Coffee heat rising

Publishing

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.

How am I whipped? Let me count the ways…

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It’s 8:30 p.m. I started working at 7 a.m.

Well, wtf? That’s only 13 hours. Why do you suppose I feel so whipped, whapped, and brain-banged?

Actually, I got an enormous amount done today, some of it by serendipity. Big accomplishment is finishing the last installment of the Travelers series. My dearly beloved freelance writer/cowriter has written five of the seven pieces for that magnum opus. And it must be said, she’s a lot better at it than I am. She’s an amazingly good writer, and — mirabilis!! — she has a sense of humor.

Ô that rarest of the rare!

Her stuff is fun to read (think of that: p0rn that actually is, objectively, fun to read…). So I’m hoping we’ll get some serious traction once we start to post Traveler stories to Amazon.

Anyway, I finally finished doing my part: mortaring in the chinks around her solid bricks with my little addenda. They’re not bad, but they’re not as funny (on purpose) as hers. 😀

Also today an amazing discovery came my way: a large cache of vintage erotica has slipped into the public domain. It’s out there for the taking, and it invites republication in new and elegant forms.

You think 50 Shades is something new? Not so much, my friends. It was outdone several generations ago. Let me tell you raunch! Let me tell you BDSM!

Well, I shan’t. I’ll let Camptown Races Press tell you.

The seedling of a new plan sprouted today: a Camptown Races sideline to be labeled Classic Erotica, presenting repackaged and freshly decorated vintage smut. This could be highly entertaining. Oh, no. It will be highly entertaining. Some of this stuff puts 50 Shades to total shame.

I tried on a new template for the Camptown Ladies. Tell me how you like this one. I couldn’t get that handsome cowboy(oid) (OH! let’s just pretend he really IS a cowboy!) any larger without resizing him in Preview (again), which I ain’t a-gunna do. Just click on his gorgeousness for the full effect. He is, in a word or three, to die for.

Another of the day’s several projects was to get a grip on the workflow involved in “publishing” a bookoid on Amazon. It’s truly a tedious, time-consuming project, one I hope some day to foist off on an admin, virtual or in-person. To do that — and also to make my own efforts work consistently — I wanted to begin writing down a step-by-step checklist of the process involved. Yesh. The problem is, as you may note, that some of these “steps” are not single steps: they’re a whole series of steps folded into one “to do.”

Book Publication Checklist

Which Book:_____________________________________
Which Series:_____________________________________
Publication Date___________________________________
Place cover design, PDF, and .docx files in same folder

1. Design Cover | Need not be perfect for Bowker

Obtain Shutterstock copy
Record book the image is used for
Design image in PP
Check that image is correct size
Save to DropBox
Save to hard drive

2. Get ISBN | Assign 3 ISBNs at the start of each week

Proofread MS copy and be sure content is adequately formatted
Create PDF and store to disk
Record correct ISBN by COPY&PASTE into spreadsheet.
Enter ISBN here:
Enter correct ISBN on copyright page

3. Format MS

Format Word MS in plain vanilla
Check that A-level heads are marked “Chapter Title”
Insert links to preceding bookoids in series
Insert links to appropriate websites
CHECK links to be sure they’re not mail-to!
In a series, insert link to vh Amazon author page for future stories
DO NOT insert “chapter number.”
Delete any header or footer content
Replace section breaks with page breaks
Check all character formatting: use styles
Check all paragraph formatting: use styles
Proofread content again
Update TofC field on a PC
Check ISBN on copyright page
Check  for correct title information on copyright page
Enter credits for artwork on copyright page
Enter plug for upcoming bookoids and other bookoids at end
Enter link for Camptown Ladies at end

4. Post to Amazon

Enter preliminary data in form
CHECK THAT SERIES & VOLUME ARE GIVEN AND ARE CONSISTENT
Format image to required size
Upload image
Upload MS
Check in Kindle reader
Make corrections
Re-upload to Kindle
Recheck in Kindle reader
Finalize upload

5. Clear data from DropBox | Move folder from DB to hard drive, containing:

Move images from Images collection to hard drive
Move cover jpegs from bookoid directory to hard drive
Move Word file from bookoid directory to hard drive
Move PDF from bookoid file to hard drive

6. Begin Publicity

Post teasers at websites
Post teasers at social media sites

7. Publicize | ASAP after bookoid goes live:

Post widgets at websites
Post links at social media sites
Hit up reviewers
Tell friends
Hand out flyers at SBA, WVWW, choir
Send notice or newsletter to mail list

TO DO: BUILD MAIL LIST

Dear God. “To do”: Finish bourbon & water and go to bed…

The Enterprise: Things Are Looking Up

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Welp, I’m feeling a great deal less prickly today, so we’ll replace those crabby-looking cacti in the header with some cheery flowers. The enterprise — actually, both enterprises, blogging and micropublishing — are beginning to look up.

Today our heroic new Web wrangler, Grayson Bell, managed to get the last of the Blog Empire over to our new host, BigScoots. It’s been a long haul: we first moved the whole gigantic package to WestHost, but that proved to be a big mistake. After a week or more of intense frustration, we decided to cut our losses and choose another self-hosting site. He’s worked with BigScoots before and highly recommends it.

And yea verily! All of the sites are now working like a dream: lightning fast speeds and no glitches. So far.

It’s been a very long day (again). As usual, I didn’t get any of the scheduled writing time in. But I did get all the transferred sites tested, and I started populating the sites for the Racy Book Publishing Venture:

Camptown Races Press and
Camptown Ladies Talk (my favorite!)

And I published another episode of Fire-Rider to Amazon today. It’s not live yet — takes Amazon 24 hours or so to put these things online. But it’s on its way, anyway.

This morning I made a presentation to the Scottsdale Business Association, the bidness networking group I belong to. Subject: What I learned about publishing on Amazon. I’ll probably post some version of that at Writers Plain & Simple, now that said site has been revived. It was really down and out, pretty much for the duration.

I’m whipped. I’m hungry. And I need a bourbon and water. But at least we’re back in business.

And so, until tomorrow!

 

Tales of Micropublishing

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LOL! Check out my wee squib at LinkedIn. With that one, I’ve probably blown my blogging wad for the day.

But y’know, I’ve really got to start haunting the social media more. I don’t understand how they work, and they look like still more techno-timesuck. Well…I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what they are.

The logic of “social media” where long strings of bloviations are posted mystifies me. Do people REALLY have nothing else to do but sift through all that chatter? Do they read any of it? Why?

I guess what puzzles me the most is that something like Twitter or LinkedIn seems so unfocussed. Finding something useful there — something relevant to your job our your interests — looks like a tall order. Among a great deal of chaff, I found this nicely written post at LinkedIn by Arizona graphic designer and book coach Michele de Filippo, but when I went back to find it, I had a time relocating it.

Twitter takes that staticky effect to a whole level unto its own. There what you see when you sign in is toilet paper. A long strand of toilet paper that apparently unrolls ad infinitum, with (as far as I can see) no end. Ever. Most of the posts there appear to be automatically slapped up there. A few live people are chatting back and forth. But the question is, how do t hey find each other and how do they filter out all the irrelevant static so as to have something resembling a “conversation”?

At Twitter, “Direct Messages” is clogged with spam…here’s some guy congratulating me on something I supposedly published on Disqus. Specifically what is not mentioned, of course, because the purpose of his message is to advertise something. A few live humans thank me for following them. Hm. I haven’t figured out how the hashtag thing is supposed to work on Twitter. Strange.

So…I gather we’re supposed to use the platforms to reach out to people who might be interested in whatever we have to offer. But the question is, how do we FIND them, so we’re not blitzing harmless bystanders with flak that doesn’t even faintly interest them? In the do unto others department, I’d rather not spray Web users with irrelevancies in the hope of reaching one or two folks who like what I’m offering.

?

Facebook seems to make a little more sense. The page that pops up when I go to that thing is filtered (somehow) so only my friends’ posts show up, and by and large what they post is either interesting or entertaining. Twitter feels like carpet-bombing. Facebook is more like a firing range. With targets.

In the marketing department, I finally got around to updating the Fire-Rider site. It’s been down, like all the other provinces of the Blog Empire, off and on for the past ten days or two weeks. When I’ve had time to work on it, it’s  been down; when it’s been up, my hands have been full of other work.

Speaking of the which, WonderAccountant wants to know where a stack of statements are (?? how would I know?) and why my bank account is off by approximately the amount of a Social Security check (no clue!)

And so, away…

Of Artichokes and Oysters…and New Books

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 In the first of two annoying crashes, the Mac crashed and deleted everything I’d written here. I can’t even remember what I was going on about.

In the second of two exceptionally annoying crashes, WestHost (our new web server) crashed a post I was writing at Writers Plain & Simple and erased 30 minutes worth of work. In spite of my having saved it. No. BECAUSE of my saving it: I hit “save” and the “Edit Post” page went down.

God…freaking…DAMN…it, this has been another of those marathon time-suck days. Coming up with the idea of clustering the time-sucks on specific days was good: yesterday I got some writing done. Day before yesterday, not so much, because reality inetervened. But yesterday: Bobbi got tossed in the middle of BillyBob’s king-sized bed.

What could possibly happen?

So…artichokes. Did you know you can freeze them?

Trader Joe’s sells these wonderful little baby artichokes, SO cute and so delicious. They come in packages of four. What usually happens here at the Funny Farm is that I cook them all (they fit fine in a pasta kettle), eat one, and drop the rest in a Ziplock bag to stash in the fridge.

I may (or may not) eat a second one the next day or so later. But then the package gets shoved to the back of the refrigerator shelf. And I lose track of them.

(Did you know that some people think starting a sentence with “and” or “but” sounds pompous? Honi soit qui mal y pense, say I to that. Goddammit.)

Anyway, so before long these lost artichokes spoil. And I am disgusted and discouraged.

It’s quite enough to have computer technology to make you disgusted and discouraged, without having to be disgusted and discouraged over rotten artichokes.

Freeze them:

Cook them all. (To wit: boil a pot of water; add a little chopped up garlic and a sliced lemon if you have it; toss in the ‘chokes; cook until done, about an hour.)

Take them out of the hot water and set them upside down in a strainer or colander that’s been placed in the kitchen sink. Let the water drain out and the artichokes cool to room temperature.

Place the artichokes on a tray or cookie sheet. Set this in the coldest part of your freezer. Wait.

When the artichokes are frozen through, place them in air-tight plastic freezer bags and store in the freezer until you get around to eating them.

Voilà.

This morning I posted the third Fire-Rider installment on Amazon. It only took three hours to acquire the ISBNs for that and the fourth story and then to get the present piece “published.”

This happened because of the dizzying swarm of errors I’ve instilled in the MSS. I’m laboring away thinking godDAMNit, I know I fixed that I know it I know it I KNOW it!!!!!!!

Well. Yes. I did fix it. But I stored the fixed files to a flash drive and failed to copy them back up to DropBox.

But that notwithstanding, there were a couple of errors in the “fixed” files that I hadn’t fixed.

You begin to sense the complications implicit in this chain of events? Yeah. On and on and on…

I think they’re all fixed now. But I hate Word. I hate it hate it hate it. WHY does it default to do the stupidest most ridiculous most pointless things imaginable by the techie brain? Why do you have to fight it uphill every single step of the way?

Oh Hell. Fire-Rider isn’t an unwitting iteration of the Odyssey. It’s an allegory of  Man vs. Machine.

FR III isn’t online at Amazon yet (it takes awhile for these things to arrive in the marketplace. But FR II is here.

fire-book-2ai

Time Suck: You CAN’T avoid it!

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Nor can you control it.

Yesterday I received a notice that obliquely clued me to a REAL serious problem: somehow ISBNs that I had assigned to certain titles were wrong, either on Bowker’s end or on mine.

A fruitless discussion with a CSR led to more confusion. He arranged for someone else to get in touch by e-mail.

Before pursuing this fun mess, though, I decided I’d better get it  untangled.

It took the ENTIRE FUCKING MORNING to figure out that

a) Bowker was showing two ISBNs assigned to the e-book version of 30 Pounds;
b) one of those numbers apparently was spurious, bogus, and altogether nonexistent, even though it exists in Bowker’s records; and
c) the ISBN that I’d thought was assigned to Fire-Rider I was NOT assigned to it at all.

 We’re talking about sifting through 110 ISBNs here, and comparing Bowker’s spreadsheet with my spreadsheet, line by line.

By the time I figured out what on earth was going on, or at least what I think is going on, and then dealt with a couple of other hassles, it was after noon.

Oh well.

Finally did get back to writing: I got about three-quarters of the way through one of the two Travelers episodes that I need to write to help complete that series. My freelance co-author has been going to town with the thing whilst I’ve been tangled up in Time Sucks. Today I should be able to finish the story I’m working on and, with any luck, start the next one.

Tomorrow is devoted to time suck. Nothing substantive will get done, at least nothing that I want to get done…

And so, to work.