Leaving Wegman’s on a Sunday
What color are baby’s eyes? Mama’s?
What color would you call that hair?
What color is their gambling?
What color is his Jamaican soul?
What color is the grocery clerk’s floral scent?
What color is his refusal to understand?
What color is her disappointment?
What color is today’s winter cold?
Screens so caked with snow, I had to open the door to see the accumulation.
So far, we have only four or five inches but it’s supposed to snow all day. Today’s plans cancelled, of course.
I left the writing retreat early yesterday and so did two others. They were predicting snow for much later in the day for Amherst and even later than that for Boston, but it was already doing SOMETHING at nine a.m. and anyway I was gonna be too tense to be able to write or listen well. It was the right decision.
What I wrote on Saturday and Sunday morning was disappointing in any case. For instance, the scene I produced yesterday started in Henderson, Kentucky and somehow ended up in West Feliciana, Louisiana. Oops. People didn’t know if the daughter was the mother or the daughter or dead or alive. Ha! This kind of feedback is helpful.
Other off-the-cuff writing didn’t land either. One narrator (um, that would be me) was dubbed “smug.” Yikes.
Listening was the best though. It often is at these things. Many phrases and characters will stay with me for a long time (I’m looking at you, Ronna!)
I drove briefly around the UMass campus on Sunday and there were so many new buildings that I barely recognized the place. Oh, there was the library (I liked a carrel on the 11th floor). There was the art complex (topped with solar panels — yeah!) And there was the ugly concrete Campus Center. There memory held — it was ugly in 1978 and remains ugly today.
Didn’t feel a lick of nostalgia.
Speaking of snow and blizzards and memory and the 70’s, I would’ve been at UMass during the Blizzard of 1978. Hmm. I don’t seem to have much memory of it and let me just say that is as good a descriptor of me back in the day as anything.
As for the tariff decision, I’ve been schooled by Hubbell. Let’s take the win, he says. Marshall got it wrong, he points out. Don’t be so defeatist, etc.
Yes, it could have been worse because in this timeline EVERYTHING can be worse. The SCOTUS could have, for whatever reason, hallucinated all over the relevant statute and invented more (MORE!) broad and sweeping executive powers. They properly read and applied the law. Hoo-hey!
Let me emphatically state that I am thrilled Trump lost on this.
Sometimes as a writer it’s productive to pick up a long-neglected notebook. It might surprise you, or better yet, re-energize you. Three years ago, I was enthralled with Lucy Audubon as a possible subject. I read two biographies of John James, one of her, and did some preliminary research. However, I kept asking myself: do I want to spend years with this material?
Hers was a difficult life, one of repeated abandonment by her husband and of constant financial struggles caused by both the ineptitude and neglect of that husband. Loneliness, poverty, and grievance are difficult themes.
Well, a couple of days ago some scribbled scenes from years back got me reconsidering. In both workshops this week, I spit out new passages even though I hardly remember enough factual background to do so.
I know from writing The Weight of Cloth that it’s helpful, maybe even necessary, to occasionally write in one’s own voice about what you are learning. I call these passages novel adjacent. Maybe this is unique to writing historic fiction where you have to absorb all kinds of information about another age — and not just intellectually but emotionally and viscerally too.
Anyway, here is a NOVEL ADJACENT passage from July 2023.
The travel options were few in those days – boat, horseback, wagon, or foot. We often hear about what a striking figure Audubon was — tall, handsome, with a thick mane of hair — but it is also notable that he had huge feet. Our famous birder could walk five miles an hour, no trouble. If it seems amazing to paddle down two-thirds the length of the Mississippi and back several times in a single lifetime, imagine walking 100’s of miles – something Audubon did routinely.
Also try to imagine riding on horseback with your two-year-old on your saddle and your wife on her own horse by your side FOR 800 MILES from Louisville to Pennsylvania, in the winter no less. Now image such a trek through dense woods with no real roads.
John James Audubon lived his life as if success was assured. Forget the failed businesses, the shifting accounts to avoid debt collectors, the 200 drawings destroyed by rats, the uphill battle to find an engraver worthy of his work. In between every misguided attempt to start a business, he was drawing. Birth of two sons. Drawing. Almost killed in a knife fight. Drawing. Loss of a daughter in infancy. More drawing.
When it came time to produce a work for sale, he stuck to his guns. No, he insisted to the printers, do not make them smaller. The birds must be near to life-sized. Portfolios measuring in feet rather than inches were a harder sell but Audubon was adamant, sure somehow that his vision for Birds of America would succeed. He bucked scientific illustration standards of the day too by including vegetation and sometimes even hills and towns in the distance. It’s hard to appreciate now but depicting birds with flora and not suspended in empty space, isolated, was a novel idea then.
Letters from England back to Lucy show less confidence. She waited and waited for him to make himself plain, for him to make the simple ask: “Come to England. I need you.” Instead he deferred to her wishes in a way that came across as cold and detached. He told her to write about poverty less, making clear that he was reading her letters in the drawing rooms of wealthy men. The affront of that! She, the breadwinner, was not to mention money? No wonder she relied so heavily on her sons in those years, grown men by then. No wonder one of those sons refused to speak to his father for half a decade.
Mid-read of one Audubon biography, I was charged with checking in on my neighbor’s dog. My neighbors were three years into a what seemed an endless kitchen revamp and hence the dining room was stacked with boxes of pots and pans and food stuff. I had to walk through the room carefully, twisting sideways at times, to get to the dog’s bowl.
It was a real mess. A temporary mess with a purpose, but still a mess. But hold on! There I was mid-twist, when I looked at the walls. There hung not one or two, not three or four, but seven Audubon prints! They are huge. They are stunning. They silence me with their beauty. They turn a room shit-heaped with clutter into a museum. Or a shrine.
The birder-husband was long gone by then, but the prints remained. What better testament to the staying power of art?
Having recently read about the complicated etching process, I brought my nose right up to the glass on one print to really take a look. It astonished me then and now how a series of scratch marks on metal, acid baths, and rolled-on inks can produce such artistic and life-like renderings.
This is what Audubon risked everything for. This is what made him insufficiently attentive to Lucy. This is what drove him into the woods, alone, time and time again. It’s a legacy that turns his many failed businesses into mere footnotes, or even gateways, for had one of those ventures succeeded it might have consumed his energies and prevented the necessary devotion to birds, the notebooks filled with drawings.
And what of Lucy? Late in life, she wrote in a letter: You might not recognize me. I’ve grown thin, turned grey, and have lost all of my teeth. The absences were long and punishing. She had to work to survive, sometimes as a governess to plantation owners’ children, sometimes as a lone teacher in a town school. She offered piano lessons. It’s not a stretch to assume that she resented her husband – his singular and motivating purpose dragging him off either into the wilderness to draw or to England to schmooze for patrons and oversee the printing process. Imagine the long months going by without a letter and when finally one arrived, being on tenterhooks, motivated to pack and sail if only he would ask and instead reading, “Do what you want.”
*. *. *.
Here are a couple of other relevant posts.
Lucy Sketches (April 2025)
Focus and Restrictions (May 2023)
Fly to Lah (October 2021)
This post does not address hybrid publishing, indie publishing houses, or services that you pay to self-publish with.
Except to note this: as you travel through reviews of various hybrid publishing companies, you’ll invariably see people screaming IF THEY’RE ASKING FOR MONEY THEY ARE NOT LEGIT. Caution is advisable but this remark simply doesn’t reflect the current publishing landscape which is peppered with legitimate hybrid publishing outfits. Similarly, using the adjective “vanity” to describe such services is both outdated and insulting.
There are a lot of ways to go with each step of the self-publishing process and your choices will depend on your budget and skill set.
Here are a few online resources that I used.
How to self-publish in ten steps. Gaughran is very generous with his expertise and stays current with changing rules on FB, etc.
Jane Friedman offers classes on self-publishing, marketing, and on the publishing industry generally.
Amazon walks you through the steps pretty well. Amazon KDP
Reedsy — expert marketplace. All kinds of editors, cover designers, book formatters, and more. They make collecting bids for services efficient.
I also learn a lot in an ongoing way from self-publishing groups on Reddit and Threads.
Best possible manuscript.
Formatting
Electronic and paper have different formatting requirements for both the covers and the text.
ELECTRONIC
We created a WORD FILE, submitted it to D2D, and they converted that to an epub file. Once that’s done, you can review and make adjustments before publishing.
In the first 90 days (after going live), you can make as many adjustments as you want for free. After that, they’ll give you one free change per 90 days and charge you for more than one. (NB each manuscript update can fix multiple typos).
You can then download their epub file and submit to ebook sellers directly. We did this with Kobo, Apple, and Google.
For Amazon, we used their KINDLE CREATOR to make a Kindle book from the WORD FILE. (Kindle Creator program can be downloaded from KDP to your desktop).
Amazon lets you do unlimited revisions although each revision has to be resubmitted for review (once the first review is done, all subsequent reviews happen quickly, generally within 24 hours).
For all electronic versions, the cover is a JPEG and is limited to the front cover.
Much less formatting for ebook.
No headers, no footers. Be you do need consistent title headings.
KDP will create a Table of Contents automatically and you’ll have some limited ability to fine tune.
PAPER
We created a different WORD FILE then converted it to a PDF for submission to Amazon, D2D etc.
This as good a place as any to say that Reddit has been a useful resource. They organize posts by topic. I follow “self-publishing.” Below, the co-founder of D2D chimed in to correct the misinformation his staff gave me.
(All are POD —print on demand.)
Determine “trim” or page size (I chose 6×9).
Margins (rt and left margins will be different in paper version)
Font size
Space between lines / (space between letters)
These measurements affect both the look and feel of your page and your PAGE COUNT. I really wanted to keep my page count under 350 pages.
You’ll need to decide how to treat chapter names and where to put headers with title/author and page numbers.
I recommend looking through paperbacks and seeing what they do and what you like.
FOR THE PAPER COVER — we submitted one PDF of entire cover (open — meaning, including front, back, and spine). see below
There was a slight difference in paper weights between Amazon and D2D and your book cover designer will need to know that.
More on cover creation below.
Administrative steps
Set up separate email address for business. Some authors set up a publishing company or an LLC. I didn’t do either.
PS don’t set up a “publishing company” in order to be able to claim that you’re not self-published without doing some research. I think your company might have to actually publish someone besides you.
Purchase ISBN’s — Bowker.com. It’s the only place to get them. I bought a ten-pack.
Hardback, paper, audio — all need separate ISBN’s. I needed a fourth ISBN for an independent bookstore listing on IngramSpark because they want a bigger discount and a return policy.
(This is really in the weeds here but D2D “publishes” their POD books through IngramSpark, meaning without even listing with that distributor I was in their catalogue. But because of the huge discounts required by bookstores, I listed a second ISBN with the requisite discount attached (and a return policy too which most bookstores want). Every bookstore I approached therefore needed to have this made clear).
D2D and Kindle can supply ISBNs but even though they don’t technically own your work, I don’t advise using them.
Bar code — do not buy.
Copyright— though not necessary, I copyrighted my manuscript. Main advantage: looks more formal in your title page and as a self-published author you want this.
Catalog with Library of Congress. They’ll supply you with a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN).
Book Cover
SPINE — to calculate dimension of spine, you’ll need to know your paper WEIGHT
ISBN — for the back cover
Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) for copyright page
BLURB and BIO
You’ll need a catchy book blurb for back cover and for Amazon. A short bio too.
Lately I’ve seen some amazing AI summaries of books and I have the question: if you use AI in your marketing materials does that count as “using AI”? Another self-published author has done preliminary research with the answer: “No” it doesn’t count.
Many fine fiction writers suck at blurbs, which is — ahem — why I wonder.
Also a good time to consider categories and keywords. Do your research by examining comparable titles.
COVER DESIGN
Three second rule. Impact matters. Genre matters. Needs to look good in a thumbnail.
Do it yourself — Plenty of authors design their own using Canva or some other platform. I don’t advise it. Also if you use AI, you can’t honestly say that AI was not used to produce your book.
Professional — they know genre standards, know how to size and position type, how to produce files needed for various platforms.
I had tons of preliminary cover ideas and a strong visual vocabulary and still hired a designer.
Actual publishing
Consider LAUNCH DATE (impacts contests you can submit to).
Going wide with an aggregator and direct placements vs KU
KU — Kindle Unlimited — exclusive for set term (90 days?); paid by page views.
KDP — Kindle Direct Publishing. Not exclusive. POD — print on demand.
Aggregator — I used D2D (Draft To Digital).
Went direct with Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo (but not Barnes and Noble because of their fussiness about ISBNs).
D2D offers a menu of outlets. I picked: Hoopla, Overdrive (two library sourcing sites), Barnes & Noble, Everand, Fable, Tolino and more. Some of those cater to European markets.
Recent changes to IngramSpark have lots of authors deciding to list books wholesale on their own sites. BTW, you learn a lot about recent trends and controversies by following self-publishing on Threads.
I’m not going to do sell wholesale directly. It would mean having books on hand and dealing with shipping AND informing independent bookstores that you’re doing this. And since my D2D listing would remain on IngramSpark, it would just generate confusion.
Haven’t thoroughly investigated Inkventory but it might afford an alternative to IngramSpark and do-it-yourself wholesale.
Once you’ve hit publish, you can order advance copies to supply to readers.
I only supplied one ARC but it was a strategic choice and connected me to my local bookstore. After she posted an incredibly positive review on Instagram, Newtonville Books immediately ordered 20 copies through me, made my book their January Book Club selection, and scheduled a reading.
NB: author copies from Amazon inexplicably take WEEKS to arrive, so if you’re planning a reading and want to sell copies of your book, be sure to plan ahead.
Send “your best” copy to the Library of Congress.
Marketing
Work on your website. I’ve been blogging since 2008 and my domain name is deemallon.com so I had a leg up. I set up several PAGES (as opposed to blog posts) with long and short bios, a landing page with order info, and other links.
It was important to me to share historic facts and sources with readers, so I provided both a lengthy Historical Notes link and a Bibliography.
Since I’d cut a lot from my book and also wrote many novel-adjacent pieces, I provided links to some of those.
Approach local libraries. Find the adult acquisition contact and email a blurb, author bio (stressing that you are local), and offer to gift them a copy.
I also gave a copy to the Wellesley Library. Friends gave copies to libraries in Austin, TX and San Francisco. Hoopla purchases are all library buys but you can’t tell where they’re going from your dashboard.
Approach local bookstores.
TL;DR It’s the right thing to do but it’s A LOT of work with very little return.
Post to social media.
Run an ad campaign on Facebook.
I ran three ads for a couple of months and then two since January (12 months at writing). Your ad will include a link to a buying platform (Amazon for me).
When you’re making so little return per book, it’s hard to subtract the substantial ad fees, but given that it’s likely no Amazon sales would’ve transpired without the FB ads, I have to keep perspective.
You have to have a Facebook PAGE in order to advertise.
NEWSLETTER — Many stress the importance of a newsletter. I haven’t done one. Also I don’t post to TikTok and probably should.
(My blog has 600+ subscribers and Insta has about 1200 followers. Modest but active).
Much marketing advice is geared toward writers of series, things like: 1) write newsletters to whet readers’ appetite for the next installment or 2) make first volume free to drive sales to second and third volumes. Obviously not applicable to a stand alone work.
Writer vs Reader spaces
It’s tempting to comment when readers post snarky things on your FB page (mostly insinuating that I ripped off The Indigo Girl), but it’s important to let those things lie. Amazon comments, Goodreads reviews, FB comments etc. ARE MEANT FOR OTHER READERS.
Having said that, though, be sure to strenuously remind friends that reviews matter and that you hope they’ll post one. A star rating of four or five stars even without commentary helps your book be seen.
THE WEIGHT OF CLOTH spent most of its first year in the top 10 – 15 of BIOGRAPHICAL LITERARY FICTION.
I just checked and today, January 10, 2026 it’s at 14. I don’t actually know how or if this translates into sales. What you want to be is an Editor’s Pick. Not sure how you become an Editor’s Pick.
Amazon screens for review-packing. So if you share a Prime account with someone or share a last name, those folks shouldn’t leave reviews. Although I’ve read horror stories of books being taken down, I’m really not sure how carefully they monitor reviews.
Goodreads is owned by Amazon and people are pretty disgusted by it and moving over to other apps like StoryGraph.
If you use Goodreads, you’ll want to set up an Author’s Page.
I’m not very active on the app and I’m not sure what difference it would make if I was.
On bookshop DOT org, you’ll need to upload a blurb and thumbnail.
Celebrity book groups, BTW, do not accept unsolicited novels. Obviously to be chosen by Oprah or Reese would be life changing
More on IngramSpark changes.
Elsewhere I read a long thread from an independent bookstores owner who said to relax because most bookstores were not going to try and hunt down your book on your site to buy wholesale from you.
And then, there’s the wisdom to KEEP WRITING. Here’s a good beginning-of-the-year pep talk from Chuck Wendig.
Sales, Royalties, and Venue
In my first 16 months, I’ve sold more than 1,650 books. This is nothing for a trad-published book obviously but makes me something of a rock star as a self-published author.
It was a big moment when I crossed into profit (meaning I’d recouped the $5k I spent on an editor and the $975 I spent for my cover). The profit margins on sales are ridiculously small and I’m sorry to report that Amazon offers the best percent of royalty by miles. And, even though I list on bookshop.org and Barnes & Noble and elsewhere most of my sales (by a lot) are on Amazon. Something like 80% (but more than 90% of my revenue). I wish that I could quit the site but it doesn’t feel doable.
In yesterday’s AWA workshop, Kathleen Olesky supplied a Langston Hughes poem entitled Tired as a prompt.
Will 50 million protest this weekend? 70 million? If we are all we have, it had better be a good showing — the signs held high, rage surging on the street. We are all we have, our signs, our rage, our collective refusal to go along.
Let us take a knife and slit the skin somewhere obvious, but not life-threatening. Let us then watch vermilion beads of blood form along the edge of our self-inflicted wound. And then let us turn toward a person near, not unlike those handshaking mandates issued from the pulpit, introduce yourself, offer a greeting of peace, except this time let 25 million people turn to the other 25 million people and take blood oaths — “We swear we will not lie down in defeat. We swear fealty to each other. We swear fierce loyalty to our discernment, to our bones filled with the marrow of justice. We let our lungs breathe in freedom, which resides somewhere in our atmosphere, and likely somewhere reachable.”
Our blood-sealed oaths will signal a willingness to protect one another, to go the distance, to scar the skin in service of a better America, an America ready to be restored and go not one, two, or five, but 10 times further in the departments of honest tolerance and government that serves all.
The vermillion beads of blood will not lie, they cannot. Neighbor, put your sign down for one minute and trust my blood as I shall trust yours. We swear. We swear not to give up.
“Is it time for the tar and feathers,” asks one purveyor of the early history of our revolution. Is Renee Nicole Good like the fallen Bostonians of 1770, five of them, whose arbitrary and unfair deaths at the hands of a tyrant’s occupying force triggered the revolution and made Thomas Paine write the pamphlets that ignited the populace to take up arms?
We are all we have both inspires and terrifies.
Five years after the Boston Massacre, which was hardly a massacre but certainly what we would today call a mass shooting, five years later, a resolution was put forth. Thomas Jefferson wrote it. “The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” That was 1775. Now 251 years later we ask, we wonder, must we also take up arms? Is that what it will take to redress our grievances, to act in defense of freedom?
I still can’t quite see it, but I can easily imagine canceled midterms and maybe a rerun of Jan 6, this time with rainbow-striped flags.
I am so tired of waiting and wondering how this is all gonna turn out. The ancient political scientist online piping up,“we won’t recover from Donald Trump.” The Canadians on my feed screaming, “Don’t just complain do something!“ causes a private smile at the not very funny circumstance of an insane tyrant, shitting all over America and our allies being what it takes to crack that polite Canadian veneer.
But nothing is funny about this. The stakes are too high. He cannot be allowed to attack Greenland, can he? Little Pixie Speaker of the House says of the Venezuela bombings and abductions (practically under his breath and walking away, always walking away from the cameras), “It’s inappropriate.“
Inappropriate? Is that what we’re calling lawless violent tyranny now?
But honestly, that he said anything even mildly opposed to his Dear Leader shocked me, so complete has been his subjugation. Lindsay Graham crawled out of hiding. Where has he been? Speaking of unabashed Dear Leader recitals. I didn’t remember what an awful bite he has and here I refer to his teeth and jaw, not his powers to menace.
In other news, we can drink again and eat all the meat we want again as long as it’s organic. Things are upside down. So does that mean we can be fat and drunk when the measles rash erupts on chest and neck?
There’s nothing funny about this. We are all we have. I don’t have time to read about how this absolute firestorm of destruction has been decades in the making. No. No. Just swear to me, let our forearm blood, smeared one on the other, act as a pledge that says we are not finished.
The moral arc may have long ago snapped, but it doesn’t mean we are done. Let us become good and kind. Let us become good and kind, even in the face of illegitimate and rampant destruction. Let us breathe and bleed and resume carrying our signs even if we can’t quite believe that that is what it will take.
Later, I will sit down on a bench in Boston Common in view of The Embrace and eat an orange I quartered before leaving the house because no matter what, oranges are tasty in the winter.
There are no worms eating at the rind, no dessication, no mold – just sweet and juicy fruit that eats like sunshine.
Because I’m not actually recounting the events of the day here is a link to a Threads account that does so.
