Coffee heat rising

Cookbook

wooHOO! Cookbook on Its Way!

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Dark Kindle LoResThe new version of the weight-loss cookbook is on its way to publication in print and at Amazon! This afternoon I sent all 296 pages and the wrap-around cover over to the printer, and then set up Kindle to accept the final version of the .mobi file, which should appear within a day or so.

The latter still needs to have its table of contents updated — bizarrely, Kindle can’t read a table of contents that has been compiled in any Mac-compatible program. So every time I need to upload a bookoid that contains chapters, I first have to send it to Tina, who performs the 30-second task of updating the ToC on her PC.

The copy in the new, renamed edition is largely revamped. Its first incarnation, How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, was the first book I had ever uploaded to Amazon. And — wouldn’tcha know — it had the most complex formatting of any book I’ve posted there. In the fools-rush-in department, I took on footnotes, tables, lists, heads, subheads, sub-subheads, and even images without having a single clue to what I was doing.

Nor did I understand that Amazon’s online Kindle previewer is next to useless: what you see in that thing is decidedly not what you get. The result was a mess, but because I’d proofed in that online program, I didn’t know it was a mess.

Not until an angry reader posted a rant about the horrible formatting did I realize something was awry.

By then I’d figured out that you have to download a resident Kindle previewer onto your terminal — and, preferably, download your .mobi file into a Kindle reader or into an iPad, if you can figure out how. When I viewed the How I Lost file in the previewer installed on my Mac, I was horrified. No wonder that poor reader was flummoxed, frustrated, and infuriated!

At that point, though, I was maxed with other work — the plan to post eight to ten bookoids per month was absorbing 12 to 14 hours a day. Revamping the cookbook was not going to happen.

So I took it down from Amazon — unpublished it and forgot it.

Now that cutting the production schedule by 50 percent has allowed life to settle, I’ve returned to the cookbook. After posting more bookoids than I can count — some of which contain formatting challenges — I’ve learned what one needs to do to simplify a manuscript and get it to go online with relatively few glitches.

The manuscript has now been reformatted in a new template, its structure revamped and simplified, a great deal of extraneous detail cut. That made it look better. Then I went through and cut as much of the Bloggish as I could get rid of without rewriting from beginning to end.

Much of the original content had been copied and pasted from Funny. And y’know…blogging is not the same as writing. Blogging is more like a combination of texting and personal letter-writing. It has its own conventions, and its tone and style are casual to a fault.

In the book world, to a large fault. 😉

Language and style cleaned up, format reorganized, the book deserved a new title and new cover art.

Hence the new title: 30 pounds / Four Months.

This book would make a good Christmas present. It has about 120 recipes, some very old (even historic!) and some very 21st-century. The strategy it describes for losing weight really does work, and sticking to it isn’t at all onerous, once you see what works.

So watch this space! I’ll let you know when the electronic and the print versions are ready. If you’re interested in a print copy, let me know in the comments to this post and I’ll arrange to send one to you whenever I have them.

 

 

 

Almost Too Good for Words

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First crack out of the box this morning, The Good Gray Times reminded me that I have to prepare a dog-&-pony on editing for a meeting that will take place in about a week. Today’s paper brought this astounding bit of intelligence to the breakfast table:

The assault was described as a terrorist attack by the Belgian prime minister…

Man! Stay away from those fanatical Belgians!

I’m supposed to “present” on the subject of editing next week. Having been given a very vague topic, I’m feeling a bit at loose ends as to what to say. The morning’s instant of hilarity at least provided grist for a post at Writers Plain & Simple, a site I’ve neglected overmuch since we made the move to BigScoots.

That can be a start for the d&p, I guess… Maybe I should offer them something like 10 things to fix when editing your own work. Then I could hold forth about the passive voice, a subject one can easily spin out to 20 minutes of yakathon. I have a particularly good bleat about the passive voice. Restrictive vs nonrestrictive…always good for five or ten minutes. The abstraction ladder usually keeps people awake — lots of good images. EEEEeeeeee How can I say how much I don’t feel like writing this thing?

Yesterday I did make good progress on the second installment of the Ouija Lover series. Heh…now our supernatural hero has not one but two women in the sack. Hot diggety!

But alas, today is a TimeSuck day, so not much writing is gonna get done. On the slate:

• Assign at least 3 ISBNs (ideally, get it up to ten, but this is a time-consuming proposition)
• Post Fire-Rider VII to Amazon
• Create the “editing” PowerPoint
• Prepare hand-out to go with the PowerPoint
• Plug Fire-Rider VII on various social media
• Begin drafting an article for LinkedIn, which REALLY needs to go up next week
• Study Smashwords’ freaking endless set of formatting instructions
• Try to apply these to the first Fire-Rider installment
• Begin figuring out how to get FR up on Smashwords
• Figure out how to recruit people to review Fire-Rider installments, which entails…
• Figure out how to post FR episodes as freebies
• Remove cookbook widgets from all websites

In the absence of much editing work to assign to my associate editor, I’m hoping to foist the Smashwords formatting on her or on one of her underlings. A cursory read of SW’s godawful how-to PDF suggests that a strong grasp of Wyrd is all that’s needed. We both have that, with a vengeance; she’s probably more skilled with it than I am. And I think we could take one of the templates I’ve purchased and simply modify the styles to provide the desired font and type size.

Last night I took the cookbook off of Amazon. The formatting in the file that went online was a mess — something that was not visible in their click-bait “reader.” I had no idea what a fiasco I was publishing until I downloaded a full-bore .mobi reader and figured out how to make it work. Once the document was “saved” to Amazon’s server, I found I could not overwrite it with corrected copy, nor could I delete it and re-upload corrected copy.

The thing has a very complex layout structure, with heads, subheads, and lists. Smashwords will not let you use Wyrd’s automatically bookmarked level A and level B subheads…you have to go through the entire damn thing and manually enter bookmarks, then go back to the manually constructed TofC and enter links to those.

Well. With 125 recipes plus a four-chapter section on the 30-pounds diet, that is going to be a ridiculous job!

The print copy looks just fine. So I may just buy a bar code & UPC from Bowker and have it printed on the PoD’s cover, and then sell only hard copy on Amazon and Smashwords. Not promising, but better than just tossing out all that investment in time and money.

Frustrating.

But it was a learning experience.

Dumb Tax and Learning Experiences

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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???

Spring is Sproinging in Phoenix

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So, you say, it’s colder than a bygod where you are? Heh heh heh heh… Well, it’s pushing 70 here. Reached 81  a couple of days ago but by and large has hovered in the 70s. If you wanna be warm, please come to Phoenix in the springtime. That would be January…

The plants are going nuts already. I came outside to put a little extra water on the citrus and the climbing roses, both of which have gone thirsty all winter. Ended up spending two or three hours puttering around the yard, yakking with the neighbor, throwing the Queen’s tennis ball around.

So, sooo much work to do — shovel off the desk, plow through the latest snowdrift of paper that’s collected there, do the bookkeeping, write the Eng. 235 syllabus, build a new Canvas site for them, ride heard on the 102s, edit copy, edit copy, edit more copy. And y’know what?

I don’t want to work.

If I’m going blind in one eye, maybe it’s my body trying to tell me to quit working and go do something else while there’s still time. Sometimes I think I should shut down the editorial business, quit taking on underpaid junior-college courses, and just loaf.

Maybe not, too. 😉 Heh! Good thing I pulled down Fidelity’s share of this year’s savings ten days ago — for the first time in recorded history, we managed to sell at the top of the market! And it’s prob’ly just as well I didn’t buy a new vehicle. The money for that (most of it) is in an old whole life policy and so neither earning nor losing money while the Dow merrily heads south, but still…my cookies would be frosted if the bottom line had dropped an extra 15 grand for the purpose of buying a car.

Ruby-Throated_Hummingbird_1The roses, whose population is much depleted because I’m sick of pruning them every year, are bursting out in new growth. The bougainvilleas survived the winter with little or no frost damage, because we haven’t had a single hard frost all year. A fierce little curved-billed thrasher has been excavating the yard in search of bugs, in the process turning over the soil and saving me a fair amount of work. Good bird! The hummingbirds, mostly Anna’s at this time of year, are in a frenzy…OMG! There’s a broad-tail! Who’d’ve thunk it?

We have three hummingbird feeders around the shack, which have had to be refilled with some frequency. Lately I’ve taken to preparing a half-gallon of sugar water and keeping it in the fridge, so I don’t have to fool around with making the stuff when the feeders run dry.

honeyBee-apisUhm… A honeybee just flew down into my mug, half-full of tea. Thought she was going to fall into the drink (heh! the literal drink!) but she came to rest on the interior, strolled up to the rim, walked all around it, and then took off for wherever honeybees go at this time of day.

So many things to do out here. I’d like to move a bunch of iris bulbs that have been living but not thriving in a large pot…want to put them in the flowerbeds around the climbing roses. KJG, who gave me the bulbs a couple of years ago, says they don’t do very well in pots. And it looks like she’s right. The bed by the pool is overrun with Mexican primrose and red salvia, both beloved flowers but plants that tend to get out of hand. They’re majorly out of hand just now! One of the citrus trees has sprouted a big yellowing section, indicative of root rot. I need to climb underneath there with a screwdriver in hand and adjust the irrigation, cut it back a bit. And I suspect the dirt Richard’s crew piled up there (when they should’ve hauled it off or spread it in the alley…) is too close to that tree’s root system, which could suffocate part of the tree. Either way, that looks suspiciously like a job. Probably I should hire Gerardo and his underling to come in here and shovel that stuff out of the yard.

Won’t he be thrilled…? 🙄

In the paying work department, I finally finished the intro to the proposed cookbook. Intro is three chapters explaining how to lose weight without really trying. Still have to organize the recipes in a sane order and list the jpegs in the order in which they should appear — that’s going to be a time-consuming job. Then decide exactly how to publish the thing.

One friend publishes cookbooks as PDFs, but I don’t think she can go through Amazon with the things. A business acquaintance has taken up converting Word files to Kindle format and is anxious to do both the cookbook and the novel that way. But he can’t handle many graphics, and the utility of having a recipe book on Kindle just escapes me! He thinks if people want to actually use the thing — like, say, in a functioning kitchen with water and pots and pans and dishes? — they’ll buy the print-on-demand version. I suppose. But I know I sure wouldn’t…if I’d paid for a Kindle version I wouldn’t pony up another ten or fifteen bucks for a print version, not on a bet.

So that question is under consideration.

The novel is about ready to go, at least to a designer. Same business friend wants a shot at converting that to Kindle. The agent who advertised that she was looking for new adult fiction writers never even bothered to send an f**k-you-very-much response to the full-length proposal I sent, which was quite a project to put together. So at this point I’m willing to self-publish the book through Amazon and try to market it, though I haven’t the faintest idea how.

Nor am I enthusiastic about doing a plain-vanilla Wyrd-to-Kindle conversion for the novel. In the first place, the thing has a DIY map that needs to be drawn by a professional graphic artist; in the second, there are several tables that I do not want converted to toilet-paper-style lists. And in the third, it really needs decent cover art, and I feel no craving to substitute a piece of cheap stock art for that.

The designers that my little business has been subcontracting to charge a mind-numbing fee for interior page design. Which IMHO is a little ridiculous, because once you’ve got a design (which isn’t hard) all you do is pour the copy into InDesign. To design cover art? Don’t even ask.

Uninclined to pour a ton of money into what’s really a hobby project — any piece of fiction that doesn’t get published through a legitimate publisher is just that: a hobby — I called an old friend of mine, the former art director at Arizona Highways. He’s semi-retired now, but he’s still doing design for an occasional client. He proposed to do the page design for less than a third of what my underling charges, and the charge for the map and the cover art was pretty reasonable, too. He’s very, very good: at the top of his form was one of the premier magazine designers in the country. So if he’s willing to do it, I’m going to hire him to do the novel, I think.

Speaking of work, none of it seems to be doing itself. So I suppose I’m going to have to get up and stagger back into the salt mine. Bye!