Sheila and Sara

 After years of drafting, trunking, rebooting, and rewriting, my debut novel, Christophina's Wings , is out for public consumption. I know I've been intermittent about posting here about it, but I'll be back with progress reports and excuse note as I refine the sequel, Christophina's Garden. Anyway, if you want to check out the book, it's available at sarashay.com/books for your perusal. Whoo-hoo!

 Many years ago, my father set up a micropress to publish a textbook my mother had written about nursing education. When I got it in my hypomania-addled head that I wanted to publish some self-help books of my devising, I put together one called Catbooks and Other Methods  about various free-writing techniques for head-clearing and problem-solving. My father let me release it through the auspices of Lullwater Press. (You can still get it! Just go to  https://www.wonderbink.com/books/ and pick your ebook purveyor of choice.) It was a new experience for him as it was for me, since my focus was digital publication and the previous book he'd done had been in print. I designed the cover and handled the conversion process; he got the ISBN block and provided the company details to the various booksellers.  I still haven't sold enough copies to collect payment on it. But, I'm kind of okay with this. It was, primarily, an exercise to to get a feel for the process. I had othe...

I did a shameless plug of Catbooks and Other Methods on a prominent writer's blog and somebody tweeted me to ask if it was available for the Nook.  Then two of my relatives received Nooks for Christmas and I decided it was probably time to look into that particular publishing avenue. Thankfully, Nook uses the EPUB format, as Apple does, which means I didn't have to burn up yet another ISBN for another ebook format.  So last night we set up an account with PubIt! for Lullwater Press and this morning I did all the uploading and filling out of details. It should be up in the next couple of days and when it is, I'll be yawping about it all over the Internet.

There's a sound that Apple programs make, a chime of three ascending notes, that signals that something has been successfully brought to completion.  It's the sound you hear when a program has finished installation or a CD has been fully uploaded to iTunes. I never knew that sound could be as delightful and terrifying as it was when it rang out to inform me that the upload of my book for purchase via iTunes had gone through. I resorted to using Pages to translate my words into EPUB format, which was a touch more aggravating than I would have liked and forced me to relinquish a great deal of control over how I wanted it to look.  But once I relaxed and put my emphasis on the words I wrote rather than my font and formatting choices, it fell into place a little more easily.  I can only hope that those willing to lay down the ninety-nine cents to purchase this wee book will be forgiving of any lingering twonkiness in the layout. I'm guessing that the folks at Apple will...

Catbooks and Other Methods has sold a handful of copies on the Kindle but I've been putting off doing any serious promotion of it until after I'd gotten the EPUB version up and running in the iTunes Bookstore. Unfortunately, I've also been putting off the "getting the EPUB version up and running" part as well. Part of it is my usual procrastinative tendencies but the main reason is that Apple is the opposite of Amazon in terms of ease of publication. Publication for the Kindle can be summed up in three steps: 1. Write a book. 2. Set up a Kindle Direct Publishing account. [Steps one and two can be done in either order, to be honest.] 3. Upload your book. That's all you have to do. This is both good news and bad news, as this means that the book you spent ages perfecting is sharing space with the sorts of manuscripts that would normally be languishing in a publisher's slush pile and the ebook equivalents of SEO spam. It takes a lot o...

Rather sooner than I'd planned, mind you, but I was under the impression I'd be able to set up a postdated release date for the Kindle. No such luck. It's up and I've just got to deal with it. You can get the Kindle version so far. As of this writing, I am still waiting to hear back from Apple about setting up the EPUB version in the iTunes bookstore. It's still something of an odd abstraction at this point, but I'll be posting soon about what I've learned from the process.

I've finalized the ebooks and sent copies to my publisher. Going to have a long and quiet evening at home to celebrate.

ISBNs have been acquired. I'll be meeting with the head of Lullwater Press this evening. (A fancy way of saying "I'm stopping by Mom and Dad's house for dinner.") Guess it's time to do one more grind and polish on the book itself. I'm sure there are folks out there who are curious about the nuts and bolts process of ebook publishing, so I'll do my best to keep you posted.

The acquisition of ISBNs for my upcoming ebook has hit a slight snag, as it seems Bowker is confused by the fact that Lullwater Press previously obtained the ISBN for their first publication via LuLu and is now asking for a batch of them directly. I figure I can at least work on a final grind and polish while waiting for this matter to sort itself out. The next phase is going to have to be the dreaded M-word: marketing. It's not my strong point by any means, and certainly one of the reasons I steered clear of the very thought of self publishing for so long. Granted, by putting these out as electronic editions, at least some of the heavy lifting in the Letting People Know It Exists Department will be handled by large, scary corporations. But I know from experience that merely offering something for sale on the Internet is no assurance that anybody will notice, let alone make a purchase. Non-skeevy marketing in the Internet age seems to break down to three simple (if not always ...

So a little HTML hackage in TextWrangler and some Calibre magic have provided my ebook with a workable Table of Contents that links directly to the chapters. The nice thing about HTML as an ebook writing medium is that you can check the formatting in short order by firing up your favorite browser and opening the file with it. This way I was able to test my tags and fix them instantly instead of loading things onto the iPhone and then finding out that they were borked. It's still a rather short work, some twenty-odd pages on the iPad, but this is a how-to book rather than a novel, so I can hope that its utility will make up for its brevity. I'm not planning on charging more than a buck or so for it anyway. I think the next steps are one last going-over for revision, finalizing the cover and then getting it set up on iBooks and Amazon. Yikes.

After a long pause and much procrastination, I've resumed work on hashing out my wee little ebook. A few things I've learned: 1. Calibre works wonders for rendering .odt files into something resembling an ebook. So far I've done a few test drafts that I've been able to look at on my iPhone and iPad in three different reading apps (Stanza, Kindle and iBooks) to catch and mend the flaws and glitches. 2. Optimal size for an ebook cover image is 600 x 800 pixels . This allows it to play nicely with the Kindle and looks fine on iBooks as well. My test cover was originally rendered as 6000 x 8000 pixels (slow going, but still functional) and then scaled down to fit. PNG looks better than JPG, by the way. 3. Get rid of the double space after the period. It looks funny when rendered on a page, even an electronic one. 4. Make sure there are no gaps before the page break, or you may wind up with a blank page in the middle of everything, depending on how the pages come o...

What I have so far: 1. A tentative title. ( Catbooks and Other Methods: Free Writing for Mood Improvement, Problem Solving and Making the Waiting Room at the Dentist's Office a Better Place to Be ) 2. A draft manuscript. I cranked out an early draft in Scrivener and later transferred each chapter to my Wonderbink blog as a series of entries there. 3. A potential publisher. As I've mentioned earlier, my parents set themselves up as Lullwater Press and my father is willing to add my little book to their catalog. I could also just as easily set up my own gig through LuLu and simply lean on their expertise in the process. Still deciding. I guess that's as good a place as any to start. Next step is revision, I think, as well as getting a feel for what I'll need in order to render these words into a booklike form.

Two and half years ago I wrote a blog post called The Wrong End which asserted that self-publishing was less than ideal for the aspiring writer. Obviously the landscape of publishing has shifted in the intervening time. Now that there are more ways to publish and distribute books in electronic formats than there were in 2008, one can set up shop as a self-publisher and not be saddled with boxes of books to lug around and wave in people's faces and you can have large corporations like Amazon and Apple do the heavy lifting of making your work available to the world. This doesn't mean I entirely rescind what I said previously about the hard work from the wrong end. The ease of distribution still doesn't mean that the hard work of polishing the work to be the best it can should be ignored. Even having the wonders of social media to tell the world about your book won't help much if the book isn't that good to begin with. But I am curious about the possibilities of eb...