Documenting America, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, self-publishing, Sharon Williams short stories, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

Three Publishing Items

Leave a comment

That’s what I’m waiting on: three publishing items. The first two are within my control, once the proof books get here. Those are the print version of the home school edition of Documenting America, and the print version of The Candy Store Generation. I ordered the proofs Saturday, and they should be here today or tomorrow. Assuming they are good, I’ll pull the trigger right away and get them listed on CreateSpace. Not that hoards of anxious fans are waiting to buy them.

The next is In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. This is only partly in my hands. Well, I could publish it as an e-book immediately. But my wife is proofreading it right now. Last night on the phone she reported she was well into the book, less than a quarter to go. Since she’s finding a few things that need correcting, I’ll wait on her to finish. At the same time I’m waiting on my son to tweak the e-book cover. I don’t know when that will happen. But the cover he sent me would be acceptable as is (though not optimum), and Lynda says the typos are minor, so I could really go ahead and publish immediately. I think, though, I’ll wait.

Oops, there’s actually a fourth item. My short story “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango” is actually ready to be published. I’m sure it can stand another reading or two, and maybe I’ll find a few things to correct or improve, but I think it’s ready to go. I’m waiting on a beta reader to give me her comments. She’s the person the heroine is patterned after—and I even use her name—so I’ll wait for her. But then there’s the issue of a cover. I want to do it myself. I know what I want, and have played around with some graphics software to create it, but so far I’m not happy with the results.

So there you have it. Four items, not three, already in or just about fixing to enter the publishing stage. Next post will be about my current work-in-progress, The Gutter Chronicles, which really is almost complete as a novella.

Documenting America, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Sharon Williams short stories, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

Stewardship of my writing time

1 Comment

Every now and then I make a post like this, so my loyal fan(s) will know that I’m not a slacker. Well, at least not a big slacker; maybe just a little slacker. Over the last month I have been much engaged in publishing tasks, less so in writing.

As I’ve reported previously, I’ve been working with the graphics in the print version of my book The Candy Store Generation. This took up a lot of my time over the last two weeks. That’s now behind me, however, as our company’s graphic arts gal, Lee Ann Gray, volunteered to do the work needed. I worked with her. She had them all done, until I realized I had given her the wrong size for the book. So she re-did them.

But when I uploaded them, I realized I still had them a half-inch narrower than they could be. I didn’t have the heart to ask her to do them over, so I left them like that. I inserted them in the Word document, uploaded it to CreateSpace, did all the formatting stuff including on-line proofing, and ordered the proof copy. A few graph that were website captures are still at a low resolution, but I don’t care. I just want to get it published.

I also ordered a copy of the home school edition of Documenting America. I actually finished the edits to this a couple of weeks ago, but hadn’t decided if I’d bother with another proof copy or not. This book has also been frustrating in that I can’t seem to contact any local home school people for marketing purposes. I go to the websites of the groups, get contact information, send out e-mails, and either get no response or an auto-response that the e-mail address is invalid. I have no sales of it in electronic format, so have few hopes I can sell it in paper format. Oh, well, it will be available should I ever figure out how to market it.

I had conversations with two different cover designers for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. My son had said he would do it, but his life as a young professional and new homeowner is incredibly busy. Thinking he wouldn’t come through, I contacted another man. I told my son about it, and he came through with a draft cover. It’s a good start, and actually good enough if I never got another one. But he’s going to tweak it some. So I’m getting very close to publishing this, at least in e-book formatting. I have one mini-scene to add to the text, which I’ll complete today.

I have done some writing this week, on two different thing. I wrote a short story titled “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango”. I began it last Monday and finished it yesterday at about 6,400 words (perhaps 25 printed pages). My intention is to publish this as an e-book only, and attempt to do a simple cover myself. I want to get FTSP out first, then this.

The other thing I worked on is my spoof of the civil engineering industry. Titled The Gutter Chronicles: The Continuing Saga of Norman D. Gutter, E.I., I use situations from my career and put them in the life of the unfortunate Mr. Gutter. I had 11 episodes (i.e. chapters) written as of a few years ago. I never planned on publishing it, but lately I’ve been circulating copies of it to a new batch of CEI employees. That made me realize I had a bunch of words written that could easily be transformed into an e-book. I’m adding four new chapters, one of which is done and another of which is 500 words from being done. The other two are outlined, so completion isn’t far away, maybe three weeks or so.

So that’s where I stand. I hope the next four weeks can be as productive as the last four. If they are, my list of titles for sale will climb from six to nine.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

Mixing Publishing and Writing

Leave a comment

Three days and no blog post. Experts in the publishing industry suggest keeping a blog updated more frequently than that. I’ve been very busy, mostly with publishing activities. The graphics for The Candy Store Generation continue to haunt me, sapping my time and energy. I can’t remember specifics of all I’ve written here, so I won’t say much; just that in the attempt to improve the graphics myself, I clicked on a disguised link and downloaded a particularly nasty virus. I think that is now all behind, and the computer restored with the help of on-line technicians.

But the bad graphics are still with me. Over the last couple of days a woman in my office is helping me. She’s our graphic arts person, the one who does the detailed work on our marketing materials. I had thought about asking her, but that would have meant asking her to use company computers and software for personal use. I can do that myself within corporate guidelines for that behavior, but didn’t want to ask another to do that.

She took my Excel graphs and went through the process: create the PDF at 300 dpi or better; load it in Photoshop to crop, resize, and save as a jpeg (rather than as a TIFF); shoot it back to me to insert in the drawings. Except when I printed them at book size, in both black & white and color, the grid lines of the graph had disappeared.

She and I looked at it and decided I needed to thicken the grid lines in Excel. They could be thickened in Photoshop, but that would put the work on her, not me. So I did that to one graph, send it to her, and in less than three minutes she sent me the jpeg, but without the resizing. It’s critical to do the resizing in the graphic arts program because any resizing in Word destroys the dpi settings.

So today I’ll have her resize that one graph and print it. If it seems to be okay, I’ll fix the grid lines in the other graphs on my noon hour and get them to her. By the end of the day I’ll have those nine or so graphics at print quality. Three are already there. That will leave the things I received from CBO or captured from websites. I think only two or three of those are what I would consider poor quality. I’ll have to make a decision at that point.

In all of this I haven’t really felt like writing—until last night. I find the tasks of writing and publishing don’t mix well for me. Kind of like when I was doing construction observation half-days. I found I couldn’t concentrate on office things the other parts of the day; my work suffered. I’ve found the same is true with writing and publishing.

But last night I put all publishing tasks aside and decided just to write. I went back to the short story I started a few weeks ago, left hanging at 1,050 words, at the end of the first scene. I re-read that and made some good corrections. Then I tackled the next scene. In not too much more than an hour of writing, that was done and the story stands at 1,950 words. I may re-read it tonight and think it’s junk, but I’m pleased with that.

Tonight I may switch back to some publishing things. Or maybe I’ll add one small scene to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Either way, I feel much, much better about my writing life after the last two days. Maybe I’ll make it.

 

technology woes, The Candy Store Generation

Crossroad on “The Candy Store Generation”

Leave a comment

To make the internal graphics better on The Candy Store Generation, I have to go through the following process.

1. Save the graphic as a PDF file, making sure the quality is at least 300 dpi, and using certain other settings. But since I have no program on my home computer that would create a PDF, I first had to make a decision: buy an Adobe product that will make a PDF or find a free PDF maker. I went for the latter with PDF995. We use this program at work, so I felt it was safe. Except somehow I didn’t download the right thing. When I tried to make a PDF it didn’t work. It took me two or three sessions on the PDF995 site before I could figure it out and download the correct program.

2. Open the PDF file in a graphic arts program. Crop it. Resize it to the size it will be in the print book. Somehow maintain the dpi quality.

3. Save it as a TIFF file.

4. Replace the inferior jpeg in the Word file with the TIFF.

5. Repeat for 9 graphs generated in Excel, and about the same number captured from web sites or sent to me by the Congressional Budget Office.

6. Decide whether to send the book file as a Word DOC or as a PDF. They recommend PDF, but Word seems to work.

Except, I have no graphic arts software on my computer at home (nor at work), so I either need to buy a product (such as Adobe Photoshop) or use a free one (such as GIMP). Supposedly you can download a simple Photoshop product for a 30 day free trial, but I couldn’t find such a link.

So I decided to download GIMP. It comes highly recommended by many in the self-publishing part of the writing industry. Except, once again, I somehow clicked on the wrong link. The GIMP site was very busy, with multiple choices for downloads. I downloaded the wrong program, not the graphic arts program but a file manager of some kind.

I was then looking at the GIMP site to figure out what the right download was, when suddenly a program called PC Optimizer Pro started scanning my computer for problems. That was not a program I downloaded, either with PDF995 or GIMP. While that was running I checked it out through some Internet security sites. The program isn’t malware, but it was described as being a web security program of modest value. I stopped the scan, uninstalled PC Optimizer, uninstalled the file manager, and tried to figure out why a new search box has shown up on the bars at the top of the screen. When I uninstalled one of those programs, I had a message about the uninstall not being final until I rebooted.

So I went back to GIMP, opened it, opened one of my PDF graphs, and was stunned. On the screen were hundreds of choices for what to do with this graph. The manual was 28 mb, so quite long and involved. I spent a couple of hours going through to see how to do the very simple task of saving a PDF file as a TIFF after cropping and resizing it, while maintaining at least 300 dpi.

I sort of achieved that for one of the graphs, I think. I opened it, figured how to crop it, resized it to 3.25 inches horizontal, keeping the aspect ratio the same. When I did that the dpi dropped from 300 to 289. I’m not sure why that happened, but I decided to leave it. Then, after much tribulation, I learned I don’t save it as a TIFF, I export it as a TIFF. I did that, and think I saved it as such. But when I decided to exit GIMP it gave me a warning box that my file wasn’t saved. I didn’t know if this was the TIFF file or the original file. Some other photo manager programs that come with my computers both at home and at work do that. If you open a photo and change it and save it as a new file, it still warns you that the original file was modified and not saved. It’s an idiotic notice and quite frustrating. I decided to ignore that and exit anyway, figuring I could re-crop and re-size, and re-export to TIFF again if necessary.

However, upon rebooting, I couldn’t get anything to open: not Internet Explorer, and not Word. At least not in a reasonable time, say five minutes. At that time, not having a hammer handy with which to render my computer, dual monitors, router, and modem senseless, I went upstairs to fix supper, never again to return that evening.

I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight. Will I go downstairs and find IE and Word opened in my absence? Will I find that the uninstall process of those two programs ruined my operating system? Will I lose everything on that computer by having to use a system restore? And will I ever learn any of this stuff well enough that I can a) finish the print book and b) not make mistakes that will harm my computer?

So frustrating.

self-publishing

Weary from Publishing

Leave a comment

This weekend just passed, my writing work was mainly publishing. I had finished review of the proof copy of The Candy Store Generation sometime last week, and typed the edits in the CreateSpace file for the print book. However, I decided I needed to do whatever I could to improve the print graphics, and so began work on those. I think by Friday evening I had four graphs re-done, at a higher resolution, ready to insert into the print book.

But the graphs were fine as they were for the e-book. So I decided to make the edits on the Kindle and Smashwords files and upload them. I think I had about 15 typos to correct, and maybe 20 places where I improved the wording. So I had to type these three times, once in each previously formatted file. I had that completed by Saturday morning, and uploaded the new versions.

I also have in hand the proof copy of the homeschool edition of Documenting America. Friday evening, while watching the Olympics, I proofread the material added for the homeschool edition. It’s about 30 pages of material, but a lot of that is pasted-in URLs that don’t require proofing. This was done by evening’s end, and I typed those edits on Saturday and uploaded the new version to both Kindle and Smashwords.

I did not, however, do anything on the two print books. Documenting America will be fairly easy to do, as I think there were only six or seven typos to correct, and no graphics. The Candy Store Generation will be harder. I should have taken the hour required to get Documenting America done and off my to-do list, but after correcting four book files and uploading them, I was kind of weary, and decided to put it off till tonight or tomorrow.

Which leads me to a conclusion I’d noted before, but haven’t written about. I’m finding being my own published to be a wearying enterprise. Writing tends to excite and energize me. I feel as if I could write for hours without any loss of desire to keep going.

But when I do publishing tasks, it’s all I can do to keep going, to finish those items I need to do get the book uploaded (and hence “published”) and go on to the next publishing task. And that’s with essentially zero self-promotion of my books. I don’t know how weary I’ll feel once I start doing some of that.

Writing

So Many Writing & Publishing Tasks

Leave a comment

The temperature outside right now is about 11o F. I’m not making that up. It was almost that hot yesterday and Saturday, and should be the same for the next two days. I have some yard work to do. I need to get some walking in. But you know what? I’m staying inside until the high temps get back below 100.

So it’s a good time to have lots of writing and publishing tasks to do. I have all kinds of inside time to get them done. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble prioritizing and remembering all that I have to do.

For example, Friday I saw that Smashwords found something in the home school edition of Documenting America that prevented it from being added to the premium catalog. It’s a simple change I need to make to the MS Word file and re-upload it. I saw that at work, but I’m keeping all my official submittal files at home. This was a simple 10 minute task, including the uploading. Unfortunately, all weekend I forgot to do it, and never checked in to my Smashwords dashboard and saw that I needed to do it. I saw it today, at work, which is not where my files are. So this is a to-do item for tonight, if I can remember it.

So what did I do this weekend? Here’s the rundown.

  • Read through the last third of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People on Friday night and Saturday morning, looking for an inconsistency in the days of the week during the playoffs. I first edited and reprinted the season/playoff schedule I had created, to make sure of what the right days were. I found the inconsistency and did a mark-up. Then I typed the corrections. That took me up to about 1:30 p.m. on Saturday.
  • Scanned the proof copy of The Candy Store Generation, which arrived in the mail on Friday. I found no formatting problems, so it’s just a matter of getting any errors corrected. Lynda found one on the back cover copy, so I need to get that to the cover designer. I didn’t actually proof-read it at all over the weekend, leaving that for today and the next couple of days.
  • Wrote/typed about 15 chapters of instructor material for the home school edition of Documenting America. I now have only four to go.
  • Wrote and published two blog posts for my other blog, An Arrow Through the Air.
  • Wrote my Goodreads review of Trial by Ordeal by Craig Parshall.
  • Began reading The Eye of the Story by Eudora Welty. I consider this a book dealing with writing art and craft.

This sounds like a lot. Unfortunately I had much, much more I needed to accomplish. I should have done some proof-reading of TCSG. I should have completed all of the instructor material for DA-HS Ed. I should have worked on my next short story, or typed some plotting issues on the sequel to FTSP. Or done some formatting for the print version of DLA. Or done those changes to my writer’s website.

Well, it’s not unusual to have a larger to do list, written or unwritten, than can be accomplished in a limited time.

self-publishing

The Learning Curve, Step by Step

Leave a comment

I’m not any further along on understanding how to work with digital graphic files than I was last time I wrote about it. I consulted with some people who are in the know, and the consensus was that CreateSpace was being overly picky on the requirement of 300 dpi when the graphics were not photographs. So I went ahead and ordered the proof copy. I’m hoping it will be here today, and I can finalize the book within two days.

But beyond the graphics issue, I’m still traveling the learning curve on all this self-publishing stuff, not just the mechanics of layout and publishing but also the necessity and tasks of promotion. I have a similar situation at work. We use two different computer programs in our floodplain simulations. One we use on every project; the other we use infrequently. The one we use all the time had a steep learning curve. If I used it in 2002 then didn’t have another project with it until 2003, I had to learn the program all over again. Finally, after a project every year, I think I have mastered the basic use of it, though I don’t think anyone would call me a power user.

The other program I’ve used three times since 2009. If I had to use it now, I wouldn’t be able to without some significant re-study of how to do it. It wouldn’t be as bad as the first time, when I learned how to use it from reading manuals and trial and error, but it would still be a slow process.

Right now it’s the same with the three self-publishing platforms I’m dealing with: Kindle, Smashwords, and CreateSpace (for print). The interior formatting requirements are so different for e-books and print books that I still have difficulty switching between them. I’ve now uploaded six items to both Kindle and Smashwords, and am starting to feel comfortable with them. Next time I upload something, which I hope will be in less than two weeks, I think it will go smoothly.

But with the print layout I’m still far down on the learning curve. I’ve done the layout of three books, two uploaded and one ready to go once I get the cover. I have one more to do: Doctor Luke’s Assistant. That’s so big at 155,000 words that I’m somewhat intimidated by it. I think it will be such an expensive book that it won’t sell at POD prices, so I don’t mind putting off the formatting. Plus, I’ve had plenty of other things to do on my writing and publishing to-do lists.

I’ll work through it all. I feel good about my progress. Someday I might even get to the point where I don’t fear clicking the “submit” button. It might take three or four more e-book items, and at least that many print, but I’ll get there.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

A Day of Accomplishment

Leave a comment

It’s 6:09 p.m. as I begin to write this, on Saturday afternoon. While there are still hours left in the day, I can look back on what I have done so far and say this was a day of accomplishment.

I should have written down what I did. I’m very sleepy right now, and the list of things done would help me recount them. Maybe I can work backwards. I spent the afternoon working on layout of the print version of Documenting America – the Homeschool Edition. That is done, sitting on my computer. I’ll want to give it one more go, and maybe play with the margins a little. It’s up to 234 pages long, a little longer than I expected. I think I indented some quoted items too much, but can easily play with that and finalize it in less than an hour. I’m still waiting on the cover, so I’m ahead of where I need to be on this one.

Earlier I formatted the same book for Smashwords and uploaded it. It seems I did everything right, because it generated no error messages. It’s already listed for sale on Smashwords, though I have to wait and see how it does with premium catalog distributions.

Before that I re-did some of the interior of the print version of The Candy Store Generation, and uploaded it to CreateSpace. Or maybe I did that last night. Whatever. I received back an error message saying that the cover didn’t work because it didn’t have any bleed around the edges. I contacted the cover designer and she said she’d make that correction this weekend.

Before that, maybe last night, I completed a look through Doctor Luke’s Assistant to see what kind of marks Lynda made on her recent read-through/edit. They aren’t too bad, requiring less than one evening of typing. I may do that in a couple of days, then re-upload it to Kindle and add it to Smashwords. I’ll even look at a print version, but I’m afraid it’s too long to be economical at POD book costs.

I started the day reading in a couple of psalms and praying, then reading 15 pages in a novel I’m reading for pleasure. I’m only 1/3 of the way through it, so I need to be reading more.

For tonight, I have a Sunday School lesson to preview for tomorrow, and will have to fix my own supper with Lynda gone. Then I may do the first typing on the short story I’ve been playing around with on paper. It will be good to be doing the work or a writer for a couple of hours, rather than of a publisher.

self-publishing, The Candy Store Generation

So Much To Learn

2 Comments

Two weeks ago I set most writing tasks aside to concentrate on publishing The Candy Store Generation. Working with Rik Hall, a book designer, on some interior design elements, I was able to upload the e-book to Kindle a week ago today and it went live last Saturday. A couple of days later I had the Smashwords file and uploaded that.

That left the print book to work on. I was waiting on the print book cover, but that didn’t stop me from formatting the inside of the book. I was determined to do the best I could with this before sending it on to Rik. I figured this wasn’t my first print book to format. I did Documenting America by myself. The main difference with CSG is the many graphics.

So I set to the formatting, completed it on Tuesday, and sent it off. On Wednesday Rik said it looked pretty good, though he had some suggestions for improvement. I made the changes and sent it on Wednesday. On Thursday he told me he thought it was ready to go. Also on Thursday I received the print book cover from Vicki. So Thursday night was upload night.

The cover uploaded fine. The book interior uploaded fine. But CreateSpace has a new feature. Some software on their end cruches for a couple of minutes, checking your interior. It then gives you a report on whether it finds any problems with the layout of the interior. In my case, it found 12 problems, most dealing with the graphics. Those relating to the size of the graphics (inches or pixels) I can handle fairly easily. But two are proving difficult.

One was that the fonts are not “embedded.” The message is a warning. It says CS can pick the fonts, but that it would be better if they are embedded. The problem is, both my MS Word and my Adobe Acrobat are set up to automatically embed fonts. So when I created and saved the document in Word, the fonts should have been embedded. Then when I used Acrobat to create the PDF file, the fonts should have been embedded. So why weren’t they? A check of Adobe help forums suggests that the plug-ins used with Word to create a PDF are the problem. While Acrobat is the program I used, I did it by clicking a simple button within Word. Maybe that’s the problem.

The other problem is that all my graphics are not of the quality they suggest for print. The are in the 100-200 dpi range, whereas CS suggests using 300 dpi or better. I’m using Word 2003, and it automattically resizes imported images to be 200 dpi. I spent two to three hours in Word help and on-line help and forums and I haven’t found anything yet to tell me how to get around this. A writer friend said she got the same error message about photo quality, decided to print anyway, and it worked fine.

Today I went ahead and completed the upload. It’s now in a 48 hour period where someone or something is further checking the book to make sure it can be printed as uploaded. After that I’ll order the proof copy, and see how it looks. Perhaps the graphs will be fine. Or perhaps I’ll have to get a graphics editor, something better than Paint, and learn how to use it.

Which brings me to the learning part. When I was querying agents and editors, and pitching to them, and submitting proposals and partial or full manuscripts, there was much to learn about that whole process. Now that I’m self-publishing, both e- and print, I have a whole new batch of things to learn. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to the learning process, but know I will be the better for it.

Author | Engineer