Did I actually say I daydreamed of spending my days writing for a living? Really? What on earth could I have been thinking? Wouldn’t you think that after 70 years on this earth I would have figured out that NO ONE MAKES A LIVING DOING CREATIVE WORK.
My entire day has been consumed — utterly, totally consumed — with screwing around with other people’s websites. And what have I accomplished?
Almost nothing.
Well. Along the way I’ve taken notes and printed out how-to guides, so I now have a kind of user’s manual for the wanna-be micropublisher:
• Tracy Atkins’s guide to formatting hard copy and e-books with his and Friedlander’s book design templates.
• Atkins’s detailed instructions for how to upload your book and cover to KDP.
• Amazon’s detailed instructions for how to upload your book and cover to KDP, which conflict in places with the latter.
• The KDP contract, all 22 single-spaced pages of it.
• Kindle’s cover image specs.
• Nook’s cover image specs.
• Amazon’s detailed instructions for how to create a cover image using that monopoly’s new cover image building tool. (This will put quite a few graphic artists out of work.)
• Detailed instructions for how to move a domain off WordPress, which don’t work.
• William King’s (now outdated) detailed instructions for how to create a Kindle cover using PowerPoint.
But otherwise, what have I accomplished? Damn near nothing.
I’ve managed to upload the body copy for the diet/cookbook to the print-on-demand publisher. But since I wanted it coil-bound (so it would lay flat on a reader’s kitchen countertop), I imagined all I would need is the front cover image.
Wrong: after much puzzling and wrestling around and begging for help from support, I learn that you have to submit a PDF for a wrap-around cover, only with no spine copy.
Lovely. God only knows how long it will take the graphic artist to produce that. You understand, I’ve been waiting for MONTHS for cover images to come forth.
I’d hoped to get the cookbook up on Amazon today in e-book format. At the outset, it looked like Caliber was the way to go. Considerable time-wasting study later, it appeared that was a bad idea.
Instead, it would be better to go directly through KDP, despite constant bitter complaints about the difficulty of said process. By the time I’d figured that out, though, I was already too tired and too frazzled with computer-generated frustration to take on a monster job like that. It will have to wait till tomorrow.
And that will mean ANOTHER day will go by in which I get exactly zero (0) writing done.
WordPress.com will not let go of my writersplainandsimple.com domain name, even though in theory I own it and in theory they’re supposed to move it over to GoDaddy at my request. I paid the bastards to renew it, and now their records say it expires in less than a month. They kept the money I paid to renew that but canceled the Akismet subscription, so soon that site will be spammed out of existence. I have been banging my head against that wall since 9:07 this morning, to exactly no avail. I’m about to threaten them with a lawyer…this is getting ridiculous.
My friend the e-book builder sent a link to a very interesting market research tool that effectively deconstructs and reconstructs data from Amazon Kindle sales. Tried to download it. The outfit marketing it will only take cash or charges through PayPal. To do that, you have to have a password. Since we took both of our accounts off PayPal after the recent hacking attempt, at the behest of my bidness partner’s fiancé who has a degree in IT, I’ve forgotten the password. The one in my records doesn’t work. So I couldn’t buy the damn thing. Too bad: it looks extremely useful. Or…ahem…it could be just another time suck…
To Do, 7/21/2015
• Remind artist about need for 5.5 x 8.5-inch diet/cookbook cover image.
Mooted, two ways from Sunday.
a) He headed me off at the pass and sent the image before I could ask.
b) See above: a full wrap-around cover PDF is needed even though there’s no goddamn spine!
• Finish domain transfer from WP.com to GoDaddy, which didn’t get finished yesterday.
Foiled and frustrated, see above.
• Try to convert diet/cookbook to Kindle format using Calibre.
Hah!!!
• Build BikerBabe cover in PowerPoint, using William King’s somewhat outdated strategy.
Mooted by the discovery of Amazon’s proprietary cover-building tool, which looks useful but probably will prove to be another goddamn electronic frustration. If it works, though, it’ll be a godsend.
• Ask new web guru to build new sites for Camptown Races Press and Camptown Ladies Talk.
He still can’t get into Westhost.
• Inquire at PVCC about opportunities for Scottsdale Business Association to partner with the college’s internship program.
Bingo! Their internship director will meet with us next week. One count it (1) thing accomplished today!
• Get domain name for Camptown Races Press.
Pointless until web guru can get into the hosting service.
• Do pool chores
Most of those were automated and so they got done. By now, I imagine, the filter probably will need to be backwashed.
So. Think of that. By quitting the comp job, I’ve gone from spending my days doing a mind-numbingly frustrating activity that I hate to spending my days doing a mind-numbingly frustrating activity that I hate. Interesting.
This is a test…