All posts by David Todd

self-publishing

It’s Maddening Being Your Own Publisher

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And that’s what a self-published writer is: his own publisher.

 I got the Kindle requirements down without too much trouble, and my two books are up and available. Sales are slow, but I’m not doing a whole lot to promote it, pending having my print book available. I figured out Smashwords, and both my books are available there, and in their premium catalogue. That means they are distributed to the Apple iTunes store, the Sony Reader store, and elsewhere. That hasn’t helped me much so far as I have no sales there. Of course, I haven’t done any promotion to speak of, because I’m waiting till I have my print book available till I promote.

So why isn’t the print book available, and when will it be available? I finally began the process this week. On Tuesday I opened my CreateSpace account. This is an Amazon company for self-publishing print on demand books. Also on Tuesday I read instructions and watched the training video.

On Wednesday I began the process of getting my book, Documenting America,  printed. I created the book in the CreateSpace system, got an ISBN for it (the freebie kind), and pulled up my MS Word file and did the reformatting needed to go from e-book to print book, including changing the page size to 5.5 x 8.5 inches, one of the CS standard sizes. Finally I was ready to upload my book to CS. I learned it had to be converted to PDF first, and here I was stuck. I only have the Adobe Reader, not Adobe Acrobat, the program that lets you create PDF files. Getting that I soon learned would set me back $139 or $179.

I was aware of several low cost or no cost alternates, but rather than go to the trouble of finding and downloading them (it was getting kind of late), I decided to e-mail the reformatted book to my office and see if I would be allowed to use our office software to create personal PDF files. This morning I learned I could use it, and so created the file on my noon hour. Problem was, it didn’t create 5.5 x 8.5 inch pages. It created 8.5 x 11 inch pages, with the print limited to the middle 5.5 x 8.5 inches less the internal margins I set.

So I did what I normally do when faced with a problem like this. I read some of the help and experimented with the menu system. I soon saw where I could convert the PDF writer to write to 5.5 x 8.5 inch pages, and created a new PDF file to overwrite the other one. Except, the new file still had 8.5 x 11 pages. Did it twice more to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake, with the same results.

So I did what I normally do when faced with a problem like this. I went to look for CreateSpace forums, where members help themselves work through problems. Found the forums, joined them, and began reading. I found the question I had asked several times in a couple of threads, but never answered. Some of those threads run twenty pages or more. At the moment I haven’t the heart to read the twenty pages. Maybe I’ll start a new thread.

So I did what I normally do when faced with a problem like this. I went and got my lunch and ate it, along with some chips I’m not supposed to have. Through all this time, I set aside writing in favor of publishing. I’d rather be writing. But writing won’t necessarily lead to books in print, sales, and readers. So do the publishing thing I will.

Somehow I’ll get some help with this PDF conversion, and get it right. I suspect that in 2 weeks to a month I’ll be holding books in my hand and have them available to sell. And I’ll rejoice.

Writing

The Other Part of To Do Lists

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In my last post I mentioned how having a plan for my novel helped me when I came to a point where I wasn’t sure what to do next. I made a plan and then began following that plan.

That doesn’t mean the plan was perfect. Already I’ve made two adjustments as I went. I consolidated two chapters and shifted the order of two others. But the plan has kept me going, and I continue to make almost daily progress on the book.

But, what I don’t have, or I should say what I haven’t done a very good job on, is developing a to-do list system for my writing. At work I print out a daily log sheet, where I record major activities, people I interact with, log my calls, and sometimes log my e-mails. Instructions from clients, instructions to contractors–all goes on the sheet.

One part of the sheet has a list of my current projects, which I change as I need to, and a space for me to write my to-do list. I’ve never done the best job with the to-do list, but I generally use it. On the left side I write things for the office, and on the right side I write personal items (pay this bill, call the plumber, etc.). As I say, I’ve never done the best job at keeping and following a to-do list.

However, about two years ago, maybe not that long, I heard about a system where you put only four things on your to-do list. I suppose the idea is you can concentrate better on those things. If you get them all done, add four more. I’ve been following that, and I think it’s helped. Although, sometimes I see that list with only four items on it and think that’s all I have to do, and tend to slack off a bit. So I’ve taken to drawing a line after the four and adding two or three more things, just to remind myself that there’s more that I must do.

Well, for writing I have never been able to develop that kind of system. I tried listing all my works-in-progress, and drawing a to-do list from them. That hasn’t worked real well, partly because my works-in-progress keep changing. I’m working on a new system now, and I hope within a week or two to be able to report back that I’ve found something that works.

Without a to-do list, I forget things. I forgot to check back with my Smashwords dashboard after I uploaded Documenting America to see whether it was accepted to the premium catalogue. It wasn’t, and it sat there for a couple of days without my checking it. Then, after I learned that, I took a couple more days to get to it. Finally I made the corrections, only they weren’t the right corrections, and it still wasn’t accepted. Even this time I failed to check the dashboard daily, and consequently was a few days late getting it corrected and accepted.

Same thing with doing the work needed to get the paper edition of Documenting America out. I need to do some study at CreateSpace, and see how to turn my manuscript into print. I actually think it’s fairly easy, but I never seem to get to it. Perhaps having a to-do list will help.

Anyway, I’m working on it. As I say, hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll have something that works.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

Writing Productivity

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on The Writers View 2 (TWV2) e-mail group this week, the question asked by a panel member was about productivity for the writer. How do you establish productivity as a routine? What derails your productivity? How do you get it back.

I was interested, given that I’ve just come through a time of pretty good productivity, but anticipate less over the next couple of weeks. Almost all my writing time was spent on my baseball novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. With the 850 words I added last night, it now stands at about 37,000 words, on the way to somewhere around 85,000.

When the good productivity began about three weeks ago (or a little less), I worked on it over a weekend, and got 2,000 words written both on Saturday and again on Sunday. It took me a while to get back to it during the week. I was trying to correct something on the Smashwords edition of Documenting America, and it wasn’t working.  Plus just getting it ready for Smashwords took some doing, a couple of weeks before that. That was “writing time”, even though no words got added to paper.

That Wednesday I added at least 2,000 words to FTSP, maybe more. I came up to the end of the part of the book that was clearly planned out. Now the planning was all in my mind. I’m in the part of the book where “strange incidents” begin happening to the protagonist, Ronny Thompson, as the NY Mafia guy tries to distract him from pitching well, thus hoping the Cubs don’t make the playoffs, which means they obviously wouldn’t win the World Series.

I had thought through some of these strange incidents, but had never planned them. Which one of the five would be first? Which second, etc.? How would I lead up to each? How would I make it clear to the reader that something wasn’t quite right about the way things were happening? Then what about the counter-moves by the Chicago Mafia guy? Would he respond to each strange incident, or were his counter-moves actually in the works before the incidents?

Then what about the sports reporter for the Chicago Tribune? How was I going to work him in in response to the strange incidents? I hadn’t really thought about that at all. He was simply going to receive a packet of material at his desk from an anonymous source, material damaging to the Thompson family, and run it in the paper. That didn’t seem quite right, however.

So on Thursday of last week, rather than try to work on the novel by adding words, I worked on it by developing a plan for the last 58,000 words. I listed the strange incidents yet to come and put them in the logical order. I interspersed them with interactions of Ronny and his girlfriend, Ronny on the diamond, the reporter doing some investigative work, the two Mafia guys and their rogue associates, the girlfriend by herself.

Three important things included in this planning were related to Ronny’s girlfriend. was the scene where the readers come to realize (if they haven’t figured it out from the foreshadowing) that Ronny’s girlfriend is a Mafia plant, and not a very nice girl. I planned a chapter of Ronny and Sarah having a quiet, innocent dinner at his apartment, and a chapter of her coming to realize what her life had become, and how it was once better, setting the stage for her character arc by the end of the book. All that I knew I wanted in the book, but hadn’t actually figured out how it was going to happen. Now I know, and the first two of those three events are written.

To each of the chapters I added a number of words I wanted it to be, approximately, with the whole thing adding up to my planned 85,000. I’m not being dogmatic about these chapter lengths, however. I’m just guessing, based on the items in the chapter, how long they’ll be.

So beginning last Friday, through Monday, I had great productivity. Looking at my written plan, which could be called a loose outline, I began writing, not skipping anything. Just knowing what was coming next helped me to prepare. I’m sure in my non-writing hours I thought through the chapter I would write that night. In four days I added more than 10,000 words, then on two weekend days, with distractions and some health issues, I added another 1,400.

I was going to write about the second part of planning to increase productivity, but I’ve run out of noon hour time, and this post is too long already. I’ll add another post soon.

May the productivity continue.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People

Writing Productivity

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Once again, I’m batching it, at least through tonight. Lynda is in Oklahoma City, helping tend to grandchildren and visiting a friend in the hospital there, someone she went to church and school with in Meade Kansas. So it’s been quiet around the house. I often don’t turn the TV on much, preferring to read or write in the silence. Some writers say they do better with noise around, either background music or street noises. I think I do better in the silence.

For all the peace and quiet, I didn’t have as productive a week as I could have had. For the week I added over 8,000 words to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, bringing the total words to a couple of hundred short of 35,000, on its way to around 85,000. That sounds like a lot of production, and I suppose it is. If I could do that many words every week I’d be done with it in six or seven weeks. Done with the first draft, that is.

However, I could have written much more. I allowed the spam problem on this blog take at least a day away from production and I tried to figure out what to do. A lot of that time wasn’t figuring time, however, but fuming time. Fuming and wasting time, feeling sorry for myself. Another day I was too tired to write. I sat at the computer for a couple of hours, but got nothing written. A professional writer should be able to fight through the tiredness, and a produce through perspiration when inspiration fails.

Part of my slowness was that a couple of these chapters were something I was writing up to, but hadn’t figured out exactly how I’d do them. One was the first Mafia-induced distraction in the protagonist’s life. I came to that chapter with no plan. I was able to write it, and I think produce a good chapter, with a twist or two that didn’t come to me until during the writing.

Then there was the chapter where the protagonist’s “girlfriend” shows the readers that she isn’t what she claims to be. I had sort of been dreading that chapter, knowing it had to be in the book but not sure how to write it in a way that my mother would approve. Well, not my mother. She didn’t put many restrictions on her reading. Let’s say in a way my mother-in-law would approve. She doesn’t want to read things the least risqué or lurid. As I was writing the chapter, I found a way to show what I wanted to show without being at all explicit. I wrote that chapter over the weekend, and I’m pleased with it as it stands. I’m sure I can improve it some in rewrites.

Yesterday I wrote two chapters, over 3,500 words. The second one is a critical chapter where the girlfriend has her first plot point, the event that causes her to embark on the journey that will bring her through her character arc. Those that teach writing talk about the two plot points the protagonist should go through that leads him into the stages of his journey, but I’ve not heard them talk about plot points for characters below the protagonist-antagonist level, but it seems to me such events apply to them as well.

Anyhow, said girlfriend has begun her character arc. Tonight, plans are for the protagonist to have his fourth “strange thing” happen to him that is really a Mafia-induced event. It’s a big one, done under the noses of three people who are supposed to protect the protag from such things. I plan for that to be only about 1,000 words, though we’ll see how it goes. I’ve thought of one change I need to make in an earlier chapter. I’d love to have enough time to get into another chapter, where the “good” Mafia Don is able to add some protection for the protag in a way that nobody would suspect him.

One thing I did, on Friday I think, after I was too tired to write a second chapter, was to develop an outline for the rest of the book. I had an outline in my mind, even down to thinking through a scene here, a scene there, but I had nothing in writing, nothing that told me, “Okay, you’ve finished this chapter; what comes next?” Now I have that, and it’s a good feeling. It shows me that my thoughts on the length of the book are about right, and that the plot is about right. All that’s missing are the words.

family, Writing

Is it always going to be this way?

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I don’t take adversity very well. I need my life to be full of peace in order to be productive and creative. Today was anything but that.

It actually began last night, getting home from church around 8 PM, I found a large hole dug in my yard. The underground phone lines had been marked on the ground about a week ago, and the digging was where the markings were. Since we haven’t had any phone problems, I assumed this was an un-requested upgrade of the service line. Entering the house, I found we had no phone service.

It took me four phone calls today to find out who was responsible. That man couldn’t tell me when it would be fixed, just that they’d have a technician out not later than 5 PM tomorrow. Meanwhile I get home and the hole is still open and fenced off and I still have no phone service. If AT&T wants people to keep their land lines, they are sure doing a poor job of showing it.

Then there was the spam attack and trying to figure out what to do about it. That took almost 3 hours. I’d load a WordPress help page, and find it a mass of words, crammed together, with graphics and links. Page after page, link after link. You would think, since this is such a problem, they would have somewhere on the dashboard a direct link saying something like, “Download and install this widget to protect against automatic spam swarms. But no, you must search for it. Figure out exactly what you want and then search for it. Go through the multiple crammed screens, file downloads, file extractions. Never a Wizard to show what to do next.

Finally I figured it out. The protection is installed and active. Two hundred fifty auto spam posts deleted. All desire to write gone. I started the blog to develop a web presence to build a writer’s platform—that ready-made audience that agents and editors want you to have before they will even talk with you about any book. Yeah, right. My audience is smaller than my techno-IQ, which is almost in negative numbers.

I can’t help but think of that song that we played on tape and sang for Ephraim multiple times last week: “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly….” In this case it would be: There once was a writer who started a blog. Stupid dog to start up a blog. He started a blog to capture some readers…. I need to work on it beyond there.

Goodnight all. I can’t work under these conditions. Might as well go eat.

miscellaneous

Spam

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Folks, I have temporarily disabled comments while I deal with a spam problem. I had over 200 spam comments posted to the blog today, and I can’t deal with it. This is all very confusing to me on WordPress. On Blogger it was much easier to protect against spam.

Okay, I’ve installed protection, so I’m re-opening comments. Nothing showed up on my screen, but maybe that’s because I’m logged-in as administrator. I’ll try logging out and see what I get.

Documenting America, Writing

Citizen and Patriot

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Once again I am considering changing my writing course. Not changing it, exactly, but trying once again to focus it.

I came back from the Write-To-Publish Conference with too many irons in the fire. I worked on them as best I could, but have not been able to spend the brain power on them to make them into real prospects. I need to lay a couple of these works-in-progress aside.

Then today was a blog parade hosted by WordServe Literary Agency, with many of their clients posting on their platform building efforts. Out of twenty or more blog posts to that many different blogs, only a few dealt exclusively with the writer’s platform, the rest dealing with marketing of books in general. The thoughts I gleaned from the weight of these posts, and from another writer’s blog recommended to me today, were these:

  1. A network of family and friends who will champion your work is the first essential.
  2. Concentrate on one genre, to maximize marketing efforts as well as for other reasons.
  3. Social networking has become quite effective for book marketing.
  4. Blog to meet readers needs, not for other writers.
  5. Have a blog that targets the audience of your book.

These all seem like truisms to me. Well, except maybe social media. I have limited experience with it, and haven’t been able to satisfy in my own mind that is true. Certainly my initial experience with it says it is not true, but that maybe I have to work at it both harder and smarter.

So I think immediately I’ll exclusively devote my actual writing time to two works, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, and the Documenting America brand, which would include The Candy Store Generation as the next installment. To build up a network, I’ve begun casting around for groups to join and participate in. I joined Conservative Arkansas today because, while I tried to take a tone in Documenting America that is not truly conservative, I think conservatives are the most likely audience. I’ve already made one post there and had a couple of people like it.

My blogs certainly have not given me an army of fans who will champion my writing. In fact, with a couple of notable exceptions, my family and friends have proven utterly disinterested in anything I write. Writing acquaintances have shown more interest. So I guess my efforts will have to be targeted to find a new army of friends.

Concerning having a blog targeted toward my work in progress, what I’ve thought of is to open a new blog page under this David A. Todd writer’s blog aimed at the potential audience of Documenting America. I would make posts in support of that work, possibly an excerpt from the book, possibly research toward a second volume, possibly editorials. Anything that would draw in and inform people who might want to buy Documenting America.

Doing this would mean making 3 posts a week in the new blog, which I’m thinking of calling “Citizen and Patriot”, after the passage in the James Otis speech around which chapters 1 and 2 of DA are built. But it would also mean having to cut back on my other two blogs. And finding time to write freelance articles would be impossible, so that would be gone for a while.

So my question to you, loyal readers, is this: Does this sound like a good idea to you? Should I write a blog targeted to US history, focused on original documents, not analysis? I’m anxious to know what you think.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Harmony of the gospels, Writing

Getting into a Writing Routine

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Okay, excuses have to stop. My tick-borne disease is on the mend, if not fully reduced to antibodies. Grandson #1 is gone back to Oklahoma. Blogs are linked, and I can put different content on each and feel okay about it. So the time has come to get to work and write.

Last night I began the task of re-establishing a routine, and perhaps tweaking what I’ve done in the past. With my wife out-of-town, and with my aches and pains under control, I had no excuse but to be B-I-C for a significant number of hours yesterday. That’s “butt-in-chair” for you non-writers, implied that it’s either in front of a working computer screen and keyboard or at a writing desk with paper and manuscript.

I was at the computer from about 3:30 PM to 9:30 PM, with a 45 minute break for supper. During that time I worked on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I wrote about 1900 words. Why not more in 5 1/4 hours, you might ask? First, I re-read the chapter I wrote last week, making a couple of small, though important, changes that should add a little intrigue as to what the mafiosos are doing. Then I remembered one enhancement I wanted to make to the first chapter, a simple six word sentence fragment by a radio announcer that will add nuance throughout the book.

Then, I set to work on Chapter 14. But, I hadn’t really planned or thought out this chapter, about spring training in my protagonist’s first full season in the major leagues. So it was a struggle to get into it. I kept “shelling out”, as I call it—to a computer game or a web site or Facebook or turning the TV on and off to hear some of the raging political news. I’d spend five minutes writing, get stuck, shell out to a game for fifteen minutes, think of something else to write and come back and write it. Then I’d get stuck again, shell out again, this time to a publishing industry blog, figure out what to do next, and come back to writing.

After my supper break, I had less and less of the shell out time and more time in the book as the needs of the chapter and the words of the characters gelled in my mind. In 5 1/4 hours I should have been able to write 3,000 or even 4,000 words. Maybe, if I was in a chapter I had already thought through, I could have done that. Or maybe, if I had a better way to think of what to write next, I could have produced more. But I completed the chapter, and think it’s not bad, and I enhanced two other chapters with not more than a hundred words. So I’m not displeased. Tonight I’ll be working on a chapter I have thought through, so hopefully I’ll get more done.

This morning I arrived at the office at the usual time, about 6:45 AM, beating the main commuting traffic. My devotions are from the Harmony of the Gospels that I wrote. Then I sit with my coffee and spend about 20 minutes adding to the passage notes section of the Harmony and twenty minutes formatting the letters of John Wesley. These I downloaded from The Wesley Center at the NNU website. I format them in a form I like that is tight for printing yet still very readable. I’m on volume 6 out of 8 volumes, the first five fully formatted and printed and residing in 3-ring binders, sometimes read, often waiting to be read.

Are these smart writing pursuits? I don’t know. The Harmony is not, I think, a commercial project. It’s more of a labor of love and a self-study guide. The Wesley letters might be a legitimate writing activity if I ever get my act together and pursue the Wesley study series I pitched at the Write-To-Publish Conference. That idea isn’t dead; I just haven’t figured out the exact form the series should take, and developed the idea enough to present a proposal to the publisher. But this is sort of a labor of love as well, and will lead to excellent reading matter for me once it’s all done.

So my routine is coming together. I don’t know how long it will last. I’d like for three months of it, with not too many interruptions. That will give me a completed novel, completed Harmony, completed Wesley letters, and some time to work on other projects. I might even feel like a productive writer.

writer's platform

More on Writer’s Platform

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Today on her blog, literary agent Rachelle Gardner posted the elements of a book proposal, at least how their agency wants to see them. While different agencies vary slightly, the elements Rachelle posted are pretty much universal. Every agent wants to see this information in a proposal before they will consider your book or send it on to an editor.

What troubles me most about the proposal is this statement, which she says is needed in both non-fiction and fiction proposals.

Author marketing: This is where you’ll talk about your platform. How are YOU able to reach your target audience to market your book? This is NOT the place for expressing your “willingness” to participate in marketing, or your “great ideas” for marketing. This is the place to tell what you’ve already done, what contacts you already have, and what plans you’ve already made to help market your book. A list of speaking engagements already booked is great; radio or television programs you’re scheduled to appear on or have in the past; a newsletter you’re already sending out regularly; a blog that gets an impressive number of daily hits. Include specific blog stats (monthly unique visitors, monthly pageviews), number of Twitter followers and number of Facebook fans/friends.

This is what bugs me most about trying to be published through a regular, royalty paying print publisher. “Speaking engagements already booked”? Really? What am I supposed to say? “I have this great book, and if it is every accepted by a publisher, it will be in bookstores in 24 months.” The audience would laugh me off the stage. Same thing for radio, double-same for television.

I just don’t get this idea that you must have a speaking platform in order to get a book published. Who will book someone to speak if they don’t have a book published? If I were scheduling speakers for some meeting, say a quarterly men’s meeting at a large church, if I had the choice to book a published author to speak or a wannabe author, which one would I choose? The published author, of course. Who in their right mind wants to spend an evening listening to someone who so far hasn’t been able to get published? This seems exactly backwards to me.

But maybe it’s possible with those civic clubs that meet weekly—the Kiwanis, Lions, Civitians, and probably half a dozen others. They need so many speakers that maybe they will take about anyone. But when I call the volunteer with the organization and ask to speak before the club, what do I say? “I’m trying to get published, but have to have speaking engagements lined up before any publisher will even talk with me. Want me to speak to your group?”

Now obviously, that’s not how I should go about it. For my book Documenting America, I should say something like, “May I speak to your club on a unique way to study USA history? It’s this….” If the concept is compelling, maybe the Kiwanis club will schedule me. There’s 17 Kiwanis clubs in our two county area, and probably five times that number for all the civic clubs put together. Is it possible I could speak to them all about a book not published?

I’m struggling with this.

writer's platform, Writing

Progress on Writing and “Platform”

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If I’m a writer, I have to write something. A good rule would be “Do something writing-related every day.” I pretty much follow that, though of course some days are more productive than others.

Yesterday, for example, on my writing “diary” sheet—which is a table of days of the month across and writing items down, with specific details footnoted at the bottom—I checked the following.

  • Harmony of the Gospels (wrote passage notes; some edits on the harmony)
  • John Wesley letters (formatting volume 6 for MS Word document)
  • An Arrow Through the Air (my other blog—posted there)
  • Absolute Write forums (posted)
  • Rachelle Gardner blog (posted)
  • Other writing blogs (posted)
  • Documenting America (format for Smashwords)

That’s not a bad number of items, though it’s easy to see that, except for the blog posts, I did no writing. I don’t consider my Harmony of the Gospels to be a commercial writing project; it’s more a labor of love.

So a day went by with no specific progress on my works-in-progress, other than formatting Documenting America for uploading to Smashwords. That’s important, but not writing. Also, the day went by with no promotion of my writing. The posts on the blogs and forums are a sort of general promotion, mainly in the fact that agents see my name and activity, and fellow writers and a few potential buyers see the same. I don’t dismiss the value in that, but it’s not a big platform building activity.

Obviously I have to devote more efforts to writing and building a writer’s platform. I need to work on this website, and figure out how to include a “contact me” link. I somehow need to promote my author page on Facebook to try to get more than the 8 fans I currently have. I need to start creating a buzz for Documenting America. I don’t want to do a lot of that until I get it listed on Smashwords and included in their premium catalogue for wide distribution.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m not unhappy with my recent efforts, but I’m not satisfied either. My physical problems of late are starting to fade. I’m feeling almost at my background level of aches, pains, and infirmities. Extra family responsibilities will soon fade, and that will be back to background. Beginning Sunday, I should have much more time available for writing and for platform building. I hope, with a post really soon, I’ll be able to report better progress at adding words and adding fans or sales.