Coffee heat rising

Publishing

Gotta Take a Break

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Oh, wow! What a morning! I’ve been going since 4:30, with so many things demanding attention right this minute that I’m falling all over myself.  Gotta take a break and think about something else.

You know, I need to prioritize the jobs I’m trying to do so that at any given time I’m working on ONE of them, not trying to juggle them all at once. With a three-ring circus in progress, all it takes is a single disruption to set you to spinning off-balance.

Today’s disruption comes from WordPress.com, which has decided to gouge me a series of fees for the “free” website I set up for Writers Plain & Simple. These demands, in which they threaten to shut the site down unless I change the settings so they can “upgrade” at will, come exactly 11 months after I started that site, meaning that if I did sign up for paying services, a full month should remain. Meanwhile, I’ve been nagging my back-end guy to move the Blogging Empire off his server to WestHost and to take the WordPress.com site with it. All this was supposed to have happened last week, but because it didn’t happen (again…), now I have THIS hassle taking up my time.

Goddamnit.

So as I was trying to eat my miserable breakfast and sip my stone-cold coffee around various chatline operators, none of whom would come online (finally I got a message saying they were busy and if I’d like to file a support request maybe someday in my lifetime they’d get back to me), I tried to list the things that need to be attended to right now, right this minute:

1. Learn how to build an acceptable e-book cover image.
1. Learn how to use Calibre.
1. Learn how to post to Kindle and to Barnes & Noble
1. Finish the current Biker Babe bookoid, started yesterday.
1. Download cover images from stock photography sites
1. Get blogging empire moved over to WestHost
1. Figure out how to cope with that
1. Enter Tina’s edits and upload diet/recipe book to Kindle and B&N via Calibre, assuming I can figure out how to use Calibre
1. Upload print layout of diet/recipe book to PoD printer.

Notice that they’re all prioritized, all right: as No. 1.

Not a single one of these needs is going to happen today. One of my clients, a guy who seems to need a lot of hand-holding, called and urgently requested a meeting. I don’t know what he wants, but

a) I do know it’s going to absorb at least half of today; and
b) I suspect it has to do with his desire to set up his book in PoD format, which he’s been having about as much luck with as I’ve had in my project to move the blogs to WestHost.
c) If that is true, I do NOT understand why the design firm that I sent him to has not just made it so, since I happen to know they have an account with Snowfall Press and there’s no damn good reason they can’t just upload the PDFs to Snowfall and charge him for the privilege. And then some.
d) Because there is no damn good reason, that means whatever the reason is, you can be sure it’s no damn good.
e) And finally, what that means is that no damn good is about to pour onto my head and absorb the next week or two of time that I need and want to use to get my own enterprise up and running.

I am so damn tired of having to DROP EVERYTHING to do stuff for someone else, to the point that nothing I want to do to make my own life better and to position myself to earn a living without having to teach miserable freshman comp courses EVER GETS DONE.

I’m seriously thinking about dropping the editorial business altogether and telling clients they’re going to have to find someone else to read their copy. That, however, would he highly counterproductive. I’m spending the S-corp’s money like water trying to get this enterprise up (and do NOT appreciate WordPress engrossing some of it for nothing!), and will need at least some income to keep afloat until we see how the racy book enterprise works. If it works. Yesterday enough money came in to cover the cost of two hours’ worth of one-on-one lessons in using PhotoShop, which I happen to know is the best tool to create ebook covers.

It can be done in PowerPoint. But the resulting quality remains unclear to me. I’ve seen some ebook covers allegedly created in PP, and I’ve tried it and found it fairly easy. But in fact, PhotoShop is much more versatile and allows one to customize stock art so as not to have a cover that looks like all the other covers of men’s torsos armored in abs.

I’ve taken two courses in PhotoShop, back when we thought the university’s Journals office might need to do some degree of design work. Bored me stupid — listening to some guy explain how to do it for eight hours at a time is not conducive to learning. And because as it turned out all our journals had their own graphics people, we never used either PhotoShop or InDesign. The only way to learn to use software that works for me is for me to USE it. To use it for days on end, until its methods and works become second nature.

One thing is for sure, it’s dead right that if you want to get something done right, you have to do it yourself. Yea verily, if you want it done AT ALL you have to do it yourself. I’ve been waiting on the cover art for some of this stuff upwards of a year. I’ve been waiting weeks and weeks to get the blogs moved. And that’s one reason why everything I need to do is now parked at the top of the priority list: because NOTHING HAS GOTTEN DONE WHEN I ASKED (PAID!!!!!) TO GET IT DONE.

Cripes. I’ve got to get dressed to go meet the client.

Bookkeeping Blues

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ledgerIf it has numbers in it, I hate it.

So…any excuse in a storm! And over the past few months, I’ve managed to find quite a few. Soooo… About two-thirds of the giant dune of paper that’s piled up on the desk is four months’ worth of bills and bank statements for the Copyeditor’s Desk and for me.

Plowing through all that was going to take half the day, I suspected. And…yup! Exactly right. Got home from this morning’s early ayem meeting and grocery shopping on the way home. Sat down to work around 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. , after filing final grades for what I hope will be the last freshman comp course I ever have to teach. Finished wrestling with the figures shortly before 5:00 p.m., reduced to a bundle of aggravation.

I think I’ve entered all the credits and debits. I seem to have reconciled Quickbooks with the credit unions’ statements. The bills are paid and nothing is pending.  And QB says I have just about $3,000 less than the credit union thinks I have.

Well. Okay, so I’m glad it’s not the other way around.

But still. It’s frustrating.

Really. I’ve got to keep up with these little tasks.

In the process, though, I made a couple discoveries:

1. WordPress.com is quietly charging me $38 for something undescribed, even though I supposedly have a “free” website t here and even though the theme is not a premium theme.

2. Slave Labor a book that few have ever heard of and fewer still would care to read, is selling, in a very, very tiny way. Revenues on this obscurity average around eight bucks a month.

That’s for one book with a readership best described as “limited.”

So…let’s say each of 100 p0rn0graphic books earns all of ten bucks a month — probably a conservative estimate. Now we’re talking about a thousand dollah. That’s only $120/month less than I need to replace the teaching income. Hm.

That would require five people to buy each book per month, on average. Doesn’t seem out of reason.

So: onward with the stories!

 

work work work work work work work work work wor…

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Awake at 3:00 a.m. Couldn’t get back to sleep so dragged the laptop into the bedroom (yeah: bad! but the surgical incisions feel a lot better when I recline to work).

Packaged a proposal for the Boob Book, intended for an agent who looks promising and so, I hope, will consider working with me. Started merging the various documents and realized…helle’s belles! No chapter outline!

Dayum. So had to drop everything and write that. Hope it doesn’t look too careless or off-the-cuff. Finally got the whole mound together, attached it to a cover e-mail, and hit “send.”

By then it was light out. Dogs insisted on getting off the bed and racing around and being fed.

Dogs off, dogs fed, back door open for them to go out and the mosquitoes to come in. Back to the bed-desk.

Started grading papers. Only a few remain to be read, but one of my best students is running late. I’d given her some leeway…but of course worry that she may not get the thing in on time. She’ll pass the course anyway, even if she turns in nothing. But…she’s an A+ student and I would like not to send her away with a C. Or worse.

Two very well written papers arrived. That was cheering. One reasonably well written paper came in from a student who couldn’t write hir way out of a paper bag if hir life depended on it: i.e., said paper was written reasonably well by someone s/he hired. Another couple of papers: painful to read. Make that agonizing.

In-house for The Copyeditor’s Desk: a lengthy introduction for a book under contract and two reviews for our journal client. Tina had already read and formatted the reviews, so all I had to do was read behind her. The introduction…we’d read it before, but she found new stuff; I found new stuff; it got some tidying. AND damned Wyrd has decided to default to Roman numerals for the end-notes.

This is a known issue for Wyrd 2007, 2008, and 2010 for Mac…and apparently — far as I could tell from a relatively quick Web search — one that effing Microsoft has elected to ignore. And it is a gigantic PITA.

Naturally Wyrd crashed (AGAIN) just as I was wrapping up the intro…try to fix ONE character in the effing end-notes and you take the whole goddamn program down.

Little was lost; files I’ve been working on for the past several days (which were open because I don’t want to have to track them down in the intricacies of my file architecture) recovered themselves, and only one edit in the introduction disappeared.

I should be happy that only my time was wasted, hm?

Worked a little on formatting and writing “Our Story So Far” blurbs for the Fire-Rider series.

A prospective writer for Camptown Races Press inquired about our contract.

Ahem. Contract?

So as soon as I shoveled the paying work off the virtual desk, I had to come up with one of those. It actually looks pretty good, IMHO. Fortunately one chapter of my book The Essential Feature covered publishing contracts and was vetted by an intellectual property lawyer.

Now I have about 20 minutes before I’ve got to traipse the car to Costco AGAIN to get the car’s tires changed and be sheared to the tune of $400. I figure it’ll take an hour or two for them to do that, so I’ll take the laptop over there and write p0rn while sitting in their air-conditioned shop.

One never knows these days, does one? Just think of it. That little old lady sitting next to you in the tire shop or the dentist’s office, tapping away on her dainty laptop, just may be writing kink… 😀

 

Start-up Risk: What Will the New Enterprise Cost?

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QuestionmarkLast night when I got a chance to take a deep breath, I again reviewed and toted up projected operating costs for the first six months of Camptown Races Press’s existence.

Why six months? Because with any luck, the thing should run in the black by then, assuming I can put 15 to 20 bookoids online each month. Apparently critical mass is achieved at about 100 publications. That would be 17 squibs a month.

I’ve written two, each taking about a week or ten days to prepare. However, during that time I’ve also had to do with a new, painful, & temporarily debilitating surgery at the same time my summer course draws to an end — significant distractions, we might say. Also both of the new bookoids are longer and more sophisticated than necessary. If I wrote two books/month that were what I would naturally write when confronted with a keyboard and a screen and filled in with eight- to ten-page quickies (heh!), I could probably crank six or eight a month myself and hire out the rest. Assuming I can find enough people to write nine or ten in a given month.

So I calculated the minimum and the maximum operating costs I think will be necessary to run the new publishing imprint for six months, assuming it does indeed generate enough copy to produce 100 novelettes and free-standing short stories over that time.

Making another assumption — that I can learn to format these things for Kindle and Nook myself — the major costs are editorial (i.e., hiring writers), cover design, stock art, hosting fees, and back-end website management. Over six months, these will range from a minimum of $5,085 to a maximum of $7,850.

I propose to capitalize the new business with funds in the S-corporation. These figures represent about half to three-quarters of the S-corp’s liquid assets. And of course they don’t account for any unpleasant little surprises, like this handy-dandy MacBook Pro self-destructing….

True, The Copyeditor’s Desk will continue to bring in some money. We still have several editorial clients, two of whom pay a decent rate. But in a good year the editorial biz only nets about 10 grand. This has not been a good year, so far. Nor am I any more enthusiastic about taking on new editing clients than I am about ever having to teach another section of freshman comp…

But oh, my! This morning I sat down to begin drafting the proposal for the Boob Book, preparatory to sending out my pitch to publishers who might actually pay me an advance — which, should any such thing come to pass, would also help to capitalize the nascent porn business. And the thought wafted into my mind:

How incredible would it BE if all I did, every day, is write?
What if once again, after all these years, I were a writer and ONLY a writer?

{sigh}

And 🙂

But then of course the sane voice whispers, “Are you kidding? Have you even considered the opportunity cost of spending all your time writing when you could be earning actual dollars teaching dunderheads online?”

Yech.

The question is, which endeavor really represents the opportunity cost: the writing or the teaching? If scribbling steamy novelettes really can generate more than $1,120 a month, then teaching is the culprit here, because it would take away from the total potential earnings.

But if I can’t make that much, then spending my time writing instead of teaching is going to cost me $1,120, every month from now until I shuffle off this mortal coil.

It’s a big risk. Very big. I could lose my shirt.

Is it worth it?

Well. I’m not fond of teaching. In fact, I would go so far as to say I hate it. And I’m very, very tired of editing arcane academic works. I would go so far as to say I hate that, too.

I like to write. I’m good at it. And any day I’d rather spend eight to ten hours writing in pursuit of the almighty dollar than teaching or editing for part-time hire.

Yeah. Say I’m crazy, but I think it is worth it.

I hope.

Week, Interrupted (Endlessly…)

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BEFORE I FORGET: Go here and check out what our Web guru, Jesse, is up to. It’s not like he doesn’t have enough to do, with a full-time job and a growing family. Let’s try to help this bunch meet their goal. 🙂

Jesse is about to get even more busy trying to wrangle Funny and the rest of my blogging empire onto a new server, now that gainful employment has made his freelance business redundant. We’ve selected WestHost, because for less than he’s been charging it provides significant support and all the blandishments he’s been providing. At any rate, if the site goes down briefly (again 🙄 ), watch this space. It should stabilize, and I hope that all the email & RSS subscriptions will come over with it.

It’s already Friday and I haven’t finished the second risque novel. It’s within a few words of the end, but it ain’t there yet. That’s because every time I turn around, here’s something else I have to do.

Today I have to take the car down to Chuck’s, there to get the side-view mirrors replaced. When my son drove it home from the ER parking lot, alas, he noticed that the Gorilla Tape doesn’t really keep the mirrors very stable at freeway speeds. He became unnerved and insisted that they have to be replaced.

{sigh} The young will be served. I suppose.

But there’s another time suck.

Yesterday I ran out of propane, after I left the burners on to incinerate the grease. Another time suck: traipse to U-Haul to refill a tank.

Also yesterday I had to deposit a check from Social Security and one from Medicare. Not wanting to traipse way to hell and gone up to the credit union, halfway to Wickenburg, I tried to use the new printer to scan the things. Under the best of conditions, scanning and depositing a check electronically can take almost as long as driving all the way to the CU and back. Yesterday’s were NOT the best of conditions.

Then I had to call the Mayo and fork over the $80 Medicare had dribbled out to me (here we go again: another $11,000 dribbed and drabbed out in payments of $80 to $150, each of which I have to fiddle with interminably). To get someone on the line to accept a credit-card charge, I had to sit there and listen to their ENDLESSLY INFURIATING machine tell me over and over “thank you for waiting blah blah blah blah blah”… That sucked another ten minutes on top of the time suck involved in scanning and depositing the damn checks.

The handyman is supposed to come over to fix the leaking kitchen faucet. As of this morning, of course, it’s stopped leaking. So I have to deal with that somehow, one way or another.

Student papers are coming in, God help us.

We rigged a trick to get some of them to turn in papers early, so we wouldn’t be SO hopelessly swamped next week when we have to read 20+ pieces of long-form drivel on an impossible deadline while we’re both struggling to survive. They get 20 points of extra credit if they turn the final paper in early. So a couple of eager beavers have in fact done that.

This is good. But it means I have to drop what I’m doing to turn those around.

Met at length with my associate editor/bidness partner and her sister to discuss the porn publishing scheme. It really is a frighteningly promising scheme. The number of people — mostly women — who read this stuff defies belief. Porn is a multi-billion-dollar industry, most of it conducted by small-timers working as much under the radar as they can get. We believe it’s a huge, HUGE pie and we should be able to cut ourselves a slice of it.

But it will require focus, which is not something I seem to be doing well with just now.

Shifting the websites over to WestHost is a huge endeavor. There’s NO way I can do that myself, and Jesse has his own hands full. So this is going to be another time-sucking challenge.

The way this thing has grown — by topsy — has left me with a passel of individual sites, some of which I would like to combine as subdomains to just a few main sites, thereby relieving me from having to keep paying GoDaddy stupid amounts of money for domain-name renewals. We have…

• The Copyeditor’s Desk, a freestanding affair

• Funny about Money, also freestanding

• Plain & Simple Press, under which I’d like to see the following subdomains

• Writers Plain & Simple, the blog for P&S Press

• Fire-Rider, which will market 19 installments of the Fire-Rider series, if and when the artist ever gets the covers done and I ever learn how to get them onto Amazon all by my little self

• 30 Pounds in 30 Days, to market the diet/cookbook, another MS that’s been ready to go for a year and gone effing nowhere because of my illnesses and others’ foot-dragging

• Adjunctorium, the blog for Slave Labor, which probably will go away in the near future but needs to exist awhile longer

• Camptown Races Press, site for the new imprint through which we plan to run our pornographic works of art

• Camptown Ladies Talk, blog for the new racey publishing imprint

If Camptown Races Press flies — and I mean really flies, as in earns enough to replace the teaching income and then some — I’d like the editing business to go away. Not because I don’t enjoy reading some of my clients’ work. A few are truly interesting and worthwhile. But because I’d like to be able to devote all my time and energy to getting the sexy book business up and to keeping it running over the long haul. That is going to be a full-time job.

At any rate, umpty-umpteen gerjillion years of writing blogs have, at least, suggested a simpler way to set up the new imprint’s marketing blog. Do not do not DO NOT create blogs or static websites for new series. At the most, do subdomains for the most active and largest of them. Otherwise, use the sidebars to mount thumbnails of new stuff that comes out as it comes out, and set up pages for the series holding galleries of thumbnails for the backlist. Et voilà. A much simpler structure, much cheaper, and far easier to manipulate.

Two or three months’ worth of credit union statements and bills are sitting on the desk waiting for me to enter into Quickbooks and file away. Another huge time-killer.

It’s almost seven. I must fly to get the car to Chuck’s by eight. And so away, to watch another day be sucked into a black hole.

 

Getting Back on Track

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Okaayyy…. So, ten days, two weeks later, she’s finally getting back on track toward pursuing the new set of goals. Canning the job, I think, is gonna make a huge difference. Yesterday I made some progress on the current To-Do list; realized some of those couldn’t be done before other stages are done, and so tasks will have to be re-prioritized. Not a problem.

Today I plan to start moving sites off my friend Jesse’s server over to WordPress.com. This makes me nervous because I just HATE that techie stuff and always, invariably, inevitably screw it up. But I’ll start with Adjunctorium, which is really just a sandbox project at base — the world won’t end if that transfer fails.

Then I’ll move The Copyeditor’s Desk over — nobody ever reads it anyway…it must have a page rank in the negative numbers.

And finally Funny about Money will have to go over. And therein lies my concern: Funny is VAST. This will be its 2,490th post, and it has 12,083 comments, with an inexhaustible trove of images and God only knows what kind of behind-the-scenes infrastructure to support all that.

I’ve never tried to make a transfer like this by myself — I’ve always hired someone who knows what s/he’s doing. And if anyone knows such a person, I’d appreciate it if you’d pass the name along ASAP!!

At any rate, once this transfer gets under way, Funny may disappear temporarily while the domain name gets repointed to WordPress. I’m told the subscriptions will go over, but I do not know that to be the case and have little faith that it will be so.

So, if your RSS or e-mail subscription to Funny quits working but you can still see the site, re-subscribe.

Yesterday, I bought a hundred ISBNs. These are not actually necessary for e-book publishing, unless you want to appear as the publisher of record. And believe me: I do not want Amazon to engross that function — which is what happens when you let Amazon assign one of its “free” inventory numbers in place of an ISBN. The Copyeditor’s Desk is NOT going to cede its title as publisher (under the Plain & Simple Press and the Camptown Races Press imprints), period.

So, if the naughty books go up on both Amazon and B&N (we’re told B&N’s standards of naughtiness are much looser and stuff actually sells better there than at Amazon), then I have enough ISBNs for fifty books.

That will not be enough to let us know whether the p0rno scheme is going to work: for that to happen, we’ll need at least 100 publications. HowEVER… By the time I’ve used up 50, another $1,000 payment will come in from our client journal, and that’s enough to buy 200 more ISBNs.

Yesterday I set aside four hours to work on the present mischievous bookoid. Actually ended up spending about five on it. Am now about half or two-thirds of the way through it.

What a hoot! How do I come up with this stuff?? Here we are, still at a G rating (but not for long… 😉 ):

Coworkers and friends Stephanie and Bonnie meet at a Starbuck’s to spend part of a day off the job just hanging out. Stephanie, in the course of shoveling her ex-husband’s possessions out of what is now exclusively her home, has come across an antique Ouija board, handed down to her from her great-aunt Mabel. Delighted by the interesting old artifact, she brings it along to show to Stephanie. After some tergiversations (one of which is very funny, IMHO), they decide to try it out. They make contact with an entity who identifies him/herself as Lou Lee and claims to be 4500 years old:

The two paused to sip their lattes.

“Isn’t this a kick?” said Stephanie.

“It’s pretty silly,” Bonnie replied. “But yeah, it is kind of fun.”

Before long they set their fingers back on the planchette. After a bit, it began to glide across the board again. Back to the alphabet:

M…E…E…T

M…E

“Meet you?” Steph asked.

M…E…E…T

“Where?”

I… W…A…N…T

K…N…O…W

Y…O…U

“What on earth is that?” Stephanie wondered aloud. “Are you doing that?”

“No,” said Bonnie. “I thought you were.”

“Well…don’t.”

“I’m not.”

W…E…

A…L…L… T…H…E

P…L…E…A…S…U…R…E…S

P…R…O…V…E

“It’s the ghost of Christopher Marlowe.”

“I think he lived sooner than 4500 years ago.”

L…I…G…H…T

A… C…A…N…D…L…E… I…N

Y…O…U…R

B…E…D…R…O…O…M

“Uhm, that sounds kind of forward,” Bonnie remarked. Stephanie said nothing. The planchette curled across the board.

O…P…E…N… T…H…E

W…I…N…D…O…W… P…U…T

R…E…D… R…O…S…E

O…N… T…H…E

S…I…L…L

“Steph. Stephanie…” A light slick of perspiration had spread across Stephanie’s cheeks. She was so focused on the board she seemed not to hear her friend’s voice.

“Steph!” Bonnie lifted her hand from the planchette. It continued to move under Stephanie’s fingers.

I… W…I…L…L. C…O…M…E

T…O… Y…O…U

I… W…A…N…T

T…O… K…N…O…W

Y…O…U

“Stephanie. Please stop it.”

Y…O…U… W…I…L…L

L…O…V…E… M…E

Bonnie grabbed the moving planchette and yanked it out from under Stephanie’s fingers. “This is creeping me out,” she said. “It’s time to stop.”

Her face flushed, Steph looked up at Bonnie.

“Steph, are you all right?

She ran her hand through her damp hair to brush it back off her face. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“That was batshit crazy. Let’s put this thing away.” Bonnie stood up, placed the Ouija board back in its box, put the planchette in after it, upside down, and covered it firmly with the lid.

Neither woman felt like finishing her coffee, which was half consumed and going cold anyway. They sat at the table and decompressed for a few minutes, and then agreed it was time to go on their various separate errands.

“But Stephanie,” Bonnie said as a parting shot, “please: put that game back in the attic, will you?”

“Well… I thought it would look cool on the coffee table.”

“Seriously. Put it away. Don’t mess with it again. I’m asking you.”

Stephanie studied Bonnie for a moment and realized she really was alarmed. “All right,” she said. “I’ll put it away.”

“Promise me you won’t try to mess with it when you’re alone in the house, OK?”

“Stephanie! It’s just a board game. You’re starting to sound like that wacky old bag lady.”

“She wasn’t a bag lady. And I don’t know what was going on with all that, but if you weren’t doing it and I wasn’t doing it, I don’t think it was anything good. And I don’t think you should have anything more to do with it. Especially not when you’re all by yourself.”

Steph sighed imperceptibly. “OK,” she agreed. “I promise. I won’t take it out of the box again.”

Rose Redoute Yeah. Right, Stephanie…sure.

What follows, of course, will not be suitable for nice girls and boys. But if you like to live dangerously, I’ll let you know the title, whenever it is a title. 😆

By the way, if you think you can write this stuff and would like to do so on a contract basis, I’m hiring.