All posts by David Todd

self-publishing, Writing

No Sale

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It’s been a long dry spell without a sale. My last one was February 13. So right now it’s 41 days without a sale. This has been a difficult time. A large part of the prevailing wisdom about promoting your published works is to not promote them. Rather, write more things and get them up for sale.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing—not promoting, that is. About once a month, on the self-promotion days of a couple of Facebook writer groups I’m in, I promote something. On even rarer occasions I post a reminder on my Facebook that I have books for sale. I did that last night.

On of the things Amazon has, something that’s still in beta mode, is an author ranking. As of last night I was #343,269. That means 343,268 authors within the Amazon system are more popular than I am. Here’s a graph of my ranking.

Sobering, isn’t it? You can see from this graph how, at these lower levels, a single book sale can propel you upward by a couple of hundred thousand places. That tells me that somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 authors will have a sale at Amazon on any given day. By the way, the big, one-day drop I circled on the chart was Thanksgiving Day. Amazon seemed to have a glitch in their system, and that does not look like a valid ranking. That one day excepted, I’m at my lowest ranking since Amazon instituted the system.

I suppose the sales will come. At other places at Amazon’s Author Central site they say they are having to reconstruct some things, and that sales haven’t posted since maybe February 1. However, my stats show at least two sales after that, so I don’t think I can hope that a bunch of sales are happening and they just aren’t posting.

We’ll see what happens. I’m at least a month away from publishing China Tour, with nothing in between them. I have a couple of professional essays I could put up fairly quickly, and they wouldn’t need fancy covers, so I could do them myself. But would even that small amount of work divert me from my creative writing and delay my overall progress? It’s a decision I need to make over the next few days.

Engineering, Writing

I’d Like Another Gig

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This time last year I was writing two columns per month at the e-zine Buildipedia.com. It was good work, $100 for a 500 word column, topics that flowed naturally from my work, minimal research. I received good feedback from the editors, and they rarely changed anything I turned in, not even a word.

But in May they cut it back to one column per month, and after June they stopped it all together. Not enough ad revenue to support it, or maybe not enough visitors to the pages; not sure which. $200 went to nothing real fast. That may not seem like a lot of money, but it really helped with the budget.

I sure would like to find something similar. On Wednesday I began the process of looking. I found an on-line blog-like magazine that was perfect for replacing Buildipedia. I started filling out the on-line application. Then I realized the last post was sometime last summer. It appears it’s no longer an active site.

I estimate there are about 50 other sites I need to check out. I’m not optimistic about finding something. But maybe, maybe.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Next “Writing” Steps

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China Tour is done. As I posted on my Facebook author page, I finished the first draft of the novel on Sunday March 17. The word count is 71,571.

Now I’m letting it sit for a while. Not too long, however. I think about a week. I’m anxious to edit it and publish it. It’s also possible a plot hole or two may need to be filled. Early in the book I may allude to something later in the book, only to find as I wrote that I never added the thing I intended. Those all have to be fixed. My past experience is that the first round of edits will result in more words, as I think of things I need to clarify, or more references to put in, especially in a book in a foreign culture as this is. I suspect I’ll add close to 1,000 words in this edit.

The second round of edits will be for the purpose of trying to reduce the word count. A first draft will almost always be wordy. Too many modifiers, too much passive voice, too many times of not thinking whether a certain word is needed. I don’t know where this will end up. It’s possible I’ll find whole sentences to come out or paragraphs to drastically trim. Those 1,000 words from the first edit may be offset and more in the second edit.

Edits after that will consist more of proof-reading, and incorporating things that beta readers might find. Not that my past experience with beta readers pointing out minor glitches is all that good. Normally I receive, if I’m lucky, general feedback about publishability, though on well over half of the books I’ve given out to beta readers I heard nothing from them at all, not even if they read the book.

So for a week, or two at the most, I’m not writing new material or even editing. I’m going to use this time to do the following.

  • Prepare Doctor Luke’s Assistant and In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People for issue as print books. I finished most of DLA last night, and should finish it tonight.
  • Complete, or at least get well along, on my 2012 income taxes. I’ve made a start, though there’s much more to go.
  • Decide on whether to enter two or three poems in a poetry contest. At $5 per entry it’s probably throwing money away, but….
  • Write a query letter for a magazine article idea I have and sent it to a major Christian magazine.
  • Write and mail a genealogy letter to a cousin. I’ve been putting this off due to busyness.
  • Keep up with blogging.
  • File a bunch of stuff.
  • Work with the cover designer for China Tour.

So the time will be full, just not on new writing.

Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Conflict, Conflict, Conflict

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It’s been more than a week since I’ve written here. So busy, so lazy, so uninspired.

I’m down to the last three chapters in China Tour. This is the point where the action should get fast and furious, the conflict be greatest, the hero become the hero, and then have a quick cool-down to the end of the book.

Randy Ingermansson, a novelist best known for creating a system of novel writing called the Snowflake Method, discusses how to begin a book. In the opening, he says, introduce your main character and plunge him/her into conflict. Then, as the book goes on, raise the stakes in the conflict. Make it harder to achieve aims while at the same time make the consequences of failing to achieve aims more disastrous.

This is what the American reader wants. Whether it’s the same in other countries I don’t know. But books that follow this “formula” seem to be the ones that sell better. In real estate it’s location, location, location. In novel writing it’s conflict, conflict, conflict.

The conflict could be physical danger, emotional turmoil, or just about anything. Frank Peretti’s early and best known novels were about spiritual conflict.

I’ve read some novels, however, that were so full of conflict I was tired of it half way through. One book that struck me this way was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I need to first confess that I haven’t read the full book yet. I read some kind of abridgement to it, and listened to an audio abridgement, and read some of the book. Tolkien’s writing style isn’t my favorite, and I’ve had trouble getting back to it, and back to The Lord of the Ring trilogy, which I also started and didn’t finish.

In the abridgement, Bilbo never seemed to get a breath to just be a hobbit. I was tired for his sake by the time he got to the forest elves (I think I’m remembering that correctly). I would have liked a little more balance between conflict and resting. Oh, well, that may be just me. The popularity of the book indicates millions of readers don’t agree with me.

In China Tour, one of the couples has reached Beijing and the other will in the next chapter. The remaining two aims, not necessarily in agreement with each other, is to see the Bibles delivered to the persecuted Chinese Christian, and to make contact with the Chinese dissident and put him in CIA custody for extraction from the country. That was supposed to have happened in a rural province in the south, over the border to Vietnam, but the tourist couple got in the way of the spy couple, and the plans got blasted to smithereens.

I have the means of extraction figured out, the location, and how the principles will achieve it. I don’t know if the conflict is high enough or not. I’ll know that tomorrow or Sunday when I actually write it. I know for sure that I haven’t raise the stakes of failure sufficiently. Just this morning, however, I thought of a way to do that. It will happen in a chapter already written, and I’ll catch it on the first round of edits.

So, for the next three writing days I will be trying to create conflict. A strange position for a lover of peace to be in. Wish me luck.

Operation Lotus Sunday

Back in the Saddle Again

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After three months of doing almost nothing on China Tour, self-enforced first because of holiday preparation and travel, then because of sickness, then because of busyness, then because of more travels, then because of after-travel busyness, tonight I once again picked it up and added words to it.

 

Wikimedia Commons, photo by Guety, used with Creative Commons license

During the last three months I received comments from one of three beta readers who have seen it in its incomplete state. Well, actually two, for one woman’s husband gave me some general oral feedback. That woman said she would like to see more local references and culture added in, to give a better feel of being in the country. She and her husband have visited China, and been to some of the places mentioned in the book.

I figured that wouldn’t be too difficult to do, given the number of sources I have. And I’m not talking just about Internet sources. I’ve mentioned the trip diary before, which I’ve made good use of. And I think I mentioned the 1983 Fodor’s China, the tour book we used to plan the trip and then during it. Two other sources, in the house, that I haven’t tapped, I will get to this weekend. One is all the letters and postcards we sent home to relatives, which they kept, and which we now have.

The other is all the propaganda materials the Chinese kept giving to us. It seems that at every hotel we received attractive, magazine-type printed matter. I don’t remember too much about them. They have been packed away in a box for close to thirty years, and moved from Saudi to North Carolina to storage to Bella Vista to Bentonville and back to Bella Vista again. But I know right where they are: on a specific shelf in the basement, in a different place than the trip diary was. Friday night I’ll pull that out and see what’s in there, and if any of it can be of use to enhance the reader’s experience.

One other source I have are the tourist books we picked up in a few cities. I didn’t think of them till tonight; not sure why. Again, the point is to drop in short statements here and there to help the reader with the fictional dream, the suspension of reality, and feel like they are in the scene. That doesn’t take a lot of words, but coming up with the right words will be a challenge. I figure that will be part of the editing process.

So what did I get done tonight? The scene that is part of Plot Point 1, the inciting incident that causes the hero to take up the quest, had a serious flaw in it. Maybe not a flaw as much as a glaring omission. About two weeks ago, while going about my business at the office and making a casual observation, I realized this omission. It took me a while to ponder it and figure out how to correct the scene. That figured out a few days ago, I just needed to jump in and write.

But that jumping in a writing isn’t so easy when you haven’t been writing for a while. For several nights I reported on my Facebook author’s page that that would be the day when I’d fix that scene. But I didn’t.

Finally tonight I did. It took only twenty minutes or so to read the scene, figure out where the insertions should go, and write out the insertions in long hand. I won’t type them till this weekend.

Then, I took the rest of an hour to read more in the chapter and make a number of edits. None of it was major. Things like using “a bit” too often, if at all. Or using “immediately” three times in close proximity. Or failing to close quotes or use a period where needed. Things like that.

Work on the book will begin in earnest this weekend, and continue until done. I hope that will be just two weeks. I do have my income taxes to work on, but that should be easier than the last couple of years. My spreadsheets are already made, needing only any tweaking based on this year’s IRS forms. And all my forms and statements are in place.

Let the novel writing resume.

Carlyle, Harmony of the gospels, Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Three-part Writing Problem

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Or four parts if you include my two blogs as another part, or if you count them as two then actually five parts.

I continue to read in Carlyle’s works, even going so far as to prepare my own bibliography of his works, and to purchase a printed bibliography. I found the ones on-line to be very inadequate. Even the one I downloaded from Google books, published in 1881, had a lot of gaps, as did the 1919 one I also downloaded. The 1989 one I ordered came, and it seems to be quite complete. From it I’m completing my bibliography, trying at the same time to figure out how to structure it. Each evening I try to read a few pages in Correspondence Between Goethe and Carlyle. This is going well, despite many formatting problems with the e-book. I should finish this by this coming weekend.

I need to resume my work on China Tour, and bring that to completion. As I think I said previously I have only 3.7 chapters to go, and I know pretty much what I want to write. Scenes from these chapters dance in my head. I believe I have the method worked out whereby the goals of both the CIA couple and the Bible smuggling couple are achieved. Even the denouement is clear to me. About ten days ago I realized I had a major omission in an early chapter, dealing with when the two couples meet and how they resolve a particular problem. The additions to a specific scene have at last come to me, and now I need to write it.

Then today, in my before work hours, I resumed work on my Harmony of the Gospels. It’s been a while since I wrote about that on the blog, and I haven’t touched it since last June. This is more a labor of love and a self-study aid. I’m down to having one appendix to write, that of the crucifixion. Today I wrote a few words in it, and pulled up a reference I downloaded many months ago and began reading it. I refreshed my memory of what needs to go into this appendix. I basically have about 30 minutes a day to work on this. I suspect it will take me two weeks, at that rate, to write this appendix.

I’d really like to add a couple of essays to the Harmony, not necessarily tied to specific chapters or times in Jesus’ life, but to some general topic, such as why try to harmonize the gospels at all. I started one of those over a year ago, and must see where it stands.

Then my blogs demand to be worked in. I’m trying to post at a six-per-week frequency: three to each blog, with one day off. I haven’t arrived there yet, generally achieving four per week, sometimes even three. I want to keep working on that schedule.

But for right now, here is how I plan on dividing my writing time.

  • Spend 30 minutes a day before work on the appendices and essays of the Harmony.
  • Spend 30 minutes a day (max) during the lunch hour on my Carlyle research, though toward what end I’m still not sure. This will never end until I make an end of it.
  • Spend the rest of my writing time, which is whatever minutes I can carve out of the evening and weekend monoliths, on China Tour until it is finished.
  • In whatever moments I can further find, perhaps in the pieces chipped away from the monoliths, to write six blog posts a week.

This is a worthy goal, one which I will work hard to make into a reality.

Carlyle

Researching for works far in the future

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For the last three or four weeks—I guess since I broke off from writing China Tour on Feb 4 as we prepared for our trip—my reading has been mainly for research.

Not research for China Tour, though I do have some materials on hand that I should be reading to flesh out national references and actual sights the Brownwells and the Whites would have seen. Not in the civil war volume of The Annals of America, which might lead me to good source material for a civil war edition of Documenting America. And not in the book on colonial America that I started sometime last year, and might serve as some background for a different edition of Documenting America.

No, all of those would make sense. Since when did anything I do with my writing make sense? No, I’m reading in the works of Thomas Carlyle, and even in critical evaluation of his works. I doubt this will lead to any marketable book, or to any publishable article, any time soon.

When I received my Nook, I searched Barnes and Noble to see if they had free books (as Kindle has tons of free books). I found they did, and so I loaded up on some. Most of them were John Wesley works and Thomas Carlyle works. I read one of Wesley’s, the shifted to Carlyle. One of my writer friends had spoken highly of his On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, so I decided to read that first. As of last night, I’m seven pages short of finishing.

It’s been an interesting read (sorry, Mrs. Rosen). Based on a series of lectures Carlyle gave in 1840, which were then cobbled up into a book in 1841, it has some diverse subject matter. I can see some essays coming from it, and certainly a number of blog posts. One thing I found was a general lack of an on-line bibliography of Carlyle’s works, so I put one together. I since learned of one published in 1989, so I ordered it used and it should be here any day. It will be interesting to see how comprehensive the bibliography I prepared is. But I can’t see any of this giving any significant, immediate boost to my writing career.

So why am I doing it? Interest? Trying to be erudite? A sense that this is an important writer (despite his later lapse into racism; or maybe he’s important for that reason, to learn how it happened and avoid it)? That it seems my great-grand uncle David Sexton, based on books he left behind, was interested in Carlyle?

I wish I knew. I’ll finish Heroes tonight and start planning out some blog posts on it. The bibliography will come tomorrow or Thursday; I’ll take a few days to compare it to my list and most likely make some adjustments. Once all that is done, I’m hoping this interest in Carlyle will fade, at least somewhat, and I can get back to more profitable research and writing.

But, in doing this now, I’m happy. And that should count for something.

Carlyle, Wesley, Writing

Solitude

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A curious convergence today caused me to read two items on the same subject from greatly different locations. Literary agent Rachelle Gardner today posted to her blog an article titled The Lonely Life of the Writer. Her point is that, since the largest part of the world doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a writer or to seek publication, the writer is pretty much alone in those pursuits.

Then, looking for something to print and read during the lunch hour, I went to the Carlyle Letters On-line, pulled up a month in a target period for which I want to know more about Carlyle’s thoughts and pursuits, and I found this in a letter he addressed to a friend from his home town.

Zimmermann has written a book which he calls ‘the pleasures of solitude’: I would not have you to believe him: solitude in truth has few pleasures, uninterrupted solitude is full of pain.

So the solitude of the writer’s life is a converging subject in those two reads. Solitude can mean different things, however. As Rachelle Gardner used it, it was not being alone physically but being not understood by those we are around. Carlyle seems to mean it as the physical, though he quite possibly could mean either one or both.

Continuing in Carlyle’s letter, I find this interesting continuation of his thoughts.

But solitude, or company more distressing, is not the worst ingredient of this condition. The thought that one’s best days are hurrying darkly and uselessly away is yet more grievous. It is vain to deny it, my friend, I am altogether an unprofitable creature.

This reminds me of John Wesley’s statement in a letter to a woman friend, early in his life, about he feared passing through this life and not leaving his mark. Carlyle echoes this.

Perhaps this is a feeling more widespread among those who pursue the creative arts than I figured upon first discovering that Wesley quote. The time it takes from the decision to produce a written work that one hopes will impact the world until the time it actually does impact the world, a time of solitude of mind if not of body, is huge. No matter how short it may be it will seem long. Our words designed to entertain or inform reach no one for the longest time.

I have no real conclusion for this, no take-away value for the reader. Count this as a journal entry of an observer of his own writing life.

Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Back after a break

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On February 7, Lynda and I began a long road trip to San Diego. The main purpose was to attend the Environmental Connection 13 conference, the annual conference of the International Erosion Control Association. I moderated a panel discussion on low impact development, and presented a half-day course in specification writing for erosion and sediment control works. We included three vacation days, plus the weekends, and so were gone for 12 days.

During this time I did very little with writing. I brought the printed manuscript of China Tour with me, intending to edit it, or thinking that possibly Lynda would read some more in it. All I did was read and handwrite some edits on the first chapter. I also kept up with a couple of writing blogs, though not rigorously every day. I worked on re-formatting a Thomas Carlyle book that I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. That’s actually quite enjoyable and relaxing.

But we’re back now. It’s time to get back in the saddle and get to writing. China Tour lacks only three chapters and maybe 8,000 words from being finished. Then of course will be comprehensive editing. My cover designer is lined up, and we’ve had conversations about the cover. A marketing plan is rolling around in my brain. Right now I’m hoping for a book launch in May, though whether that’s early or late will depend on a number of circumstances, most importantly the birth of grandchild #3, granddaughter #1, currently “scheduled” for mid-May but anticipated earlier just like her next older brother.

self-publishing

Errors in Self-Published Books

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This will be a short post. The universal complaint about self-published books is that they are poorly edited. They need a content editor, line editor, and proof-reader. In my book The Candy Store Generation a fried read it after publishing and found four or five errors (in 196 pages). At some point I’ll fix those and re-publish.

Today I was looking at Doctor Luke’s Assistant on Amazon, specifically at the “Customers who bought this book also bought…” section. I clicked on one of those. I won’t say what the book was. It has 13 reviews to my 12 for DLA, but a significantly lower rating mix. As I usually do I checked the lower ratings, and they contained the “lots of errors” complaint. Sine the book has a “Look Inside” feature, I went inside. The book opens like this:

On the 29th of Sivan, in the year 2449, between the Wilderness of Paran and the Wilderness of Tzin, west of Egypt and south of Canaan, in a remote desert location known as Kadesh-Barnea or Ein-Mishpat, there were fourteen hours, four minutes and forty seconds of light in a day.

I stopped there. Kadesh-Barnea is on the Sinai Peninsula, the first watering hole south of Israel/Canaan and EAST of Egypt, not WEST.

A minor detail, perhaps, but important enough that someone who knows a smidgen of geography will be turned off and not buy the book. I’d like to contact the author and advise him to fix it, but not sure that I should.

I hope I hope I hope that, in my books, I haven’t mixed up east and west anywhere.