John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 24

A Little Help from my Friends: How I Got My New Novella Published

“I get by with a little help from my friends,” The Beatles sang.

It is so very true.

Yesterday, I was locked in a war with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. No matter how I tried, no matter what I did, I could not get the files to upload for my new novella, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale.

I’m not a novice at this. I’ve published five other books with Amazon’s KDP. I’ve uploaded updates at least once to every single one of them. I’ve redesigned and uploaded the cover to each of them. I know from publishing with KDP.

But damned if I could figure out what was wrong. When I tried to upload the book files, it would get stuck in an endless loop. One time it churned for over three hours trying to convert the files from Word to Kindle format. When it would finally give up, it would say simply, “We couldn’t process your file. Please try again.”

Now I understand there are computer glitches and such. But the infuriating thing about this failure was that Amazon wouldn’t say what was wrong. Just, “We can’t process your file. Please try again.” And their tech support is only available by email, and they take 24 hours to respond.

I checked my links. They all worked. I checked the file size. It was under the limit. I tried loading it as Word and as HTML. Nothing.

As Monday turned into Tuesday, I went to my friends. I posted a thread on the Facebook page for the Book Goodies Authors Group. (If you’re an indie author, and you’re not a member, you need to be. There is no more helpful group of indie authors on the planet.)

Questions and suggestions started pouring in. I tried everything people suggested. Nothing worked.

And then one of them, Katie Darden, offered to convert the Word files to a Kindle one on her computer. All I had to do was email it to her, and she’d see if she could get it to work.

She had no idea what she was volunteering for.

Katie ended up spending hours tinkering with the original files. She found two broken links, and we thought that was the problem. She found some images that were pasted in instead of being inserted, and we thought that was the problem. Never mind that these links and pasted images had worked on every other book I’ve ever published and republished.

So we fixed it all, she converted it to .mobi, and got it to upload. Huzzah!

But I still couldn’t get it to work. So we went back to the drawing board. We determined something was wrong with the cover. We tinkered with that. Multiple times. Sometimes it wouldn’t take it, making us think the file was too big (since Amazon just said, “We couldn’t process your file. Please try again.). Sometimes it told us it was too small. Katie and I both monkeyed around with it until she could get both the book files and the cover to load.

At 10.30pm CDT, I finally hit “Save & Publish.” Katie lives in the Pacific Time Zone, so it wasn’t as late for her as it was for me. Of course, she only stopped working on my book long enough to fix and eat dinner with her family. She had no stake in getting my book out. She doesn’t make any money on it. She just wanted to help someone else out. We’ve corresponded a few times through Book Goodies, but we’ve never actually met.

But she was willing to help me get Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale launched.

I still don’t know what went wrong, really. I’m not certain things will work when I inevitably update the files with new ads or a new bio (or a thank you to Katie). But I know that, without Katie Darden’s help the book wouldn’t have gone live today.

Please check out Katie’s website. She’s a nonfiction writer with a book on organizational techniques among others. Like her Facebook page.

And maybe buy a copy of Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale too. She worked awfully hard on it.

I got by with a little (actually a lot of) help from a friend. I hope one day I’ll be in a position to pay it back or, failing that, pay it forward.

Being an independent author isn’t as “independent” as it sounds. We need help. We often need help from each other. Thankfully, I was able to get it when I really needed it.

Technical Issues Delaying Launch of BEAUTY & THE BEAST

It’s always dangerous in business to make yourself dependent on the goods or services of someone else. It puts part of your operation outside your control.

I’m stuck in that particular corner of Business Hell right now. I’m trying to get my new novella, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale, published through Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing. I’ve elected to enroll it in KDP Select, meaning the eBook version will be available exclusively through Amazon and can be borrowed through the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

This is not the first time I’ve done this. I’ve published five books through Amazon. I’m good at formatting, getting them uploaded, and looking good before releasing them to the world.

But right now I’m stuck.

Something’s wrong with KDP’s publishing platform. When I upload the files, the software gets stuck trying to convert it to Kindle format. I’ve checked everything I know of and communicated with Amazon’s technical support. As far as I can tell, the issue is not on my end.

I’ve been fighting this demon for over 48 hours now. You see, the plan was I was going to get everything uploaded, checked, and ready to go well in advance of midnight on October 1 and then hit publish, so it would be online and on sale today. This is the most organized I’ve ever been about getting a book launched. I’ve got promos planned for the next two weeks to help give the book some legs.

But instead it’s after 2pm, and, not only am I not live, I’m not even close. There’s always a delay after you publish while Amazon approves it. At this point, it’s highly unlikely to be on sale today, which will start to put my promotions in danger.

And I still don’t have a solution.

I’m not really mad at Amazon. This is a digital business, and things go wrong with computers.

But because I’m dependent on Amazon to publish, I’m totally screwed right now.

I have a note in to Amazon’s tech support, I know of at least one other writer having the same problem, and I’ve got a friend working on a solution for me. I’m sure Amazon is trying to get it fixed. Hopefully, things will clear up one way or the other very soon.

But it’s tough having to sit here on release day and not release. It’s tough having your business be dependent on someone else’s when theirs isn’t working correctly.

More news as it becomes available.

BEAUTY & THE BEAST ARC’s Available and On-Sale Date

Here are two quick updates on Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale.

ARC’s Available

Advance Reader Copies of Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale are available in .pdf and .mobi (Kindle) formats. If you are interested in writing a review (preferably timed to come out in the first week the book is available for sale) email me your request or leave a comment below with your contact info. I’ll send it to you FREE in exchange for a fair review on Amazon.

On-sale Date

I will be releasing the book for sale a week from today! Tuesday, October 1, will be the official on-sale date for the eBook version. Beauty & the Beast will be enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Select, so you’ll be able to borrow it if you subscribe to Amazon Prime.

At the moment, it looks as though that will also be the date for the print version. After a few technical difficulties with the cover, everything uploaded correctly to CreateSpace. The proof is on its way to me. As long as everything looks right, it’ll be ready in time for the October 1 release.

More info as it becomes available!

Cover Reveal: BEAUTY & THE BEAST

I’m very pleased to unveil the cover for my new novella, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale. It’s another terrific piece by my regular cover designer, Jill Jess. Check it out below:

Here’s the book description:

Be careful what you wish for. . . .

Rory Bellin dreams of a better life. As a senior at Lawrence High, she yearns to be taken seriously for her accomplishments – she’s editor-in-chief of the school paper, president of three clubs, and on track to graduate with a 4.0 GPA and admission to Yale. But all anyone, even her mother, cares about is LHS regaining its former football glory and winning a state championship.

Caleb Johnson dreams of a better life. He aches to be able to lead Lawrence High to its first football championship in eighteen years and to date the most beautiful girl in school – Rory Bellin. But, as the third-string running back, he never plays, he has a face no one could love, and, whenever he tries to talk to Rory, his usually glib tongue turns to clay.

But maybe Mr. Nickleby, the new English teacher and newspaper advisor, can help. He has the key to both of their desires. He’s willing to make their dreams come true.

Of course, getting what you wish for has a price. But that doesn’t matter, right? If you want something badly enough, you’ll do anything to get it, no matter what it costs. Even if it’s your soul.

Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale is a contemporary take on the classic story by the author of the Wolf Dasher series. John R. Phythyon, Jr. weaves a dark fairy tale both familiar and fresh about understanding what’s important, finding one’s place in the world, and the consequences of obsession.

Be careful what you wish for . . . you might just get it!

Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale releases later this month. More information will be available soon!

I Suck at Twitter

I suck at Twitter.

This is not news, really. I have struggled since signing up for it years ago to understand how best to use it and why I even should.

Since becoming an independent author, I’ve gotten even worse at it. Despite being told not to, all I really did with my Twitter was post links to my books. When I truly realized that wasn’t working, I quit.

Again, this isn’t really news.

What I’ve been able to ascertain is that, to be good at Twitter, you have to have something to offer. You can’t just promote yourself.

So I’d like to forward links to things I think are interesting that my followers might like, and I’d like to offer the occasional witty nugget about my life, so that I show I actually am a human being, not just a Twitter robot.

There are two problems with that. First, I’m really busy. I have a hard time keeping up with stuff that doesn’t directly impact what I’m working on, because there’s just so little time in my day.

Second, I couldn’t keep up with my Twitter feed because I was following too many people. I followed 859 tweeters. That number was so overwhelming, I just quit reading my feed. So how was I to find anything to retweet?

So, last night, I unfollowed over 700 people. I felt bad about it. It wasn’t that I necessarily didn’t like their feeds. I just couldn’t keep up.

If I unfollowed you, I’m sorry. You can take heart in the fact that, since I wasn’t reading my feed, I wasn’t really following you. If you have one of those services that tells you who unfollowed you, I won’t be hurt if you unfollow me back.

From now on, I’m going to try to read my feed and RT stuff I think is interesting. I’ll try to tweet interesting blog links. And I’m only going to post links to my books if they are brand new or on sale. (I also tweet my own blog links, but, hey, I have to get the word out somehow.)

I’m still not sure I won’t suck at Twitter. But I’m going to try to get better.

Cursed Project Forces Schedule Change

This is not how I planned it.

The schedule for this year was supposed to be The Sword and the Sorcerer in March/April, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale in July, and Roses Are White in November/December. It’s August, and I haven’t published a damned thing.

It’s been amazing how things have gone wrong. “Sword” would not get written. It fought me over and over again, draft after draft. Life issues also conspired to slow down both the writing and the editing processes. And then last week, a computer crash stole another week’s worth of work time.

Meanwhile, B&B was supposed to be a short story. It grew into a novella.

I’ve been writing and writing and editing and editing, and I still don’t have a finished book.

And now timing is an issue. Beauty & the Beast is set during football season. It’s set at a real high school and the annual game with its cross-town rival figures heavily in the climax. The book needs to release during football season — which is next month — to best capitalize on its themes.

But The Sword and the Sorcerer isn’t going to be ready before the end of this month, and that would mean I’d risk missing the window for B&B. So there’s really only one solution. I’m going to have switch up the publishing schedule.

I’m moving Beauty & the Beast ahead of The Sword and the Sorcerer on my timetable. If I don’t, I’ll miss an opportunity.

I hate that. It means delaying “Sword” until November or so. But we’ve still got five chapters to edit in the allegedly final draft, and this editing session has uncovered the need to rewrite two more chapters, meaning they’ll have to be another round of edits.

I haven’t worked on a project this cursed in a long time. It’s pissing me off.

But I don’t have a choice. The only alternative is to put out an inferior book, and that’s no choice at all.

So, as of now, my next book will be Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale. I should be able to get it out next month. I’ll release an official date shortly.

In the meantime, I’ll be hoping there are no more unforeseen problems. I am tired of feeling cursed.

Rewriting Helps a Book Stop Sucking

I haven’t blogged much recently, because all my writing efforts have been aimed at The Sword and the Sorcerer.

That’s good, right?  Well, sort of.

What I’ve really been doing is rewriting. And by “rewriting” I mean “totally tearing things apart and putting them back together again so they won’t suck anymore.”

“Suck” is actually a pretty strong word. I think, overall, The Sword and the Sorcerer is a strong novel.

But the first several chapters just didn’t want to come together well. I really labored over getting them right, and, since, if the first few chapters aren’t very good most people will stop reading, “suck” is a word I had to come to terms with and act on.

Show; Don’t Tell

If you’re a writer, you’ve heard the old maxim, “Show; don’t tell.” In other words, let the reader see the action, don’t tell him or her about it.

The original first chapter was all about the tell. My protagonist is a poet. He was unveiling his latest epic in court. And I told the reader how much people enjoyed it and how successful he was. To save my poor ego, I’ll stop short of calling it bad writing, but suffice it to say it wasn’t good.

In the first rewrite, I wrote a portion of the poem, and then showed the patrons reacting to and commenting on it. Much better. We get to experience  the scene instead of hearing about what happened.

Don’t Bury the Lede

On the next read, though, I discovered something else. The beginning of the book was dull. That’s not a good way to get people to buy or keep reading it if they did buy.

There’s an old newspaper adage that goes, “Don’t bury the lede.” In other words, whatever the thrust of the story is should be in the first paragraph. Don’t make the reader wonder what the story’s about.

What gets the action going in The Sword and the Sorcerer is the murder of the protagonist’s father. He learns of it at the end of Chapter 2. Talk about about a buried lede!

So I wrote a prologue showing the murder. Now, before we meet the main character, we see the murder occur and already have an understanding of the incredible political ramifications. Much better start!

Pacing is Important

But on the next read-through I discovered something else. That poem I composed was waaaayyy too long. Now what I had was an exciting beginning followed by two long, boring chapters of learning who the main characters were. Zzzzzz.

I cut a large portion of the poem. I just needed enough of it to show the scene, establish the main character as a poet, and introduce the themes in the poem that would come back later in the novel. It was important to establish certain plot points in that scene, but after that it was time to move on to the action.

Know Your Characters

I also discovered as I was editing Chapter 2 that the main characters were saying things and behaving in ways that wasn’t consistent with things they knew or did later in the novel. This was easy enough to figure out — obviously, I didn’t know who the characters were when I first sat down to write the book. They evolved on me.

But it still meant I had to rewrite a large portion of Chapter 2.

And I discovered too that Chapters 1 and 2 really needed to be together. There wasn’t enough material in Chapter 1 for it to stand on its own, and the material in Chapter 2 was stronger when it was connected to the things in Chapter 1.

There were also some issues about rearranging the order of some chapters and writing a brand new one to fill in events the reader hadn’t seen.

What I’ve got now is a much, much stronger book. I’m pretty sure it stopped sucking.

If you’re writing a book, hopefully yours isn’t sucking in the first few chapters the way mine was. But you’re not done after your first or second draft. A good novel, an engaging read, requires careful study. You’ve got to make sure you’re giving the reader the right amount of information in the right flow.

The Sword and the Sorcerer is behind schedule. I planned to release it months ago. It’ll be out soon, and it’s a much better book because I waited and made sure I had it right.

A Long Way to Go: Summer of 2013 Highlights Race Problem in America

So I have something . . . uncomfortable to write about. It’s not the kind of thing I really like to address in “Pleading the Phyth,” but current events won’t let me stop thinking about it.

Racism.

It’s an ugly word, an ugly fact, and it’s been in the news a lot this summer. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin. Paula Deen was pilloried for admitting to using the N-word and lost all her endorsement deals and her job at Food Network. In the U.S., the Summer of 2013 has been about race.

It’s easiest, I think, to look at the current state of racism in the U.S. through the lens of Paula Deen’s spectacular fall from grace. Two months ago, she was everyone’s favorite deep-fried, Southern cook. She pandered exceptionally decadent, unhealthy recipes with a twinkle in her eye and a charming, old-fashioned Southern belle accent. When the fat girl who taught you how to make yourself as fat as she embraced heretofore unknown levels of irony and signed an endorsement deal to push diabetes medicine from Novo Nordisk, hardly a viewer batted an eye.

But then she got sued for creating a hostile work environment, and, in her deposition, she admitted to having dropped N-bombs in the past.

The public outrage was immediate and loud. Deen appeared to trip at the zenith of a high mountain and come crashing rapidly down, hitting every rock and tree between the summit and the foot. After giving herself a black eye with the admission, she made things worse by not actually apologizing for having said it and then weeping to Matt Laurer that the only time she ever used it was when a black man robbed her. As though that made it forgivable.

Deen is old enough to be my mother. The Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court destroyed while she was nuking her own reputation was enacted when she was a young woman, meaning the Civil Rights battle swirled around her in her formative years. That a Southern woman in her 60′s having used the N-word at some time in her past should come as a surprise to anyone is astounding to me. It’s not that I’m not offended she used it. It’s that, given her upbringing, I  just can’t be surprised.

But that’s really what’s at the heart of this Summer of Racism. We want to be surprised. We want to be shocked. We want to be outraged that anyone could behave in racist fashion in 21st Century America.

Alabama sued to have the Voting Rights Act repealed on the grounds that it is no longer necessary. The South, it claimed, has moved past racism. And because this is the 21st Century and we want to believe that, the Supreme Court agreed and struck it down.

Some of us, at least, want to believe the justice system worked when George Zimmerman was acquitted. The state couldn’t prove its case, so the accused went free. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen.

But that conclusion ignores one very important fact: Trayvon Martin is dead, because he was a black kid walking through a white neighborhood. Zimmerman didn’t like how he was dressed and didn’t think he belonged where he was. So he pursued him and confronted him. And then things went sideways, and an innocent kid ended up dead.

We want to believe we are no longer a nation mired in racism. But it’s just not true. Race is still a very big deal.

You can point to the South and say it’s their fault. You can look at all three of the incidents I’m covering and note they all happened in the South. You can go all the way back to the Civil War, say it was about slavery, and point to all the modern-day assholes who put the Stars and Bars on their vehicles and say things like, “The South will rise again!”

And you’d probably be right about all that. But the South does not have a monopoly on racism. Here in the oh-so-progressive Midwest, it only took University of Kansas guard Elijah Johnson dunking to end with emphasis a basketball game at Iowa State for irate Cyclones fans to call him the N-word on Twitter.

In liberal California, just like everywhere else in the U.S., they incarcerate far more black men than white.

In the Southwest and Texas, they are determined not only to keep the Mexicans out of our country, but to deny a path to citizenship for those here illegally.

States with virtually no history of voter fraud now require you to show a driver’s license or other state-issued ID to vote — a move that impacts non-white voters much more heavily.

And in our nation’s capital, they do not understand why using a racial slur as the nickname for their professional football team would be considered offensive. They even have the gall to refer to it as a term of respect.

I am not here to call us a nation of racists. I do not believe most Americans are racist, and I believe a lot of racism is unintentional, born of pure ignorance. We have, as the saying goes, come a long way.

But the dark specter of racism in the U.S. has not been banished. It still infects our national body like a sickness we have not yet found a cure for. We may have come a long way, but we have a long way to go.

Paula Deen may have long ago stopped dropping N-bombs. But the attitude she expressed towards her black employees in her interview with Matt Laurer suggests she still looks down on them.

The jury in the George Zimmerman trial may have acted absolutely rightly in acquitting him. But Trayvon Martin is dead because he was black.

And the five Supreme Court Justices who voted to kill the Voting Rights Act may honestly believe we have entered a post-racism age. But if they do they are naive.

I’m not done writing about this. If you’ve read one of my books, you know they weave social issues through the plot on a thematic level. I had already been planning to tackle racism in an upcoming novel.

But it seems more important now. We’ve got to stop believing we’re past this and do the hard work of becoming a better people.

Are Independent Authors like Heavy Metal Bands?

Reblogged from blindoggbooks:

A very good friend of mine plays guitar in a heavy metal band in Denver.

Since I really don’t care for heavy metal, I won’t get into my personal opinion of their music. What I would like to discuss comes from a recent thread he started on facebook regarding the lack of air time that metal bands receive from radio stations.

Read more… 685 more words

Some fine thoughts by indie author Tim Baker about indie authors getting "air-play."

Running on Full

Last week, it felt like my brain was empty. I was completely exhausted by a variety of personal life crap, and it was all I could do to focus on writing. Somehow, despite all that, I managed to finish the first draft of Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale.

I expected to be completely spent — to have a sort of “writing hangover” that would reduce me to being able to do little more than some website makeover work and marketing things this week.

Instead, the opposite has been true. Somehow, coming through that storm and getting the first draft of a novella completed has recharged me.

Usually, I set aside a first draft of a book and come back to it after a few days (or weeks). Not so with B&B. I’ve been eagerly editing this week. I’m about halfway through it and hope to get my edits finished by Friday. Possibly, it’s because I knew as I was writing I wouldn’t be done when I was finished. This particular book has been difficult to get down. I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to do as I was writing it. Now that I’ve got a direction, I’m excited and don’t want to let it go.

I’m also breathless to get The Sword and the Sorcerer back from my editor. I’m a little glad it didn’t come in this week, so I could keep working on Beauty & the Beast, but I’m also anxious to make some changes to SatS that have been running around in my brain.

And yesterday, the first percolations of an idea for a new modern fairy tale came to me. Not to mention I’m sorting through plot ideas for Roses Are White.

I was worried about this summer, because, with the kids home, I was uncertain how much work I could get done. So far, it hasn’t been an issue at all. I feel more productive than I have in weeks.

So here’s hoping I can keep up the pace. Here’s hoping I can keep on keepin’ on. I’m behind on this year’s production schedule, but if the ideas keep flowing like they have been, I may be able to get caught up after all.