Coffee heat rising

Publishing

Coulda Shoulda Woulda

by
Sittin’ by the dock of the bay….
Actually:
Loafing on the front patio,
watching the hours flowing away…
***
Just posted this squib at my favorite time-wastin’ site, Quora.
Is a PhD really worth pursuing? How many PhD students can really get ‘productive’ or real-time use output from their PhD research?
Victoria Hay, Ph.D.
Retired academic; owner of The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.

Profile photo for Victoria HayThe Ph.D. may (or may not) be worth pursuing…if you have an independent source of income.

You need a working spouse or an inheritance to keep a roof over your head and food on your table while you’re “pursuing” the Ph.D. Otherwise, you’re certainly not going to be “productive” or generate “output” from your research, because you’ll be too busy working two full-time jobs: one to support yourself and one to generate credit toward the doctorate.

Would I do it again?

Huh…let’s think about that…

  • I got a great job at Arizona Highways Magazine after I’d finished the degree. But that was only because the boss was impressed with academics. For him, it was a grand ego trip to have a someone with a doctorate on his staff. The job I landed was in journalism; it had nothing to do with academia.

Most employers are not that easily flamboozled.

  • I got a nice ego trip of my own when my dissertation was picked up by a prestigious publishing house. Does it matter that I’ve never seen a penny from sales on that book? Meh! Probably not: again, because the flamboozled boss thought that publisher was so awesome that he wanted to hire me.
  • Eventually, I got three books published through respectable presses.

All very nice…except I’ve never seen a penny in royalties from two of those books.

  • Later in life, I got an academic job.

Whoop…de…doop.

One of my academic colleagues and I did a little pragmatic research and discovered we would be earning more cleaning house for a living than the university was paying us at the associate professor level. In fact, we seriously considered going in together to start a house-cleaning business.

  • Would I do it again?

Hmmmm…. Probably not.

If I had gone whole hog into magazine publishing starting the minute I finished the bachelor’s degree, I would have had more fun in life; I would have had a lot more people reading my published words; I would have been paid a helluva lot more than I earned in academia; and I would never have been tempted to think about starting an enterprise as a cleaning lady.

Amazon Publishing? Think Again!

by

Check this out:

This afternoon, what should land in the incoming email but this stalwart message from Amazon:

On Jul 10, 2023, at 4:44 PM, KDP Customer Support <support+5003n00002ihn8oAAA@kdp-support.amazon.com> wrote:
Hello,

We received a failure notification when attempting to pay your KDP royalties. To receive your payment, you’ll need to update your bank information in the following marketplaces:
Amazon.com,Amazon.com.au

To ensure we have the correct bank information on file, we’ve placed your royalties on hold while you update your information.

If you’ve corrected your bank information within the last three business days, you can disregard this email. We’ll attempt to pay your royalties using your updated bank information in the next payment cycle. You can check the KDP payment schedule here: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200641050#schedule

For security purposes, you cannot edit your current account’s bank information. Follow these steps to delete the existing bank account and add a new one:

1. Sign in to http://kdp.amazon.com.
2. Click “Your Account” in the top-right corner of the page.
3. Choose the option on how you want to receive the one-time password (OTP).
4. Follow the instructions to complete the Two-Step Verification using your phone or an authenticator app.
5. After you receive the OTP, enter it and click “OK.”
6. Click “Getting Paid.”
7. If you have a bank account entered, delete it by clicking “Delete” under the account’s name.
8. Click “Add another bank account.”
9. Under “Tell us about your bank,” follow the prompts to add a new bank account.
10. You may see a message asking for a bank in a different location (Amazon does not support electronic payments everywhere).
11. Click “Add.” You’ll see a green checkmark showing your information has been updated.
12. Click “Save.”

To learn more about adding a bank account, check our Help:
https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200641050#add_bank

To check your payment status on the KDP report, visit https://kdp.amazon.com/reports-new

Regards,
The Kindle Direct Publishing team
© 1996-2023, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Amazon and Kindle are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. 410 Terry Avenue North Seattle, Washington 98109 US

Please note: This is a transactional message regarding your account. Your subscription preferences will continue to be honored for all future commercial e-mails from Kindle Direct Publishing.

 

Uh-HUH! Isn’t that innaresting?

Well, folks…my little bookoids have been posted on Amazon for YEARS. All told, they’ve generated…oh, I dunno, maybe $50 at the outside. Not because Amazon’s operatives can’t access my account: this vast wealth has steadfastly been direct-deposited.

As a matter of fact, I wrote off the “publishing” (hah!!) enterprise many months ago. “Years” may be the operative term. I’ve never received more than a few bucks from Amazon — as in “double-digit figures” — and not more than a couple of times. So frankly, I’ve pretty much dismissed the whole endeavor. The only reason the books  still reside on this website is that I’ve been too lazy to take them down. And, Dear Reader, you can access most of them here for free, simply by clicking on the images in the right-hand margin.

It’s getting late in the day now, and I’m tired from the heat and the other tasks I’ve had to do today. But tomorrow, I’ll remove book ads from the site as necessary, or rework them so that they refer wannabe buyers to me, not to Amazon. The truth of the matter is, if you have something to say that’s worth putting in print, you’re far, FAR better off to go through a real publishing house than to fart around with self-publishing — Amazon or otherwise. If a publisher doesn’t want to pick your idea up, it’s probably not worth the cost of typesetting, editing, publicizing, printing, and shipping.

Meanwhile…to KDP, I have this to say:

It would appear that KDP is VERY shady:  https://writersweekly.com/angela-desk/and-even-more-complaints-about-amazon-kdp-kindle-direct-publishin

I am not going to spend my time and work myself up into a state of computer-induced frustration because suddenly Amazon (or whoever you really are) decides to rip off the vast wealth my piddling little books generate.

None of my banking information has changed. If you can’t send me whatever vast fortune my work is producing, then kindly take it off your platform. If you don’t want to hear from my lawyers, please have the decency not to use this device to cheat me out of whatever royalties the things have brought in. And please note: your company would be well advised to let me know when you comply with this request.

Millicent V. Hay (Victoria Hay)
Hay Writing & Editing, Inc.
Phoenix, Arizona

Good things…Dumb things

by

In the GOOD THINGS department… Have you ever noticed how little disasters seem to lead to large benefits? Why is that, d’you suppose?

Case in point today: the busted tooth disaster. How did I NOT want to have my muzzle cut open to remove that broken tooth? And how did I TOTALLY not want to pay out my entire goddamn year’s tax refund to an endodontist for the privilege? Let me count the ways…oh, wait! I can’t count that high.

But…oh, yes, but…

With that cracked fang out of there, the mouth doesn’t hurt annnnyyy more.

That is correct: no pain. Zero-point-zero-zero twinges, stabs, or aches.For the first time in a couple years, I can chew on that side of the maw…and did you know your taste buds are different, one side of the tongue from the other? Yeah: food tastes different (read BETTER) when you can munch it on the other side of your mouth.

I know: weird.

Yet another benefit of the Battle of the Busted Tooth: whilst convalescing, I learned about Pacific boxed soups. Not that I hadn’t tried a few of them. But canned (and by extension, packaged) soups are not my cuppa. My experience with canned soups and broths has been that they’re oversalted and they taste of industrial chemicals.

But I had to eat something. One of Funny’s readers had recommended the Pacific brand, so I picked a variety of them at Sprouts.

Hot dang!

These things taste like REAL SOUP. I mean, they taste like that soup would taste if I’d made it myself, upon mine own stove.

The potato soup? Outta the way, Julia Child!

The tomato soup… What? It seems to have…well…tomatoes in it. The sweet potato ginger Thai soup? To DIE for.

What? Today, after having had a lovely and interminable morning farting with the computer, I finally rose from the chair into which I had been frozen along about 11 a.m., starved and craving a ration of strong drink. Remaining in the cupboard: a little box of Pacific brand lentil soup.

Dump into pan. Add a little chard. Heat. Zing up with a squeeze of lemon. Use it as an excuse to pour a glass of wine. And…

Dayum! How do they do that? Once again, it actually tasted like real lentil soup. If I made a giant pot of lentil soup, it would taste just like that.

In other precincts, check out this little post at Quora: it’s garnered 242 “likes” since I put it up just a few hours ago. Probably because it’s kind of funny. Stupidly hilarious, we might say, if we were cynical enough…

In the Dumb Things department: might as well ’fess up: I just do not have it anymore when it comes to techno-talent.

Yea verily. Back in the Dark Ages, I was ahead of the wave. Always on top of the computer revolution. And all that bullshit. But today: I do not care soooooo much that I can’t remember stuff I learned and knew and used for years.

Last night I set up the first raft of FREE READS Fire-Rider stories to post automatically starting about 7:00 this morning. There. All done. Nice, eh?

Heh.

Well. It would be if I were still even faintly competent with computers.

What did I fail to take into consideration? Wellllll….  With a blog, the most recent post is what appears first to the reader. Soooo… If you posted chapter 1 and then chapter 2 and then chapter 3 and then chapter 4, your reader sees your posts effing BACKWARDS: she sees chapter 4 FIRST.

Arrrghhhhh….. Yea verily, I failed to remember this basic factoid — i.e., the computer universe is unstuck from reality every which way from Sunday, which in computer land is the last day of the week, not the first day. So when I got back from this morning’s wee-hours doggy-walk, I found that the first few posts had appeared…bass-ackward.

So I had to sit down and repost every goddamn entry, with the first entry to go online last, so that it appeared at the top of the queue…

THEN…then I discovered that for the life of me I can. not. remember. how to build a widget.

Worse yet, I do not want to know.

Absolutely positively not. I do. fucking. NOT. want. to track that BS down and relearn it!

See why I don’t own a smartphone? Because I do not want a damn telephone that’s smarter than me, that’s why.

 

WooHOO! Proposal: GONE!

by

Finally DONE! The proposal for the Overprescription book is written, finished, and winging its way to Canada! GONE!

What a project. Every time I looked at the copy, more things to change would pop up. I rewrote an entire chapter. Revised the chapter organization twice (or was it three times?). The proposal finally ended up with eight sections…

  1. The pitch itself (6 pages, single-spaced; 2100 words)
  2. Table of contents
  3. Detailed chapter outline (18 chapters & introduction)
  4. Introduction (1400 words, exclusive of references)
  5. Chapter 1 (3520 words)
  6. Chapter 2 (2120 words)
  7. Chapter 3 (2375 words)
  8. Curriculum vitae, much shortened and bowdlerized to hide dates (3½ single-spaced pages)

{chortle!} One thing you have to say: when I pull out all the stops, I’m damned impressive! Polish that ego! 😀

It’s highly unlikely that the first publisher who sees this thing will buy it. (Although it’s happened before: twice, come to think of it…) But I wanted to give Toronto first shot at it, because the Canadians seem to be a great deal more alert to the problem — and the Canadian government is far more assertive about combatting it. The U.S. government…well, one hesitates to use the term “corrupt”…but when agencies are in the pocket of mega-corporations, it’s hard to think of a more accurate term. Let’s leave it at “laissez-faire.” Yeah.

Presuming the first foray will be repelled, this week I need to run over to a college or university library and raid Literary Marketplace — whether in database or electronic format. Compile about a dozen potential publishers — these days names and email addresses of acquisitions editors can usually be found at publishers’ websites….but first you have to identify the likely markets. I suspect LMP is still the go-to reference for that purpose.

So with 12 or 18 likely publishers — companies that expresssly state they publish the kind of thing you’re writing — you start sending out proposals, six at a time.

Editors hate that, of course: they don’t want to compete for your book, and they certainly (and reasonably) wish not to spend a lot of time and effort evaluating a manuscript, only to be told you’re going somewhere else. However, the “do we want it” process can take so long that if you have to go to several publishers, you may not see a printed book in your lifetime.

So what I’ve done in the past — and probably will do this time, too — is always to have a half-dozen proposals in circulation. When one comes back, rejected you simply turn it around and send it to the next publisher on the list. I’ve never had to send a proposal out to that many houses…but one does have to be prepared for rejection, and to keep the process moving steadily.

It will be interesting to see what transpires this time.

Time flies…damn fast!

by
Woo HOO! There’s a book hiding in this pile of pills!

Tempus fidgets, as my mother used to say. She and about a million others in the Greatest Generation, I’m sure. True that, though: time passes so fast you don’t even notice it going by.

Yesterday, for example, I didn’t notice it was Wednesday. Thought it was Tuesday. Along about sundown it happened to occur to me that a whole day had disappeared. 😀 Tossed a blurb from Asked up online, but never did much else, partly because we had another sharp storm in the evening that threatened to blow down trees and power poles.

Just wrote that little piece on Quora — “Did You Ever Walk Out on a Doctor (because he was disrespectful…).” And right off the bat, it attracted something over 200 “likes” — a kind of a record. Since it went over so well there, I decided to add it to the Asked collection.

Another essay — on getting out of an abusive relationship — is closing in on 1,000 likes. Can you imagine?

In the middle of this, up pops a message from a client: did I receive the paper he’d sent me to edit?

Uhmmmm…well, nooooooo….

Turns out the damn MacMail decided out of the blue to route messages from this guy into “Junk Mail.” This was several days ago. He sent me a new copy before I could find the original among the 105 unread messages in “Junk,” the 174 derailed to “Trash,” and the 415 (!!!!) in  the “Facebook” folder.

Holy shit! There is simply NO way anyone could possibly keep up with that tsunami.

Tuesday was one long struggle through the heat and humidity to stay focused on writing the proposal for the Drugging of America book. On reflection, I realized Chapter 1 covered way too much ground, and that I needed to break it into three chapters. That took most of the day.

So I now have three new chapters — for a total of 17, plus the introduction, plus the references section, plus a resources section. And now I have to revise the chapter outline. Whee!

But by the end of today, most of the proposal was drafted. Still have to write a self-aggrandizing bio, but otherwise the most difficult parts of that thing are done. Tomorrow I’ll finish the body of the proposal, revise the chapter outline, and get the thing ready to send off. I hope.

My plan is to send one proposal to one university press — the one I think most likely to publish this book. Then when (which is usually the case: when not if) they reject, I’ll send out a half-dozen at a time until someone bites.

And I think they will. This really is a great idea for a book, one whose time has arrived. And there isn’t much competition. Other than Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest eloquent rant, that is.

But the advantage I think mine has is that it isn’t an eloquent piece of creative nonfiction cum seat-of-the-pants reporting. This is a book that could be — easily — used as a reading in a number of college courses. And not just in pharmacy or nursing. The proposal will suggest courses — real courses that I’ve tracked down at universities — in public policy, nursing, and pharmacy, plus a combined program that leads to an MD and a master’s in journalism.

Texts that sell in college courses, as you can imagine, are the sine qua non of academic publishing. Sell a book to one professor, and you sell upwards of a dozen copies a semester. If it’s a decent undergraduate course — as you can bet will be the case in colleges of nursing — you’ll unload upwards of 30 copies per section. A required lower-division course? Hundreds of copies. Every semester. At a stiff price.

I was still getting substantial royalties from The Essential Feature 10 years after the thing went to press…because every professor who ordered it for a course spawned 30 or 60 sales. Per semester.

So…that’s how I hope to sell this book.

However it flies, the thing is not going on the trash-heap that is Amazon.

Selling your squibs on Amazon is fine as a hobby. That’s essentially what my little scribbles are — the FireRider series and the diet/cookbook thing and the various other stuff. Taken together, they generate about $5 a month. When the weather’s  good. But pretend as much as you would like that you’re “in business” to sell the stuff: it’s still self-published. You can’t get a newspaper or magazine to review it for love nor money, nor do you have much chance of persuading a bookstore or a library to pick it up. And it certainly is not going to end up on some professor’s syllabus!

Another day has slipped by. I’m exhausted! Going to bed, before it starts to rain again…

How to Cause Angels to Sing

by

So here’s what: I need to know if the PDFs at this site — The Complete Writer — actually work from a website visitor’s perspective.

Does the page explain adequately what is going on and how to access the three PDFs posted so far?

Do they download without a problem?

Once they open, do they seem intelligible?

What have I forgotten, screwed up, confused, or otherwise rendered colorful and mysterious?

Got any suggestions? observations? complaints? whatever?

Lemme know, through comments either here or at the P&S blog post on the events of the day. And plug the darned thing on all your social media sites. ♥