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Publishing

How Failure Can Turn to Success

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Closeup view of hardcover booksThey say failure can help turn your losing experience into a successful endeavor. That’s becoming evident from the publishing enterprise, which so far has been a total flop. On the surface, what I learned from that is not to try to sell anything unless you have some very strong marketing skills and are willing to spend uncountable hours using them. However, something far more positive is coming out of it.

For the past two or three months, I’ve had more work than I can handle. People are lined up at the door trying to get me to edit their golden words or advise on publishing them. And one of my clients has hired me to help him self-publish a memoir that he intends not for the public but for family and friends.

Yesterday I mocked up three draft covers for his book. One of them turned out looking pretty darned nice. Another would be even better if the quality of the image were better — it has a couple of flaws, one of which probably resulted from dirt on the lens and the other of which appears to be a data issue. We’re using his images, taken with a variety of cameras over 40 years. I dare not post them here, since they are his images and since he has no intention of making this book available to the general public. Too bad…it’s an entertaining narrative.

As I reflected at Plain & Simple press, there are any number of good reasons to use print-on-demand or e-book technology other than trying to trying to publish a best-seller. In fact, trying to publish the Great American Novel is the worst of all possible reasons.

Well. No. Probably trying to get rich selling smut on Amazon and B&N is worse. 😀

One of several things I learned a-sailing the Amazon (and falling off the edge of the earth) is how to create a nice-looking paperback through print-on-demand technology. As we scribble, I now have the skills and tools take a book all the way from manuscript to print. And that process can be modestly lucrative.

Three projects like the one I’m working on now would recover all the losses I’ve enjoyed in the book publishing enterprise.

I’ve also learned of a Mac app that allows you to create really attractive .mobi, ePub, and iBook e-books fairly simply. I may try this on the client’s MS just to see what happens. If it can handle images (not an easy trick), then I would be able to offer e-book formatting of fairly complex documents, too. This would further enlarge the opportunities to make a profit helping other people publish their projects.

I would never advise a client to spend a lot of money self-publishing what he or she imagines is the Great American Novel. But if the person has a good reason to create a book-length document for a business, for a nonprofit organization, for patients or customers, or for family and friends, self-publishing can be an economical and relatively easy way to fulfill certain specific needs. And if you’re just a hobbyist — and you know you’re a hobbyist — writing a book because you get a kick out of writing and would like to see your results in print is surely no more expensive than skiing or four-wheeling. As long as you understand what you’re doing and don’t imagine you’re going to get rich (or, probably, make a profit), I’ll even help you publish your novel.

Does this experience generalize?

Evidently so; otherwise we wouldn’t have those chestnuts to the effect that you have to fail before you can succeed.

In learning how to lose money, you learn how not to lose money. With any luck at all, you may learn how to make money. This is an underlying principle of all the “personal finance advice that can fit on a notecard“: if you get into debt, you can learn not to get into debt; if a bank screws you, you can learn to use a credit union; if you’re not earning enough, you can learn ways to earn more.

Some errors, of course, are not so easily rectified: fail to save enough for retirement and you won’t have a second chance. Text your way up the wrong way of a freeway off-ramp and your next success will be a Darwin Award.

But most of the time you do have a chance to learn something — and profit from it.

What “failure” have you turned into a success, dear reader?

Computer Kudzu

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It’s taken two days to prune the computer kudzu out of this little machine. Ever notice that? Files grow like horror-movie vines, shedding endlessly reproducing directories and subdirectories. After awhile you can’t find anything, because whatever it is that you need (right this minute, dammit!) is hidden under impenetrable mounds of digital debris.

Hour after hour of hacking and shoveling left just 12 main directories.

12FilesWho’d have thunk it? Two years of nonstop work occupying seven days a week boil down to 12 little computer folders.

…And 52 subdirectories with 118 sub-subdirectories… Ugh.

That doesn’t count the ones I threw out, the ones in the “Archive” folder, the ones in “Dropbox,” the junk that’s settled on the Desktop, and all the mystery files in “Microsoft User Data,” for which I disclaim responsibility. 😀

But the depressing part surfaced in a folder containing a bunch of projects I’d started and imagined working on after quitting the damn teaching job. An elaborate sequel to Fire-Rider involving a tribe of cryptids…a crime novel I drafted in graduate school, unearthed a couple years ago, dreamed up a new plot line for, and had begun revising…a corgi book…several books on nonfiction writing technique…a personal finance book…a science fiction story with an alarmingly clunky opener (gotta write that thing over!)…a book to be titled, creatively enough, I Hate Cats…Notes for the proposed (and long-defunct) boob book, complete with a full-blown proposal including two chapters, two appendices, and an introduction….

Ohhh well.

Really. If I’m going to do this publishing gig for nothing — actually, right now I’m doing it for considerably less than nothing, since the $34 I earned last month hardly comes under the heading of “profit” — then I might as well amuse myself by writing unpublishable books and stories, instead of working my buns off formatting, publishing, and marketing the unsalable. LOL!

In fact, if I pulled down revenue from The Copyeditor’s Desk, an ordinary year’s occasional income would come to just about what adjunct teaching pays for a course load equivalent to a full-time load with honest pay and benefits at the Great Desert University. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. Thirty-four bucks a month makes adjunct teaching look good. Matter of fact, it makes reading Chinese dissertations and math treatises look good.

Editorial work doesn’t exactly overtax one’s skills or time. It would leave plenty of opportunity to write whatever drivel I feel like posting.

Or even to have a life. Can you imagine?

Goodreads: The Last Social-Media Straw

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Dear GOD how I hate these accursed faceless social media platforms, with their horrid “help” pages that run you around and around and around circles and don’t answer your question and seem to have been designed solely to frustrate users.

It’s been a while since I visited Goodreads. I need to get back into my author page, update my booklist, and start a blog. But GR has decided I’m “not a member,” even though it seems to recognize  me, sort of.

It wanted a password. I entered the pw I have in my records. It rejected that password. I clicked “forgot password.” It emailed a link to reset the password. I jumped through that hoop. When I tried to get in, it ran me RIGHT BACK TO THE SAME HOOP JUMP!

It asks me to enter a password, flicks me the electronic finger, and then tells me to enter my email and if it approves it will send me a link. I jump through that hoop again…with the same result.

GoodreadsAnnoyance

Your choice is to “confirm” with a password or, astonishingly, to “confirm with Facebook.”

FACEBOOK? Why on earth would I want Facebook to have my Goodreads credentials or to “confirm” that I’m me or even to know that I’m on Goodreads?

It apparently is a choice (of sorts): either enter a password or “confirm” (whatever that means) with Facebook.

Over the past months, I’ve put off going back to Goodreads, even though it’s supposedly a key marketing tool, because I got so mad the first time I signed in there that my password is a near-obscenity. Because three of my books — published through real publishers, not through Amazon — came out under variants of my full name, they won’t let me post the Racy Books at my Goodreads site, because they’re published under the “Roberta Stuart” pseudonym. None of my bylines are pseudonyms.

My parents gave me a clunky, old-fashioned, ugly first name that made me the target of bullying throughout grade school. When we came back to the states, I started using a nickname based on my middle name. As a journalist, this was my standard byline, and The Essential Feature, a journalism textbook, naturally was published under that byline. But I had used my full formal name for my first book: a historical biography that grew out of my Ph.D. dissertation.

The first business partner I had, back in the day, was a marketing & PR guy of some skill. He felt I should go by the full, more formal-sounding middle name, which is also stuffy and stilted but at least most people can pronounce and spell it. So my third book had that name, and I still use it for business.

Amazon and its purchased underling Goodreads have decreed that a legal name consisting of three fungible parts — a first name, a middle name, and a last name — is actually three pseudonyms! No argument to the contrary is brooked.

That means, of course, that I can’t use Goodreads to market the steady stream of books we planned to emit — and have emitted — through Camptown Races Press! Goodreads had already glommed what it announced were “pseudonyms” from the books Columbia, Folger, and William Morrow had posted on Amazon years ago and so would not allow me to add a real pseudonym.

When I protested this, a CSR came back with an elaborate workaround. It was so complicated and promised to be such a vast time-suck that I was put off and let the whole project drop. Then I ended up in the operating room.

The medical nightmare was such a distraction that it was all I could do to try to meet our original goal of publishing 80 to 100 books within the year. Anything that was aversive — or that had an aversive element — got tabled. And the most solidly tabled of those was Goodreads, primarily because the first experience with it started off in full aversive mode.

Much as I dislike toilet-paper-style social media platforms, I did take up Twitter to a lesser extent Facebook. Facebook is inhabited by my coreligionists, whom I would rather not proselytize with Racy Books. So Twitter was pretty much it.

And the result was not very successful, probably because I don’t understand the point of social media and so don’t understand how to address them.

Magazines, books: I know why people read them, and I know how to reach magazine and book readers. Blogs are to a  large degree similar: you can see a reason that a person might want to read a given blog. A blog is magazine-like in that it has an editorial voice, it usually has a specific topic or slant, and it has a relatively consistent publication schedule.

But an endless, gestalt flow of nonstop babble about…what? Trivia? Cat pictures? Kid photos? The latest house you sold? That plate of food you bought at Alice’s Restaurant? Why? What is the appeal?????

Social media of the Facebook/Twaddle/Google+/Goodreads variety seem to me more like small talk than like journalism. And I’m really not good at small talk.  Because it bores me, I lack the patience to engage it for very long or to come back for repeat engagements. It’s part of the Aspergery character of my personality: I don’t connect with people in that way.

And…I don’t want to be “connected.” Not that I don’t like people. Most of them, I do. It’s just that I don’t want to be all over them, and I don’t want them all over me. 😉

So. I don’t know if I’ll ever get on Goodreads. And quite possibly don’t care.

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Meanwhile, print copies of the cookbook have been flying out the door! It’s sold a few electronic copies on Amazon (why anyone would want an electronic device on a kitchen counter while water, olive oil, butter, and flour are floating around escapes me, what what the hey?). But I can barely keep up with the requests for hard copies.

Interesting.

So I’m thinking my real social medium may be Toastmasters. This would give me an opportunity to talk about writing and thence segue into mentioning my books. I’m pretty good at public speaking, after 20 years of teaching in a college classroom. But people I’ve met who’ve been to Toastmasters are really good at it. One woman who gave our writing group a presentation on public speaking was so skilled as to be downright gifted. She came across exactly like one of those people who give TED talks.

Maybe what I need is not to be parked in front of a computer poking useless messages into “social” media but out on the road, talking to live people face to face.

Books, Books, and MORE Books

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Went over to the church yesterday to help set up this year’s fundraising book sale for the choir. It’s a fairly big deal. You’ve never seen so many books inside a single room, this side of a library. When you look at piles and piles of books, you have to wonder: who writes all these titles, why, and more to the point for a micropublisher, how can anybody possibly compete, given the sheer mass of product out there?

So what did I learn, if anything, from this?

• Despite the prevailing wisdom about the profitability of flooding Amazon with electronic titles, one probably would be better off to publish fewer titles of high quality or broad pragmatic use. Instead of publishing a lot of titles, it may be better to invest one’s time and financial resources in marketing one or two titles.

• Very, very few titles stand out. Too often — especially where genre novels are concerned — cover design conveys the message that you’re looking at more of the same. Even literary novels rarely grab one’s attention, unless the author is someone  you’ve read and liked. Or hated. Many cookbooks are similarly uninteresting; ditto travel books. Some children’s books stand out, partly because design is integral to the entire package, not just to the cover.

So here’s a question: Would it be possible to create a book for adults whose interior design is as important as the cover art? I mean, other than a coffee-table book. Could a novel or a history book or an inspirational book be designed in the same way as a child’s book, without bankrupting its maker? That really is a question, because as we know, children’s books are very expensive to produce.

• Some types of amateurishly produced bookoids become collector’s items. This is especially true of cookbooks. There are folks out there who collect cookbooks produced by clubs, charitable groups, schools, and the like.  Some of the older examples we put out on tables look like they were run off on mimeograph machines; others appear to have been printed and coil-bound at Staples or OfficeMax. But most of those didn’t stay on the tables! Volunteers grabbed them up and paid for them as we worked.

Short form lessons for wanna-be book publishers:

• Every title must stand out. If you’re going to hire a designer, it will pay to hire the best. A run-of-the-mill designer will create a run-of-the-mill cover, and your product won’t be noticed whether it’s on Amazon or a bookstore shelf.

• Whether you’ve got a truly great book or just another piece of escapist genre fiction, marketing is key. In a vast tsunami of books, not even the best of books will be noticed unless it’s drawn forcefully to the public’s attention.

• Nonfiction books should be tightly focused on a specific aspect of their subject matter. So many cookbooks, so many travel books, so many inspirational books, so many craft books, so many this, that, and the other books are out there that a publisher needs to draw the buyer’s attention to something different or highly specific in order to stand apart from the crowd. That, my friends, is easier said than done.

No doubt many more messages lurk in the second-hand book sale.

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In closely related precincts, while I was at Whole Foods last week, I asked the manager if he’d be interested in selling the very whole-foodsy 30 Pounds/4 Months diet/cookbook. He was interested but said at the moment the post of “forager” (yes!) for the department that sells books and magazines was empty — they were looking for someone to fill the job. He suggested I check back now and again.

If you want to work for Whole Foods, you have some retail experience, and you live in Phoenix, you might want to keep an eye on their “help wanted” postings. 😉

So far, I have yet to figure out how to fix the formatting for the .mobi version of 30 Pounds. Nothing I’ve tried works. Short of retyping it from beginning to end in a fresh template, I cannot see how to fix it. I suppose I’ll have to track down an ebook formatter who can break into the code and clean up whatever weirdnesses Wyrd has inserted in there. My guy right now is pretty swamped — people are lined up at his door to get him to work on their bookoids. He’s usually slow, but I’ll bet he’s really slow right now.

The advertising campaign I launched on Smart Bitches/Trashy Books seems to at least be putting eyeballs on our book covers. The most recent report shows, in this week alone for the four books we’re advertising:

• Bobbi and the Biker: 77,889 impressions, 48 clicks on the ad
• Bobbi’s Secret Life: 77,641 impressions; 82 clicks
• One Night at the Library: 77,658 impressions; 54 clicks
• Science Teacher: 77,595 impressions; 77  clicks

How many of the folks who clicked on the ads bought a book? None. We’ve sold two Racy Books this month…but neither of them were those Racy Books.

We’ve also sold one, count it (1) copy of the first collection of Fire-Rider books. That is not anywhere near as well as we did last month, which wasn’t what one would call “very” well.

However, Fire-Rider is garnering some very nice reviews. Book I, for example, nailed FOUR five-star reviews! If  ego boosts bought groceries, this one would stock the pantry for a year:

Reminds me of Robert Adams’ _Horseclans_ series in the way you can dimly see the strands of our present world shimmering in the fabric of a far-future United States.

I had a bit of trouble at first keeping track of the characters, but that resolved as the story went on, and I found the developing interrelationship between the two characters, Kay and Tavio, intriguing. One thing I appreciated was that while there was a lot of information about this world descended from ours, it seeped in through the story and wasn’t dumped on me all at once.

My chief complaint was that the story ended just as the story was getting interesting – I know, the nature of episodic fiction! I’ve added the first boxed set to my wishlist.

No idea who’s writing these things, but whoever you are, ♥♥♥♥♥♥

5-star reviews LoRes

Obnoxious Facebook…

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In my old age, the glories of a lot of things the Moderns love do escape me. Facebook? Biggest corporate escape artist in town. Between its habitual invasion of privacy and its faceless corporate obstinacy, I find Facebook utterly obnoxious. I’ve never been able to figure out its appeal, but the more I’m forced to know about it, the less I grasp people’s fascination with it.

Facebook appears to have stopped reposting from Funny about Money. At least, it has if you believe JetPack, whose corporate credibility strikes one as a lot more reliable than Facebook’s.

Because  I have no patience with Facebook and do not wish to consume the few hours remaining to me on this earth with learning how to operate a system whose point goes over my head, I hired an ad manager to run a Facebooks Ads campaign to publicize Fire-Rider and the diet/cookbook. She asked for my log-in details so she could set up an ad account for  me.

Turns out Facebook, like Big Brother, is always watching you. Its machinery noted that someone was logging in from a different ISP than my Macbook and so they canceled the ad account, took down the ad campaign to which she had devoted a number of hours, and forced me to dream up a new password. When I asked for my money back (turns out the business of spying on your ISP is a known issue with FB — apparently no normal person can be expected to log in to FB from more than one computer), she came up with a workaround. It remains to be seen how long Big Brother is going to let that stay in place.

Understand: the feed from Funny was set up years ago by a long-since retired WordPress guru. She’s not even in the blogging business anymore. I wouldn’t have known how to set up a blog feed into Facebook, nor would I have been inclined to do so without said guru’s prompting — FB doesn’t interest me and I wouldn’t have signed up at all except for the choir’s insistence that everyone must go online.

JetPack makes it easy to feed blog posts to WordPress — thereby increasing everyone’s potential for pointless clutter by vast orders of magnitude. So with the latest update, it asked me to “refresh” FaM’s connection to FB. Obediently, the little sheeple did so.

It — JetPack — seems to have had no problem connecting Writers Plain & Simple to my Facebook feed, but it no longer can get Funny online, apparently because FaM is posted with the old password. I have no idea how to fix this, and I’m pissed.

Not that the world rotates around FaM. But since I’ve drifted away from PF blogging per se, FaM has become my personal blog. The old connection with FB, then, made it easy to update friends about whatever is, famously, “on my mind” (grrrrr! patronizing bastards) without having to log in and upload links or post bleats.

Among the many things I dislike about Facebook is the lack of control you have over what goes up on the thing. Facebook is like the Borg: We will assimilate you. It’s spying on you everywhere you go, and it seems to pick up messages for group B that you really would not like to share with group A among your friends, family and associates.

Why do Facebook’s arrogant developers fail to grasp the possibility that you might not want your church group to know about your spicy publishing venture? I do not publish porn because I so love it. I publish porn because I can’t make a living at teaching, a trade that now pays less than minimum wage. It’s not something I want anyone but porn readers to know about.

Facebook makes it difficult — IMHO probably impossible — to separate out groups of acquaintances and friends. It mandates against setting up more than one “account,” and the thing is set up to confound efforts to send out messages to targeted groups and still actually reach those groups. In theory it’s possible to do so, but who trusts Facebook? The risk that a message for Audience A will end up being shoved in the faces of Audience B is definitely there. And IMHO, any such risk is too much risk.

Brave new world, isn’t it… So we think.

Spinning Wheels in the Publishing Business

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So the page proofs for the cookbook shipped from the new PoD vendor. When I was down at the plant the other day, they advised me to  enter their address as the shipping address in the order form, and then I could just run down there and pick them up, free of shipping charges.

Heeee! The message didn’t reach the mail room. Someone actually made out a mailing label and put it in the mail! Hilarious!

Post office said it was supposed to be delivered today. The front office guys were abhorred. They offered to print a new one. I said the world’s gears were not grinding to a halt and not to worry about it.

That will add another couple of days to the cookbook production. Those of you who asked for copies: hang in there! The thing is on its way.

fire book 2aiMeanwhile, on Wednesday I was supposed to have posted …. uhm… “published” the third and final collection of Fire-Rider stories — Books XIII through XVIII — to Amazon in Kindle format. For various reasons, that didn’t get done. Now it’s finally winging its way toward my sidekick, who has a PC on which to update the table of contents. Cutely, Kindle cannot read a TofC that has been compiled in or updated in any Mac program.

The new marketing agent had the privilege of tearing her hair (instead of me having to do it!) until she got all a set of ads posted on Facebook, plugging these fine pieces of literature.

As it develops — get this! — Facebook has the most incredibly stupid rule to the effect that an image for a Facebook Ad may not have more than 20% of its area devoted to type. See that boxed set image there? Just the byline and the title cover  24% of the image. Yes. What it means is, in effect, you can’t advertise a book on Facebook!

She finally managed to cobble something together by using one of the designer’s early iterations of the cover that had almost no coverlines on it. But…uhm…what we’re advertising, then, is not what we’re selling.

At any rate, while we await the correct table of contents, the collection’s interior can be prepared for hard copy printing. I need to get all three of the “boxed set” volumes posted at the PoD guy’s site, so copies of those can be ordered as needed.

So I was going to spend part of the day converting that thing for print format.

Instead, though, I ended up spending most of the time available laying out a client’s memoir for print publication — the interior pages, that is. I don’t have a cover image from him and so can’t do anything about that. But I think I’d rather have him see the interior first, lest he decide he’d like a different trim size. The book is fairly long, and I’m thinking the standard trade book size — 5.5 x 8.5 inches — might give us more pages than we’d like. A larger trim size will mean fewer pages. I guess.

I’ve reduced the font size and will install narrower margins once everything is flowed into the template. I’d like to keep the thing under 400 pages, which I think will happen. We’re at 233 typeset pages now; the MS is 300 pages, but he insists on typing single-spaced, so in reality it’s almost 600 manuscript pages: around 130,500 words. A lot of words.

🙂 Guy’s done a lot of living. Most of it pretty interesting…

Other parts of the day were consumed with driving a payment to mail from the post office, since my mailbox was robbed again yesterday, driving to the drugstore, running interference between the accountant and a subcontractor over W-9s, and on and endlessly on.

The new Fort Knox of a mailbox has yet to be installed. Wish WonderHandyman would get off the dime! Not that it matters for outgoing mail: henceforth everything I need to mail will have to be physically delivered to the post office — no more little red flag for the mailman. Uhm….mailperson…personperson.

 And now it’s getting late at night. Nothing has gotten done — or at least, nothing has been carried through to completion, other than mailing one (count it, 1) envelope with a check in it. The dogs are conked out, and the human hopes to be so, too. Very soon.