David Lubar's Blog, page 4

NaNoWriMo? Nope. I have my own personal StaNoDuTha.

Yesterday, National Write a Novel Month ended. I think it's a nice idea. It's great to bang something out quickly. It's great to write a whole novel, since writing is an essential part of learning how to write. I might actually participate, except I have my own tradition, which dates back 17 years. In 1994, I had a full-time job as a game designer and programmer. I'd also started writing again, after a bit of a lapse. Some time in early November, I got an idea for a book about a boy who temporarily becomes a vampire when he encounters a vampire who only needs a small sip. The idea excited me, but I didn't want to dive right in. Thanksgiving was approaching, and the four-day weekend seemed like an ideal time to start. As I waited, I kept crafting more and more of the opening in my mind. On Thanksgiving morning, when I sat down to write, the story gushed onto the page. At the end of the day, I had 4,000 words. I kept the pace up for four days, coming close to finishing the first draft. (It was a chapter book, so it ran far shorter than a novel.)

I enjoyed the experience so much, I decided to recreate it the next year. As often as possible since then, I've tried to start a novel during Thanksgiving. Hidden Talents, True Talents, and My Rotten Life all started that way, as did several unfinished or unsold novels.



Some years, the stars just don't line up right. This year looked like one of those. I'd been working sporadically on a novel since July, trying to build up momentum. I'd also played around with several ideas. One of the ideas intrigued me, but it wasn't right for my current commitments. I did write several scenes to explore the concept, and felt that at some point, I'd return to the book. Then, while sitting in the passenger seat of my car, holding my daughter's dog in my lap, merging onto Germantown Pike from rt. 276, an idea hit. I realized I could combine the cncept that had intrigued me with another of the dormant ideas, which currently existed as nothing more than an opening paragraph, into something so much larger. It was what I call a "fire in the belly" idea. I knew I had my Thanksgiving project.

I'm older and slower than I was in 1994. I wrote about 1,000 words each day. But I got a solid start on the book. I don't want to share details, yet. I will say that it is an older book than the chapter books I've written recently. It will be for high school and upper middle school students. It's a fantasy. It won't be a quick one to write. But it's the right book to write. I'm excited.

Gobble Up These Thanksgiving Books

FAVORITE BOOKS FOR THANKSGIVING

The Ear, the Eye, and the Drumstick -- a fabulous collection of recipes for those leftover and rarely used parts of the turkey.

Cranberries for Sal -- in which a young girl realizes that her life is bogging down.

Pippy Lumpstuffings -- a spunky redhead, left on her own by a self-indulgent, career-driven father, manages to make a passable Thanksgiving feast for herself and her horse.

The Very Hungry Relatives -- a horror novel that might be upsetting to younger readers.

The Jelly Postman -- in similar fashion to Frosty, a tale of a civil servant sculpted from cranberry jelly by a bored lad and animated by some unspecified magic.

The Noshing House -- actually more concerned with the day after Thanksgiving, but extremely satisfying and fulfilling.

Fowl Moon -- a youngster learns a lesson about shopping at outdoor markets with bad lighting and, after bringing home a duck instead of a turkey, tries to defend her actions with all sorts of poultry excuses.

Jeremy Thatcher, Turkey Hatcher -- in which a boy establishes a telepathic link with a turkey and discovers it has no thoughts whatsoever.

If you enjoyed this piece, check out my eBook humor collection, It Seemed Funny at the Time, for lots more comedy at a bargain price.

You saw it here, first

Or on Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe Google image search. Anyhow, here's a first look atthe next Weenie cover. The book comes out in June, 2012. I'm reading through the galleys this week, and I'm feeling good about the collection. It feels like a winner. Or a weiner.

My eBook eXperience -- part nine (conclusion)

So, what have I learned, and what do I think is worth passing along, and was it all worth he effort? My thoughts on these questions, in no particular order:

If you are comfortable with basic HTML, it isn't hard to get a book into Kindle format. If you don't know HTML, there are still ways to do things yourself, but you won't have as much control of the format. This probably won't matter for a novel.

The ePub format takes a bit more work, but there are a lot of support forums out there for people using Calibre and Sigil. Other than an investment in time, there's really no down side to playing around with the software.

Smashwords provides a lot of good information on formatting a manuscript. Even if you plan to put your book directly on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, consider using Smashwords for their coupon ability.

Most published writers (not counting superstars or those with a huge Facebook or Twitter following), who are used to getting PR from a publisher, are in for a bit of a letdown when they launch their eBook. (I've spoken with several other writers who've been through the process.) This dismay can be amplified by the immediate access eBook authors have to current sales figures. (When someone says, "I'll buy your book today," the unchanging sales total is like a tiny stab to the heart. It's even worse when the reviewer thanks you for the coupon for the free book, and there's no sign it was redeemed.)

Since anyone can publish an eBook, eventually everyone will publish an eBook.

It would have been smarter for me, when making my first eBook, to publish something that appealed to the same audience as my published books. But a book like that could also be published in print. "Smart" doesn't always take priority. If I had to depend on an eBook to pay the rent, it would be crucial for me to be smart. At the moment, I can afford to be a little bit stupid.

Despite the somewhat gloomy tone I may have taken when talking about sales figures, I'm glad I went through the experience. I enjoy solving technical problems. I enjoy making my work available to readers who might enjoy it. I've already gotten some nice praise from people whose opinion I respect. I put out a good book. It just needs to find its audience.

Thanks to everything I learned, I'm pretty sure that the next time I publish an eBook, it will take a lot less time. And I definitely plan to publish more eBooks. Though probably not with politicians on the cover.

That does it for posts about eBook experience. If I learn anything magical about marketing, I'll write about it here. But I definitely need a break from all of this for the moment. Before I move back to my usual mishmash of topics, here's one more link to the book I know you're all eager to buy.

Oh -- one last tip for all you eBook authors out there. Forget about blogging. It doesn't help at all.

My eBook eXperience -- part eight

So, hot diggity, I'd published an eBook, It Seemed Funny at the Time: A large collection of short humor. Now what? Here's the thing. My first twenty-three (rough count) books were published the traditional way, and my publishers took care of a lot of the promotion. I did the usual author stuff, like signings, conference talks, etc., but they're the ones who really spread the word. It's worked very well, and I have no intentions of abandoning the traditional route any time soon. (Quite the opposite. I have just one book coming out next year, but there will be a slew of releases in 2013. But it's far too early to promote any of those titles.)

I had several target audiences for the book. The first part is general humor, with a bit of extra appeal for people who remember the 1980s, or are at least versed in the pop culture of that time. There are separate sections for computer geeks, writers, and YA and kidlit fans. I posted an announcement on a listserve for librarians. I post there often. It has nearly 4,000 members. That resulted in a whopping total of three or four sales. This was the first in a series of groin kicks that drove home how insignificant my slice of the social network actually is. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, and here (Livejournal). But I've never made an effort to gain followers or friends. I don't focus on a specific topic, so I haven't developed a niche readership. I sometimes discuss my political beliefs, which might alienate some factions. I've sold millions of books, but my readers don't flock to Twitter and Facebook. They flock to Call of Duty and Family Guy.

Clueless about how to spread the word, I did something very stupid. I decided to send an email to everyone in my address book. Yup -- every person who'd ever sent me an email, or to whom I'd sent an email. I gathered up the list, wrote a short email explaining that this was the one and only time I was ever doing a mass mailing, and clicked SEND. My mail service informed my that I was over the allowable number of addressees. I cut the file into smaller chunks, and started sending emails. At about the halfway point, my mail service informed me that it was shutting me out for 24 hours because I'd sent too many email, and too many had bounced. Crap. I'd become a spammer. Briefly. Just once. But I still felt sort of slimey.

Here's the worst part. Later on, I realized that there were certain people I could email to ask for a review or a blog mention. But some of them had already gotten my first spammy mailing, and I didn't want to compound the offense with a follow-up.

In one sense, my early experience has been dismal. I've sold fewer than 50 copies across all platforms. (I offered it at a deep discount on a small message board I frequent, and sold no copies.) But there's a bright side. Unlike print books, eBooks don't get remaindered. They don't get pulled from the shelves if they don't sell well in the first month, or the first six months. If I figure out a good way to spread the word next September, or even in November of 2014, the book will be as available as it is today. (It's also possible my dismay is premature. I didn't do any promotion before the book was launched. Print books get a lot of pre-release PR. So the book has only been waving its arms and crying for attention for two weeks. There might be a dozen bloggers out there getting ready to write about it. Or there might not.)

Bottom line -- was it a good idea or a mistake? I'll discuss that, and pass along some final thoughts, in the conclusion of this series. Meanwhile. Buy my eBook. Please. I really want to get my sales totals up to three figures. Or six.

My eBook eXperience -- part seven of many

Smashwords provides a formatting guide. Basically, they want a Word doc with as few different styles as possible. The only challenge is that Word loves creating styles. The easiest approach is to start out with plain text, then add in the formatting for bold, italics, and chapter headings. I didn't want to backtrack that far, since the ms. was already fomrtted and it had a lot of bold and italic. But I knew I could check whether Word was doing anything undesirable by writing the file out as html and looking at the code. The hardest part was that I now had to generate a hand-made table of contents. (This was hard in the tedious sense, not in the complicated sense. I had more than seventy entries.) Happily, I didn't have to type up the entries. Here's a quick and easy way that I got a copy of my table-of-contents entries.

I used a web browser to open my mbp_toc file. (This is the file that MobiPocket Creator generates.) I could have opened any html version of my ebook, but the mobi one was the first that came to mind. Then I selected the entire table of contents and copied it into the clipboard. Next, I opened Notepad (not Wordpad) and pasted the text. Now, I had my TOC in plain text. I then had to insert all the hyperlinks and book marks. After that, I put my title page back (I'd put it in a separate document so I could place it ahead of the TOC in the Kindle version) and I was ready to sumbit the ms. to Smashwords,

The process seemed to go well. The problem is that Smashwords generates all the files with an automated system, so the author doesn't have total control of the format. When I tested the Kindle version, it didn't go to the introduction. It skipped over it and went right to Part One. Taking a guess that Smashword's software looked for phrases like "part," at the start of a page, I added "Part Zero" to the chapter heading for my introduction. That fixed the problem. There were some other tiny issues, but none that I felt made enough of a difference to drive me back into the depths of Word. My book was now available on Smashwords.

All that remained was for me to spread the word, and then sit back and watch the sales come in. Right. I'll get to the ugly and dismaying world of self-promotion next time.

The cheese stands alone, leaving me in awe of the idiocy of Herman Cain

I hadn't intended to interrupt my series of posts on eBook publishing, but Herman Cain's latest statement needs to be addressed. (Special thanks to David Gill for giving me a great line to steal for the first half of the subject heading. I take full credit for, and pride in, the second half.)

Of all the moronic and simplistic statements Herman Cain has made, no single utterance has driven me to the keyboard with as much passion as his latest brain fart. He is quoted in GQ as saying, "The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is." There are so many things wrong with this statement, at so many levels, that it could be the grain of sand for a doctoral thesis (or one of those far-too-long New Yorker pieces.) I'll let others address the obvious issue of sweeping generalizations and the whole idea that there is some sort of manly archetype to which all men aspire. I'll stick with the crucial part that annoyed me enough to write this post.

Real pizza -- good pizza -- doesn't need any toppings. This is not to say that you shouldn't cover your pizza with whatever you like. I've had my share of topped pizza. But when I go to a new pizzaria to try out their pie, I always get a plain one. That's the true test. Even if I want a topping, I keep it simple. Once you bury the pizza under a heap of everything, it becomes a different food. (Just as a Chicago pie is a totally different creature from a NY pie. It's not Catholic vs. Protestant. It's football vs. Call of Duty. Wonderful things, but different things.) A heavily-topped pizza is just an unfolded calzone.

Am I claiming I know more about pizza than the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza? No. I'm not claiming I know about marketing and manufacturing chain pizza. I don't know how to get the best deal on ten tons of cheeselike stuff, or what sort of slogan to put on the box for best results. But I've had pizza in some of the greatest venues on Earth, including New York, Chicago, the Jersey Shore, New Haven, and Florence (the one in Italy, not the one in Henderson). I'm claiming two things. One -- the true test of pizza, for me, is a plain pie. Two -- people need to really listen to Herman Cain and think about what he is saying.

As for being manly, all I can say is I've never been accused of harassing a woman. I think that is a much better barometer of true manhood than an abundant pile of pepperoni.

My eBook eXperience -- part six of many

Submission time. Almost. I realized I wanted some blurbs. Two people came to mind, both of whom were influential in the humor world. One was John Scalzi. He's well known as a blogger, and an author. He was also my editor when I was selling humor to America Online. (AOL had a short-lived hidden humor feature that popped up when you clicked the logo on the front page. It was called "Howdy!" and alternated between an essay and a cartoon. They had a nice assortment of contributors, including the amazing cartoonist, Caldwell, and the writer Madeleine Begun Kane. That was back in the days when people paid for online access by the hour. So there was an incentive to keep people reading. When they changed to a monthly billing format, I knew the humor feature was doomed.) John had also given my HMO piece, which I called "Frequently Asked Questions about Health Care," the perfect title -- "HMO Phobia." I sent him an email asking if he could provide a general blurb about my humor-writing ability, and also asking permission to use the title he'd come up with for that piece. (I asked for a general quote becasue I didn't want to ask him to read the book. I know how busy he is. And I get requests for blurbs fairly often, so I know how time-consuming it can be.) He quickly responded with a nice blurb, and permission to use the title. He's a good guy.

My other request went to Joshua Malina, who starred in one of my favorite shows of all time, Sports Night. He also produces one of the funnier streams of humor on twitter (follow him as @joshmalina). We've been discussing a possible television project for a while, hampered only by the inability of the networks to realize how perfect and brilliant it is. I asked Josh for a general quote, also, since he's read a fair amount of my fiction. He was nice enough to offer to read the book. He came through wonderfully.

Okay, all set. I logged into Amazon's Kindle publishing site (KDP), and went through the submission steps. There was nothing tricky or complicated. I'd already written up my description. When the time came to upload the eBook file, it passed whatever tests they ran. I got a message telling me the book would be available withn 24 to 72 hours. Naturally, about thirty minutes later, I started checking. It actually showed up that evening. I downloaded the sample, to make sure everything looked right. It was fine. The long hours I'd spent creating the prc file myself had paid off. The bullets in the table of contents looked fine.

Barnes and Noble was next. They also had a publishing site, called "Pubit." If anything, their process was slightly easier. Again, the file passed on the first try. The book showed up that evening. I downloaded the sample, and discovered a problem. As I'd mentioned way back toward the start of this series, the Nook has separate external and internal tables of contents. As a short-cut to making my title page look nice, I'd used headers (h3 and h4 for title and author name). Whatever software Barnes and Noble uses to extract the sample of the book must look for headers to build the external table of contents. So, if you're reading the sample and pull up the table of contents, you'll find the following chapters included at the top: "It Seemed Funny at the Time," "by," and "David Lubar." I thought about redoing the title page and resubmitting, but I had done so much massaging of the file to get it into the right format, I was hesitant to take any steps backward. I figured people who downloaded the sample would just start reading, and not pull up the TOC.

Other than that, everything had gone as planned. I now had a book available for the Nook and the Kindle. It was only after I'd done all of this, and made up a page on my site for the book, that I noticed a typo in the description. I changed that in all three places. After which, I noticed the second typo. I fixed that one. I'm sure there's a third. Please don't tell me about it.

This has grown longer than I expected. I'll get to my Smashwords experience tomorrow.

My eBook eXperience -- part five of many

To recap: I had an eBook all set to go, except for the cover. I needed to find something that would support the title: It Seemed Funny at the Time. I figured I'd start by looking through the photos on my computer. I found an old one of myself that I liked, except that my eyes looked sort of quinty. The old photo made sense, since I wanted the cover to convey the idea that these pieces were gathered from a large time period, and many of them were written a decade or more ago. I had an idea how to take care of the eyes and also make the photo funnier. Here's what I roughed up:


Not bad, but admittedly a bit creepy. As I was browsing through more photos, I saw one that had been taken near Washington D.C. before the 2008 election. I realized it work work well on many levels, getting a visceral laugh on first sight from most people. The only down side was that it might alienate some potential readers. But real humor requires a touch of fearlessness. Here's the photo, along with my attempt to put in the title text:

The bad news is that I have no design skill. The good news is that I'm aware of it. I was perfectly happy to spend a huge amount of time formatting my eBook rather than paying an expert, because I had confidence in my technical skills. I knew I could do the job, and I knew I'd enjoy the process. But I could play with fonts and images for years, and never get a good cover. Smashwords provides a list of cover artists who have worked with some of their authors. I went to each page on the list, and saw lots of nice covers, but one person's work stood out. I loved what I saw on Digital Donna's ebook sample page. I knew I wanted her to do the cover. (For folks who don't have a photo they like, cover designers use stock photos and stock art, which is surprisingly affordable.) I got in touch with Donna, and told her I had a photo and a title, and wanted her to work her magic on it. She came through big time. I love what she did.



Now, I was all set. I had everything I needed to put offer my book on the Kindle and Nook. I decided to upload those versions right away. and then do the formatting for Smashwords. I'll get to those adventures tomorrow.

My eBook eXperience -- part four of many

Warning -- this is the most technical entry of the series. I'm mostly putting in all the nerdy details so the next person who runs into one of these problems can find an easy solution.
Second warning -- it took a long time to write this up, and I have other work to do, so I am going to let the typos remain unfixed. (I'm a messy typist.)

To recap, I made a Kindle version of my book, loading a Word doc into Open Office, writing it out as html, and running it through Mobipocket Creator. Now, I wanted to make an ePub version. A bit of surfing revealed that most people did this by means of a pair of programs. Calibre converts files from one eBook fomrat to another. It has a lot of power and a lot of conversion options. Sigil is an editor specifically for ePub files. I loaded my prc file into Calibre. Set it to convert from prc to ePub. (At the top, make sure it is set for PRC as input and EBPU as output.On the PAGE SETUP page, make sure input is Kindle and output is Nook.) I'm going to jump ahead of myself and mention one other thing for the conversion. On the EPUB OUTPUT page, uncheck "Preserve cover aspect ratio." If you don't do this, you might get an epubcheck error.

I wrote out the ePub version. (Right click the book on the main page, select "save to disk" then select "save single format" then select EPUB.) Now, I had a file I could load into Sigil. And this is where I was able to get rid of the bullets in my table of contents (TOC). At the bottom of the list of files in Sigil, there's a folder for styles, containing the file "stylesheet.css." If you have an unordered list, replace the word "disc" and the word "circle" with "none." (They occur in the lines "list-style-type: circle;" and list-style-type: disc;.") Those are the commands that put the bullets into the list. (This doesn't work on the Kindle.)

Okay, my ePub file is almost finished. But I had a huge TOC. This isn't a problem in the book itself. But I didn't want it in the TOC that pops up from the Nook menu. Happily, Sigil lets you select which items you want to appear in that TOC. I made those changes. Now, there was just one last piece of software to deal with. ePubcheck is a program that makes sure the file doesn't have any errors. (Sigil, itself, scans for this, but Barnes and Noble specifically wanted the file to pass ePubcheck.) You can run the check online, but they encourage people who will be using it repeatedly to download it. Which gets us to the last really techie part of this.

ePubcheck is a Java program. To run it, you have to add it to your system path. But I was lazy, so I took a different approach. Here's what I did. I extracted the ePubcheck files to a directory. Let's call it "estuff." I also put my ePub file in that directory. Then I opened up Wordpad and wrote the following two lines:

cd\c:\program files\java\jre6\bin
java -jar c:\estuff\epubcheck-1.2.jar c:\estuff\mybook.epub

I saved this file as "epc.bat" in the directory c:\windows\system32

Now, from the DOS command prompt, I just had to type "epc" and the batch file would run epubcheck on "mybook.epub."

There are lots of other ways to do this. (For example, instead of sticking the ePub file name into the batch file as mybook.epub, I could have called it %1.epub, which would have allowed me to pass the name from the command line as "epc mybook") But I was being lazy.

I was surprised to get ten errors. But eight of them were for the same problem. Since others might have some of these problems, let me list them, and the solutions.

The error "Value of attribute 'PreserveAspectRatio' is invalid" was fixed by unchecking Calibre's "preserve aspect ratio" box. The line created by Calibre when this box is checked seems valid, so the problem might be with ePubcheck.

The error "attribute 'type'" not allowed here, came from a line that included "type='FOOTER'." Tracking back to the html created by Open Office, I saw it had put an empty footer section at the end of the file. I deleted this in the html.

Now, for the last error. "element 'ul' not allowed here." It popped up 8 times, giving me a huge clue. My TOC had 8 major sections. I looked in Sigil at the file containing the html for my TOC. For some reason, Calibre added the line (with brackets):

li style="list-style: none; display: inline"

before each of the nested "ul" parts. This is what ePubcheck didn't like, though it didn't seem to casue a problem. I removed that line wherever it occurred, along with the matching "/li" at the end of each section. That fixed things.

So, now I had a viable ePub file. I figured I'd put up the Kindle and Nook files, and the get to work on the Smashwords format while the money rolled in. But first, I needed a cover. I'll cover that tomorrow.