So Much News, So Little Time

It seems of late that many things are happening in the world that I care about, and that attract my attention. I hear a news story and I think, "I could write a good blog post about that." But having gone to a twice a week posting schedule, how can I get it all in?

For example, in the national news is the story about the Supreme Court decision on Hobby Lobby, where religious freedom is said to trump certain government mandates. Or, stated another way, the government can't mandate something that compliance with will cause someone to violate their religious convictions. The full fallout from this decision isn't known. Yet, it's a prominent news story that's deserving of attention.

Then there are the scandals that are plaguing the Obama Administration. Phony scandals the president calls them. Real scandals the press calls them, at least that part of the press that is covering them. Revelations come weekly in the IRS and VA situations, revelations that make government mismanagement or misconduct seem more and more certain. What happened in Benghazi has never been fully explained. The situation on the Mexican border is pathetic. Any one of these things could justify a post with political analysis.

Closer to my own world, a couple of things about writing and publishing are making major headlines. Don't look for them on the evening news or in the New York Times. They aren't big nationally, but they are among writers. The negotiations between Amazon and Hachette continue. The very people who are upset at Amazon for driving down prices are now upset with them for failing to discount Hachette books, saying that they have lost sales as a result. And still we don't know for sure, because the negotiations are taking place with a non-disclosure agreement, exactly what the issues are. Some say Amazon is trying to strong-arm Hachette; some think Hachette is trying to force Amazon to charge higher prices. We still wait on the conclusion to and fallout from this.

And, in still other news, on July 1 the NY public library held a panel discussion/forum on Amazon and its impact on the book world. The panel included James Patterson, who has been an outspoken critic of changes that are occurring in publishing, changes he doesn't like. He said bookstores and libraries are threatened. He wants the government to take action. Mind you, he's never said what action he wants the government to take. I can only presume he wants some kind of law that either reigns in Amazon or otherwise props up book prices. How that would help libraries I don't know. It's also possible he might want e-book prices significantly raises or their distribution curtailed. Maybe the latter will help libraries.

Also on the panel is an intellectual property attorney named David Vandergriff. He runs a blog popular among self-publishers, called The Passive Voice, and he is known as the Passive Guy. I read his blog daily and comment from time to time. He posted a summary of the panel and his impressions of his fellow panelists and what they seem to think the condition of the publishing industry is. Very insightful. I commented on the thread. Comments are still being posted by PG's loyal followers, with a few drive-by, non-engagement posts by one woman who disagrees with PG.

I haven't listened to the recording of the panel discussion yet, but will do so, probably next Monday. The gist of it is: the publishing industry is in trouble; Amazon is the reason; something must be done. However, the big five publishers in the USA are making good profits, perhaps even record profits. Discounting by Amazon is driving sales to them. E-books are more profitable than print books. So what's the problem? The problem is that Amazon is such a big bookseller that the publishing industry doesn't like it.

Everyone seems to be predicting the fall of Big Publishing. I don't see it myself. Printers should be concerned, as e-book's growing share of the market will shrink their work. Booksellers should be concerned (especially Barnes & Noble), as people are discovering the ease of on-line shopping. But publishers don't look to me to be in trouble. What could hurt publishers? Only two things that I can see.

1. The fail to embrace new technology and methods.
2. Writers, including big name writers, begin abandoning them in droves in favor of self-publishing.

I don't see the latter happening in the next five years, probably not in the next ten years. The world has too many writers wanting to break into publishing that, even if more and more authors choose the self-publishing route, plenty of other writers will willingly step into their places.

However, I do see big publishing failing to embrace technology, in the form of e-books. They want e-book prices high to prop up the print book market. If e-books cost $15 and hardbacks cost $25, people will still buy hardbacks. But if e-books are $5 and hardbacks $25, fewer hardbacks will be sold. Already the print market is stagnant while the e-book market is still growing. Yet Big Publishing insists on keeping e-book prices high—even colluded with Apple to make that happen—so as to save the print book market. They don't seem to realize that their insistence on high prices are driving book buyers to the self-published market, where e-books typically sell for half (or less) of what Big Publishing charges, and where paperbacks, even at print-on-demand prices, are undercutting hardbacks enough to take market share.

This type of behavior will sink the publishing industry, eventually. When? I can't predict that, but again I doubt it will have significant impact in the next five years. Ten years? Perhaps. Quite a few more things have to happen before the decline comes.

Genre Focus Disorder - is it real?

I've said it before: I have Genre Focus Disorder (GFD). I called it by another name before, but GFD seems more appropriate. The experts in the publishing business say you should stick to one genre. Make a name for yourself in it, carve out a niche, become known, build an audience, and you'll do better. If you write in multiple genres, fans from one genre most likely won't follow you into another genre, and you will have to build separate audiences, carve out multiple niches.

On the other hand, some publishing veterans say experimenting with different genres during your pre-published time is acceptable. Once you sell something, however, use all your efforts to concentrate on that. This is said more from a trade publishing perspective than a self-publishing perspective, but it somewhat applies to the latter as well.

For me, however, I've found I have to write whatever I have inspiration for. I have mapped out books and short stories into the future that will probably consume all my writing time till old age claims it. I write sort of how water, when released from a container or hits land during precipitation, runs downhill or seeks its own level. That's good for productivity, but probably not so good for audience building and sales. Since I'm self-publishing, when I complete something, I publish. The 16 items I've self-published so far are in ten different genres. Of course, genre definition is difficult to pin down. Another person reading all my pieces may say they are in only eight genres.

Only eight?

So what has happened this year in my GFD? In March I published Thomas Carlyle's Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. This was not for sales, though I've sold three copies. It was for practice at editing, formatting, cover creation, all things publishing, and it helped fulfill my fasciation with this Victorian behemoth. It was good practice. But what happened afterwards? Ideas for four different follow-ups to it came to mind, one of them book-length. That one wouldn't let me go. For three weeks I worked feverishly at it: researching the subject, contacting people, obtaining copies of documents old and new, and putting a bunch of stuff in a MS Word document. At the end of the three weeks time I had a book diary with many entries, and a file that is probably 70 percent of the eventual book, though subject to formatting. At that point I said "This is madness" and went back to other projects. But by that time the GFD attack had run its course.

So I completed three other projects. One was my novel, a sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I had been working on it since October (I think), so it was good to get it out of the way. Then I did the work of formatting The Gutter Chronicles for print and publishing it. That was okay as it was always on the schedule. The next thing on my publishing schedule was to add "It Happened At The Burger Joint" to my items for sale, which I did. My schedule then was a little imprecise. I could pick up the novel sequel, Headshots, and edit it. I could work on the next short story in the Danny Tompkins series, or the next short story in the Sharon Williams series. Those were on the to-do list, and made sense. I knocked out the Tompkins story, and published it this past Monday. Even made my own cover.

But then, GFD reared. Actually it reared even before I had finished the short story, "Saturday Haircuts, Tuesday Funeral". I was in Little Rock last week for a two day conference, and was in the hotel room in the evenings without much to do. I had brought a number of things with me to fill my time, as I always do, not knowing for sure what I'll want to work on. One of them was a volume of the Annals of America series. I used this series to find source material for my book Documenting America. When I published that in 2011 I saw it as the start to a possible series. I thought the next one would be from the civil war era, and the one after that would be from the pre-constitution era, focusing on the development of the constitution. But I had no hurry in doing either. Well, I suppose the civil war one could be considered subject to a deadline, since we are in the period of the civil war sesquicentennial and books about it might do better if released then.

But really, it wasn't necessary to work on this. I had my completed novel manuscript with me, and could begin editing in the quiet of the hotel. But the civil war book wouldn't let me go. I spent the first evening scanning documents in the Annals, and figuring out which ones to use as source material. I know how long I want the book, how long I want each chapter to be, thus how many chapters I need, and, knowing a fair amount of civil war history, know what subjects are needed. In one long evening, including getting to bed much too late (but who can sleep when GFD is at its strongest), I had the whole book planned, all but six or seven of the source documents identified, and even some specific parts of some source documents marked for extraction. I thought, Ah, GFD has now run its course. Back to my publishing schedule.

Not so. Monday and Tuesday of this week I was prohibited from working outside (I have much yard work to do) due to a combination of rain and a fall resulting in minor injuries. So what did I do? Instead of picking up and editing the novel, I worked on finding more source documents for the civil war book! And this morning I created the Word file. It is now officially a writing project. The pull of this book has become very great over the last week. What's going to happen for the rest of the week?

I really need to get back to my novel. I'd like to have that published in July, and need to give it two full rounds of edits before doing so, maybe even three rounds. I'm hoping to begin editing it this weekend, maybe by reading it aloud with my wife. So that gives me only a couple of days to allow GFD to run wild. I can handle that. Perhaps it will burn out. Then, when the civil war book comes up in the publishing schedule, which is maybe in October, I'll have a nice start to it and be able to build on. GFD flare-up concluded.

Except, I may have found a cover illustrator for my poetry book, Father Daughter Day. Which means I'll have work to do on it. Argh! Is there no end to it?

Writing Energizes Me, Publishing Tires Me

I usually write my writing posts at my writing blog and save this blog for various life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever type posts, but possibly this is one that's relevant to both.

Last Saturday I wrote "the end" on my latest novel. Headshots is a sequel to my baseball novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I thought Headshots would be around 80,000 words; it ended up being around 87,400. So I wasn't too far off. The last 20,000 words came out fairly quickly, at a rate of over 1,000 per hour when I was working on it. Some of those scenes I had played out in my mind many times. It was just a matter of figuring out how to get the right characters at the right place at the right time. That seemed to go well.

Of course, editing is still ahead of me. I've read through it, in its incomplete form, twice. The first time was when I was around 50,000 words in, and struggling with the sagging middle. I was unsure of the timeline, unsure about several subplots, unsure about which character had done which thing. So I read it carefully and made an outline and timeline. The second reading was when I was about 70,000 words in. I wanted to make sure those things added after the first reading made sense, and had plugged the holes I'd found. After completing the text I went through the mark-up from the second reading and typed those edits. I finished that last Sunday.

Now, Headshots is sitting for a week or two, while I'm taking a break from it. While all my writing time went to the novel, various other publishing tasks went by the wayside. Now is the time to pick them up and complete them. For the last three evenings I've been working on the print edition of The Gutter Chronicles, my workplace humor novella. Hmm, it's about 43,000 words. Is it a novel or a novella? Monday night I formatted the interior. That's actually not that hard to do. I do it in words. Since the chapters have titles, I wanted to use the right hand page header as the chapter title, while the left had page header remained the book title, with page numbers at the bottom. Word lets you do this without too much trouble, though making sure blank pages are really blank, without headers and footers, is something to watch for.

Then I created a table of contents with the page numbers supplied by Word. Then I chose the page size (I use 5.5x8.5 for most of my paperbacks), then set the margins. That brought me to a page by page review, making sure the margins looked good, the page breaks looked good, indents were correct, etc. I found one place where I had to change indents. That took all the time I had to spend on Monday evening.

Tuesday I went to work on the cover. I already had an e-book cover. So next was to create a canvas of the right size in G.I.M.P., put the e-book cover in, add a back cover, add a spine, make sure they were all sized correctly and put in the right place. Without going into too much detail, I had much trouble with it on Tuesday night. The front and back covers came together okay, but I couldn't get the text for the spine to work properly. Couldn't rotate it and place it where it needed to be. I had managed to do this when I made the print cover for my Thomas Carlyle book, but that happened almost by accident rather than by design, and I couldn't replicate it. So I went to PowerPoint and created the spine, saved it as a graphic image, and loaded into the G.I.M.P. cover, resized and placed. Easy peasy.

I did that Wednesday, and uploaded the interior and cover to CreateSpace, did all the metadata type stuff, and submitted. Today I learned it meets all CS's technical specifications, and I can order prints. So yea! I've done well learning the technical requirements for a print book.

But what I find is that those publishing type tasks really sap my energy. I come upstairs from The Dungeon and find I have little energy to do anything else. This is different from when I'm writing, or editing. After three hours doing that I'm pumped up, ready to go on to the next task. After three hours of publishing work I'm ready to collapse in a chair and do nothing. I suppose that shows I'm more suited to be a writer than a publisher. Interior formatting I don't mind; that's an exciting challenge. But covers and the whole submittal process is what does me in.

I suppose many endeavors in life are like that. Some are energizing, some sapping. My day job tends to be energizing. In it I do a lot of things I like, and feel energized upon completion. I also have to do some things I don't enjoy so much, and these sap the energy out of me. On the whole there's more that I like than that I don't.

They say if you love your job it's not really work. I love civil engineering in the type of job I have now. I love writing. I do publishing tasks because I don't have money to subcontract them out, so I have to do them myself. Possibly these tasks will become more enjoyable over time, and I'll find them energizing. That's beginning to happen at work, as after teaching training classes I don't feel quite as drained as I used to. I won't say I'm energized, but my response is definitely moving toward the energized end of the spectrum. Will it ever get that way with publishing tasks? I'll have to do it a bunch more times before I'll know.

James Patterson rails against change

The publishing world is once again in an uproar—or at least the part of it that I pay attention to is. This time it’s Amazon v. Hachette. The issue is the terms of the contract between them. Hachette is the publisher; Amazon is the book distributor. Four years ago Hachette colluded with other publishers and Apple to force Amazon to accept contract terms that resulted in higher prices for e-books. The Justice Department brought suit against those entities for this, and won. As a result, these publishers must renegotiate terms with Amazon on a staggered basis (to guarantee no collusion), and Hachette is first up to bat.

In the last week or two word got out to the press that negotiations aren’t going well. Then Amazon disabled the pre-order buttons for some or all books being published by Hachette. Thus, if some author that you like to read is published by Hachette or its imprints and has a book that will be out soon, you can’t pre-order it. That’s the story as I understand it. No doubt what I’ve heard in the press and on the publishing part of the Blogosphere is a simplistic view.

Various publishing professionals and authors published by Hachette have weighed in, almost universally siding with Hachette. One of these was James Patterson, the most successful author of the last two decades, multi-millionaire, chief of a writing team that puts out his books. He wrote about it here, on his Facebook page. Those four paragraphs have been taken apart and put in an appropriate, sun-less place by people more knowledgeable than me.

For this blog post, I want to concentrate on the last paragraph, and one particular Patterson statement:

If the world of books is going to change to ebooks, so be it. But I think it’s essential that someone steps up and takes responsibility for the future of American literature and the part it plays in our culture. Right now, bookstores, libraries, authors, and books themselves are caught in the cross fire of an economic war. If this is the new American way, then maybe it has to be changed—by law, if necessary—immediately, if not sooner.

Look closely at what Patterson is saying. American literature is at stake in the Amazon-Hachette negotiations. As he stated a year or so ago, libraries are endangered, bookstores are endangered, authors are endangered. His solution? A new law is needed, immediately if not sooner. Translation: I have a problem. I don’t like the way my world is changing. Government, step in please with a law to keep my world exactly as it was, or at least don’t let it change any more.

It seems to me that what Patterson is really upset about is that all the changes in publishing are most likely to result in him losing market share. He wants the government to guarantee him an audience. Others have said essentially the same thing, also cloaked in rhetoric. Dan Rather wanted some kind of law to protect the audience of the mainstream media because people *gasp* were getting their news from Fox News Channel and *double gasp* the Blogosphere. Shame!

Patterson believes that libraries are going down the tubes because of e-books. And who was the party mainly responsible for the rise of affordable e-books? Amazon. He believes bookstores are going down the tubes because people find it more convenient and cheaper to buy books on line. And who was the party mainly responsible for the rise of e-commerce concerning books? Amazon. He thinks authors are going down the tubes, though doesn’t state why. I would guess it’s actually trade-published authors he’s referring to, and that they are going down the tubes because they now have competition for market share from a growing list of self-published authors and books. And who is responsible for creating a popular and easy-to-use publishing platform so that those who don’t make it past the trade-publisher gatekeeper system can get their books out to an audience without forking over to a vanity publisher the money they could have spent on a used car or a vacation? Amazon, or course. Amazon is at fault for a trifecta of problems.

So we need laws to protect libraries and bookstores and perhaps authors. Not all authors, though: only those published by the likes of Hachette. Because those published in other ways are destroying American literature and, by extension, American culture.

What utter rubbish. Many people have forever screamed for a government solution to their problems, rather than changing trades or business models. One famous case in antiquity was British boot buckle workers, who asked for a government solution in the 1790s when the Prince of Wales started wearing laced shoes, a nation full of royalty groupies followed suit, and buckle manufacturers and workers fell on hard times because of the buckle-less shoes. And as one famous radio talk show host has said, no doubt a century later the buggy whip manufacturers wanted a government solution when the horseless carriage started to become popular.

Now, a century after that, elements of the publishing industry want a government solution because technology has made possible the paper-less book, which in turn has made more possible the publisher-less author.

I may not fully understand the true and complete purpose of government, but I know it’s not to guarantee wealthy people such as Patterson and Rather an audience.

It seems to me that publishers are doing just fine. It’s bookstores that have been hurt by changes in the industry resulting from technology. But Amazon isn’t to blame. Consumers are. They are buying in a way that’s cheaper and more convenient. Libraries are perhaps hurting, though many are making technology-based changes to serve their “customers,” and are doing well. What about authors? If you look at the complete subset of trade-published authors (A list and midlist and one-timers), I suspect as a group they are being squeezed by their publishers, and have done better in the past. Not being part of that subset I don’t know for sure. But if you look at the full set of authors in this nation, technology-based changes have made things much better for them. They have more books out, sell more copies, don’t care if they sell an e-book or a paperback or a hard cover. They connect with fans. And they are making more money as a complete set than they ever would in the trade publishing world.

The only ways publishers will be hurt by the new world of publishing are: if they fail to embrace and take full advantage of distribution channels that weren’t there two decades ago; or if authors published with them realize they don’t need those publishers and desert them en masse. I don’t see that happening in the next decade. Ten years is more than enough time to adjust your business model without needing a government solution, don’t you think?

As for this demise of American culture, that will have to wait for another post.

Milestones in the last week

That's what's happened to me: several milestones over the last five days. I don't know that my brain will allow me to make a lengthy discussion of these, so let me list then, then come back to them and see if I have the wherewithal to add commentary.

• Participated in my first 5K event last Saturday, April 5
• Was able to learn G.I.M.P. enough to be able to create a cover for a print book
• Had a good enough regular check-up at the doctor that he has reduced the frequency of my check-ups to every six months instead of three months.
• Figured out two sticky problems at work. Neither is done yet, but the way is clear to both of them.
• Had the book cover I created accepted by CreateSpace, and I was able to order the proof copy.

Concerning the 5K, I need to make it clear that I participated, I didn't run. One of the routes I take on one or two weekend days is 5K, so I knew I could finish it. Based on that route, I was hoping to beat 50 minutes in the competition. Then last week I went to the track and did a two mile hard run, to see how I might do. Based on that I had an unofficial goal of 48 minutes. I finished the event with a time of 45:44, last among men in my age group, but I felt good about it. I jogged about a minute or two during the race, maybe even three minutes, and that seemed enough to help me get my time down.

I discussed G.I.M.P. in my other blog, and won't take too long here. It's a graphics editing program, not at all intuitive to use. Over four days of the last seven I worked my way through it, and was able to put together a cover for the print version of Thomas Carlyle's Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. I turned that in Tuesday night, and Wednesday afternoon received the e-mail from CreateSpace saying that the cover (as well as the interior, which I had already formatted a few days before) met all specs needed for printing, and they could proceed. So my first print cover was acceptable. I ordered the print, and can't wait to see how it looks on the book.

With my blood sugar measurements as low as they've been for years, and still trending down, the doctor was wanting to give me four months between check-ups instead of the normal three. But that doesn't work so well for prescriptions filled on a quarterly basis. So I suggested that I continue to come in for my lab work quarterly, but that I see him every six months. If the labs show any sign of trouble, either his office or I can schedule a visit. He thought that was a good idea, so it's done. I won't see the doc again, except for the labs, until October, which will be my annual physical.

And, one other thing that's positive this week is getting up to three book sales for the month. I sold one e-copy of Documenting America, one print copy at work of Operation Lotus Sunday, and an e-copy of the Carlyle encyclopedia book. I'm not really expecting to sell many of this oddball, public domain book, and to sell even one so soon after publication is good.

So I'm feeling good about things right now. Next will be to finish my novel-in-progress, to make a proper cover for The Gutter Chronicles (including a print cover), and to do a print cover for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Then it's onward to who knows what after that.

Unfathomable Energy

One summer evening in 1991, we were out walking as a family, on the London Road/Chelsea Road loop where we lived in Bella Vista. Down the hill, cross the ravine that drains a major area into Lake Windsor, then up a steep hill. From that point on it's fairly level, minor up and down hills until you get back on that part of London that led to our rental house. When we got to the flat-ish part, Sara and I decided to run, and did so up to Chelsea. Or maybe we did a little way on Chelsea also. I believe it was almost dark or may have already been dark by then. Two things she said at the end of the run that I still remember. "Wow, you have very quiet footsteps when you run," and "I can't believe how much energy I have."

Remembering that very clearly, even almost twenty-three years later, that got me thinking energy. Last week I came through a period where I had very little energy, and I didn't understand it. My routines were normal. To bed about as normal and up about as normal. All body functions functioning as they should. I little more pain in my right knee than usual, but not by any means excessive. My weight was down a couple of pounds in a week. Yet, at work and at home, I felt that I couldn't do another thing. This actually started around March 23, Sunday. I had gone for my 3.1 mile walk on Saturday, pushing it hard. That was after the usual morning chores. Sunday, however, I felt the lack of energy and didn't do the walk. I worked on writing tasks, but didn't get a whole lot done, if I remember correctly.

This continued in the next week, and even last weekend. I forced myself to be productive at work, and went for noon hour walks (typically 1 mile) most days.  I skipped my walk on Saturday, though on Sunday I again forced myself to do the 3.1 miles, not as hard as the previous Saturday. During the week I mainly worked on publishing activities rather than writing. I was formatting my latest book for e-book and then print book. On Saturday I did the final few tasks and actually uploaded it. I first didn't realize I failed to click the "Publish" box, and four hours later checked to see why it hadn't moved to the next phase. I did that, and almost immediately the Amazon review came back with an error needing correcting. I fixed that, and waited. By the time I arose Sunday morning, the book had published. And Sunday afternoon I found enough energy to go for that walk.

This got me thinking about energy: how we get it in our system and sense that we have it. What takes energy from us, what feeds it to us? We all know a huge meal saps energy as the digestive system parts talk back and forth. The over-full stomach alerts the small intestine that a slug of stuff to digest is coming, etc. But lack of food will also sap energy. Why should a 12 year old girl and a 39 year old man gain energy by expending energy (for I, too, remember that I had a lot of energy that evening, same as Sara) but a 62 year old man loses energy by doing very little? It's a mystery.

Maybe those publishing tasks were looming before me, and dislike of having to do them was what was driving the energy out of them. Then, once completed, I began to get my energy back. And it's not that I don't like the publishing tasks. I actually like formatting books, looking into the minutia of what makes a book look good, learning new tricks of the trade, getting it done. But it's not as much fun as the writing and editing. Now, I have the print book ready to go with the exception of the cover. I did the e-book cover, and will incorporate that into the print book cover. So far I've begged my print covers done, and did some hiring of it done. But I'm determined to learn how to do it. I'll never be artistic, and my covers may never be the best, but I will learn the mechanics of putting them together. Facing this, however, is continuing to pull energy from me. The last two nights I could have been working on it, and yet, I did other things, not even necessary things.

On Saturday I will participate in my first 5k event. I plan to walk it, although I reserve to job some at the end if I feel good. How much energy will I have? On Monday I went by the track and walked a mile at what I felt was a competition pace. I completed it in 15:22, and did another quarter mile at the same pace. That's faster than the 50 minute goal I have for this first 5k. Will I have enough energy to complete it? Maybe, if I find a way to do things that increase my energy over the next couple of days. If I work on that print book cover, I'm not sure what that will do to me.

And no, I'm not going to drink one of those hyper-energy drinks. I see no reason for monkeying with the artificial stimulant cocktail that they are, not give that I take a handful of medications. I need to figure this out by natural means. I'll have to see how I feel after the 5k. If I break 50 minutes, or even as low as 48 minutes, and still have plenty of energy for the tasks that I face over the next days, maybe I'll know something more about personal energy.

The Self-Published Porn Flap

This probably didn't hit the national news. It might have barely made it to the major newspapers. But the author world seems to have risen up in indignation at decisions made by some publishers to stop carrying self-published books. Those publishers have done so in a knee-jerk reaction to complaints about porn.

I don't know for sure where or how it started, but apparently some self-publishers of print smut were disguising their work by giving innocuous titles, descriptions, and meta data. I suppose, if you were a reader of these things, you would recognized the veiled descriptions and know the book was for you, but if you didn't read these and were searching for something else you might accidentally buy a porn book. Such terms as "daddy" would alert the smut buyer it's about incest, but not alert other buyers it wasn't about an innocent family situation. Of course, that must also mean those innocent buyers didn't access or read the "look inside" sample.

Some publisher, maybe W.H. Smith in England, took all self-published books down from their web site while they sorted it out. WHS was not the publisher of these books, but they sold them on their book retailing site. I guess Kobo also did this in the USA. Self-publishers were understandably upset. Kobo's reaction was the most extreme, as they took every self-published book down until they could find the ones that violated their terms of service.

Since I don't check the websites of all book distributors to see if they have my books for sale, I never would have known about this without the uproar in the self-published authors blogosphere. For the record, I support the concept that these e-retailers can refuse to sell any book they want. They have no obligation to carry a book that is against their terms of service or business model.

But oh the uproar! How could they do this, delete books just because they had disguised smut that might end up on the e-readers of children? Some Facebook writer acquaintance linked to a petition about this, except the petition was aimed at Amazon, because apparently Amazon doesn't allow a whole lot of that in their e-store to begin with. I didn't copy the petition, unfortunately, and don't believe I could get back to the two-week old FB link. I started writing something about this at the time, looking at the petition and the comments from those who signed it. Here's what I wrote.

That "petition" is laughable. Amazon is just a retailer that makes decisions on what products to carry. They choose not to carry a certain kind of book. So what? Buy it somewhere else.

The comment son that thread are also ridiculous. "Who gives anyone the right to tell me what I can and cannot read?" and "I don't want anyone to tell me what I can or cannot read." Hello, people! That's not what Amazon is doing. Read whatever you want to. They just aren't selling what you want to read. And why, if you don't want anyone to tell you what you can read, do you think you can tell anyone what they have to sell?

Reading that now, I'm remembering that the petition accused Amazon of censorship. Never mind that Amazon isn't the government, it's a private company. Never mind that they aren't suppressing publishing, since so many venues exist where you can publish with no restrictions. Never mind that Amazon has had this policy in place for a long time, and that it was other retailers who had caused the recent flap. The Passive Guy calls this "Amazon Derangement Syndrome", and the people who created and signed this petition and commented on it sure had it.

How laughable that those who don't want to be told what to do (not that Amazon was doing that) are fine telling Amazon and other e-retailers what they must do. Unbelievable.

A Failure to Communicate? Or to Understand?

When you only read a few blogs, and a controversy on one blog spills over to another, it makes for an exciting few days of blog reading.

That’s what happened Monday when Rachelle Gardner, a literary agent whose opinions I listen to, posted about restrictive non-compete clauses insisted upon by publishers that will prevent contracted authors from simultaneously self-publishing. You can read about it here. As you will see from the comments, many people objected to what she wrote, including her title, “Will My Publisher Let Me Self-Publish Too?”

Over at The Passive Voice blog, the Passive Guy chose to excerpt Rachelle’s post and follow it with some apt comments. You can see his post and the comments here. The discussion was lively, mostly negative to Rachelle’s position. TPV is generally favorable to self-publishing and negative to trade publishing, though I’ve found the blog owner to be more fair in his assessments than some other self-publishing gurus.

Now today, Rachelle felt the need to clarify what she wrote. You can see that here. Today she posted that her previous post was not a “this is what I believe” post but a “here’s how publishers think and behave” post. Understanding how publishers think and behave will make you a better negotiator of the author-publisher contract, she says. That was actually how I took her original post. While a few phrases in the original post could have been construed as favorable to the publishers’ position, e.g. “Publishers are rightfully concerned” (to the detriment of the author), those familiar with Rachelle’s larger body of posts would know that she is a faithful advocate for her writer clients.

But what is mostly missing from either of Rachelle’s posts but is mentioned in TPV comments is that the publishers are way out of touch with how readers find and buy content today. People find an author they like and stick with that person. If they could buy a book from an author every two months they would like to do that. Trade publishers would put out one book a year for the author. Readers will find someone else in the meantime. The days when an author published a book a year and her publisher had a mailing list of 75,000 who were fine waiting for the annual notice that a new volume was available are over.

One of the mantras of the self-publishing crowd is the best promotion for your book(s) is to write and publish another book. Rather than spend time on promoting already published books, write the next book and get it polished and published as quickly as you can. Six a year are better than four a year are better than three are better than two are better than one. So far this isn’t working for me, but my severe case of Genre Identity Disorder is most likely what’s causing that. Or maybe there just aren’t millions of people out there who like the same kind of books I like. But the anecdotal evidence that this method works is almost substantial enough to be statistical. So I’ll keep doing it and hope my GID works itself out over time.

If trade publishers were savvy about all this, and understood the changing nature of the book purchasing market, rather than restricting authors with non-compete clauses they would encourage their authors to also self-publish. They would say, “Because of production schedules and limitations, we can only publish one of your books a year. But because we know more books are better, feel free to publish a couple of other books in between the ones you publish with us. We will all profit more from you doing that.”

So why don’t the trade publishers do that? As I said, I think it’s because they don’t truly understand their market. But it’s also possible that they don’t want their authors learning just how easy self-publishing is and how much greater return there will be from it. That might lead some authors to say “Why do I even need a publisher?” If that’s what they’re thinking, it would be a scary scenario to them.

The divide in the writing-publishing community seems, in my observation, to be growing greater between trade publishing and self-publishing. I don’t really see it closing any time soon.

Authors Gaming the System

In recent days the publishing industry has learned how three authors have "gamed" the system, as I call it. They are:

• John Locke is one of the darlings of the self-publishing crowd. He wrote a number of books, published them in rapid succession, priced them at $0.99 for an e-book, and sold a million e-books in a few months. He then published "How I Sold a Million e-Books in Five Months", which sold a ton of books. What he conveniently left out of that memoir/instruction book was that he spent thousands of dollars to buy reviews on Amazon. You can read about it here. [link may expire]
• Stephen Leather is an author I don't know. He's admitted to using sock puppets (see his comments in this thread) to post reviews on Amazon. For those who don't know, a sock puppet is Internet-speak for someone who posts to a site/forum/list under multiple identities, thus disguising who he is. It's different than simply remaining anonymous, since multiple identities are involved. Sock puppets are typically use to promote yourself while appearing to be a different person. They can also be used to denigrate your opposition or competition, or to get around being banned from a site.
• Roger Ellory (writes as R.J. Ellory) is also guilty of practicing sock puppetry, praising his own books and denigrating others. Here's a compilation of tweets about it (language warning). This story has had a lot of legs, and finding more comprehensive, paragraph-organized posts about it should be easy with a search engine.

What does all this mean? That self-published authors have figured out how to game the Amazon system to sell more books? Looks that way. The self-publishing part of the Internet is abuzz with this, as is some of the trade publishing I-zone. After all, Ellory is a trade-published author, yet he stoops to sock puppetry. Shameful!

This paints self-publishing in a bad light, but it also taints trade publishing. It seems authors in both camps may behave badly. Locke's ethical downfall is probably the greater, though some may disagree.

This comes down to ethics vs. law. As I've said before in different venues, the law defines the lowest level of behavior deemed acceptable to society. Ethics describes a standard higher than the law, to which a person ascribes in order to be a better member of society. These three authors have followed the law (though there is a question of whether or not the sock puppetteering violates Amazon terms of service, which is an ethical behavior/sort-of-law to which they agreed).

To make a long story short, only once have I solicited a review. That was to a man I know who said he'd read one of my books and liked it, and I asked him if he would post a review at Amazon. He said he would, though he hasn't yet. I don't ever plan on soliciting reviews. My books will rise or sink based on the judgment of the marketplace, without interference from me other than typical marketing and sales activities.

A Nice Soaking Rain

After weeks, maybe as long as two months, with very little rainfall, this morning we are in the midst of a nice, soaking rain. Last night the forecast was for 30 percent chance of rain today. Normally when it's 30 percent chance we don't get rain. When it's 40 percent chance we probably do. So I went to bed last night figuring we wouldn't get any.

This morning, after showering I turned on the weather as normal, and the radar showed a line of strong storms coming on us from the northwest, a little over one county away, and moving quickly in our direction. The radar loop showed the storms weren't dissipating or splitting. It couldn't miss. Sure enough, around 7:30 a.m. it began raining at our office, and still is. Radar shows it might rain for another hour or so.

What's that expression? "When it rains, it pours." Not so today. The first ten to twenty minutes was heavy (at the busiest part of Bentonville's rush hour, though I was already inside at my computer), but since then it's been nice and steady. The ground is so dry lots of this must be soaking in. Perhaps the County will be able to take the burn ban off—not that I have anything to burn.

Right now it's raining in my writing life. I'm working on four or five projects, all moving toward publication close together. I submitted an engineering article to Buildipedia.com, and it will be published tomorrow. The next one isn't due for a month, as they are cutting back from a bi-monthly column to a monthly. I'm in the waiting process on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Today is the 23rd day since I submitted it to the editor. I'm resigned to self-publishing it, but we'll see.

I'm editing The Candy Store Generation for clarity and consistency. I think I have some repetition in it, and want to eliminate that. I'm two-thirds of the way through preparing the home school edition of Documenting America. That's not taking much time. I do a chapter a day.

These three book-length projects are all coming together at about the same time. Is it pouring? Not really, because I set my own schedule on them. I can determine the priorities, putting them in the order I choose. If things get too hectic, I can just delay any of them I want to. The short stories that are on tap for after these book projects will happen, but if I need a break, so be it.

I'm at least glad that the words are raining. My mind has been active enough that any time I've sat down to edit or write I've been able to. The quiet house while I'm in my temporary bachelorhood (coming to an end in a few days) has allowed me to not be distracted. I wouldn't say my production has been as much as it needs to be, but at least it's been steady. Kind of like today's rain.

And of course, during this time I've been on the wild ride with Doctor Luke's Assistant. That's pretty much ended now, as sales have slowed to a trickle. A number of writing friends have posted that they are reading and enjoying it, and that they will post reviews on Amazon when done. At least one has said she is going to promote it. I hope sales continue to trickle. One or two a day is actually a decent number for a self-published book. Soon I'll look at producing a print version.

So, on with writing. On with multiple projects. On with words raining. I can still hear the rain on the office roof, and still sense the words inside me trying to get out.

Sales, showing the result of the promotion

'Nuff said. That's as of 11:30 a.m. today. These are only paid sales. I think adding in the 5,039 giveways would skew the chart just a bit.

Book Sales

I'm going to post a graph here of my book sales to date. Not that I planned to do a post on it, but in order to insert an image to a post on Absolute Write, as I wanted to, the image has to be on-line. Here's the graph:

Okay, that didn't paste in too well. How I wish I knew how to create and manipulate images! I'm going to post this, then will try again and hopefully get a better graph.

Second one is in; maybe it's better.

Was It Intuition? A Publisher Avoided

I'm not going to name names.

Today I learned that a Christian self-publishing company, one I encountered at every conference I attended, was entwined with a cult-like church.

In 2008 I considered them for self-publishing my poetry book Father Daughter Day, but wasn't able to complete the research necessary to make a decision. In 2011 I further considered them, even talking with one of their staffers by phone and e-mail. I decided not to do it, as their costs seemed high and their take on each book printed also seemed a little high. Or maybe that's what I concluded given that the author's royalty seemed so low. Whatever it was, I wasn't ready or willing to pay several thousand dollars to have my book published.

The company's reputation was stellar. At every conference people talked about how this company, among all the self-publishing companies that charged significant up-front fees, actually did a good job with publishing only well-written books, doing good quality production runs, giving the author value for their money, etc. Now, today, I hear of many bad things about the publisher and its entwined church.

Was it intuition that caused me to turn away from them? Or perhaps a gentle nudge by the Holy Spirit?

Can't Judge a Book: Thinking about Book Covers

I have two works ready to publish as electronic books, all but the covers. One is a short story, “Too Old To Play”. The other is my New Testament-era novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. The covers for each are commissioned. I received drafts for DLA last night via e-mail. Actually, I don’t think you could call them drafts, as they are earlier than that. I think we are at the concept stage.

That has me thinking about covers today. The old adage is “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Yet the conventional wisdom is that the quality of a cover can make or break book sales. So while you can’t judge a book by its cover, that’s exactly what the American book buying public does.

But, electronic books aren’t print books and thus don’t have covers, you say. Oh yes they do, and publishing pundits say the cover of an electronic book is just as important to sales as with a print book. So even with e-books we find the cover is a driving force with sales.

Why is this? Why can’t I just put a generic cover on my books? Something like the one here for “Too Old To Play”? Put some typical back cover copy under the title and author name, and let the buyers come. Seems that would be a much better thing for authors. And it would make the old adage true.

So I’m currently in a cover research mode. I’m finding no end of easily accessible advice and examples. The Passive Guy blog has posts on covers. That led me to The Book Designer, and this post on cover design.

After the two covers mentioned above, I’ll be needing one for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People (unless it gets picked up by the agent I recently submitted it to). I’m planning on going to a couple of book stores tomorrow night to look at covers in the genres and get some ideas. At noon today I think I’ll go to the nearby thrift store with a large book department and see what’s there. Those will be older, and likely won’t reflect current practice.

This morning, before work hours, I browsed through covers on Amazon. I noticed a lot of sameness in what are called genre books. The quality of the covers is good, but they lack originality. Look at the covers of successive books of “bonnet fiction”. They all look the same. In that case, that’s probably a good thing, as a buyer knows what to expect in the book based on the cover.

I believe I have some decent ideas for covers, such as what my son finally produced for Documenting America, which came from my suggestions. But my mind can’t make my hands produce what my mind conceives. Now it’s all based on software. Does that make it easier or harder? In some cases easier, as described in this blog post. I like the way the text superimposed on the photo. I like the way you can play with font sizes, styles, and colors. This is all done with software, and I should be able to learn software.

Well, I have no real conclusion from all of this. Generic covers don’t work; designed covers cost, either time or money, and require both artistic abilities and skills. Research is required. Development of skills is required. And again, the whole weight of what is needed to succeed in this extra career I’ve chosen is becoming overwhelming.

The Candy Store Generation

To have a successful self-published e-book ("successful" meaning good sales), what you need, according to Joe Konrath, are:

• a great book,
• a catchy title
• a dynamite cover,
• good promotion, and
• a body of work that builds on itself.

Even while I cling to the dream of having something published through a traditional publisher, and do some things to go down that road, I'm looking for the next thing to self-publish. What that next thing should be finally came to me on Memorial Day.

Why not write The Candy Store Generation? I first thought of this during the 2000 election, watching the first presidential debate between Bush and Gore. They argued about how to spend a budget surplus expected to be 1 trillion dollars over the next ten years, a result of five years of Republican-led Congresses. It struck me that they sounded like children in a candy store who were given an unexpected windfall from daddy.

But it also struck me that these political animals, children of political families and of privilege, were simply reflecting what America had become. By 2000 the majority of Congress had flipped from what Brokaw called The Greatest Generation to the Baby Boomers. The Boomers were now calling the shots. The Boomers made up a huge voting block. I'm one of them, and I see things in the majority of my generation that bode poorly for our nation.

I let the idea gestate for some time, and in 2009 I wrote four blogs on friend Chuck's blog, "The Senescent Man'. I won't say I wrote them to rave reviews, because they generated no comments. I also rushed them a bit, and didn't develop them for the blog as much as I should have.

Last Monday I decided that I should try to expand them into what I wanted to do. I don't have a complete vision for the book yet, but I don't see it as a long book. Maybe 10,000 to 20,000 words. It will mainly explain what I see are the bad results of Boomer leadership in virtually all areas of American life. I'll also discuss some of the why—from my perspective—the Boomers became what we became. It will be a book mainly of my opinions, with some research, but not a whole lot.

On Tuesday night I went to the old blog posts and dumped them into a MS Word document. It begins as a little over 2,000 words. So I'm already 1/8 to 1/4 done. The smaller word count isn't much of a book, so I'll probably go for the longer one. I have to get the full vision first, and an outline, and maybe couple of chapters done before I decide.

The good news is that I don't start with a blank sheet of paper. I start with a concept that has been fermenting in my gray cells for a decade, and which saw the light of Internet day in small part. The blank sheet of paper is the hardest part of writing anything, it seems. Once that is overcome, it's all downhill. I remember the comic strip "Shoe". The editor asked the writer, "Is the article done yet?" to which the writer replied, "90 percent." He then trudged back to his littered desk, rolled a blank sheet of paper into his typewriter, and said, "The white part." I'm past that. May The Candy Store Generation come to fruition.

On Royalties, Accounts Receivable, and Holiday Weekends

This morning I decided to finally create a spreadsheet that will track my e-book sales royalties. Now, one of the benefits of e-self publishing (eSP), at least the Kindle variety, is that you know exact sales figures in real time. Payout is only when you accumulate $10.00 in royalties, and there's about a 30 day wait after that.

Compare that with traditional publishing, however. There, I'm told, the sales figures are more or less hidden, the royalty statements are advanced math, and the delay in payment is six to nine months. So the e-book royalty situation is much, much better than for traditional publication.

So far I've sold 3 e-copies of Documenting America and 4 of "Mom's Letter." My accumulated royalties are $2.70, rounded off and including any fractional cents for each sale. I guess I don't know what Kindle does with those fractional cents, but I assume they accumulate. So I'm way far away from reaching payout. Obviously too I haven't generated any buzz yet through limited promotional efforts.

At Suite101.com, I have accumulated $5.47 of ad-share royalties. We are experiencing hard times at Suite, due primarily to changes in the Google search algorithm that has de-rated the site, resulting in drastically lower page views with resulting drops in ad revenue. Except for two big days this month, I typically earn less than 10 cents per day. Of course, I haven't added any articles there since February. I expect that to change this weekend, as I have a couple planned.

A positive thing is my accounts receivable. Buildipedia.com published my latest article yesterday: Asphalt Pavement solar Collectors: The Future is Now. That earns me $250. Also yesterday I submitted my next article for Buildipedia, a feature article on erosion control from construction sites. Once that is accepted and published, I'll have another $250 earned. It's possible they won't accept the article (unlikely; they haven't rejected any yet), in which case I'll earn just a kill fee. So all together my accounts receivable for writing work stands at $508.17. Not bad.

Which leads me to Memorial Day weekend. I'm looking forward to the three days. We have nothing planned. Our children are together in Oklahoma City right now, son having driven there from Chicago to see his newest nephew for the first time. We'll be in Bella Vista, chilling, maybe grilling, doing yard work, reading, writing—at least I'll be writing, cleaning, de-cluttering. Normally my writing desires always exceed my productivity for these weekends, but it's good to dream and plan big. This weekend I hope to:

- Upload corrections to Documenting America, and upload the professional cover my son created for me.

- Get started with SmashWords and upload both Documenting America and "Mom's Letter" there.

- Get started with CreateSpace and upload Documenting America there.

- At least look into Pubbit, and maybe upload both e-books there.

- Possibly register a writer's web site and begin work on it.

- Work some on the passage notes to A Harmony of the Gospels

- Type edits to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, including one chapter written in manuscript, and maybe add one more chapter.

- Write/submit two articles to Suite101.com.

As I say, that might be more ambitious than practical. I'll report back after the weekend on what I actually accomplished. Oh, and maybe I'll be able to write a few blog posts and schedule them to post at future dates.

What One E-book Sale Can Do

Actually, it was an e-short story sale. Yes, yesterday I sold another copy of "Mom's Letter" on Amazon Kindle. That puts it up to 4 sales since I published it in mid-February. I did a little promotion on it today, both on Absolute Write and at the Suite101 forums. I don't know where the sale came from, and no new review has yet shown up. I'm happy for it, and for the 34.65 cent royalty I'll earn--if I ever make payout, that is. I'll make payout, I have no doubt about that. It's mainly a question of whether it will be on this side or the other side of the next New Year's Day.

What are the impacts of this sale? The book ranking of "Mom's Letter" skyrocketed from something below 300,000 (hadn't checked for a while) to 45,632. At least a 260,000 place jump from one sale! That tells me that 260,000 other e-books haven't had a sale recently. I don't know how the Kindle rankings work. Are they cumulative since publication? Are they based on the last 30 days? Last 7 days? I haven't figured that out yet, though I haven't tried very hard to figure it out. I suspect it's based on sales in a recent time period. That means 45,632 e-books have had at least 1 sale during that time period. Since the Kindle Store has some million or millions of books available, that means many, many, many had no sales in that period. Welcome to the world of self-publishing.

Another impact is promotion. This demonstrates how important promotion is. A simple link posted to a forum can generate a sale. It might be a sympathy sale, given that I mentioned how sales were lagging, but a sale is a sale. Actually, I don't know if the sale came from my post. One gal responded to my post saying she would tweet it for me. But since that tweet (if she did it; I don't tweet to check on it) came as a result of my forum post, that forum post should at least earn an assist. So I guess I should bet busy and promote some more.

What about the impact on my psyche? It's not as great as the third sale was, nor the first two way back in February. Self-sustaining sales, not directly attributed to promotional efforts, might give me a bigger morale boost. But if I have to make two Internet posts to generate one sale...well, seems like a lot of effort for 35 cents.

But I am a little more encouraged to go ahead and complete the editing round currently in progress on Documenting America. I have four more chapters to read, and then fifteen chapters of edits to type. I'm not really finding much. I had a few embarrassing typos, a few not so embarrassing, and a couple of places where my wording could have been clearer. Nothing much, really. I hope to have the improved, artistically-designed cover available in a day or two, and it would be nice to have the text edits available at the same time, do the re-up-load in one shot instead of two.

Any encouragement is good. May the sales continue.

"Documenting America" Kindle e-book for Sale

So Sunday I uploaded it. Twenty-four hours later they said it was accepted for publication. Another twenty-four hours and it went live, for sale at a bargain price of $1.25. Do I sound like a shameless self-promoter?

Here's the link:
Documenting America, Volume 1

So far I have two sales! One coming from my Facebook announcement, and one from my announcement on the Suite101 forums. I'll probably do more promotion for this than I did with "Mom's Letter", and see if that results in better sales. A 40,000 word book for $1.25 will seem like a better deal than a 1850 word short story for $0.99. That might help sales. I wonder, too, if the recent taking out of Osama bin Laden will result in a surge of American nationalism, which in turn might help sales. I don't say that I'm hoping his death feeds my sales, just thinking out loud at what the possible reaction of the American buying public might be.

I still have so much work to do. I have to figure out how to get a properly formatted Table of Contents for the book. I have to get it—and "Mom's Letter"—formatted for and uploaded to the SmashWords distribution platform. And I have to get DA formatted though CreateSpace to have a print-on-demand book for sale.

But I'll take an evening to enjoy the moment, and dream a little.

So Little Progress on a Weekend

Saturday just past dawned clear, but went cloudy quite fast. Then the sun broke through. I was up around 8:30 AM, as usual for a Saturday. Read my devotions, then went outside for my normal yard work. The sun was out, then behind clouds, then out again. The wind blew in gusts, then it was dead calm, then it blew again. I did such minor things as clean a little in the garage, then pick up sticks from the front yard (a rock yard), then pull weeds from the front yard. Then I was ready for my weekly sawing on the downed tree on the wood lot next to us.

Prior to my current health kick, improving both weight and blood sugar, I was lucky to be able to saw one section from this tree. The diameter is only 8 inches or so where I'm sawing. Then, two weeks ago, I was able to saw two sections, and felt good at the end. Saturday I decided to shoot for three sections, which would finish the tree. And I was able to do it, feeling at the end that I could have done another if I wasn't down to the stump. That was such a good feeling: to finish the tree, and to see my arm strength and stamina built up from even a month ago.

So then it was inside to see what else I had to do and to write. I pulled up my latest Documenting America file, and decided to have one more go at the Introduction. I knew I needed to add something about how I came to select the documents included in the book. So I did that, then went on to some work on Essential John Wesley. Two hours later I found it was time to head to Wal-Mart for the weekly acquisition of groceries.

Saturday evening was devoted to my Wesley studies, as well as preparing to teach Life Group on Sunday. The Wesley reference book I have out on inter-library loan was due Monday, and I was determined to get my $2.00 ILL fee's worth. So I read through the slim book again, taking some different notes. This continued into Sunday. To make sure I "got my money's worth," I wrote a review of that book for this blog, and posted it Saturday. I may have spent too much time on the slavery writings of Wesley, but I consider the research not only for EJW but also for future articles or essays.

Sunday afternoon I went through the work of formatting and uploading Documenting America for and to the Kindle Store. It's there, not live yet (as of this writing), but in the review queue. Should go live Monday evening or sometime on Tuesday. I still don't have a decent cover, so I'm just using the one I developed with my limited graphics skills. But I can change the cover at any time, so I decided to upload. Upon review I realized the spacing in the Table of Contents was messed up, but I decided to run with it. The Kindle uploading software allows for a separate TOC upload. Somehow I sensed that wouldn't be easy, so I decided to put it off.

Sunday evening was devoted to Wesley studies, in an old article I found about him as a literary man, and in his journals. That meant I did not do any writing in the Wesley book. That gave me a feeling of lack of accomplishment. All together, this weekend I wrote less than 1,000 words, including the blog post. I need to get in 3,000 on the weekends to have a prayer of ever finishing anything. Other things I wanted to do was to look into Amazon's CreateSpace, to have a physical book for Documenting America. I have a feeling it's not too difficult. I also wanted to look into the Barnes & Noble e-book tool, and SmashWords, so as to have my stuff available on multiple e-reader platforms. Alas, I didn't get to any of that.

Why is it so difficult to make writing progress on the weekends? With Saturday evening and Sunday all day being rainy, I couldn't walk, so I had plenty of time to write. Yet production was minimal. All I can do is try harder in the future.

Oh, and I was right about creating a TOC for Kindle. Just did some research into it, and it involves HTML code—simple stuff I think, if any HTML can be considered simple. Well, I'll let the book get up, then see what I can do.

More on Self-Publishing: Upfront Costs

So, the commenters on Rachelle Gardner's blog indicated "affirmation" was their number one reason for seeking publication through a traditional publisher and avoiding self-publishing. Another reason mentioned was cost—it costs too much to self-publish. Here's a sampling of the comments.

Because as a self-published author, either you are limited to e-books...or you have to pay a lot of money up front - on editing and professional-quality cover art - to produce an attractive print version....

One, because I lack the ability to do two things at once (ie: write a novel AND market it). If I self-pubbed, I'd need the resources to hire someone to do that part for me, and I am too broke to do that currently.

...I chose to persue the traditional route for a couple reasons. I don't possess the resources required up front for a first class publication....

It seems, however, that these and other commenters who mentioned cost are using old information. Or they haven't conducted complete research and discovered the full range of self-publishing options available. Not so long ago self-publishing involved paying a hefty set-up fee, then having to purchase a large number of books you would sell yourself. Stories of boxes of books in writers' garages are legendary. The initial investment could easily be two to three thousand dollars.

Today, however, while that arrangement is still available, two other options to self-publish are very reasonable. Electronic self-publishing (eSP) involves zero upfront cost, unless the author needs to hire out formatting and covers. Well, a freelance editor may also be needed to make the text book perfect. Still, the cost of covers and formatting are very reasonable for a full length book. Freelance editing could be expensive, I suppose, though I haven't looked into the cost of that. Options such as critique group and exchange of beta reader time and effort are ways to offset those costs. But for the writer who can format and edit sufficiently, and if you accept just a slightly lower quality of cover cost (presuming you can't do it yourself), the upfront cost to eSP is quite minimal. And there's no initial inventory of books.

eSP, of course does not put a physical book in anyones hand; thus this may not be fully satisfying. For physical books, the inexpensive alternative is POD—print on demand. This relatively new technology has improved by leaps and bounds the last few years. Cost of the equipment has come down, and the quality of the bound book has improved. People who have bought these (I haven't yet; haven't been any place that had one of the machines, nor ordered any books that came that way) say you can't tell the difference between an offset print book and a POD book. Offset printing costs more for a small print run than does a single POD book, but a POD book costs more than an offset print book in a large print run.

So the negatives about the cost for the author to self-publish as compared to the traditional publishing route have pretty much vanished. Part of the reason for this is the cost to the author to traditionally publish. Yes, there are costs involved, and I don't mean lower royalties. I mean up-front costs. First, the best way to break in to trad-pub is to attend conferences, meet agents and editors, attend classes, network with anyone and everyone you can, and pitch your book at each opportunity. Those conferences cost money. With travel and tuition it could be $1,000 per conference, and you might have to do that for years before you attend the right conference with the right agent or editor having the right product to pitch. Thousands of dollars.

Of course, you could say that you need to attend conferences for the classes and networking, even if you don't pitch a book, just to grow as a writer. I won't argue that point, other than to say conference attendance would be a whole lot less if you eliminated the chance to meet editors and agents. I don't think that many people would go simply for the classes and the networking.

Then there's the cost of a freelance editor. Yes, read carefully all the advice given by publishing professionals (agents, editors, publishers, already published authors), and you will see they all recommend that you hire an editor to edit the manuscript you intend to submit to a traditional publisher. When signing a first time author, publishers want a manuscript that doesn't need a lot of editing. That's what all the experts say. So really, there's not cost savings there. If you need an editor to self-publish, you need an editor to pre-edit your work before submitting for traditional publishing. The cost is the same.

Then there's the cost of time and emotions. Once the quality of your writing is where it needs to be for acceptance by a traditional publisher, that doesn't mean you will be successful at getting it placed. Publishers are the buyers in a buyers' market. They turn down excellent books all the time, making a judgment of what might sell by the time they can get the book to market. Or they may have just contracted for another book the same as yours, and don't want to have two competing books. Or any of another hundred reasons why they may have to pass on your book that is just as good as others being published, and maybe better.

And finally there's the emotional cost of dealing with rejection after rejection, of waiting, and of wondering if you'll ever break in. That will be more of a concern for some than for others. Rejections strike different people in different ways. We all know it's part of publishing, and so we become philosophical about it. Still, there's an emotional cost for everyone as they process the rejections and the wait times. Those costs can be beneficial, but they are still costs.

So, all in all, it seems to me the cost to traditionally publish is not less than the cost to self-publish, and may in fact be more.