Headshots, Short Stories, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

And the Words Keep Coming

1 Comment

As explained in other posts, I’m working on several writing projects at once. I recently completed a short story, which is now simmering as I figure out what to do about it. I’m working on Headshots, a sequel to my baseball novel. And I’m working on volume 2 of The Gutter Chronicles. I’m doing this last one in off moments at work.

Tuesday I finished the first chapter of The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2. I proofed it Wednesday and added one small item. It’s 2850 words, which is about right for a chapter in this book. This is meant to be a humorous book, taking workplace situations in an engineering company and turning them into funny stories. Yes, things that have happened to me over the years are finding their way into the book.

Humor may not be my writing strength. In fact I’d say almost assuredly it isn’t. Yet everyone who’s read volume 1 of TGC say it’s very funny. So maybe I’m  not too bad at that. But how can that be? I’m a serious novelist.

So as I was writing this first chapter, beginning a month or more ago, I came to realize it was more dramatic than funny. I needed to “funny-it-up” somehow. I put it aside for almost a month, trying to think of how I could do that. It wasn’t devoid of funny moments, but it just wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. As I walked on noon hours, or as I commuted, it was on my mind.

So Tuesday I was at my computer at noon, not being able to take a walk due to the weather, and decided to pull the story up and work on it. I re-read what I had in the chapter, and an idea of what to do came to me. What if I had Norman Gutter, the main character, hallucinate. He was very sick from a tick bite, though he didn’t know that’s what caused it. I had him go to the hospital and, in his painful and energy-less state, I had him begin hallucinating about the people and things he saw. I had him see the different people he worked with in not very flattering ways. Finally, as the doctor begins to examine him at the hospital, he has a hallucination about her just before he passes out.

Is it funny enough? That, of course, is the question. I proofread it quickly, saved the chapter out as a PDF, and e-mailed it to our HR assistant in the office. She read all of the first volume and enjoyed it. I figured if she saw this chapter as good, and funny, then it was okay. She e-mailed me back that afternoon: “Laughing out loud. Definitely a good read.” So I think I nailed it.

Now this morning, in the time I had before work, I decided to work on Chapter 2. I knew exactly where to start, because of where I left Norman at the end of chapter 1. So I began typing and soon found it was 8:00 a.m., time to begin work, and that I had 650 words typed in just a little more than half an hour. Wow, that’s more than I usually get in that little time. I’m not into humorous parts right now. That will have to come later in the chapter, maybe on my noon hour today. Or, if that doesn’t work, then next week. It would be nice to have two chapters finished by the end of next week. I’d feel good about the book at that point.

How interesting I find it that the words just come when I need them. I suppose it’s not really the words, but the ideas. I’ve found this to be true for quite a while now. In Headshots I’m at the sagging middle, that point in the book where a writer struggles to keep the action going as the hero works toward the climax. As I reported in another post, last weekend I added 3,800 words to the sagging middle. Things I hadn’t much thought about gelled into ideas, those ideas found expression in words, and I was writing, pushing the story forward.

I don’t know that it will always be this way. I might find myself at times where I have absolutely no idea what to write next, so I re-read where I am in the story, and the ideas just come and the words quickly follow. So I suppose this mean, I am a writer.

self-publishing

How Hugh Howey would change publishing

1 Comment

An interesting discussion is taking place at the Absolute Write forums about recent comments by Hugh Howey, author of Wool. Hugh is fairly confrontational and controversial. He’s said some things in the past concerning women that were vulgar. Because of that, some people won’t listen to a word he says. The discussion is here: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=283374. But see his point 13:

What Hugh Howey wrote:
13. Monthly payments and speedy sales data. Authors enjoy money and they enjoy metrics, and right now they have to wait too long for both. At New Harper Collins, we pay royalties every 30 days. And whatever sales data we have, you have. Simple as that. If self-published authors can have this, then our authors should have this. No more waiting six months to pay people. That’s history. No more wondering how your book is doing; you have access to all the data we can cull. Share your results in the Harper Collins Author forums.

One of the moderators at AW, Medievalist, responded to Howey’s point 13 as follows:

13. This one is really silly. Bookstores order books but don’t pay for them until they sell them. This is, if you think about, fair. It’s not their fault if a book doesn’t sell. Bookselling is a business run on credit, and it’s not likely to change any time soon.

Libraries generally have 90 days, though some distributors and publishers allow less. Publishers aren’t sitting on piles of money, hoarding royalties. There’s a reason they pay an advance you know, an advance that the author keeps even if the book doesn’t do well. Mind, the P & L from an experienced publisher is generally fairly solid, so that the publisher isn’t losing money on a book, but the idea is to make money for the publisher and the author. That way the author will do another book with the publisher, and that one too will make money, and increase the sales of the first book.

I don’t think I’ll respond again at Absolute Write [Edit: They have now locked that thread there], but will instead do so here, and provide a little context for discussion of this point 13.

I must respectfully disagree with you, Medievalist. Surely publishers and booksellers work on an accrual accounting basis, not cash. Revenue and profits are “booked” the moment an item is shipped or an invoice sent, not when payment is made. That’s the same as our engineering business. We send out an invoice for October’s work on Nov 10. The client doesn’t pay us for seventy-two days (the industry average), which will be January 22. But that invoice accrues as income, and the profits represented in that invoice accrue as profits, from the invoice date. So we pay taxes on that profit (it’s still assumed profit, not realized) in the current year when we send in quarterly taxes on Jan 15 even though the cash doesn’t get to us till a week later. If it turns out the client stiffs us the invoice, we delete it in two stages from the next year’s accruals.

Sales accrued and royalties paid based on accruals can be taken away and deducted from future royalties. That happened to me recently when B&N over-reported sales on one day, a day I sold three copies of one e-book and accrued $6.00 of royalties. B&N later corrected the over-reporting and deducted $4.00 from my accrued revenue. That’s the equivalent of a return. And I’ve had e-books returned at Amazon after the close of the month in which it was bought. The royalty on the return is easily deducted. It’s all a software thing, very easy to accomplish.

But even if it were as you say, and trade publishers are so unsophisticated with accounting in this modern era that they can’t provide monthly sales statements.

In January:
We shipped X books to Bookseller A
We shipped Y books to Bookseller B
We shipped Z books to Bookseller C
We had W returns from prior shipments.

To fail to do even this small gesture, which will allow writers to judge the effectiveness of whatever promotion they might be involved in, is inexcusable. Yes, perhaps publishers aren’t set up to do that right now, but they surely have computerized records of what’s been shipped. If it’s been shipped it’s been billed. If it’s been billed then royalties are accrued. If you want to delay royalties until you’re certain of the returns situation, I could buy that. But give writers all the data you have. It’s their book. It’s not a trade secret.

So, that’s the end of my rant. Time to get back to work.

Christianity, Writing

A Mentoring Success

1 Comment

Given the amount of difficulty I’ve had in my own writing career, in terms of breaking in with an established publisher, I decided a long time ago I would never encourage anyone else to take up writing. However, I violated that decision for Bessie. She is a retired lay missionary, along with her husband, to Papua New Guinea, with assignments also in Fiji and New Zealand. But let me start at the beginning.

Back in early 2011 I discovered other writers in our church. Some were seriously trying to publish, others were just toying with the idea. It looked like enough people to have a writing critique group. I discussed it with our pastor and volunteered to head it up. He said to go for it. We announced it in the church bulletin in March 2011, had a couple of brainstorming meetings in April, and began meeting in earnest every two weeks beginning in May 2011.

At one point we had eight or nine people on our mailing list. We had four or five who attended regularly, and eight who attended at one time or another. Bessie was one of the regulars, in fact the most frequent attender besides me as the leader.

She and her husband had their call to missions after the older two of their four children were already out of the house. They are laymen, so were unusual candidates for career missionaries. But God had a place for them. They did a few years of “apprentice-type” work with cultural missions situations in the States, then it was off to Papua New Guinea for seventeen years, and then a few more years at the other assignments. When the announcement about the writers group went out, Bessie told me she wanted to attend, because she wanted to record her missions stories for posterity.

She came to the organizational meetings and most of the regular sessions after that. I liked her writing style, which was pretty much how she talks. She didn’t understand some things, such as how to mix narrative and dialog, how dialog should be formatted, over-use of adjectives, adverbs, and passive voice, i.e. the typical things a rookie writer doesn’t automatically know or remember from school days English classes fifty years before. She wrote one of her missions stories, one that she had shared orally in church, and shared it with the critique group. Since the group included a couple of people who don’t attend our church, and some who hadn’t heard the story, most who read it (all except me, I guess) were seeing it with fresh eyes.

Bessie responded well to the critique. She made changes to the story and brought it back, till it was fairly well polished. Then she moved on to another story, and another. Over a year’s time she completed six or seven stories. One of the things I did as group leader was always ask everyone what their intentions were for any post they were sharing. Was it for a magazine? Part of a book? For publication? For family use, or for unknown use? Bessie said she really didn’t know, but that probably just for family use.

But, after about three stories, I realized these would make a great short book. Our denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, publishes six or seven missions books a year through the Nazarene Publishing House. Somewhere around 15,000 words each, these books are designed to inform the church about what is happening in their missions program, and to support that program with prayer, gifts, and other involvement. I could see that Bessie’s book would be about the right length (maybe 2,000 words longer), and would fill a unique gap. Most of these books, as with most of our missionaries, were written by or about ministerial or medical missionaries. Never had I seen one of these books about lay missionaries in a career position.

So, breaking my rule, I encouraged Bessie to begin thinking about how these stories would fit together for one of these denominational missions books. She said no, they were just lay missionaries, how would their book reach anyone, and similar words of unbelief. I said her book was interesting because they were lay missionaries and that our church needed to hear her and Bob’s story. Eventually I helped her to see that what I was saying was true. By this time she had written and shared five of her stories, with two more to go, including one about their retirement years.

Alas, the writing group didn’t make it. Slowly all members except Bessie and me were met by a series of reasons why they couldn’t continue. I folded the group in early September 2012. We really should have done it six months earlier, but the dream dies hard. Bessie and I, however, continued to meet. We would go to the Bentonville library two or three Wednesday evenings before a month, before Wednesday night service. Bob would browse while Bessie and I worked on her manuscript. In addition she e-mailed me her stories, which we now called chapters, and I printed and critiqued them.

She did all the manuscript typing, but didn’t really want to tackle the formatting, so I did that. We tried different arrangement of the chapters until we had it in the most logical order. Then I told her how unsolicited books normally get published through a publisher: query, proposal, then complete manuscript, but that most publishers would want a new author to have the manuscript complete before they turned in a query.

Round and round we went, Wednesday after Wednesday, polishing the manuscript, the proposal, and the query. Bessie had an ex-missionary friend who had written several of these books, to whom she sent the proposal for review and critique. Somehow we learned that we could probably forego the query process—or rather that we could actually submit the proposal with the query, given that from her time as a missionary Bessie knew the person who would head up the selection process. It was early January 2013 that both of us felt that everything was ready. The query was drafted as an e-mail with the proposal (including three sample chapters) attached. I told Bessie to push send.

But she wouldn’t. She said “You’re the one who pushed me into this. You push send.” That gave me a short pause. If I pushed send I had a degree of unintentional ownership in the query, proposal, and sample chapters. I read or skimmed them through again, looking for obvious errors and formatting problems. It looked perfect to me. I pushed send, and told Bessie she was sure to have this accepted for publication. It was a niche book submitted to a niche publisher giving a unique perspective that only she could write.

But the months wore on. Nothing. She saw the man she knew at our quadrennial general assembly, and it was as if she had never submitted it. I had given her typical times for expecting a response, and what to do if you didn’t get one, how to respectfully contact the publisher and ask what the status was. She did that once, and I don’t remember the response or if there was a response. We discussed it several times over last year. I thought it was about time for her to send another “what’s the status shall I look elsewhere” e-mails, but due to sickness, weather, and travel have missed her for several weeks.

Finally, today in my inbox was an e-mail from her. Except all she did was forward me an e-mail from the acquisitions editor she knew. She had sent him a second very respectful e-mail yesterday, and he responded something like, “Oh, didn’t you hear from us? We have your book scheduled as one of our 2015-2016 missions books.”

So there it is. The reluctant writer I mentored will be published. Before I will, at least as something other than self-published. Her success is, in a small way, my success. I wish her many sales and enough royalties to make it worthwhile. As the modern saying is, “You go girl!”

self-publishing

2014 Writing and Publishing Plan

3 Comments

I’m a day late posting a writing/publishing plan for 2014. Actually, I’m a day late thinking about it. I started off yesterday in Oklahoma City with our daughter’s family. I had a chore to do, which kept my mind well engaged from 10:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Packed the van at that point, said goodbye to everyone, including E1, E2, and E3, our grandkids, put my sick wife in the van, and headed east.

You’d think with my wife sleeping and the van quiet and it being New Year’s Day I would think about what my writing career would look like in 2014. But I didn’t. I vegged, listened to the radio, and thought about other things. Even after arriving at home, and having the house to myself while the wife slept, the Fiesta Bowl seemed a better way to feed my mind than writing plans.

But today I’m finally focused. Beginning with the things left hanging from 2013, and looking ahead to what is occupying my mind now, even when I try to push my mind to think about other things, I came up with these as elements of my writing/publishing plan.

– Decide on what to do with “It Happened At The Burger Joint”, the short story that occupied so much of my mind for so many months I had to write it in December. It’s polished and probably one edit/read-through away from being ready to submit to a magazine or self-publish. I don’t really know what to do with it. I suspect this will take a week or two to finalize and decide.

– Fix the e-book cover for The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 1, so that it can be added to the Smashwords premium catalog. I want to achieve this in January if at all possible.

– Prepare and publish The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 1, as a print book. I have a number of people at work and in the industry who want this as a print book but not as an e-book. I’d like to complete this in January. Of course, this will mean a major step up in my cover creation skills, or perhaps hiring it done. Which brings me to….

– Figure out how to use the “lite” version of Photoshop that resides on my laptop. I believe this will do all that I need for covers. I even have access to a training video on it. I believe I will make this a priority in January. I don’t know that I’ll be able to learn this program, or, if I am able, to must sufficient artistic talent to make my own covers at the quality needed, but I have to try. I can’t keep begging covers, and my earnings haven’t been enough to justify paying for covers.

– Finish and publish the book on Thomas Carlyle. This is tentatively titled Thomas Carlyle’s Articles in the Edinburg Encyclopedia. It’s all public domain material that has never been aggregated in one book. The text is done, except maybe for an introduction. I actually have the e-book cover done on this as well. The print book cover will have to wait on my Photoshop activities. I’d like to complete this in the first quarter.

– Finish Headshots, the sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. This book is moving along, slowly. I’m at 21,000 words, heading towards 80,000. I was hoping to have this ready for baseball season. It’s possible, but not probable at this time unless I delay some other things.

– Write and publish Preserve the Revelation, which will be the second book in my church history series. This will be after all the above activities are completed.

– Work on The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2. I have started this, still working on the first chapter. I have most of the fifteen chapters identified as to subject, and have brainstormed them a little. Depending on how I spend my early morning time at work and my noon hours, this should be doable to publish it in 2014.

– Write and publish one or two Danny Tompkin short stories. The next one is started in manuscript, and the plot is occupying gray cell capacity, so this may be a first quarter item.

– Write and publish one or two Sharon Williams short stories. Again, the plot for one has formed, and this could be a first half of the year thing.

– Work on Documenting America – Civil War Edition. This has long been planned. With everything else I want to do I think publishing it in 2014 is extremely remote, but getting on with the research would be nice.

– I have one other short story that is, unfortunately, refusing to release it’s hold on some of my brain. I suppose I will have to write it. I’m not sure right now when, or if, and if and when then whether to publish or not.

– And last, I would really like to start a writer’s newsletter this year, a way to build a readership and reach them. I’ve thought about this often in the past, but the time commitment has always dissuaded me. Still thinking about it.

This list has two big absences. It does not include my poetry book, Father Daughter Day, which is ready to be published except for illustrating. I don’t plan on doing anything with it right now. And it does not include any work on Bible studies or my long-planned Wesley books. I’d like to get back to those, but I have only so many hours in the day and days in the week.

Alas, retirement is still 3 years, 11 months, and 29 days away.

 

self-publishing

December 2013 Sales

1 Comment

I’ll be back to add commentary. For now it’s just the graphs, so that I can link to it at a writers site.

So, 2013 was not exactly a stellar year. Only 4 items published, and fewer sales than in 2012, and fewer sales per title than both 2011 and 2012. And, if you discount the good month of sales I had in 2012 of Doctor Luke’s Assistant, I still sold half the number of titles per book in 2013 than I did in 2012.

I don’t plan on doing a lot different in 2014 than last year, except hopefully double the number of titles published. That depends heavily on my being able to learn how to do my own covers with a quality publishing software platform.

Short Stories

An Unplanned Story

1 Comment

If you check out the progress portion of my website, you’ll see that I have a writing plan, sort of. I think through what I want to write, and begin writing those. When I have no definite idea on what to write next, I fall back on the plan, or perhaps adjust the plan so that I can move ahead and keep making progress.

So, I don’t like it when those plans go awry. That happened on Friday, and continued through the weekend. My current work-in-progress is Headshots, the sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I’m 20,000 words into that, with most of my words being added on weekends.

But for a long time now a story has been rolling around in my mind. This first passed through my gray cells a year ago, or maybe even longer than that. I don’t know if it was in a dream or a daydream. But a few scenes went through my mind. I pushed them aside because I have lots of other things to do.

This story persisted, however. It consumed valuable mental power. I started thinking about how I could flesh out these scenes to be a full story. How would I begin it? Would it be a Christian story or general market? How long would it be? What would the ending be? Everything started to gel, except perhaps the exact way to end it.

Friday, December 20, when I got home from work, I decided I’d better get to work on it, or it would continue to divert me from my main work. I started around 7:00 p.m. Friday evening. I soon had 300 or so words, and what I felt was a passable beginning. Took a break for supper at that point, then went back to it, off and on during the evening as we watched a DVD movie. My computer was never off my lap. By the time I went to bed I was surprised to see I had 3,300 words, and was done except for the ending, which eluded me.

I put it away until the next day. By this time the ending had come to me, but it covered another 1,000 words. I put it away for a day, then polished it on Sunday and sent it to two beta readers. I’ve heard back from one; she found a few typos, and suggested a couple of structural changes. Otherwise she says it’s good to go. Perhaps I’ll hear back from the other beta reader in time.

So, now the question is: What do I do with this unplanned story? [bugging out for a while; IE at work is very slow on this site; I’ll try from home soon. Or, I’ll try typing in html rather than visual; that seems to be faster.] I have no idea for a cover; it is a stand-alone story not related to anything else I’ve done. So I need to think about this for a while. Maybe I’ll publish it, or maybe I won’t.

Documenting America, self-publishing, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

Sales Begin in December

1 Comment

‘Tis the season…for book sales. People buy them for other people, and they buy them for themselves. As a writer trying to earn a little money from his sales, I’d like to be able to tap into some of this.

Last year I didn’t really see a spike in sales in December. They were the same then as in November 2012, both below monthly sale average. I’d seen an increase in December 2011 over the rest of 2011, but not so in December.

But it’s now 2013. Book sales have been abysmal in general. I have more titles available but have sold fewer books than in 2012, many fewer. In fact, so far none of my titles has sold in double digits for 2013. Reality has set in; I’m not a best seller, not even on a trend to become one.

But today gave me a little good news. One of the first things I do when I get to work is check to see if I had any book sales overnight. Since I’m selling an average of less than 5 per month in 2013, obviously I almost never see such a sale. This morning, as always, there wasn’t any. Mid-day I snuck another look at sales—still none. When I check sales like this I generally look at sales in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia, these being the main English speaking countries that Amazon sells in. In the morning I also look for sales at Smashwords and paperback sales through Amazon, which is on a different reporting page.

Then I checked in mid-afternoon. Lo and behold I had a sale! In the USA, of Documenting America, the first one (not the homeschool edition). After a silent yahoo, I did what I always do after a sale at Kindle: I checked every country that Amazon sells in. This requires two clicks to get to each country, so I seldom do that more than once a day. And to my surprise I had a sale of “The Learning Curve” in Italy.

“The Learning Curve” has not been translated into Italian. It’s an English language book that sold in Italy. My first sale in Italy, and my first sale of “The Learning Curve”. That brings me up to three sales in December. That’s already one more than November, though only half of October and and well below my long-term average of 7.5 per month.

I realize these aren’t good sales numbers. I could say “Sales have increased 50 percent month over month, and it’s only the 11th.” That would be true, but misleading. Having 13 books for sale and selling less than eight per month is, as I said before, abysmal. But as a self-published writer, I have to take hold of any good news and ride it for as long as I can. That’s where I’m at right now.

At work today I did some file maintenance on A Harmony of the Gospels, typed some manuscript in The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2, and advertised The Gutter Chronicles to a new employee. At home tonight I mainly worked on typing edits in the Carlyle encyclopedia articles book. I think I did about 19 pages of edits. This is tedious business. A few edits on each page resulting from optical scanning errors, about half of which must be checked against the original book that was scanned. I should do it on the computer in The Dungeon, with the dual monitors, rather than the laptop. But this gives me a chance to be next to Lynda as I’m working, so for now I’m doing it here.

The struggle continues, and the end is not yet.

self-publishing

November Sales

1 Comment

I haven’t been here for a long time, almost three weeks. Shame on me. Must do a better job at keeping my fans up to date with my writerly activities.

But this post will be to announce November sales. Don’t bother with the drum roll: it was only two. One of those was a paperback I sold to someone at the office; the other was a paperback through Amazon.

It was really three sales. I also sold and e-book, but it was returned. So it’s 2 net sales.

But in other news, I add one to October, going from 5 to 6, as one e-book sold at Kobo. They are always close to a month behind in reporting. So here’s hoping I had a couple of other sales in November that just haven’t been reported yet.

Here’s the table.

I added the “sales per title per year” to the table, to see how that statistic is going. The 4.62 sales per title per year for 2013 is misleading, as the spreadsheet calculates that as if 12 months had already passed rather than 11. If figured on 11 months it would be around 5.12. Better, but not good.

Carlyle, self-publishing

Still Playing With Covers

Leave a comment

Words have eluded me lately, as I haven’t really felt like knuckling down and advancing any of my works-in-progress—except for proofreading the Carlyle public domain book.

So in a few spare moments here and there I continue to work on creating book covers. As I’ve said before (at least I think I’ve said before), I seem to have little talent in the graphic arts, and for sure I have almost no skills and experience with graphic arts software. But I can’t keep begging covers forever, so, in the absence of a bestseller or other windfall, if I want to continue to self-publish I need to learn how to do covers.

My last post showed an early attempt at a cover for the professional essay I about have ready to publish. It wasn’t really the look I was going for. This version is closer, and may be the one I go with. Based on comments received I got rid of the gimmicky 10. I also found the background I wanted, and changed the proportion of the figure. As I say, I think this is close now, or possibly final. Fortunately, for a professional essay flashy isn’t necessary.

The next one I decided to work on is the one for the Carlyle encyclopedia articles. In other posts I’ve indicated this book is scheduled for sometime in the first quarter of 2014. I don’t know that I expect much out of it, but it’s just something I want to do. An affectation, perhaps. But a cover concept came to mind; I sketched it; and then I decided to try to create it using PowerPoint as my low-end graphic arts program. Here are two versions of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m in no hurry for this one. My concept is for the image of the young Carlyle to sit on a twisted pedestal. Getting it right will take some time. I may not be able to do it with a program as limited as PowerPoint; I may not be able to do it at all. But I’m having some fun trying, so maybe that’s enough for now.

 

 

 

Author | Engineer