Monthly Archives: January 2011

self-publishing

Looking for a Publishing Metaphor

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Over at Joe Konrath’s blog, the discussion about e-self-publishing goes on and on. Joe is a big proponent of it, and lately he’s had a series of guest blogs (with plenty of his thoughts added) from writers who have successfully ESP-ed. Some of them have a prior print publishing background; some don’t. Monday’s post by Blake Crouch is a good example. As always, the discussion that follows these guest posts is both informative and entertaining. Here are some examples.

by Blake: To be paid monthly to write exactly what you want to write and have absolute control over the presentation is an amazing thing. …to me, the best thing about the ebook revolution isn’t the money. It’s the unlimited creative potential. No more asking permission to write the book you’re dying to write. No more constraints on form.

by Joe: Self-publishing is a guarantee it will find some readers, while pursuing a traditional publishing contract is still a long shot.

by Michael: I can’t emphasize too strongly that this is an age of STAGGERING opportunity for writers. …To be free to write any length you want, in any genre, without some [expletive deleted] editor telling you how to do it, is pleasure enough in itself. But to be able to publish so easily, so quickly, and stand at least some change of making money—hard to believe.

I’ve been trying to think of a metaphor that describes what is happening to the publishing industry as the e-reader/e-book revolution comes storming on. I’ve heard that before an avalanche there is a “cracking” sound, then the snow comes down. Maybe that’s a good analogy. The publishing snow is cracking, the avalanche of e-book sales is about to start, and the traditional publishers are not listening. I read in several books about prisoners of war who escaped from prisoner-of-war camps via tunneling that the sand also does this cracking sound right before a cave in. Perhaps either metaphor applies.

Yet, in those cases there is no falling sand or sliding snow before the deluge. In the publishing industry, e-book sales are 11 percent of total book sales, although this data may be several months old. So there’s something visible and measurable going on. It’s not just a cracking sound. Maybe it’s more like either a flash flood or a gradually rising flood. The water is there, making enough sound that the person not paying attention to what is coming from upstream doesn’t realize a flood is coming. This seems an apt metaphor to the situation.

When Gutenberg invented movable type, the copyist industry fairly quickly went out of business. Now digital devices are slowly driving print out of business. Oh, print books will never disappear completely. e-books won’t even command a majority of market share for some time, maybe a decade. But it’s going to go up from 11 percent. The flood is coming.

Buildipedia, Documenting America, freelance writing, Suite 101, Writing

The Storm is Almost Here

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The winter storm that is so much in the news is bearing down on us. The winter storm warning from the National Weather Service starts at 6:00 PM tonight for us, so that probably means we’ll start getting some frozen stuff around 8 PM. The forecast has called for sleet, ice, snow, mixture—it keeps changing. That’s to be expected as the time nears and the computer models come together. The best guess right now is we’ll have a half inch of ice followed by 3-5 inches of snow.

Rather than negotiate the hills of Bella Vista tonight, I’m going to stay in Bentonville with my mother-in-law. Here apartment is about 3 miles due north of the office, on flat streets. If need be I could walk to work from there. Tomorrow should be the worst, with an inch of snow on top of the ice at the time of morning commute, snow still falling. She doesn’t have a computer or Internet, so I’ll probably stay at work late, or perhaps go to the library until it closes.

The storm is hitting at work and in writing as well. I have to have one of my flood studies re-submitted by Thursday. I worked on it some Saturday, and am in good shape with the computer modeling; now need to have the CADD tech do the mapping and pull a brief report together. It would be a snap except yesterday our 18-inch diameter water transmission main advertised in the newspaper, so today we should be deluged by contractors coming by to obtain drawings and specs—which aren’t ready. Hopefully they will be by 10 AM. Plus I really, really, really need to make major progress on my Rogers flood study. I’m so close to being able to run the first computer model. Four hours of undivided might do it.

In writing, I will be a journalist this morning. I have phone interviews scheduled with two DOT officials in two states, for information on my article for Safe Highway Matters. That’s due on Wednesday, and since this is the first time I’ve written for them, I’d like to get a draft in Tuesday. It’s only a 400 word article, but short doesn’t necessarily mean easier. Then I have an article due for Buildipedia the following Wednesday, and another the Wednesday after that.

Meanwhile I’m working on Documenting America and on articles for Suite101.com. Both of these are discretionary, of course. I could drop them at any time. But if I did, I would in effect be saying, “I don’t have what it takes to be a writer.” So I keep going, keep my schedule a whirlwind, hoping that I get to the point where I have something more than freelance articles published. Having decided to go the e-self-publishing route, this year is the critical year. More on that in future posts.

Documenting America, freelance writing, research

A Little Bit of Progress

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I have two main writing tasks at present:

  1. Complete as many chapters as possible in the first volume of Documenting America.
  2. Complete the article I’m under contract to write for Safe Highway Matters.

On the second one, I’m having trouble getting hold of various sources the editor suggested. I’ve done all the research I can without talking to some people. I could almost write the article from the research, but really it would read much better, and I’m sure be more valuable, if I could get some quotes and some practical information in it. I hope I hope I hope today I’ll be able to reach some people. The article is due next Wednesday; only 400 words.

On Documenting America I’m making good progress. Last night I finished chapter 21. Unfortunately this took me a lot longer than I wanted, due to letting myself get caught up in the tentacles of research. This chapter is about the wilderness conditions the first settlers encountered on coming to America. The source is one I found in my 20 volume set of The Annals of America, an Encyclopedia Britannica product I picked up for $25 at a thrift store. Back before the Internet, that was my source for original documents. Now, of course, so much is on the Internet I don’t have to rely on that for original documents. But I still use it to find things and make decisions on what document to base a chapter on.

The document in question is a 1711 letter written by Rev. John Urmstone, a missionary/pastor in North Carolina, to his sponsoring organization, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The Annals have only an excerpt of the letter, and gave no biographical information about Urmstone. The excerpt was suitable for my purposes. Urmstone described the harsh conditions and the work he had to do just to survive, work that supposedly would prevent him from his work of propagating the gospel. However, the excerpt seemed to have a whiny tone, so I wanted to see the full letter if I could.

Through a simple Google search I found plenty. I didn’t find the whole letter (thought Wheaten College has it on microfilm if I want to drive eleven hours each way), but I did find a longer extract of the part in the Annals and I found extracts of two other parts. What I found was a lot of information on Urmstone. Rather than take too much time to write it out, here’s what one of his colleagues wrote about him to the same person in England: “Mr. Urmston is lame and says he cannot do now what he formerly has done, but this lazy distemper has seized him by what I hear ever since his coming to the country.” Wow! Not exactly a glowing recommendation.

So, that, and the other biographical information I found, puts the entire body of writing by Urmstone in question. His letters to England over ten years were constant complaints about his situation: no servants; little meat; unproductive land; slaves too expensive; wicked parishioners; etc. His description of the North Carolina wilderness is probably accurate, and I can still use is at the document for a chapter. But how much more interesting it is given the knowledge about the original writer. I shall have to have a later chapter on Urmstone, maybe one about how not everyone came to America for religious liberty reasons. Some, like the good reverend, really came for economic gain.

In all of this, I spent way too much time on research. I managed to pound out the chapter last night, not yet in polished form. But what should have taken me four hours took seven. Maybe the extra three will form the basis of an other chapter, maybe not. But I’ve got to get more efficient in my work if I’m ever going to finish the book.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Documenting America, self-publishing, Writing

Crowded, Uncrowded, Crowded, Uncrowded

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The new market I added to my post yesterday didn’t work out. So my schedule is less crowded than I thought. Well, that’s not entirely true. I can write for that market if I want, just not the type of article I wanted to write. The articles they want would require more research than the articles I wanted to write. So if I write for them, the schedule will be even more crowded; if I don’t write for them, less crowded. My choice.

I had my call with the Buildipedia editor today. We agreed to get two articles under contract with February deadlines. He also wants another article from me with an early March deadline, and a series of articles I could write that would string out through the year. This sounds about like the frequency of articles, the amount of time, I want to put into that source. So the schedule regarding Buildipedia is about as crowded as I thought and hoped it would be.

Everything I see about e-self-publishing, every new bit of information I gather or opinion I see from someone whose opinion I value, says this is something with no downside, something I should do. So that means I need to dispense with further research and get my short story and first e-book on line. That means I’ll have to learn how to format an e-book, or hire someone. That means I’ll have to learn how to design and produce a cover, or hire someone. That means I’ll have to come up to speed with marketing an e-book. All part of a schedule crowd.

But that also means I can ignore the need to go to writers conferences. Money saved, time saved. It means I can quit worrying about a platform big enough to impress an editor or agent. Time saved. It means I can quit looking for new freelance work, since that is mostly for the purposes of platform building. The income I’m getting from articles will pay for hiring the covers done, so I’m sure I’ll do that. It might also pay for hiring the formatting done, but I think I’ll at least take a stab at the formatting. If my technophobia results in my being unable to master the formatting, I can always then hire it out. All that’s wasted in that case is a little time, but that’s not even wasted if I can later use that initial effort and figure out the formatting for book two, or book three.

So is the schedule more crowded, as crowded, or less crowded than I thought it was when I posted yesterday? I think less crowded, due to that one market then under consideration now being out of consideration. I’ll hold that market in abeyance, always there for the future.

Documenting America and “Mom’s Letter”, here I come.

Buildipedia, Documenting America, Suite 101, Writing

The Schedule is Getting Crowded

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I mostly took yesterday evening off from writing. The reason? My wedding anniversary. Our 35th. We had plans to go out to eat. I scheduled a 4 PM meeting with a client who is only three or so miles from the house, which put me home about 4:30 PM. But we stayed home. Lynda had a persistent headache, and my stomach was doing jumping jacks for some reason, so we stayed home, worked on a puzzle, ate left-over enchilada soup, read some, watched a couple of our favorite news shows, then three episodes of Criminal Minds. A good evening, despite the change of plans and doing nothing special for our special day.

While we were sitting and watching TV, I worked on the next chapter of Documenting America. It’s going a little harder than I’d like. Later, from 11:00-11:30 PM, I read in a biography of John Wesley, which I consider research for a future small group study I’ll write. But that was it for evening writing.

Of course, during the work day, in my pre-hour and noon hour I worked on some things. I did some research for the article for the “Safe Highway Matters” newsletter. I read two writing related blogs, one by an agent and one by a writer. That’s not a lot of writing work, but it counts.

Now, I have a week and a day to complete the highway article. Tomorrow I’ll have my call with the Buildipedia editor and we’ll establish a schedule of articles for the next couple of months. Those will all have fixed deadlines. My two floating deadlines are articles for Suite101.com and chapters for Documenting America. I’d like to write two of the former and three of the latter each week. However, that alone would require about 15 hours, perhaps more than I can dedicate to them.

ETA: Shortly after I posted this, I learned of another on-line writing gig that would be just up my alley, I think. Did a little investigation on my noon hour, and it continues to look promising. The pay would be great, if I would be approved for the premium section of the website. I’m waiting on replies to two e-mails before I do anything else about this, other than some more research into the site tonight.

So I see things backing up very quickly, as they often do, and a logjam not too far in the future. I’ll just have to see if I can do a good job of managing my time and completing as much of this as I can. Lofty goals are good, so long as they don’t become stressful. As an long-gone evangelist in our church is quoted as saying: “I’d rather shoot at a star and miss than shoot at a toad in the road and hit it.”

Buildipedia, freelance writing, Suite 101

The Freelance Writing Report

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I wrote yesterday that I had a good day of writing, being at home due to the snow storm. That continued into the evening, as I completed the research on the next chapter of Documenting America, and wrote most of it. I also did the work I needed to do on Life Group class teaching prep. I haven’t quite finished typing the handouts yet, but I’ll get that done after work. So the day started well and finished well.

I thought it was time to make an overall report on my freelancing activities. Here it is.

  • Suite101.com: I’m up to 120 articles there, having posted 4 so far in January. I’m working on a series of genealogy articles right now. After that I may get back to stock trading articles. Beginning with the month of December, we now receive data on which articles actually earn money. I’ll watch these new stats for a few months to see if there’s any pattern, then maybe change up my article mix. The month of January is on track to be my biggest revenue month there, though I’m earning a paltry $0.14 per article per month. I do it because I enjoy it, seem to be somewhat good at it, and, well, I just want to.
  • Buildipedia.com: I had another article posted there today. I’m not quite sure how many this is, somewhere around 15 I think. I need to get my records up to date for them. Yesterday I sent the editor an e-mail, pitching 5 more articles. He’s interested, and we’ll talk next week. I’d like to do an average of two articles a month for them. They pay pretty good, and I think the exposure I get there is excellent. They also seem to be growing, which can’t hurt. I’m also getting articles by assignment for them, which is nice. The whole query-go-round for freelancing is not particularly enjoyable for me.
  • I reported yesterday that I had been approached by an editor about writing an article. The publication is “Safe Highway Matters”. Today the editor and I agreed via e-mails that I will write the article. I’m waiting for the exact assignment details. This may well be a one time gig, but having an editor come to me, based on writing of mine she saw on-line, is sweet. And maybe in the future she’ll need another article. Or maybe some editor will see my writing in that publication, and….
  • I have given up trying to find print publications to write for. I won’t say I’ll never go back to seeking that publishing outlet, but for right now, no. The pay wasn’t much better, the query process stinks, and my limited experience shows they don’t pay on time. For now, I’ll stick with on-line publications. It has been a good, professional experience for me.

One other thing I should mention. The article I did for Buildipedia on the Crystal Bridges Museum, which posted there on January 6, 2011, was new ground for me in that I had to interview someone I didn’t know. That was a definite first. It made me feel like a journalist. Not that I really know what that’s like. I have absolutely no journalist training, took no classes on it in college or in writers conferences. But the editors I work with seem to like my writing, and other editors are taking notice, so maybe in a sense I am a journalist. That wasn’t planned. I just want to be a writer when I grow up.

I originally shifted to freelancing as one plank in a “platform” to present to editors or agents to whom I would shop my books. Now that I’m considering e-self-publishing my books, as I have discussed in recent blog posts, the platform doesn’t count for as much. My freelancing doesn’t generate fans of my writing. Yet, I think I’ll keep with it for a while. It never hurts to learn to write to deadlines, to figure out when something is done rather than to endlessly revise, to learn how to please an editor, and to make more and more contacts.

Documenting America, freelance writing, self-publishing, Writing

Snow Day Writing Report

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It’s 4 PM. I’m at home, at my dinosaur computer in The Dungeon, writing away. Yesterday the forecast was for snow starting around 11:00 PM, 3-5 inches accumulation, or maybe 4-7 inches, depending on who you believe. I e-mailed my boss to say I wasn’t going to be in on Thursday, and I reported on Facebook that I was going to read, research, and write till my fingers were raw, my arms and shoulders tight, my butt numb, my eyes blurry, and my head hurt. Okay, I didn’t actually mention the butt numb part on FB, but I was thinking that.

The storm gave us only a little over 3 inches; it was over by 11 AM. With that little, I probably could have driven the 15.6 miles to work with no problem, so possibly I wasted a vacation day. But I get plenty of vacation after 20 years with the company, so I don’t mind. And it wasn’t wasted at all. It was kind of a dry run for what a day might be like if I had a real writing career, where I wrote full time. Now, it wasn’t a true dry run, because knowing I have the day job to go back to tomorrow, I didn’t stick to writing quite as faithfully as I should have.

But write I did. And research. The day began with a couple of chapters in Ezra. Devotional, yes, but also part of my research for To Exile and Back. From my reading chair, I discussed stocks with Lynda, and I began to draft a genealogy article for Suite101.com. Then I came to The Dungeon. First I proof-read and reconsidered the Documenting America chapter that I wrote yesterday. It still seems good. I polished it a little and consider it done. Then I wrote and posted the article on Suite101.com. That brings me up to 120 articles there.

Upon publishing, I saw an e-mail in my Suite inbox. It was from an editor of a transportation newsletter. They need a writer with a civil engineering background to work on the feature article for their next newsletter issue. Would I be interested? I quickly said e-mailed her yes, and suggested a phone call. Then I went upstairs to listen to the weekly conference call Lynda joins each Thursday noon for stock trading. During the call I worked in ideas for new articles for Buildipedia.com. After the call and lunch I returned to The Dungeon and fired off an e-mail to the Buildipedia editor. He quickly replied that he’s interested, and asked for a phone call next week.

About that time my computer bad stuff protection program decided to do something, so I pulled out a volume of The Annals of America and chose the next subject for Documenting America, read it, and began to formulate a chapter about it. I next went to the daily writing blogs I follow, and found a great new post on Jon Konrath’s blog.

During all this activity, I came upon about six ideas for posts to this blog. I think the next step will be do get those down on paper so I don’t lose them. I might be posting here with greater frequency for a while. The internal but public debate about e-self-publishing continues, along with some other subjects.

For the rest of the day, I’ll finish reading a couple of blogs, plan and perhaps draft the Documenting America chapter, maybe work some on either the harmony of the gospels of on my baseball novel. Oh, I need to prepare for teaching Sunday school, and write some student sheets. I don’t know if I’ll look to do any recreational reading or not, but perhaps.

Documenting America, self-publishing, Suite 101

Two Nights of Research and Writing – What a Concept!

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After my post from work on Monday, about needing to have writing available worthy of eSP, I came home and took the evening to research and write. I had already done some research into my next genealogy article at Suite101.com, so I decided to write the article. I did so, it taking less than an hour after the research was done. I’m not up to 119 articles at that site.

Having finished that, I went to my book set Annals of America to look for something to write for my Documenting America series. I pulled out the volume covering 1895-1904, mainly because I hadn’t yet done anything after the Civil War and I want the series to cover much more than that. I found a good article, by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts (the first one, not the second). I read the article and found lots of good material for my article. By the time 11:00 PM rolled around I had the quotes identified (if not yet condensed), the introduction written, and a fair couple of paragraphs. Tonight I’ve been working on the actual chapter, and it now stands at 950 words, on its way to 1000 to 1200. This writing took me longer than expected, because I haven’t written this kind of piece for a while.

It all felt good. I’ve written very little since mid-December, except a Suite article and a couple of articles for Buildipedia. The reading I’ve done to research To Exile and Back was fine, as was my reading of Eudora Welty’s short memoir. But there’s just something about writing new material from original research. Kind of like home-grown tomatoes vs. store bought, if you get my drift.

I can’t abandon market research, or eSP research. Actually, I did some of the latter today by reading two writers’ blogs. But I have to say that carving out some writing time was really satisfying. After I check stocks, I’ll head upstairs, turning back down the thermostat in The Dungeon, sit in my reading chair—perhaps with coffee—and try to complete on paper the ending of my Documenting America piece. The title of it: “We Have Lost Sight of These Vast Interests”. Fitting for a writer on two days he sets aside for pure writing.

self-publishing

Something to E-Self-Publish

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The beginning of the work week resulted in my again considering whether I should e-self-publish or not. Over the weekend, I kind of forgot about it. I used the time to finish the Eudora Welty memoir I started in December and to blog about it. I did a little research for the Bible study To Exile and Back, which has turned out to be much more research-intensive than I first thought. I planned out a series of articles for Suite 101, and wrote the first one, which I hope to proof and publish tonight. I set up statistical spreadsheets for 2011. All in all, it was a profitable weekend for my writing career.

Now, back to consideration of e-self-publishing (I think I’ll abbreviate that as eSP from here on out). As I read Joe Konrath’s blog, and other testimonies and advice I find from following links I find on it, it seems I can’t go wrong by choosing to eSP. It will take some time (as in man-hours), but probably less than following the traditional publishing route. Probably? Almost certainly. eSP will burn up less clock than will traditional publishing. You can tell I watched some football this weekend.

All that aside, to make sense to eSP I’ve got to have some completed work to eSP. It seems the people who are making the most success at this have multiple titles out there in the e-book world. The examples on Konrath’s blog are all novelists, so I’d naturally be thinking novels. The only one I have available is Doctor Luke’s Assistant, which is a good candidate. Unfortunately In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is a long way from being finished, and my other novels are dreams and outlines at this point.

But in terms of non-fiction, I’ve got a couple of things close to being ready. Documenting America, which I first planned as a self-syndicated newspaper column, could easily be adapted to e-book format, probably 30,000 to 45,000 words. In fact, it might be better as an e-book. Some of the columns I wrote were squeezed into newspaper word limits, and I felt they were choppy. The ability to marginally lengthen those would be a good thing. If I dropped other writing projects, I could have one of those volumes ready to go in a month, including proof-reading. I think I could then produce one of those every three months or so, giving me multiple volumes within a year.

I also have a couple of Bible studies reasonably far along. Life on a Yo Yo, The Dynamic Duo, and Sacred Moments are candidates. Each of them could be fleshed out into a small book, say 20,000 to 30,000 words each, in a month or a little more. Is there a market for such as these? Only one way to find out. Related to Bible studies is my small group study guide to C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, which I have tentatively titled, Screwtape’s Good Advice. That one is fully planned, but only about 10 percent written. That would take a couple of months, or maybe three, to do a decent job on.

From what I’ve been able to gather from my study, poetry is difficult to eSP. Because the Kindle platform allows readers to increase or decrease text size, the fixed line breaks of poetry can easily be messed up. It’s not impossible, but poetry will probably have to wait for the next round of e-book reader technology. So Father Daughter Day, fully finished and as polished as I know how to make it, is not a candidate right now. Of course, it’s still not illustrated either.

So the answer to “Do I have anything ready to eSP?” is yes, but not a whole lot. Time to get busy writing, to put dreaming aside, to buckle down and find out what I can produce when under a deadline, even if self-imposed.

I’m edging closer, closer….

book reviews, Writing

Book Review – One Writer’s Beginning by Eudora Welty

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Eudora Welty is one writer I don’t remember reading. Possibly in an English class somewhere we were assigned one of her stories and I read it. I know I haven’t read any of her novels. Yet, when I saw the small paperback One Writer’s Beginning at a thrift store for 50 cents, I bought it. I was pretty sure I would gain something from it.

The book was assembled from lectures Welty gave at Harvard University in 1983. She was from Jackson, Mississippi, to parents who moved there from Ohio and West Virginia when they were married in 1904. Welty was born the next year, to be joined by two brothers over the next five years. In the first part of the book, titled “Listening”, Welty tells how her earliest childhood years, and how they fed her imagination. She doesn’t talk about writing at all.

In the next section, “Learning To See”, she tells of family vacations back to Ohio and West Virginia, and spending time with the extended family. Train trips and road trips are part of this section. A road trip in 1917 was quite an adventure. Each set of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins had an impact on Eudora. From abundant story telling on her mom’s side to an absolute ignoring of the past for sake of looking toward the future on her dad’s, she learned to look to the past and the future.

The third section, “Finding A Voice,” is where Welty tells how the events of her life became scenes in stories, and neighbors and teachers became characters. Welty even says how she put some of herself into one character.

All in all, the book didn’t give a lot of information for writing help. It was not inspirational, or motivational. It didn’t really provide hints on the writing craft. it’s a straight memoir. If it had anything to help a writer it was: Use the events and people in your life to populate your stories. That’s not exactly an earth-shattering revelation. Despite the lack of immediate benefit, I’m going to keep the book, and possibly re-read it in a few years.

The previous owner of this book made a note here and there. Inside the back was written, “Purchased at University of Arkansas Fayetteville, Ark June 1987”. Most of the marginalia was a single word, such as “genealogy,” “scenes,” “library,” “Latin”. Many words or phrases are underlined. But, what caught my eye was the single word written on the introductory page: “Interesting”. Ah ha, Dr. Farina, former high school English classmate. I’m not the only one who find that an acceptable word to characterize reaction to a composition.