should be able to use to produce the desired trim size.

While, no, Word cannot do really top-flight page layout (largely because its fonts just aren’t up to the job), for most self-publishers’ purposes Page Layout As High Art is not required. Something that’s readable and doesn’t look like it was put together by a sixth-grader will suffice.

These things more than suffice. I’ve been putting Slave Labor into one of them and finding the task moves right along. The styles built into the template work smoothly and provide excellent consistency. It would be good to be able to insert a hard hyphen to force a line break, by way of fixing the occasional loose line (the particular template I’m using won’t allow that), but otherwise I have no serious complaints.

Student papers are starting to come in, so when I get back from the doc’s place I’ll have to kill at least part of the afternoon reading that stuff.

Two of them have plaintively begged to be told the title of the book. Uhm…it’s at the top of the FIRST PAGE of the syllabus. What part of download the syllabus, an instruction emitted three times on the first day of this online course, did they not understand?

They have an open-book quiz on the syllabus that gives them FIVE CHANCES to find the answers. It should be impossible to get less than the full ten points. We have scores of 7.3, 8.5, 8.3…jeez.

Wonder how they’ll do on the quizzes over the book’s chapters (assuming any of them manage to buy the book)? They only get three chances to get the answers right on those things.

This train of thought is making my teeth grind again. Must get up, feed the dog, and fix some breakfast.

The New Writing Empire: Promising!

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Yesterday afternoon I sat down and began the project of dividing the epic (not to say “endless”…) Fire-Rider novel into chunks that can be serialized on Amazon. At the end of the day, I had 19 “bookoids,” as I’ve taken to calling them. That doesn’t count the front and back matter.

Our porn king’s bookoids, which he tries to post daily, are 5000 words apiece. Fire-Rider serials average a little over 8,000 words, with the shortest in the 5,000-word range.

To my delight, I found the book deconstructs beautifully into perfect little stories, each with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And strangely, the format seems to make the saga more interesting, more engaging. Instead of feeling like oh, God, here’s another chapter plod…plod…plod…plod, your sense is w00t! I’ve finished this and now I get to start a new one!

Rather than wondering when is this ever going to end?, you find yourself wanting to move forward to the next stage.

In the morning I talked with my graphic designer — the artist, not the e-book dude. He really likes the idea.

He feels we can use the existing cover image, which is extremely cool IMHO, as a kind of “brand” identity for the entire series and, without a lot more expense, adjust cover lines and a few graphic details to produce a unique cover for each bookoid.

This afternoon I’m going to divvy up the MS into the 19 segments. With the introduction and the afterword, the total will create 21 items to post on Amazon, but I think I also will put the intro (at least) and maybe the afterword online through Plain & Simple Press, giving me something freely accessible to post on Twitter, FB, and LinkedIn. Assuming that doesn’t violate Amazon’s ToS. If it does, then Amazon doesn’t get those two items; WordPress does.

Tomorrow — or Saturday, since tomorrow and Friday will be busy — I’ll download and install Scrivener and begin learning how to use it to create e-books. That or something like it is what the Porn King is using: we’re told he farms out some of the content production (“writing” may not be le mot juste) to freelances and uploads the things to Kindle himself.

Dang! I’m excited!

Today’s Maunderings

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Crazy hectic day! In another twenty minutes, will fly out the door again for what I hope will be the day’s last event.

And so in brief I refer you to today’s rumination on the writing game.

godlmighty! i wake up on monday morning and when i go back to bed it’s friday night