Last night they said we would have snow showers today, with no mention of accumulation. So I assumed that meant a dusting, with no accumulation. This morning that was changed to a winter weather advisory, with 1 to 3 inches expected. Right now it’s snowing heavily, and has been snowing since 10 AM, sometimes light, sometimes heavy. It’s pretty out there, but not exactly what I’d call “snow showers”. Oh, well, I don’t suppose the weather dudes can get it right every time. They did really well the last time.

So this noon hour I spent time researching the Kindle publishing process. Talk about confused! I have so much to learn. Somewhere I read that you basically create a Word document, don’t use footers or a few other features, upload it to Kindle, add page breaks, and publish. But today in the FAQ, or somewhere on the Kindle pages for would-be self-publishers, I saw all kinds of talk about html. I don’t know html, and despite some attempt to learn it I have failed. If I have to learn html to eSP, I’m done before I start. Surely I’m confused as to what it will take.

I finally managed to get to the Kindle Forums, and will start browsing. I have always found the forums, wherever I go online, as a good place to start and to get information. Perhaps browsing the forums will be the cure to my confusion.

So, the activities to further my writing career are going on these lines. First, complete works to eSP. I’ve mentioned these in previous posts. Second, learn the mechanics of eSP. This may take longer than I’d like, and may end up being more a case of doing than of learning. Third, I’ll continue with my freelancing work. Suite101 and Buildipedia are my two main outlets for this. I’m not actively chasing any other freelance gigs. The one for Safe Highway Matters came to me without any marketing on my part.

I guess that’s a pretty good game plan. It’s certainly enough for the moment. Later there will be more works, and more learning, and promotion of eSP works. I can’t really think that far ahead. In fact, it’s now after 5 PM. My thoughts have turned to the drive home, with a stop at Wal-Mart on the way to pick up the urgently needed things so we don’t have to go out tomorrow. For the next 90 minutes I’ll be able to work without confusion, on the mundane tasks of life, concentrating on the shopping and the roads.

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.

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….

Yesterday I closed my post by saying today I would discuss why I’m waiting to e-self-publish my work. The main things I was going to say were:

– Time needed to learn how to self-publish

– Probable upgrade of a computer in order to support the software needed to self-publish

– Cost to self-publish.

But now I have one to add, provided to me by a writer I corresponded with. In an e-mail she said, “Your best bet is to get a traditional contract before you self publish.” She’s a NY Time bestselling author, so should know a thing or two. She went on to say that the success with e-publishing experienced by Joe Konrath should be considered in knowing he was a multi-published author with a large backlist long before he ever e-self-published; an aggressive marketer/promoter with a fairly large fan base. Yes, he points to successful e-self-published authors who do not have his prior publishing background who have been successful at it.

Still, this author-correspondent in the know seems to think differently. I only know what I read in the blogosphere and elsewhere.

It’s all so confusing.