Tag Archives: self-publishing

Book, Burgers, and Covid

Catalpa collects and rots I cleared this area yesterday.

Book-focused weekend. Ken’s been playing with format — shifting a margin this way then that, tweaking the line spacing, bigger, smaller. The goals are to make a readable page (i.e. with enough blank space) and to keep the page count down. These two aims run counter to each other. I’m happy to say that it’s looking like the print edition will be in the neighborhood of low-300’s. This may change but it’s a really good page count.

Still working on my blurb. It’s about 80 words too long.

Yesterday I applied for an LCCN. That’s a Library of Congress Control number which apparently helps librarians find your book. I hadn’t heard of it before yesterday. It can also lend a little credibility to a self-published book, though I’m not sure how since if you’re like me you really don’t even scan the copyright page. I’ve been STUDYING them this week.

We’re under a tornado watch. There was a voluminous and angry downpour at dawn. Branches along our walk were down. It is muggy.

I made the best turkey burgers yesterday. Really really good. Not even sure why.

Mixed in: homemade bread crumbs, cilantro and a little basil, a shallot, S&P, garlic powder and three cloves of garlic, the usual egg. Served with homemade aioli and a nice seeded, toasted bun.

We’re getting ready to go to California this week for a wedding. The two people I know who attended outdoor weddings recently reported six to eight people getting Covid. I think that makes them superspreader events?

I’ve grown a little self-conscious about masking. I’m expecting to be the only person wearing one at this wedding. Should that bother me? Maybe not if you consider I might also be one of the only guests who hasn’t had Covid.

I read twitter still. It’s grown more and more worthless but I learn about fires and floods and I watch portions of political speeches (important to know for myself how degraded Trump is). It’s where I’m learning about Project 2025.

But here’s what else I’m learning. A succession of mild Covid cases in a small but significant percentage of people results in long term health damage. People forget that it’s a vascular disease. Heart problems may result. Immune system weakening. There can be brain and liver damage, strokes and aneurysms. If Covid was just the week you lose to exhaustion and a lack of smell, I would not give a shit.

(And maybe I shouldn’t qualify the number of ugly outcomes as “small” since some of those strokes, for instance, may happen when younger folk turn 35 or 40).

It’s on Twitter where I found out that San Francisco’s wastewater count of the virus is higher than 2020 and that there’s a surge of Covid cases in Oregon. I also learned that it’s a good idea to run the bathroom and AC fans for an hour in a hotel room before settling in.

I ordered more N95 masks and I have my iodine-based nasal and throat sprays out for packing. My last booster was in March so I guess I’m good there? Not much else I can do besides stay home.

Sunday catch up

2 Replies

So many hydrangeas here have died. Not this one!

Lady’s mantle, predictably lovely after rain

A couple of quiet days. I can hardly believe it!

The funny thing about this is I was already planning to make lasagna!

After a pause in Paris Collage, I’m back

This and the first collage feature the same moon rubber stamp

She’s back! From paper doll collage series

Happy Father’s Day!

Publishing (boring) update. SO MUCH OF THIS PART IS BORING. Ken is helping me figure out the self publishing platform, D2D. I made an account with them and supplied tax info. This will be in conjunction with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). In advance of using D2D’s formatting feature, Ken was able to resize the margins and get the book under 500 pages. This is a good thing! I think I’ve landed on a cover with a designer from Connecticut (to be revealed before summer’s end!) AND

AND I may (finally) have written a decent blurb. Bit by bit! Now to try (for the third time) to figure out WordPress’s newsletter feature. Conventional wisdom is that it’s the most important marketing tool for writers, but? Really? Who wants another fucking thing showing up in their email box? I for one am getting six daily political newsletters.

Probably more important to rework my landing page here.

Established writers have other people write their blurbs

ISBNs, bar codes, and sneakers

11 Replies

Solomon seal emerging.

Bleeding heart nodding with fuscia flowers.

A luminous volunteer.

We enjoyed the patio a bit this morning even though it was chilly.

Today my husband and I employed the body double system to get two publishing-related administrative tasks done. Sometimes I was the body double and my husband the doer and sometimes the reverse. Mostly Ken was the doer. (There! That’s my husband’s name). Both tasks involved wrangling with passwords which generally sends me screaming from the room. Literally. So the system was necessary.

And how nice — my book is now officially copyrighted and listed in the Library of Congress!

(Not strictly necessary but felt prudent). And amazing.

Then later, we headed over to the website Bowker where they sell ISBNs and bar codes. I bought ten of the former and two of the latter.

The publisher I’m thinking of going with (D2D) provides free ISBNs but then they are the holder of record instead of me. Though it is perhaps without consequence, I don’t like that idea.

I bought ten because each format needs its own number (one for paperback, one for hardback, and one for epub) and once you get to three, the bulk price of ten is cheaper. (BTW, if you only published an ebook, you wouldn’t need an ISBN at all).

And anyway, those extra numbers feel like cheerleaders rallying me to write another book.

In other big news, I spent an obscene amount of money on a pair of New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080’s — had a fit consult and everything. They are like walking on marshmallows!

Who is this person taking care of herself? Spending money on herself?

It feels good. And anyway, the PT told me to do it.

A brand new fucking glitch on WordPress is not inserting a space between pics. So get used to captions! I had spaces between photos since 2008 and now — PooF! — not.

More rain

2 Replies

There are so many things I am struggling to figure out. Like why when I write up a long WordPress post on my laptop, many of the blocks do not then “read” on my phone. Or why Instagram disappeared on my blog and reinstalling the widget doesn’t seem to work. Or why installing a newsletter subscribe button seems to require that I learn how to code.

On a more existential level, this self-publishing path is rocky, steep, and arid. It seems like every time I get moderately excited about a possible hybrid publisher, I go to their reviews and find comments like, “RUN AS FAST AS YOU CAN IN THE OTHER DIRECTION,” “they don’t care about authors,” “they missed every deadline and made me wrong about it.” You get the picture. Complaints about unpaid royalties, abysmal customer service, shitty print versions, and so on.

I’ll get there but it’s daunting, particularly since there really isn’t much incentive here ($1.05 royalty on a paperback. 76 cents on ebook?) A break even situation? (not real numbers but you get the idea).

Meanwhile, with the relentless rain it’s occurred to me that New England is turning into the Pacific Northwest.

I dreamt about a cathedral quilt, a construction style I’ve never attempted, and have since been thinking about how blankets = home = sacred space.

Thread snap and ISBNs

5 Replies

Leftovers. I excluded a pieced strip from the recently-made baby blanket (8” along the bottom in the photo above), because it made that quilt too big. Since I had all the coordinating fabrics still in a pile, I decided to keep going and make the household a couch throw (laid out above).

I started merrily along. Ran out of bobbin thread. Wound a new one. Put it in. It fell out. Put it back in. It fell out again. Really snapped the bobbin case into place (thought I had the previous times?) and the thread broke after an inch of stitching. One, two, three times — starting a seam, breaking thread.

Walked away. Frustrating. Never mind that this is the very problem I just paid decent money to have remedied.

Once a piecing rhythm got going two weeks ago a small quiet part of me thought, “Oh. The machine was acting out because I’d been ignoring it.”

(I’ll examine tension today. It’s not the tension).

It’s sunny today! In the thirties, but sunny. There’s been a lot of rain.

I have been researching self-publishing with some regular and dedicated attention and trying not to let the sense of overwhelm get the better of me.

A few random snippets: ** decided to wait on the purchase of ISBNs until I have a price so I can order the bar code at the same time ** revised acknowledgements ** fixed four typos (FOUR!) that a recent reader spotted ** removed footer from doc ** read about a handful more formatting/distribution companies ** mulled over the book’s title some more ** revised my FB page so I can start posting novel morsels, etc. there and it won’t look totally out of place ** wrote a new ABOUT PAGE for website (in third person like they say to) ** started to learn about how Amazon ranks books and the categories that would apply to mine ** made an excel file of blog subscriber emails ** collected book covers I like that are in my genre (no gowned woman facing the horizon please!).

Etc.

The main reason I bore you with these details is not so much to share my “self-publishing journey,” but to say there’s a reason I’ve been quiet here and not quite keeping up with other blogs.

After sharing of a few more of this week’s Paris Collage Club digital collages, I’ll end with a humorous screen shot, a sentiment most recently brought on by the thought of trump receiving intelligence briefings as soon as his nomination is official.*

* John Brennan, former Director of the CIA, addressed this on Deadline Whitehouse this week. He said he trusts intelligence professionals to share summaries. No sources and methods. Nothing highly classified.

Pattern and Outrage : Dee Mallon

cloth, justice, writing, and food