Mary Sisson's Blog, page 134

Creating clickable table of contents; or, There's more than one way to skin a cat (sorry, cats)

One of the nice things about the Passive Voice blog is that it attracts a lot of self-published authors, so the comments on the posts are usually informed and well worth reading.

For example, in the comments to that Diego Basch post, we wound up discussing how we create clickable tables of contents--everybody has a slightly different method, and all appear to work. Working with software seems to be one of those things where a method that person A finds quite simple utterly confounds person B (plus person B may not have the same software as person A), so if you're trying to figure out how to make a clickable table of contents, definitely poke through there and see what seems doable to you.

If you're wondering why you should bother, this same comments section inspired Jaye Manus to write a post about how important they are to navigating a book. (The short version: You can only flip one page at a time in an e-reader, so jumping back five chapters to refresh your memory about who that character is? Not so easy.)

Progress report

Today was busy again--the problem with holidays is that you spend all this time and effort getting ready for them, and then you do them, and then you have to do all the stuff you were too busy to do because you were getting ready for the holiday. Maybe I'm old, or maybe I'm trying to find a frigging work routine right now and resent the interruption, but I'm kind of relieved all the chaos is over. Have a happy 2012 despite my Grinchiness!

Anyway, I did manage to lay out two chapters plus the front and back matter. I'm now up to chapter 8 on a 19-chapter book....

"I haven't watched TV in a couple of years."

This is a post by Diego Basch (found via Passive Voice) musing about how getting a Kindle a few years ago has changed his habits--primarily his reading habits, but as the above quote shows, it's affecting his other media consumption habits as well. He's not one of these people who is too good to watch television, it's just that he's got this really handy device (more than one, actually) with all these books on it, so why wouldn't he read instead?

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, at which point there was a lot of gnashing of the teeth over the decline of the written word. People didn't read, they watched television. They also didn't write, they made phone calls.

The concern was that people were being neurologically re-programmed so that eventually they wouldn't be able to read and write at all, and that would be the end of civilization (the fact that humankind managed somehow to move from complete illiteracy to reading and writing in the first place was ignored). It turns out that, yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as neuroplasticity, and the brain that can rewire itself around major physical damage can also manage to re-learn the habits of reading and writing. Indeed, nowadays one challenge facing telecommunications companies is that no one makes voice calls any more; we just text and e-mail and use Facebook.

So why did we go from writing letters to making phone calls to writing texts/e-mails/posts? The short answer is convenience. Technological changes make it more convenient to call people, and then they made it more convenient to e-mail/text/Facebook.

E-books are convenient--they're cheap and they're easy. Now instead of turning on a TV, a person can just as easily fire up their little device and read (if not more easily--try finding a TV showing something you want to watch during the moments when your spouse is using the bathroom at a restaurant).

If you still want to feel really badly about humanity--and who am I to judge?--you can call this laziness and take heart in the fact that human nature is consistently bedeviled by the sin of Sloth. That way you can continue to flagellate yourself, which I'm sure is a relief to certain people.

Progress report

I laid out three chapters of the large-print edition today, which isn't bad considering what a late start I got (I had a bunch of things to do today to get ready for tomorrow).

Thoughts on reviews

I know, today I'm more using the blog as a tool for procrastination rather than a tool to prevent it, but I was thinking about the LibraryThing reviews and how best to use them, and I think I'm going to create a "Reviews" section on this Web site. I'm also going to put a little disclaimer on there noting that these aren't paid reviews or written by my friends.

Also, so far they are quite positive, which I think is further evidence that the book is now positioned correctly. Interestingly there's a lot of "I liked the mystery aspect!" which actually works well with an idea I had for advertisements (which I do plan to do some day). I was wondering about using that to noodle with the Amazon categories, but I hesitate because it's not in any sense a traditional whodunit. (Maybe there's something like "futuristic suspense"?)

Goals and failure via Dean Wesley Smith

Dean Wesley Smith is starting a new series of posts titled "Goals and Dreams 2012," and I really like the two posts he's done so far. His first post is about how, yeah, you're gonna fail, but as long as you're making progress, don't sweat it. Writers tend to be perfectionists, which is a double-edged sword--I think on a certain level, a writer needs to be a detail-oriented perfectionist, otherwise you'll forget plots, have incoherent characters, and write long winding sentences that don't actually make any sense.

But you have to be wary of what are called in self-help/psychology circles the Three Ps: Perfectionism, Procrastination, Paralysis. If your perfectionism gets out of control, you'll put off actually producing anything for fear it won't be "perfect." If this continues unchecked, you won't ever do anything, because you might make a mistake.

I think the balance is achieved by just making sure you're moving forward--or just forward enough. To take the examples Smith uses: He had certain weight loss, fitness, and short-story writing goals that he didn't meet. He did, however, write a bunch of stories, exercise more, and lose some weight. By "failing" to meet his story-writing goal, Smith made $3,500 per year that he didn't have before, very much enjoyed himself, and proved to himself that he could crank out stories at high speed. I have no idea whether this applies to Smith or not, but with some people a small reduction in weight or small increase in fitness can have an outsized impact on their blood pressure and cholesterol levels. So the larger goals (more money, developing beneficial work habits, better health) are being reached even if the specific goals for 2011 were not.

The second blog post has some really nitty-gritty advice about making time to write. Possibly the most important bit is to discuss your new and exciting scheduling needs with your family and significant others at the very outset. I don't mean to insult your loved ones, but the world is full of people with some really stupid ideas about what writers do. I see this a lot particularly with younger writers--they hook up with some fine young thing who wants them because writers are all cool and arty and sexy and alcoholic, and then they don't get any support for their need to spend long hours cooped up by themselves with a computer (while not suffering from a debilitating hangover) like some nerd. It doesn't get any easier once you start making money--I have people in my family who have never understood that freelancing and being self-employed are not the same thing as being unemployed, and they have never understood that not being tied to a 9-to-5 schedule doesn't mean that a person doesn't have to spend most of their time working. (I'm not sure how they thought I was supporting myself all those years, although with that generation "a man" seems to be the go-to answer to any and all questions.)

Evaluating a business and an industry

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a good post here about holiday sales--looks like people are using their new Kindles to pick up free copies of Jane Austin and Mark Twain (which is amusing, considering how Twain wanted to treat Austin's corpse). That's good news if you want people to read good books, but as she points out, if you're expecting some huge post-Christmas spike in your own sales, you may be disappointed.

Of course, whatever you're expecting, you may be disappointed, because no one really knows how e-book buyers will behave. It's a new industry--really, really new. What people will buy, when they will buy, how they will buy, how much they will pay...all a mystery. Nobody knows. The more certain you are about specific, short-term stuff, the more likely it is you'll be wrong.

I think that's fine. Obviously if you're counting on your e-book to save you from imminent fiscal collapse, you may not agree, but in all honesty, if you're counting on any book to save you from imminent fiscal collapse, you badly need to reassess your financial strategy. (No joke: If you want to get rich quick, lottery tickets are the better risk.) Dean Wesley Smith has a great blog post on how you're likely to make money writing--slowly, that's how.

That long-term perspective not only makes sense on the level of personal finance, it's a good one to take on the industry as a whole. I know I've said this many times before, but if you're selling a product for $6 or $3 or $1, and you're able to make a decent profit off of that, then you have a huge advantage over someone who is selling a similar product for $26 or $17 or $14, especially if they are locked into those high prices because of their costs.

Does this mean that the person charging a high price is going to go under right away, or ever? Not necessarily. There are plenty of ways to fill a high-priced niche--offer luxurious books, fancy authorial brand names, and exceptional service. A more germane question is: Does the low-cost provider need the high-cost provider to go under in order to thrive? No. If Bentley has a great year, that doesn't hurt Kia one bit. What we're in now is a genuine industry revolution that is opening up whole new markets for authors. That's great--but when new territory opens up, you can't expect it all to be neatly mapped out for you.

Blargh

Tried againto get Google e-books to work. No dice, of course. I keep giving them sensitive financial information, and they keep acting like they never got it, which of course just gives me so much more confidence in them. (Seriously, if you are wondering why I never did these long, whiny posts about getting an account set up on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords, it's because it was super easy! I cannot for the life of me understand why Google is making this hard.)

I also started the large-print edition. I figured I could merge the old large-print layout with the new revised layout, but Word decided that I couldn't. Thanks again, Word--you're always there for me. So I am laying out the whole thing again--I'm reminding myself that it didn't take very long last time, but I didn't get a lot of sleep last night and am tired and (you guessed it!) cranky. So I think I'm just going to call it quits after one chapter--yes, I'm slacking; no, I don't care.

Summing up e-book production

So, if you missed it, Crabby McSlacker of Cranky Fitness fame (go read it, it's REALLY funny and has a lot of good advice) posted a question about self-publishing. I want her to publish her novel for the very selfish reason that I want to read it, so I was e-mailing her about how to produce e-books. Then I decided that what I had written wasn't a bad summary of the process, so I'm going to copy it here, with the regular disclaimer that the whole thing will probably be completely different six months from now:

 

Converting the file isn't hard, and all the software you need is available for free. The only thing is that it's a little misleading, because both Amazon and B&N act like you can upload a Word document, preview it in their previewer, and voila!--it will come out looking great.

I learned the hard way that that's bullshit--their converter sucks, and their preview tool sucks so you don't know how bad the conversion is. It turns out that this is not a big deal--I just have to convert to the file to ePub myself and upload it. Of course, I had no idea how to do that, or even that I had to do that, but eventually I figured it out, and it's actually not especially difficult (and I am not especially tech-savvy).

Right now my process for creating and uploading an e-book to Smashwords, B&N, and Amazon goes like this:

1. I take the Word file and I reformat it according to Smashwords' instructions. Basically this clears away any bad formatting that might cause problems with the conversion.
2. I upload the Word file to Smashwords (with the cover image inserted into the file). That's all you have to do with them.
3. I take that Word file, pull out the cover image and the Smashwords-specific language, and I convert it into HTML.
4. I take an HTML editor and I make a table of contents with anchor links to each chapter heading (this is to create a clickable table of contents, which is essential to navigating the book)
5. I use Calibre to convert the HMTL file into an ePub file that contains the cover image.
6. I open that file in Adobe Digital Editions to make sure it looks right.
7. I upload that ePub file to B&N.
8. I use Calibre to convert the HMTL file into an ePub file that contains no cover image.
9. I open that file in Adobe Digital Editions to make sure it looks right.
10. I upload that ePub file to Amazon, asking them to include the cover image.

Steps 8-10 are because Amazon seems to do a better job converting ePub to Mobi than Calibre does, but if I include the cover image myself, it winds up looking weird. I've used MobiPocket Creator to make my own Mobi files, but they don't look as good (and I haven't taken the trouble to figure out why).

Sorting out what I need to do

I'm having kind of a chaotic holiday season here, so although I'm trying to settle back into some kind of actual productive groove, it's a bit of a challenge.

Here are the things I need to do:

1. Process the feedback on Trust and make the appropriate revisions. Once that's done with, I can start actually getting it ready for release.

2. Update the large-print edition of Trang.

3. Write Trials.

And there's random annoying crap, like today I got the print copies of Trang to use for a Goodreads giveaway. So I went to look that up...and they'll only let you give away books that have been published in the last six months. (Seriously? Gee, thanks. I guess I'll figure out something else to do with those copies. I mean, I was hoping to give them away for free. But if you think your readers would rather not....) And Google e-books still has not figured out how it might pay me, because it is stupid.

Anyway, getting back to my to-do list...looking at it, I'm thinking I just need to let go of Trials for the moment. I kind of don't want to do that because I made a real start on it, but I've told people that Trust would be released in the spring, and by rights, I should have already updated the large-print edition of Trang. (I mean, yes, no one has bought it yet, but I would be really embarrassed if someone did and it was all riddled with errors--it really puts the lie to my dedication to accessibility if the large-print edition is crappy, doesn't it?)

Another advantage of working on the large-print edition is that, unlike revising Trust, it is the kind of project I can work on even when my time is all broken up, which it is right now. It shouldn't take too long to do, and hopefully by then things will settle down a bit, and then I can calmly focus on Trust.

And then tax time will be upon us. Oh my dear sweet Lord.

(P.S. I'm still giving out e-books to the LibraryThing people, but already there are five reviews up on LT. So those people work fast! And they seem to take reviewing very seriously--a lot of them told me they wanted a Smashwords coupon instead of a file because that way they could leave a review there.)