K.C. Knouse's Blog, page 2

Twenty Miles West on Sale for 99 cents

Cover image for Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories

The Kindle version (ebook) of my recently published collection of short fiction, Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories, is on sale for 99¢ from Wednesday, August 15, 2018, through Tuesday, August 21, 2018. The regular price is $2.99.

This book is also available through Kindle Unlimited.

Not sure you want to invest 99¢ in the work of an unknown author? You can read the entire first story of the collection which is also the title story, Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas, by clicking on the cover image under the orange and blue Look Inside tag located at the top left of the Amazon Kindle listing page for this book. A majority of the second story (but not the ending), Slider, is also included in the preview.

If you buy the book and read it, please write a review and post it on Amazon. You can also leave a comment here or use the contact page to send me a private message.

Thank you for your support and happy reading.

 

The Distinction Between Writing and Content

Are you a writer or a marketer? That is the question posed by Jonathan Greene in a recent essay on Medium that makes the distinction between writing and content. Greene defines writing as storytelling and content as marketing. Writing the story is an end in itself, whereas content is a means to an end—a view, a click, or a sale of some kind.

It is easy to identify content: its purpose is to motivate the reader to take a particular action; a call to action always appears at the end of the piece. Greene makes the observation that calls to action delegitimize the writing in the mind of the reader. It becomes content.

As a writer, I have had a problem with this idea of content. It seemed to commoditize writing, to turn it into mere filler to attract eyeballs to a web page or website in order to earn money from affiliate advertising or to sell a product. Greene’s distinction between writing and content rings true to me. It helped me understand why I resented and resisted so much of the advice given with regard to writing for publication online.

Writing has been infected with this frenzied need to produce content. It seems that frequency is the driving force for search algorithms. To get noticed, to get read, to acquire a following, one has to constantly push out content. I say content because if I am putting my stuff out there for the sole purpose of working the search algorithm, then my writing is a mere means to an end.

For me, at least, storytelling (writing) takes time to achieve. It needs to ferment in my mind for a time before I even really know what the story is about. Sometimes changing one word or a sentence clarifies the meaning of the piece and transforms it. But it can take hours, days, weeks, or even months of reflecting on what has been written before that right word or sentence makes itself evident.

The thing is, I know when something is missing. It nags at me, and I will not publish until I discover what is lacking. Time and reflection are necessary for me to produce good work. I enjoy writing and will not rush it. Of course, I am not trying to make a living from my writing and that gives me the luxury of time.

The Ditch: Recent Non-fiction on Medium.com

Photo by K.C. Knouse

I recently published a non-fiction story, The Ditch, about love and hate at a neighborhood ditch on Medium.com. This is a members-only piece, but non-Medium members can read up to three selections. Check it out and let me know what you think.

You can read my short stories and other writing for free on Medium.com.

Evolution of a Book Cover

The cover for my recently released collection of short fiction, Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories, evolved over a period of two years while I edited and fine-tuned the content. In the end, I changed the title of the lead story to accommodate the final cover art.

Initially, I tried to come up with a title for the collection, but this proved to be a daunting task as the stories are not related in any way. The generic titles I came up with sounded trite or had already been used. I gave up.

Many of the short story collections I found used the name of a story for the title of the collection. The title of my lead story, Plans, seemed to be a logical choice. A red sports car played a prominent role in the story, so I came up with this cover.

Although I liked the look of the cover, I thought it might mislead the potential reader into thinking that automobiles were the subject of the stories in the collection. In addition, the title story involved a sports car that had broken down on a desert highway. The car in the cover illustration looked as if it were parked in a showroom. I moved on.

I searched through thousands of photos and fell in love with one of an old motel sign. It fit the plot of the title story in which the main character makes plans to hook up with a woman he has stopped to help along the side of a highway. Here is the original cover using that photo.

This cover seemed to me to project an adventurous nostalgia that I thought would be appealing. This one was a winner. Then I did a search for book titles on Amazon using the word plans. Hundreds of books have the word plans in the title. Most of them are non-fiction titles about planning woodworking projects and such. In response to the search results, I changed the title of the lead story and the collection to Making Plans. The revised cover looked like this.

Somewhere I had heard of a free critique of artwork offered by a design website. I submitted my revised book cover—thumbs down all around. The critiques did not find one redeeming feature. I might as well have submitted blank artwork. Back to the drawing board.

In the story Making Plans, the main character talks about a local bar named Ed’s. I discovered a photo of two beers on a wooden table that I liked.

Friends who previewed this cover thought it looked like a beer advertisement. I inserted car keys for added effect.

The beer cover just didn’t generate any excitement. I scrapped it and shifted my attention to the setting of the lead story, a desolate, desert highway in West Texas. I found a great representative photo, added an illustration of a mile marker sign, and changed the name of the lead story and book to Mile Marker 135. The cover looked like this.

My search on Amazon produced dozens of books with Mile Marker in the title. That wouldn’t do. I changed the name of the lead story and book to Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas following an Amazon search that proved this to be a unique title. It described the location of the final art for the cover: a photo of a desolate, desert highway. I experimented with different fonts for the title and settled on the Snickles font. I had found my cover at last.

Cover image for Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories

A Victim of Murphy’s Law

Photo courtesy of Tumisu on Pixabay.com

Two of Murphy’s Laws plagued my new collection of short fiction, Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories, during the creation and edit stages: it was not as easy as I had thought it would be to publish an ebook, and it took much longer than I had expected. Now, a week before my release date of April 11, 2018, a third law came into play: if anything can go wrong, it will. When I uploaded the KPF file that I had created with Kindle Create, the file that had previewed flawlessly in the Kindle Create previewer, I receive an error message. It told me that Kindle had encountered an error while processing the file and asked me to correct the file and try again.

No direction

I didn’t know what to do. The error message did not indicate what required correcting. So I created another file using Kindle Create and tried again. The same error message appeared during the processing stage. I sent an inquiry to customer service and received a reply within 24 hours. Unfortunately, the reply addressed a file uploading issue which was not the problem at hand. As I explained in my inquiry, I had received a processing error after a successful upload of the file. When asked in a follow-up email if customer service had solved my problem, I replied that my problem had not been addressed and proceeded to restate the problem.

Frustration as I neared my book release date

At this point, I had become frustrated with Kindle Create and resorted to the creation of an html file from the source doc file I had uploaded to Kindle Create. A problem existed in taking this route: I had made numerous, small, last minute changes to the Kindle Create formatted file that did not appear in the source doc file. It took several hours to update the source doc file with the last minute changes. I saved it as a filtered html file and uploaded it to Kindle. Success!!

The html file contained my original vanilla formatting for the interior of the book. It wasn’t as fancy as the Kindle Create formatting, but it worked. The Kindle version of my book appeared on the Amazon site a couple of days before my scheduled release date of April 11, 2018.

Kindle customer service continued to follow up

On April 9, 2018, I received an email from customer service with some tips that might allow the KPF file to be processed successfully. By that time, I had the book listed on Amazon, so I didn’t pursue it.

Then on April 12, 2018, I received another email from customer service that identified the problem Kindle had encountered while processing my KPF file. It seems that the tiff file I uploaded for my cover image was not compatible with KPF. Customer service suggested I convert it to a jpeg file and upload the revised cover image to resolve the issue.

Since the book was already listed on Amazon, I decided to leave it as it is. However, I appreciate Kindle customer service’s persistence in addressing the problem with the processing error. If I use Kindle Create to format a future book, I will make sure the cover image I upload is a jpeg format.

My main takeaway from this experience is to refrain from uploading the source file to Kindle Create until all corrections and changes have been made, and I am ready to publish.

Book Club Discussion Questions Added

Photo credit: MabelAmber courtesy of Pixabay.com

For those of you who would like to add Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories to your book club reading list, I have posted sample discussion questions on the website KCKnouse.com. Look for them in the main menu.

You can start the discussion with some general questions about the book, such as, what is your favorite story in the book and why? For a deeper discussion, there are specific questions about each of the thirteen short stories and novella that are included in the collection. For example, how could Tim in the story Warrior Man have dealt differently with his legacy of abuse?

If your book club comes up with other discussion questions, let me know, and I will add them to the list and give your club attribution.

Twenty Miles West Release Date Set

Cover image for Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories

The release date for my collection of short stories, Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories, has been set for April 11, 2018. The book will be released in both ebook (Kindle) and paperback formats. Both formats will be available on Amazon.com. The manuscript is 70,000 words (234 pages in paperback).

The book is in the final proofing stages with just a handful of changes left to be made. I am near the end of a project that began in late 2015 when I became aware of the tremendous growth of the independent/self-published ebook market and decided to put together a collection of my short fiction for publication.

Origins of short story collection

There were twenty-seven short story manuscripts sitting in a file drawer from which to choose. These stories had been written over a fifteen-year period beginning in 1985. I selected thirteen stories, some of which had seen publication in small press literary magazines, and a novella. Combined, these gave me a book-length manuscript.

Scanning and editing

The electronic versions of many of the earliest manuscripts had been stored on floppy discs which were no longer compatible with my computer system. So I scanned the printed copies, one page at a time, into Word files. Then I edited each story (see Culling Duplicate Words and Phrases).

Formatting for print and ebook

Formatting for ebook and paperback followed the editing process. As it turned out, the manuscript needed a lot more editing after I had completed the formatting. This caused a huge problem going forward as I had to correct two formatted manuscripts simultaneously. I will discuss this in detail in another post.

The search for a title and cover design

The title and a cover design presented additional challenges and took a lot of trial and error over several months which resulted in a changed title for one of the short stories. I will document this journey in a subsequent post.

A long journey to publication

I thought it would take about six months to produce and publish an ebook of my short story collection.  It seemed so much easier and straightforward when compared to the traditional book publishing methods I used to produce my first book, True Prosperity, Your Guide to a Cash-Based Lifestyle, back in 1996. I underestimated the learning curve, and it took me two and a half years to arrive at a finished product.

Now comes the hard part: marketing the book. It will be difficult to find and reach an audience for a collection of literary/contemporary short fiction, but I will have fun trying. Check back here for announcements of reviews and promotional deals. I will keep you informed. In the meantime, you are welcome to read my free stories.