All posts by David Todd

The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

Almost a Book Signing

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One of the things a self-published author is likely to not have, which a trade published author will have, is a book signing. That’s not an awful problem, as writers on both sides report that book signings really don’t bring a lot of people or sales to the writer. Still, there’s something magical about book signings. Just having one will, I would think, cause you to dream of long lines, piles of books flying off the table, and many fans saying nice things to you.

Yesterday my order of 25 copies of The Gutter Chronicles arrived at the office. I had pre-sold 19 of these (15 in the office; 4 offsite). I immediately began signing them, distributing, and collecting $8 per copy. I sat at my desk and signed. Then I took the copy across the building and delivered it. Then I went back to my desk and repeated the process with the next one. As I did this, two other people bought  the book and I signed the copies.

No, it wasn’t a book signing. But it was the first time I signed books in quantities and gave them to readers. It was a good feeling, even if it wasn’t a book signing. Perhaps, some day, I’ll have one of those too.

Short Stories, Writing

New Short Story: Saturday Haircuts, Tuesday Funeral

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SHTF Cover - trial 4 1601x2400Some time ago I decided to add two more short stories to my series on teen age grief at the loss of a parent. I’ve spoken of this series before. Originally it was a single short story. Then I decided to add another, and another. At that point I actually decided to plan out the series, thinking of what additional things I could write about concerning the topic.

About three or four months ago I wrote out the start of the short story in manuscript. I covered two pages of what I call “conference note pad” sized paper. Then it sat while I worked on getting the Thomas Carlyle book out, finishing a novel, and writing and publishing my other recent short story, “It Happened At The Burger Joint”. Once all that was put to bed, I knuckled down and wrote this one. The writing went fairly easy, as I had played the scenes out in my mind. I think it took only two days before I had the full story done, it coming in at about 2,700 words.

At that point I let it sit, for about a week, while I messed around with some other writing tasks. Two days ago I picked it up again, read it and did some edits. Printed it and read it again yesterday. Found a few more edits to make. It seemed to me as good as it was going to get. I created the two files for Kindle and Smashwords, and went ahead and published. Here are the links:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L8GDT2G

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/451366

This puts me up to 16 published items, three of them this year. I’m hoping to add three or four more before saying goodbye to 2014.

Carlyle, It Happened At The Burger Joint, self-publishing, The Gutter Chronicles

Typos are Killing Me

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I consider myself a good typist and good proofreader. But, as the experts say, it’s difficult to proofread your own work. This has certainly come home to me lately.

First, in March I published the e-book version of Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. I did much proofreading of the text, especially in the two longest articles, which were from optical scans and had all the usually scanning errors in abundance.  In April I was putting the print book together, which included my first print cover creation using the graphic arts program G.I.M.P. I posted the cover to my self-publishing diary at the Absolute Write forums, and a person pointed out a typo: Enclyclopedia instead of Encyclopedia. It wasn’t published as a print book yet, which made it easy to change. I clicked the “publish” button in April.

After I did, I had an odd feeling that I didn’t remember the contents of one article. I was pretty sure I had proofread all the articles twice, and the two difficult ones three times. I pulled out the print book and read that article. Sure enough, somehow I had skipped that in the proofreading. I then went through it, and found one optical scanning error. Not awful, but something I shouldn’t have let slipped through. I haven’t yet corrected it and uploaded revised versions for print and e-book.

Then, earlier this month I published my short story “It Happened At The Burger Joint“. Shortly after I did I posted about it on my Facebook personal page and author page. A FB friend pointed out to me a typo on the description. I think it’s a “the” that should be “they”. Since I was waiting on the Smashwords premium catalog approval, I decided to wait to fix the typo until I had that. That approval has come through, but busyness has prevented me from fixing the typo.

And last, in October 2012 I published the e-book version of The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 1. It’s a novella, not a full length novel. I’ve had only eight e-book sales of it. Finally last month and this I worked on completing the print version and getting it up for sale. I did that, ordered the proof copy, and did some spot reading. Found two typos, not awful ones. I decided to go ahead and publish it with the typos and fix them with a revised version ASAP. It went on sale around June 8.

My wife hasn’t read it, so last Saturday we read it aloud to each other, each taking a chapter or two and switching off. As we were reading, here and there we found a typo. At a few other places I noted where I could have worded something better. We marked those as I went along. Last Sunday I made the changes in the print book and uploaded the new version. It went live Monday (yesterday) evening. Error free? I hope so, but make no such claim. Since then I’ve typed the corrections in the Kindle version and uploaded them. The revised version went live sometime during the evening. Tonight I hope to make the corrections to the Smashwords edition.

These are way too many typos. I realize that even books by trade publishers have typos, that proofreaders are fallible people who don’t catch every error. But doggone it, I have to do a better job than that.

The Gutter Chronicles

THE GUTTER CHRONICLES paperback is available

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Print Cover-02

This morning the paperback copy of my novella, The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 1, went live at CreateSpace, and will soon be at Amazon. This was a long time coming. I published the e-book version of this in October 2012. At that time I had a place-holder cover, a poor one I had someone at work throw together for me. The cover made the book not worthy of inclusion in the Smashwords premium catalog, and thus was not available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc. Not her fault: she did exactly what I asked her to do. Finally, about two months ago, I found time to put together a better cover. I did this using G.I.M.P., and am pretty sure I blogged about this here.

Finally, last weekend the formatting of the print book version came to the top of my to-do list. That took one evening, working with headers, footers, page numbers, table of contents, page sizes, etc. That was the easy part. Then came the cover, which was the hard part, given the combination of lack of artistic talent and knowledge of graphic arts software. But I managed to do it. CreateSpace accepted the cover on the first submittal, so I did something right with the mechanics. The back cover text was messed up. When I redid it it was still messed up (tiny size), so a friend at work helped me create a PDF of it for submittal. It worked; I swapped out the cover and used a slightly modified interior file; and clicked “publish”. It went live this morning at CreateSpace, and will soon make its way to Amazon proper.

I have seven pre-orders so far, and hoping to get twenty. That will be a very nice boost to my June sale figures.

Print Cover-02 418x315

It Happened At The Burger Joint, Short Stories, Writing

It Happened At The Burger Joint

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burgerjoint_cover_FINALOn Friday just passed I completed the work of publishing my latest short story. Titled “It Happened At The Burger Joint”, it is all about the reconnection of a man and woman who had worked together decades before at a hamburger fast food restaurant. Both went their separate ways, marrying other and having families. Eventually they meet again, though not under the best of circumstances. Yet, the meeting proves to be mutually beneficial.

It’s available on Amazon and Smashwords, and distributed to other e-book retailers via the Smashwords premium catalog. Here are the links:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTW1JAE

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/445922

The cover proved to be difficult. I worked and worked on one, finding some applicable public domain photos to use. I tried working on it in both PowerPoint and G.I.M.P., and had something workable, but it didn’t look professional. It looked very much as if someone without graphic skills or artistic talent threw it together. I was about to go with what I had, when my Internet writing friend, Veronica Jones-Brown, who has done a couple of other covers for me, said to hang on, that she would work on something. She’s the one who did the cover you see in the post and in the sales links. Thank you, Veronica. I’ll get a check in the mail. Possibly, in a comment, I’ll put up the cover I had, just to show what I can’t do.

I sold one copy so far, to a high school classmate. That’s my first sale of anything in June.

self-publishing

May 2014 Book Sales

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May followed April in terms of book sales. When I first reported April sales, I said I sold eight books. I have to update that to nine, as I sold one book at the Apple store in April, which wasn’t reported until May. So that’s good. And, in May I sold 10 books, all on Amazon. Six of those sold in one day, including one each of all five of my short stories. That’s sort of a dream, to have someone discover my writings and buy my entire collection. To purchase all of my short stories is close to that. If, that is, they were all bought by the same person. I have no way to know that.

So here’s the table, full size, and a smaller version for me to link to at Absolute Write. And here’s hoping that June sales will be just as good or even better, and that I get a couple of more things published in June.

2014-05 Book Sales Table full size

2014-05 Book Sales Table 535x212

 

miscellaneous

Computer Woes by the Trifecta

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I’m back, here at my author blog, and able to post again. Computer problems have prevented me from doing that for a while. It’s a combination of three things actually, or maybe four. I’ll chronicle them for you.

First, back sometime in the second half of 2013, our old laptop died. We’d had it since October 2004. It was a faithful friend, needing little attention. Whatever happened to it, it was gone. That left us with the other laptop and the desktop in The Dungeon. Lynda has her “office” on a card table in the living room, so I let her have the laptop. I have always done the bulk of my writing on the desktop, so I continued to do that. I just didn’t have a computer (excepting my Nook) to use upstairs.

I’ve been looking around towards replacing it. We’ve had Dells for years, so I’ll probably stick with them. We’ve been happy with their products, except for a certain shipping mistake that it took a couple of years to get right. That was in part my fault for abandoning the process rather than pressing the issue. Once I found the right person to talk with they made it right by the next FedEx shipment. But the need to research what’s available, the possibility of leasing rather than buying, and of using cloud-based software has caused me to hesitate. Those reasons, plus wanting to make sure finances are ok to make the purchase. So far I haven’t, but I think I’m getting closer to that time.

Then, shortly before we left for our May trip to Boston, I was suddenly unable to log in to this website and make changes. On the login page I got 17 error messages, all related to specific lines of code or needing to enable cookies. But cookies were enabled. Talking with a couple of people in an on-line writers group, I learned that it appeared that the theme I had selected, Erudite, had been abandoned by the creator. Some change in WordPress, perhaps, hadn’t been upgraded on the theme. I went to the theme message board and left a message. So far as I can tell there’s been no answer.

Finally, a Facebook acquaintance, John Doppler Schiff (that’s what he goes by), said he could go into the code and bypass the Erudite theme and get me up and running with a default theme, after which I could do business as normal and pick a new theme. That was delayed for the thing I’ll mention in a later paragraph, but now it’s done. He said it took him all of five minutes, perhaps less. Next week I’ll go about looking for and installing a new theme. I think that’s fairly easy to do.

Then, the day we left for Boston, I couldn’t get on a browser on the laptop. We were rushing to get things together and get on the road, so I didn’t worry about it, thinking it might be a temporary glitch. Alas, when we got home I found out it wasn’t. Still no browser. I could connect to the Internet, because I was able to save files to Dropbox.  I took it to the shop, and learned that the problem was related to the XP operating system, now no longer supported by Microsoft. But the computer was licensed for Vista, so they were able to upgrade with no software charge. That was great. The week they had it, not so much. Or the fact that the second monitor no longer works.

Then came the big one. On Tuesday, while I was speaking at a lunch meeting of a professional group, a text came in. When I was done speaking I saw it was from a nephew, who wrote, “You aren’t in Turkey, are you? Think your e-mail was hacked.” I got back to the office to find it was true. It’s happened twice before, and changing the password was sufficient to recover. But this time the hackers were malicious. They changed my password, deleted my stored e-mails, and changed the primary e-mail address so that security notifications would go to them. Then they set up a mimic e-mail account but with aol.com as the ending, and began firing off e-mails that looked like they came from me.

I’ll make this short. Over a period of five hours I was able to get it all changed back. That included an hour and a half on hold waiting to talk with Yahoo. An hour of that would have been unnecessary if a certain webpage of theirs worked. It didn’t, so I had to call them. But I’m not upset with Yahoo. They were able to restore the deleted e-mails (I may have lost two hour’s worth, at most). I alerted aol about the bad guys, though I don’t expect them to do anything. No harm done except to the nerves. If any security e-mails went out to the aol address, I suppose the bad guys might have more information than I’d like. I’ll have to see if anything happens.

So, except for replacing the second laptop, I’m up and running again. For the last month or two I’d been pretty regular in my posts to this blog, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Hopefully I’ll return to that with no problem.

Daddy Daughter Day, Documenting America, Headshots, self-publishing

Upcoming Publishing Schedule

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My decision to self-publish Father Daughter Day as a non-illustrated book, in paperback only (because poetry doesn’t work all that well with e-books) has caused me to think about my publishing schedule and all the tasks related to that. Here’s what I’ve come up with—subject, as always, to finding time to accomplish everything and sudden inspiration that causes me to change or reshuffle.

  • complete the writing of Headshots, my novel-in-progress. I think I have a couple of weeks left in the writing, after which I will let it sit and simmer a couple of weeks before going on with editing and publication steps.
  • publish my short story “It Happened At The Burger Joint”. This will require creation of a cover. I have an idea and have located a graphic I’d like to use, but have yet to contact the one I need to for permission to use it. This will be an e-book only, so the cover and formatting should go quickly, just a day or two.
  • create and publish the print book for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. This requires that I wait on a certain photo that a certain person has promised to take and let me use for the back cover. This should only take a few days to do, though waiting on proof copies will occupy some time, which I will fill with:
  • create and publish the print book for The Gutter Chronicles. My novella has actually picked up some sales recently. I know a few people who want it who don’t own e-readers. I’ve decided on the back cover image, so I just need to format the book for print and put the cover together. I think a week or so.
  • by that time I’ll be done editing Headshots and be ready to do the publication tasks: e-book formatting, e-book cover, print book formatting, print-book cover, upload to three places. At this time I don’t think I’m going to do a launch team. It didn’t work out so well with my last novel, so I’ll just publish and hope for the best.
  • write and publish another short story in the Danny Tompkins series, dealing with teenage grief at the loss of a parent. I’ve had the next story rolling around in my mind for some time, at least the start of it and subject matter. After Headshots is done I’ll be ready for something short. Since this involves new writing I’m not really sure how long it will take. That will give me four Danny Tompkins stories, which might be enough to put together in a short collection as an e-book.
  • Publish Father Daughter Day. The toughest part of this will be the cover, for which I’ll be doing my own “artwork”. I have a comic-like font in mind for the words, a font I’ve already been drawing out for practice. I have a scene in mind I’d like to use for the front cover, though finding a photo for it might be difficult, and drawing it will be impossible. So, I’m a little up in the air about it; also about what to use for a back cover. That may be easy, though, as I could use a synopsis of the book on a uniform or textured color. I think the internal formatting will be fairly easy. The hardest part will be figuring out appropriate page breaks. Poetry books tend to have lots of white space, and you want to end the poems at a place that makes sense.

After that, I’ll have a whole host of projects to chose between. Most likely a sequel to Doctor Luke’s Assistant? Possibly a Civil War edition of Documenting America (for which research has already started)? Start getting serious about another volume of The Gutter Chronicles? Perhaps another Sharon Williams short story, probably titled “Sierra Kilo Bravo”? Or perhaps work on another Thomas Carlyle project? Time will tell.

self-publishing

April 2014 Book Sales

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I do this every month—or almost every month: let you all know what my book sales are for the month just ended. Normally it’s a depressing number to share and thus a depressing post to write. I look for any silver lining I can as I write these posts.

The good news for April is that I had a definite up-tick in sales. I sold 8. That may not seem like much, but when Jan-Feb-Mar was 2, 2, and 3 respectively, that’s a huge jump. One of those was a self-sale of a paperback, two were paperback sales at CreateSpace, an Amazon subsidiary that pays higher royalties then Amazon, and five were e-books at Amazon, of three different titles. And, I sold one e-book of the Thomas Carlyle encyclopedia articles book. I really don’t expect to sell any of that, so that’s a plus. No sales at Smashwords or places it distributes to. This is the fourth straight month of no sales there.

All together I had sales of four different books this month, out of fourteen published. That’s obviously not great. I’d love to be selling multiple copies of all titles every month, but I’m a long ways from that happening. The sales were all of books, not short stories, so I’ll have a higher than average royalty per sale for the month. I’m not filling a gas tank on these royalties, but I’m not unhappy.

So here’s my sales table: the full size one first, then a reduced size to link to at Absolute Write.

2014-04 Book Sales Table

2014-04 Book Sales Table 545x242

Daddy Daughter Day

New direction for “Father Daughter Day”

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In terms of completed books, my first was Doctor Luke’s Assistant, and my second was Father Daughter Day. I haven’t talked about this for a while. It’s a story, told in a series of poems, about a weekend day a dad has promised to spend with his daughter. He at first doesn’t want to fulfill his commitment, but does, and winds up more blessed than she was.

This has been finished since 2006, though I’ve tweaked a few of the poems in the years since then. My original plans were to seek a trade publisher for this. Alas, I quickly saw that wasn’t going to happen. It was too Christian for the general market, not Christian enough for the Christian market. And who reads poetry anyway? I didn’t submit it to many places, but I discussed it with some editors and agents, and let’s just say I wasn’t encouraged to continue to seek trade publication.

I haven’t self-published it because I felt that it would be better as an illustrated book. I mean a richly illustrated book, with a black and white sketch-type illustration on each page, tied in to the text on the page. Nothing fancy, simple sketches. Yet, when you figure the book would run 75 pages when formatted as poetry books usually are, and maybe 150 pages with room for illustrations, meant perhaps as many as 150 of these sketches/illustrations. How could I get that done?

My first thought was to have an art class do it as a kind of practicum course. I checked with two local high schools. One principal didn’t get back with me. When I saw him six months later and asked about it, he said, “We’re just not big enough to handle that kind of project.” I resisted the urge to reply, “That information would have been quite helpful six months ago.” A teacher at the other high school gave me the name of the art teacher. I contacted her, and she seemed genuinely interested. She said she would contact her principal about it. That was the last I heard from her. Four years later I’m still waiting (not really; gave up a long time ago).

I also contacted the art departments of two Christian colleges, via e-mail. In one case I had a recommendation via a writing professor at that college. In both of these cases, I never received a reply to my e-mail. It was kind of like submitting an unsolicited query to a Christian literary agent. The submittal/request/query goes off into the ether, never to be seen or heard from again.

Moving on to Plan B, I started talking with some artists. I discovered a cousin’s wife was an artist. She seemed interested, but declined, the birth of their first child being an obviously greater priority. One woman I met at a writers conference was interested, but was far to busy in her studies to take on a project of this size. Other leads of artists came up. I discussed it with them, and either none were particularly interested or the project was too big for them. I can understand that. Up to 150 illustrations that fit the context of the story, even if they are simple, is a big project, especially if a few of them are made more artistic for use as covers or full page inserts. I have no money to pay someone, so they would have to take the work on for a share of the royalties, which are a very uncertain remuneration. So I’m stuck.

A couple of nights ago I decided to just go ahead and self-publish the book as an un-illustrated paperback. I have one more poem I’d like to add to it, one that I’ve started on a few times but could never get it to where I liked it. I have a few conceptual sketches for the cover (or at least the title), which I’ll do myself. The interior formatting won’t be a very difficult thing.

So, before the end of the year, Father Daughter Day will be one of my publications. In a follow-up post I’ll re-set my publishing schedule.