I’ve been a bit busy lately – Life tends to get in the way of earning a living

 

I’m sure you’ve encountered the same problems as I have. Well, most of them, anyway. Or at least some of the same problems; they’re pretty universal, unless you’re a chicken farmer in China, maybe. But even then you probably share a few of my problems.

So there’s really no benefit to any of us in my listing the number of reasons why I haven’t posted recently. It would just bore you to tears, and there’s enough of that going ‘round as it is.

My current project, “A Silent Star”, is back on track after having been derailed for a few months while I settled into life in dynamic (it’s really not) Deland, Florida. Deland is one of the more somnolent locals in a state filled with glitz, bling and glitter. But some of the locals are very fed up with the laid back, easy-going life here and are trying very, very hard to change the character of the place. I am not one of them, I am happy to say.

That said, I am looking around for a new place. Part of the problem is my budget (oh, how I wish I could afford a budget), but the major issue keeping me where I am is that I can’t find a place I’d rather be. I do know, however, that I would much prefer to be some place else. I’m sure there is a psychological name for this condition, but I neither care what it might be nor am I at all curious to find out.

So if you know of someone with a vacant apartment in or near Daytona (in a very quiet area) who would like to rent a one bedroom apartment to a published author for a few years (very poor but published author), have them contact me, will you?

But “A Silent Star” is back on track for all that. The big delay (aside from niggling little issues like paying bills, finding money for food, getting real high-speed internet access and looking for another place to live near Daytona) was in figuring out the POV (Point Of View) from which to write the tale. We (my co-author and I – not all of the other voices in my head) have some pretty solid information on what actually happened to the covert team both during and after their incursion into Yemen, but most of that information cannot be allowed to see the light of day for various and sundry valid reasons.

Which means that I have to tell a true tale, but I have to lie like a rug to do it. Well, I am a novelist, so what’s the big deal? And what’s that got to do with the POV, anyway?

I’m so glad you asked.

I didn’t want to lie. I wanted to write a true history of those events. But I was not going to be allowed to do that. I had to write a historical fiction piece, which meant that the tale had to be solidly based in reality using characters created out of whole cloth. It took me some time to wrap my pointy little head around that. Then I had to sort out the point of view.

I could have written the tale as a history, with a bit of made-up dialogue extracted from made-up reports and debriefings; but that would have been a very boring read, so that idea went out the window in a hurry. Then I thought of writing from the point of view of a fly on the wall or a ghost in the room, but I am very uncomfortable with that style; it’s hard for me to suspend my disbelief and get stuck in to the story. So then I had to settle on which character I would become and write from his (or her) point of view.

Now, I have written female characters before, with some success, but I’m pretty sure I could never pull off writing an entire novel from a woman’s POV (there are many reasons for this, but mostly it’s because I am a guy). In the end, I settled on one of the two male character in the four-person team and chose to write the novel as if he were telling the tale after the fact.

And so far it is working out very well, indeed.

If there is a point to all of this (or at least a valid rationalization for it), here it is. Settle first on the format for your tale – the style, if you will, in which you will frame your story. Then decide on the POV. After that, build your characters in your mind and write out bios for each and ever one. Keep the number of your main characters as small as possible. You are going to have to become intimately familiar with each of them, and you will have to keep them in your mind the entire time you write that tale. You have to, or your novel will suffer from “cardboardiness” (yes, I just made that one up. I can do that. I’m a novelist).

Your characters have to become real people, with real feelings and real motivations, fears, hopes and dreams. And yes, it will get really crowded in your head, too.

I will be posting a few excerpts from “A Silent Star” both here and on the “A Silent Star” Facebook page over the next several months. Your comments will always be very welcome.

Download “Lonesome Cove” for Free (Kindle only) and a bit of blather

 

My latest novel, "Lonesome Cove" will be FREE for download to your Kindle (or Kindle Reader on your PC or handheld device) on June 13 & 14. 

Here's the link:

http://www.amazon.com/Lonesome-Cove-The-Bend-ebook/dp/B007TVBGEM/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1338410985&sr=1-5

 

Here’s the back text:

Terry Rankin isn’t so sure about his new client, Gianni Lupo. Gianni is an old man, just released from prison after serving the full twenty-five years of a Life sentence for a double murder in Miami. But Terry figures the man’s paid for his crime and now he’ll spend his declining years tottering around his home on Sanibel Island. Terry isn’t sure why Lupo feels the need for armed bodyguards, but what can go wrong? After all, it’s been twenty-five years.

And three tons of gold is still missing…

Please please please be sure to pass this info on to everyone you know, and please be sure to tell them to post a review of the novel once they finish reading it. That is VERY important! Authors live or die on reader reviews.

Be sure to verify that the Kindle purchase price is $0.00 before clicking on the Buy button!

The next bit is targeted toward new authors mostly, but anyone who writes in the English language should probably pay heed as well.

I know for a fact that most Americans are not taught spelling and punctuation anywhere close to the standards that I suffered through as a  child. However, that is NO excuse for anyone who aspires to earn a living as a writer in his or her native language.

Grammar, spelling and punctuation make or break a good story.

Tossing in commas helter-skelter is NOT the way it is done, ladies and gentlemen. Commas are mainly used to separate phrases within a sentence. Most sentences consist of one or two phrases. Not three or four or five. One cannot use a comma where a semi-colon belongs, and one should never, ever forget that quotation marks always travel in pairs. There are no bachelor (or bachelorette) quote marks to be found in any language with which I am familiar (and I have a working familiarity with several languages). Quotation marks belong at the beginning of a bit of dialogue and at the end.

You may not ever mix dialogue from two or more people in a single paragraph; it is not the done thing. Each character’s dialogue deserves its very own paragraph.

DO NOT EVER trust yourself to edit your own writing. EVER. Read your work aloud to yourself BEFORE you allow anyone else to see it and make what corrections you can BEFORE you turn it over to an English teacher or to someone in your writer’s group or a few fans or friend who have volunteered to help you out, but do not EVER think you can do a thorough job of editing yourself.

YOUR EYE WILL SEE ONLY WHAT YOU INTENDED TO WRITE; IT WILL NOT SEE WHAT YOU REALLY PUT DOWN ON THAT POOR, INOFFENSIVE, INNOCENT PIECE OF PAPER.

If you ever hope to make it as a commercial author (as opposed to living as an “Artist”) you NEED to find someone who has the patience and the experience to help you edit your stuff for spelling, grammar and punctuation (not to mention continuity). You really need a professional Editor, but who can afford such luxuries? Get a good friend or a few great fans to help you out, and be sure to thank them by name in your Acknowledgements section.

I write all of this not be bore you to tears but to emphasize just how incredibly important it is to your success as an author. Bad spelling, incorrect usage of terms and really lousy punctuation will destroy the reader’s ability to suspend his (or her) disbelief so they can become involved in your characters and your story line.

Such errors in the proper use of language will ruin your ability to market your material to a wide audience, and that will spell the end to your brief (very brief) writing career.

If it takes you a year or two years to write your novel, isn’t worth another six months’ effort to have a few good people help you to polish it up with a bit of editing before you invest a penny in publishing it???

Give yourself a break, folks. Don’t insult your manuscript; don’t make a mockery of your dreams with shoddy and incomplete work. Your job as a writer isn’t done until the editor says it’s done. And if you don’t have an editor you’d better have a few friends who know more about the English language than you do.

You owe that much to yourself and your future, at least.

They don’t write, they don’t call

And they don’t post reviews, either.

A year ago I counted myself fortunate if I sold five copies of my novels a month on line; that’s paperback and Kindle versions together. My sales have grown this year to well over twenty times that, and my bank manager is well pleased.

But getting readers to post reviews or even drop me a line to say they enjoy what I have written is something else entirely.

But what the heck; at least someone, somewhere, is buying my books. I’m assuming it’s not my mother any more – she passed away some years ago (she never posted a review, either).

I have received some lovely emails from readers since my work began to sell, and it is always a great boost to my otherwise flagging ego.

And I’m not alone in this. If you as a reader enjoy what a writer produces, be sure to drop the author a line and let him or her know that – and do post a review; it means a lot.

I am not soliciting reviews for myself (okay, I am – sue me). I try to avoid that sort of thing – it seems a bit churlish, somehow. Bat as a member of the writing community I can state that we succeed in this business because what we produce pleases readers one way or another, and other readers very often base their buying choices on what other readers have to say.

So go the extra mile – take that extra step – and post reviews on what you read. Decent reviews not only encourage others to invest their hard-earned cash on a writer who's work you enjoyed, it encourages that writer to produce more work that you will in future be able to enjoy yourself.

Recent industry statistics show that over one million new titles were published last year. One million. That’s world-wide, in every genre and almost every language on the face of the earth. That’s a lot of books.

And that growth is directly related to the end user’s ability to access internet retail sales sites and the ability of independent authors to access publishers such as Create Space, Lightning Source and other print on demand publishers (along with the Kindle and Nook no-fee self-publishing options) without going through literary agents and traditional publishing houses.

And the readers – the consumers – benefit by having a world of new books to explore.

What’s wrong with that? Not a damn thing, unless you’re a literary agent or a traditional publishing house. Guess it just sucks to be them right about now, huh?

The “Reader” now has the last word. Literally. He (generically speaking) decides who to read. The reader makes or breaks the author. The reader – finally – decides who he will or won’t read, who he will or won’t support with his money and his recommendations.

The reader, finally – not the publisher or the literary agent or the bookstore chain – decides which authors are ‘good enough’ and which are not.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly how it should be.

So post your reviews and tell your friends what you are reading. Your opinion really does matter.

Give a Little, Get a Little – On the Cheap

 

You’re a writer; you’ve published one or more novels/poetry chapbooks/articles/screenplays etc., and you live in the requisite cold, draughty garret along with a few pigeons and mice, or perhaps in your parents basement with just a few mice and maybe a cat who does not really appreciate your company as much as you’d like.

And you’d really prefer an upgrade to your life. Maybe a nice beachfront condo in Maui, or at least Coral Gables. I mean, come on already. You’ve paid your dues. You’ve got all this stuff written and you know from your readers (along with your mother) just how good you are. You just don’t have all that many readers, yet.

You’re on FaceBook and MySpace, you’ve got your very own web site and you keep your blog up to date (pretty much, anyway). But the readers aren’t lining up to buy your stuff in sufficient numbers for that lifestyle upgrade to which you’d just love to become accustomed.

What’s a boy/girl/other supposed to do?

Learn. You have to become much more than  just a writer. No matter how good you are as a writer, no matter how many of your readers have taken the time to tell you (along with your mother) just how very much they enjoy reading whatever it is that you write (and I’m assuming that you aren’t paying them to tell you this stuff), being a great writer is not, in and of itself, enough to get you out of that garret (or your parents basement, for that matter).

You have to learn; about your place in the market, about how to make your potential readers aware of you and your product, about how to add value to your product for those potential readers, and about how to encourage them to take some of their hard-earned cash and put it directly into your pocket instead of mine.

Did I just say that?

Sadly, that’s exactly what I said. You, Dear Reader, are one of my many competitors in the marketplace. One of several hundred thousand, in fact. I go into bookstores, and I browse through the book pages on Amazon and I see competition (I also see lots and lots of books I’d love to read). Every one of those books was written by someone just like you. Or me.

And we, each of us, compete for every dollar any reader will ever spend on another book in his or her entire life.

There really are hundreds of thousands of writers in this world, boys and girls, and tens of thousands of books/articles/screenplays/chapbooks published every year. What makes you so special? What is it about you that a reader would want to buy your book instead of mine? How is he or she supposed to find you, or see one of your book covers as opposed to me, or one of mine?

And who in the heck is he (or she) anyway?

But I’m just a itty-bitty little ol’/young/middle-aged writer person – how am I supposed to do that when I can’t even buy myself a cup of coffee at Starbucks?

Good questions. Let’s get some answers.

First, we have to define our terms. These two definitions are from:

http://dictionary.reference.com

mar·ket·ing

   [mahr-ki-ting]

noun

1. the act of buying or selling in a market.

2. the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.

pro·mo·tion

   [pruh-moh-shuhn]

noun

1. advancement in rank or position.

2. furtherance or encouragement.

3. the act of promoting.

4.the state of being promoted.

5. something devised to publicize or advertise a product,cause, institution, etc., as a brochure, free sample, poster,television or radio commercial, or personal appearance.

So “Marketing” is any activity that enables you as a business person to get your products into the hands of consumers. As noted above that can (and probably should) include advertising, selling and delivering your products.

“Promotion”, then, includes advertising (getting yourself and your products before the eyes of your potential customers) and giving them a good reason to purchase your product.

Let’s start with ‘Marketing’. You really can’t sell into a market until you know what your market is.

Identify your market. Who reads your stuff now? How old are they, what kind of education do they have, what are their likes and dislikes? What do your readers have in common? Where do they live? How do they earn their living? Do they go to church/synagogue/mosque? Are they tradesmen/women? Educators?

Once you have identified the groups into which your readership (or potential readership) falls, you need to figure out how to reach them.

And that’s where “Promotion” comes in.

Write articles or get interviewed in trade magazines your readers buy. Offer to do personal appearances at libraries and book clubs, become a guest blogger on blogs that you know cater to the readers you have targeted. Redesign your web site and modify the keywords and meta tags for each page you have on your site to improve your search engine ranking. Make sure the book reviewers for your local newspapers know you’re alive and writing. Take them to lunch if you have to.

You need to get yourself and your product up out of the muck where people can see you. You have to make yourself ‘Special’. I know your mother already thinks you are and probably tells you that every day, but it’s not enough. You have to make sure potential readers think you’re special – someone they want to pay attention to – someone who’s work they know and trust and enjoy.

You need to convince those potential readers to buy any book that has your name on it because it has your name on it.

Do that, and that lifestyle upgrade you’re looking for is within your reach.

Sell yourself. You; not your books so much, but you. Everybody knows the names of Joan Collins and Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Heinlein and John Grisham, Carl Hiaasen and Randy Wayne White and John D. MacDonald. Most people could not name more than one or two titles these folks have written, but they know their names.

But they don’t know yours.

And who’s fault is that?

The titles of your books are nowhere near as important as YOUR NAME, and what thoughts and feelings people associate with your name. You need to tell people who you are and why they should prefer your work product to that of other writers in your genre. You need to convince them they have a reason – added value to them – to give you their hard-earned money.

You need to “Brand” yourself.

Here’s another definition from the nice people at Dictionary.Com (http://dictionary.reference.com)

brand

noun

1. kind, grade, or make, as indicated by a stamp, trademark, or the like: the best brand of coffee.

2. a mark made by burning or otherwise, to indicate kind,grade, make, ownership, etc.

3. a mark formerly put upon criminals with a hot iron.

4. any mark of disgrace; stigma.

5. branding iron

verb (used with object)

9. to label or mark with or as if with a brand.

10. to mark with disgrace or infamy; stigmatize.

11. to impress indelibly: The plane crash was branded on her mind.

12. to give a brand name to: branded merchandise.

13. to promote as a brand name.

For purposes of this article, let’s consider #’s 1,9, 11 & 13.

Send out an email blast to your readers and maybe even post these questions on your web site:

• “what phrase would you use to describe me as an author/writer?”
• “What other authors or writers would you compare me to?”
• “What separates me and my work from other authors you have read recently?”

Take those results and come up with a few short phrases – say, two phrases, and turn them into a signature for every email you send out, every press release you send out and make sure it appears at the top of every page on your web site and even on your blog page. Make sure it appears on your business cards, as well.

That is your brand, and do not ever change it (unless your sales drop off dramatically, in which case you have to go back and do a bit more research).

It can take months or years to build a good brand and a good readership. This isn’t something that happens overnight – at least, not without a great deal of money, and I’m pretty sure nobody reading this has THAT kind of money laying around to invest in things like marketing, promotion and branding.

So take it slow. Do your research, and take your chances. Take small steps, study the results, note your failures and learn from them, and take yourself out to dinner when your decisions put a bit more cash in your pocket. Celebrate your victories and learn from your failures.

Just don’t quit on yourself. Ever.

I know full well what it means to go to bed hungry; I know what it means to find yourself in your car on your last tank of gas driving toward a Salvation Army shelter with a  very bleak future ahead of you. I know exactly how it feels to know that you have no job prospects in our future. My entire life has been and continues to be a hazardous experience filled with ups and downs.

I certainly can’t recommend it to anyone. But it’s what I’ve got to work with, and I’m no quitter.

I am, in fact, a writer. And a salesman, and a bit of a philosopher (it’s somewhat embarrassing at times, but you have to take the good with the bad).

I did mention this a bit earlier, but it bears repeating; being a good writer isn’t enough. You have to become a very good marketing agent and you have to become responsible for your own promotion. Promote yourself. Sell yourself. Do that, and your customers will buy your books; you won’t have to sell them once you sell yourself.

I’m right in the middle…

 

… of giving away over a thousand copies of my novel, “The Big Bend”. We’re talking about the Kindle version, of course. No printing costs, no shipping costs, nobody working in a dingy mailroom or a large warehouse that has to be built, maintained and staffed (and let’s not forget about the means of getting those books to the retail stores, and the distributors ‘bite’ and the cost of the shelf space in the bookstore, etc., etc., ad nauseam; all of that goes away when you discuss eBooks; and that is one of the main reasons why “Traditional Publishing” is going to go away, as well. They literally cannot compete against eBooks. It’s all about “Cost”. It has to be.

And I  am giving away over (I hope) one thousand copies of “The Big Bend”. That is the first of four novels in a series I’ve written about the life and times of a former cop here in Florida.

I could not afford to do that if eBooks – and Amazon – were not here. I could not afford to do that if I did not know I would be making money on the back end of this giveaway. Say, what?

Let’s say 10% of the thousand people who download and read a free copy of “The Big Bend” and enjoy it then purchase another of my novels. That means I will have sold 100 copies to people who – as far as I know - never read one of my novels before. That puts money in my pocket and brings in 100 new readers, all for a staggering cost to me of  - (are you ready for this?) - $0.00.

That’s right. It did not cost me a single penny, and almost everyone who owns a Kindle or uses a Kindle Reader App on their PC, or Mac, or hand-held device in both Europe and the US had access to Amazon during those 3 days of my giveaway. I sent out announcements on Facebook, my email notification list and blogged about the giveaway throughout the week prior to the start of the free download promo and begged everyone  to repost and forward the notice to their friends. One of my good friends in England, Morgen Bailey (http://www.morgenbailey.com/), updated a blog interview I did with her some time ago and allowed me to tack on an announcement about the giveaway (thanks again, Morgen! You’re the greatest! Love you long time!), and she has a much bigger audience than I do.

I really don’t care how many people download the free copy of that novel. I hope the number rises into the hundreds of thousands. The more the merrier.

The promotional offer began at midnight (think of it as very early Wednesday morning) yesterday and runs through midnight on Friday. This is all on Pacific Standard Time. So far, at 3:49 pm on Thursday, over 900 copies have been downloaded. I hope and pray that by the end of this evening that number is well over one thousand. That means I still have an entire day to see the numbers continue to climb. I sure hope they do!

it’s called Marketing and Promotion, and if you’re a writer hoping to grow your readership and actually make a living as an author, you gotta get yourself out there and do it. You gotta grow your audience. You have to cultivate new readers. Remember, ‘grow’ is a verb. That means you do something.

Here’s the link to the book page on Amazon for “The Big Bend”:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Bend-ebook/dp/B0035G0722/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1336075139&sr=1-3

If you don’t own a Kindle, you can get an app for your PC or Mac or your hand-held device here. I know lots of people who read Kindle books on their smart phones (just not while you’re driving please!):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=sv_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771

It’s free. Go ahead. Download a copy and read it and enjoy it. Please.

Morgen Bailey

 

Morgen Bailey, located in Northampton, England,  has recently set up a new ‘Author’s Interview’s’ blog and reposted (and updated) an interview I did with her a few month’s back. Don’t let her address on the other side of the pond put you off. Her work and her blog posts are read all over the world:

http://morgensauthorinterviews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/author-interview-no11-gary-showalter.html

But this post (this one, right here) is not so much about about that interview with me (though it does have a lot of new info in it) as it is about Morgen and what she’s up to.

If you are a writer, or you love writers and what they do, or don’t give a fig about writers just so long as you have something interesting to read (or if you’re so desperate for something to read you’re back to reading the labels on soup cans), Morgen has something to offer you.

In her own words:

“Also I’ve since had a story published in a new charity anthology and four of my free (debut) eBook short stories, a writer’s block workbook and an anthology of short stories went live on Smashwords and Amazon and I’d be ever so grateful if you know of anyone who might be interested… more (novels) to follow shortly.”

Here are a few links to get you started:

Morgen with an ‘e’

http://www.morgenbailey.com/
http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com and http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/morgenbailey

Now a new forum at http://morgenbailey.freeforums.org

And please, for my sake do repost my previous blog about the giveaway of the Kindle version of “The Big Bend”. It runs from 2 May through 4 May, and I would love to give away several thousand copies of that novel. It’s not only the first in the Terry Rankin series, it’s also the best selling of the lot ( it is a well-written tale and my personal favorite).

Here’s the link to the book page on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Bend-ebook/dp/B0035G0722/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1335612333&sr=8-3

Dreams vs Harsh Reality…

… or, “Be careful what you wish for”

I suppose this post is mostly for  writers in the early stages of their chosen career. I’ve written on this subject before, and in those posts I have made a very honest attempt to avoid sugar-coating what every budding writer will have to face in the first few years.

I don’t do this to scare away new authors – far from it. The more the merrier, in my opinion. Dashing into the fray without any forethought is a time-honored (if somewhat foolhardy) pastime of the young and optimistic among us.

But you do need to know what lies ahead of you. Writing that first (or second, or third) novel was tough enough, but how do you sell it, to whom do you sell it, and what exactly are you selling, and how much can you get for it?

What? You have no idea? Well, golly gee, Louise, why in the heck not?

Risk-taking is a very big part of getting ahead, and without risk takers the human race would never have gotten ahead of the lemurs on the evolutionary path. So go for it. Take risks. Get your manuscripts out there.

Contact literary agents, submit your writing directly to publishing houses. Pump out your press releases. Stay optimistic, even in the face of hundreds of rejection letters. Keep writing and don’t ever give up on yourself.

But don’t ever quit learning, either. Study the industry. Just make sure you study the readership, as well, since they are the ones who will buy your work. Please your readers, and don’t give much of a tinker’s damn about the literary agents or the publishing houses. They don’t buy your work, and hardly ever take the time to read and enjoy what you write. They will take your money, though. If you let them.

I wouldn’t. I’ve never paid a literary agent or a publishing house a single penny of my royalties, and never will. There was a time in the publishing industry when a writer had no choice but to submit their work – and their livelihood, and their dreams – to the whims of agents and publishers, but that day is happily done and over with, thank heaven.

You have options, and I strongly suggest that you consider them very carefully before you waste a single penny on postage or printing for your query letters and submission packages to agencies or publishing houses.

Research the industry. Join writer’s groups in your area. Join online writer’s groups and become current on industry trends. Study the trends among readers in your genre. Take responsibility for your own future as a writer. Don’t ever depend on a literary agent to take care of you – for the most part they are way too busy taking care of themselves to spend any time at all in looking out for your own best interest.

As I have mentioned before, writers are prey animals in the publishing world. Everybody wants a piece of you and what you earn.

You can’t even begin to learn to protect yourself until you understand that one single fact.

You can’t survive, much less get ahead, until you do. And yes, it is that important.  You are entering into a strange (in some ways very strange) new world when you complete your first novel, and you have no idea of what lies ahead of you.

Every time you sell a copy of your novel, or history, or collected works of poetry/short stories, you are taking money from a reader who just might –might – have given me his money instead. You compete with every writer in your genre for the money in your reader’s pockets.

But here’s the really odd thing about writers. We seem to like each other. It may have something to do with the herd mentality; we know we are prey animals, so we stick together. Yes, we compete for readers, but we also protect each other from the predators as best we can.

Every time your literary agent takes his 10 % or 15% out of your royalty check before sending the balance on to you, he is taking money out of your pocket and putting it into his. Ask yourself why? What has he done for you in the last six months?

You and you alone are responsible for promoting your book (s). You and you alone have to invest your time and money in getting your work into bookstores and getting to and from book signings and promotional events. So just why are you giving so much as a single penny to an agent or a publishing house? Explain that to me again, please?

In case you haven’t noticed, I am an independent sort of guy. Nobody’s the boss of me. And while I am as easily snowed as the next guy on occasion, I will wake up sooner or later (okay, sometimes much later), and get the situation straightened out in my favor. I LIKE my independence; I like being the only one responsible for my success or my failure, and I see no reason why I should pay anyone a single dime if I don’t have to. Mostly because I know damn good and well that nobody is going to work as hard for me as I do.

I also know that the publishing industry is and has been in a downward spiral for the last fifty (or maybe it’s a hundred) years and there is no sign of it recovering any time soon. There is not a single publishing house in business today with enough cash on hand to spend a dime on promoting a new author, including a paying Publisher’s Weekly for so much as a small box ad on the back page about the first release of that author’s novel.

And no literary agent will ever spend a single penny on a publicist to arrange a television talk show or nationwide radio station tour for you. John Grisham might get that sort of treatment, but most of us are not John Grisham.

Book marketing is a very specialized segment of the marketing industry. Study it, and study the people involved very, very carefully. They, too are predators. There are some incredibly professional, honest and very hard-working individuals in the business, but you have to keep in mind that they are in business to make a living, and they make that living off of your skill as a writer.

You are on your own. It’s you against the entire publishing industry. Do your research.  Do lots and lots of research. You won’t regret it.

Your comments are always very welcome.

Linksys RE1000 Hardware Review

 

I have worked in and around computers since 1971. And yes, we did have computers back then. Just to put things in perspective, the Romans had opened the Coliseum only a few years before that, and Chuck Yeager was beginning to think he wanted to learn how to fly.  The Wright Brothers were still stealing apples and kicking cans down the road, and dreaming of owning their own bicycle.

1971 was a long time ago. I worked first for Control Data Corporation in Atlanta as an entry-level database programmer, and then with a bit of experience under my belt I got a job with the State of Georgia Mental health Department. Neither job paid very well – I would have seen a better paycheck as a gardener, but at least the work was inside, with air conditioning.

After working up a flow chart and writing some code (In COBOL), I had to punch my own cards on a keypunch machine, stack them neatly (and in order, of course) in a shoe box and run them across town  to the data processing center where the guys in white lab coats would load the cards into the hopper on the card reader and push the big red Go button to wake up the room-sized (really large room, too, with all of the cables run under the floor) IBM 360, which would, in about .3 of a second, spit out my cards almost before it had a chance to read them. Then I would take my stack of cards back across town to my cubbyhole-sized office and try to figure out why my app didn’t work.

Again.

I have always had a love-hate relationship with computers. And they know that.

Office politics put an end to my job about half way through the  project and I quite happily went back to work as a gardener.  The pay was much better, I didn’t have to freeze mu butt off in the air conditioning, and there was no interoffice bickering, either.

I’ve been around computers a lot in my life – I’ve gotten away from programming over the years, though I did work in Fortran, IBM Assembler, Perl and some of the ‘C’ language variations and even Unix, and worked as a Novel Sys Admin back in the day. I’ve taught DOS and Windows classes to newbies, repaired and upgraded PC’s and spent years in software QA ( testing) and hardware testing. My last two jobs in the industry saw me with my own software QA lab with over a million dollars worth of servers and over thirty employees in my department.

So I know something about hardware and software and how they’re supposed to work together to make our lives a little easier.

Actually, they don’t. But that’s a rant we’re not going to go into here (and probably shouldn’t, ever. The computers will know, and that will make them very angry with me).

So here I am in Deland, Florida, almost a year before I intended to be anywhere near Daytona, where I plan to locate the next Terry Rankin novel. Since I don’t have a fixed domicile (and don’t want one), I am renting a room in my nephew’s home while I wrap up a writing project and begin to do the research on that novel I just mentioned.

There were three computers in this home, and when I arrived only two of them had internet access via a 2-wire DSL connection provided by ATT. Basically a 1200 baud modem connection (though it was DSL, it was painfully slow). The modem and the router were installed on my nephew’s computer in their bedroom at the back of the house, and my computer was in my bedroom about 50 feet away at the front. I used a Linksys N1000 Wi-Fi adapter to connect to the 2-wire DSL router.

For the first few months I could barely load a web page in my browser, and checking my email was enough to put me into a rage.

I offered to cover the cost of broadband cable internet, and that offer was quickly accepted before I could change my mind. So I contacted Brighthouse and ordered the service. They showed up the next day and a few hours later we were up and running. My Linksys N1000 adapter was retired and I was given an Ethernet connection direct to the router.

For the first few days things went swimmingly, until my nephew’s wife began to complain about how slow her Wi-Fi connection was (via an old Belkin Wi-Fi adapter). She couldn't play her internet based game – the action in the game was choppy, and my nephew said it took way too long for his email to load…

Golly, gee, why did that sound so familiar???

Our computers are set at opposite ends of the house, and there is one concrete block wall and a few wood and sheetrock walls between them. I discussed the issue with my nephew and told him we needed a Wi-Fi Extender and he agreed to pay half the cost. I drove over to the Best Buy store in Daytona and picked up the Linksys (Cisco) RE 1000 Wi-Fi Extender. It cost $79.00.

The next day I finally had time to set it up. The box contained the Extender, an Ethernet cable (unnecessary), a power cord and  an install CD. Everything you need, other than a bit of common sense and/or someone who knows what he’s doing.

The instructions on the CD are very clear, and very short, and not very helpful if things don’t work the way they should the first time ‘round. They didn’t.

Before you connect the Extender to anything, you slip the CD into the reader and it does a search for the Wi-Fi signal. Then it tells you to plug the Extender into an electrical outlet close to your computer. You are also told that if your computer is not using an adapter to connect to the Wi-Fi signal to move to a computer that does use an adapter, or to disconnect the Ethernet cable between your computer and the router and make an adapter-based connection.

I had an Ethernet cable connection with the router and saw no need to change that (silly me, but I didn’t know that at the time, did I?).

So I moved to my nephew’s computer at the other end of the house and tried to set things up there. Four hours later I gave up. I was able to set up the Extender, but it could not access the router (no, it didn’t make any sense to me, either), so there was no internet connectivity, and that was the point of the exercise, wasn’t it?

I reset the Extender to its default settings and carried all the bits and pieces back to my computer, where I disconnected my Ethernet cable from the back of my computer and reconnected my Linksys adapter. Then, being somewhat impatient I slipped the install CD back into the reader and proceeded to screw things up once again. An hour later I realized that I hadn’t rebooted my computer after reconnecting the Linksys adapter.

So it was still trying to read data via the Ethernet cable. Which was no longer connected to my computer.

I rebooted. Once the system was back up it took about two minutes for the installation to complete. The Extender was working, but I still didn’t have an internet connection.

So I called tech support at Brighthouse and after a few minutes that problem was solved (somehow the settings for the IP and DNS servers had been changed to FIXED instead of Obtain – and no, I have NO idea why this was changed or what forced the change) and my internet connection was up and running.

Once the Extender is connected properly and you know everything works, you can unplug it from the power source and move it to a more central location in the house, and even turn it this way and that until you find an optimal location – one that provides the maximal signal strength to the most distant computer.

So the Linksys RE 1000 Wi-Fi Extender works, the install CD is easy to follow as long as everything goes swimmingly the first time and persistence and a few phone calls can usually handle any problems that may come up due to a lack of information or a wish to avoid what seems at first glance to be unnecessary labor.

So everybody’s happy. Except for my nephew’s son, who still needs a Wi-Fi adapter for his computer, along with a computer table. And I still need a grounded 3-wire outlet so I can connect my expensive UPS into the wall. The house is all 2-wire electrical service and the UPS refuses to accept power from an ungrounded supply. But I have an electrician due on Monday to price that for me.

Oh, well.

On the Pursuit of Filthy Lucre, and other Worthwhile Endeavors

 

Let’s face it; unless you are independently wealthy, or at least supported in the style to which you have become accustomed by someone else, you need to earn enough money to keep body and soul together. And maybe pay the rent, utilities and insurance, buy a bit of food every now and then and maybe even put a bit of gas in your car/truck/van/Bugatti or at least fill your bicycle tires with air.

But you’re a writer; by trade, avocation, inclination or even out of sheer desperation (just like yours, truly) because your last your last job went away and nobody wants to or can afford to hire you.

If you write for pleasure, lucky you; you can ignore the rest of what I have to say and just toddle off down the garden path and sniff a few roses, chase a butterfly and pet your cat. But if you hope to or simply have to earn your living through writing, here’s the nitty-gritty, down-to-earth rude and crude truth about what’s involved.

Most folks who produce material on earning a living as a writer will write an entire book on the subject, and give you lots of information on a particular segment of the writing industry, even giving you a list of contacts for submitting to agents/publishers. Check your local bookstore.

But you didn’t need me to tell you that; you probably have one or two such books on your shelf now. I’m not going to waste your time - and mine - doing your research for you. That’s your job and you will learn a great deal if you invest some time and effort in it.

I’m much more interested in discussing how you turn a talent into a skill, and how you convert that into a product you can sell into your chosen market. So let’s assume for the moment that you do have a fluency with words; you know how to organize your thinking and how to put words on paper so they will mean something to a reader.

That’s a great starting point. I really don’t care if you’re a poet at heart, or a short-story writer, a novelist or you derive great pleasure from writing travel articles or fly-fishing stories. You have a talent for expressing yourself and a marketable skill.

Or at least you think you do. Join a writer’s group. There are scads of writer’s groups, both on-line and in your area. Look into Yahoo Groups, join LinkedIn, join your local library and inquire about writer’s groups. Nobody cares what you write, only that you do.

And then submit your stuff for some constructive (if occasionally harsh) criticism. You and your writing both need and deserve criticism. Tough it out. It’s good for you and for your writing. That sort of criticism will help you to grow as a writer; until you do this, you really are working in a vacuum.

You need a plan. A marketing plan. You need to treat your manuscript as a ‘Product’, because it is. In the same way a furniture maker builds cabinets or chairs or rocking horses to sell, you write stuff. In the same way he or she has a feel for what will sell in his chosen market, so do you.

Or at least you should. There’s no sense investing time and effort in writing something that won’t sell; not if your goal is to make a living as a writer.

And you can’t convince the market to buy your stuff just because you like it. Oh, readers might invest in one of your stories/articles/novels/whatever, but if they feel disappointed in your work for whatever reason  they will never, ever buy another piece from you.

And there goes your market. You can wave bye-bye now. See you.

Get to know what’s selling in your genre today, and figure out how to forecast what will sell by the time your manuscript is ready for the printer. That may be six weeks or six months from now. Or a year or two years, depending on your productivity.

You write for a specific market, whether you know that or not.

So get to know your readers, and what they want to read. It really does not work the other way ‘round. Or at least it does not work very well. The first law of writing for a living is that you have to write something your customers want to read. If you want to sell lots and lots of books/articles/collected poems, you have to write what lots and lots of readers want to read.

It’s really rather simple, if somewhat harsh on the ego; nobody cares what you want to write. They only care that you write what they want to read.

You have to become accustomed to looking at your writing as a business. Marketing – orienting your sales toward a market, and Promoting yourself and your products – getting the right eyes on your products and convincing them to invest in your writing, is the most important part of writing for a living. If “Content is King”, as many people say, “Marketing is the Emperor”.

All the content in the world isn’t worth spit if nobody knows it’s there, and if nobody sees any value in that content for themselves, your sales will be, well, minimal.

And THAT is the key to selling your work.

You have to add value to your work. You – your name, your biography, your skill as a writer, has to become your major marketing tool. Everybody knows of John Grisham, John D. Macdonald, Carl Hiaasen, Agatha Christie, and so on. Most of those same people could not name more than one or two novels written by any of those authors, but they do know their names.

They know their names, and they trust those authors to write what they want to read. In other words, their very names add value to their work in the eyes of their readers.

You sell yourself to your market. Then your market buys your books. It’s that simple, and that important.

Sorry to crowd your day with another post…

 

I’ve been posting stuff all week long, and today I am posting twice. I hope this does not bore any of you to tears.

Especially because I seem to have gained a few readers with my post this morning on finding your “Voice” as a writer. You will see more such short and pithy posts from me in the weeks to come. Please let me know if you find them useful or not. In either case, I welcome you all aboard!

So what’s so all-fired important I have to post twice today? Well, tomorrow’s Friday and I figure most people have lives away from their computers on Friday, and I have a few announcements I hope to pass along before your lives interfere with your computer time.

So here’s the first bit. On the 7^th and 8^th of April – that’s this Saturday and Sunday – I will be giving away the Kindle version of my third novel, “Twisted Key”.

Here’s a short blurb for the novel and the cover art:

Terry Rankin has a new client; Fatima al Natsche, a Muslim woman living under a sentence of death for her work on behalf of women suffering under Islamic law. Terry’s a businessman – he’ll protect just about anyone who can pay the freight. In fact, he admires Ms. Al Natsche and the sacrifices she’s made to get her message out.

But then her daughter flies over from Norway and gets snatched off the street in front of her mother’s home, and all of the masks come off and all of the dirty little secrets come out to play in the Florida sun.

Go to: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_2_14?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=gary+showalter&sprefix=gary+showalter%2Caps%2C644

Look for “Twisted Key”, and before you click the ‘Buy’ button, be sure that the ‘to buy’ price states $0.00. Otherwise you will wind up paying for the book…

You don’t need a Kindle hand-held to take advantage of this. There are today versions of the Kindle reader for the PC, the Mac and all sorts of hand-held devices (smart phones and tablet readers). I have heard from several people who have read my novels on smart phones and they seem to enjoy the experience. You can get these free apps here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=sa_menu_karl3?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771

And here’s the next bit. My fourth novel, “Lonesome Cove”, should be available for the Kindle later this month, and I will advertise that event as soon as I have a fixed date. I am waiting for a final round of edits and as soon as I get it and make the changes I will publish it for the Kindle. The paperback version should be available some time in the fall.

Here’s the cover art and a short blurb:

Terry Rankin isn’t so sure about his new client, Gianni Lupo. Gianni is an old man, just released from prison after serving the full twenty-five years of a Life sentence for a double murder in Miami. But Terry figures the man’s paid for his crime and now he’ll spend his declining years tottering around his home on Sanibel Island, maybe walk the beach in the morning and collect a few seashells. Terry isn’t sure why Lupo feels the need for armed bodyguards, but what can go wrong? After all, it’s been twenty-five years…

And another bit of news:

On the 14^th of April I will be at the “Author Expo” in the Marion County Public Library on Silver Springs Blvd in Ocala Florida. This is going to be a “Big Thing”, folks, with lots of authors, some speakers and all sorts of stuff going on. The event will be on that Saturday between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. If you’re in the area, please stop by and say hello.

On Editing and Rewriting

 

Editing is a job which is best done by somebody other than the writer. And that somebody should not be one of the writer’s best friends. Unless, of course, the writer finds an editor first and then, recognizing the value of a great editor, quickly becomes a best friend. Which is a very good plan, seeing that a great editor makes for a great writer.

But rewriting is a chromatically variant equine entirely. Rewriting is what a writer does to improve the flow of a tale. Rewriting is just about 90% of the work involved in turning a decent story into a damn fine novel/short story/whatever. The other 10% is made up of equal parts of creative writing and good editing.

Rewriting is essentially re-phrasing. In many cases, the first draught of a manuscript is loaded down with fumble-fingered attempts at getting the author’s thoughts onto paper at any cost. The result is probably quite far from being ready for prime time; the resulting manuscript might well be riddled with incoherent, rambling attempts at scene description and poor if not downright non-existent character development and way too much ‘tell’ and little or no ‘show’.

That is not something you want to submit to an editor. That is probably something you would not want your psychiatrist to see, either. Or even your mother.

I write in layers, and in most cases what I described above is exactly the way my manuscripts look when I first complete them. Well, at least that is the way each chapter or scene looks when I finish it. Ant that is perfectly okay – as long as you, the author, recognize that as the first stage in producing a workable manuscript. Workable, meaning a manuscript that will one day be plenty good enough to pass on to an editor for mark-up.

Good writing IS Rewriting

There is no other way to explain this. Creative writing is a myth. Creative writing is done in the mind. What goes down on paper, boys and girls, is just plain hard work (not as hard as digging ditches or picking cotton – I’ve done both). Rewriting is a process, and it really does make up the majority of the time any author will invest in a manuscript. It has to, or you will never have a marketable novel.

Much of the first layer I produce will be narrative, with little in the way of dialogue, scene description or character development. That first layer allows me to lay out each major scene I will need to slowly expose the plot and introduce major characters in the tale I want to tell.

I suppose that now would be a good time to explain that all of my novels stem from a photograph; a single photograph of an instant in time. As any viewer of a photo, I have no idea who the characters are (if anyone is even in the photo), where they came from, what occurred just before the photo was taken or what happened to those people (if any were in the photo) afterward.

It can be somewhat confusing to explain, but the essence is clear; what story surrounds that photo in time?

That’s enough of a digression. Let’s get back to the second layer I mentioned earlier. After rereading the first run-through of the MS, the author knows what has to be done in each scene to clarify his or her thoughts about the progress of the story. The goal in the second layer is to expand scene description, provide just enough scene and character description to allow the reader to build an image of place, time and weather and just enough description of the characters to place them  in the scene. Dialogue is added or trimmed to provide information to the reader both to move the plot along and describe the characters through their speech patterns.

Narrative is added where necessary, but narrative is always problematic; it slows the pace of the story. And sometimes that can be a very good thing. I know of one author who favors short choppy dialogue with little or no narrative to create a full-length, fast-paced novel. I quit reading his work a long time ago because I couldn’t stand that pace any more. It just got plain boring.

So break it up; give your readers time to relax every now and then. Life, as you may have noticed (if you pay attention to such things) does not always run at full speed ahead. There always seems to be a bit of time to relax and unwind. So give your characters time to relax, as well. Your readers will appreciate it.

“Show, don’t Tell”

If you haven't heard that little axiom before, you must be a very new writer. Use dialogue and narrative both to show your characters doing things. Don’t ‘tell’ a tale. That is boring beyond belief. Readers want to read about people, and they couldn’t care one way or the other about plots, or, for that matter, how clever the author is about plotting.

Don’t describe a character when you can introduce enough information about him or her through dialogue or action so the reader can build his or her own image of that character.

That and a lot more is applied in the second layer of a manuscript. That second layer is where I really begin to tell the story and set the pace of the novel. Most of the scenes should be in place and at least blocked-out 9by narrative, at least) at the end of the second run-through.

The third layer (or if you prefer the third time I work through a manuscript) is all about polishing and smoothing out the rough spots.

By the time I have worked through the third layer, I pretty much have a complete manuscript. All of the scenes, if they are not complete are at least present, all of the detail is laid out (if not clear to the reader) and the pace of the story is set in stone. All of the dates and times for the scenes are fixed, so I know when, where and pretty much why things have to occur.

As far as I am concerned, the story is done. Which is when I pick up the phone and call my  Beta readers and ask them – very nicely – what they’re doing for the net month or so of their lives.

By the time I get marked-up copies of the manuscript back from my beta readers and get their comments and edits into the manuscript it is ready for an editor to look at. Note I mentioned both comments and edits from the beta readers. Comments can range from “You had so-and-so start that trip in a tan Lexus, but when he got the hotel in Miami he was back in his tan Suburban.” Big oopsie there, good buddy, to “Sheila was first described as a blond but in this scene she’s a  brunette.”  That’s called continuity, or a lack thereof. Lacking continuity in a tale is the mark of a  busy writer. Allowing it to get into the finished/published novel is the mark of an idiot.

Not every literate person in the whole wide world is good at checking continuity. And since the author is the last person who is qualified to check his or her own work, finding someone who can do this consistently is critical. Especially important is to find someone you don’t have to pay $750.00 per run-through of your manuscript.

Beta readers are also very good at finding editing issues. But they will not find all of them, by any means. Only a professional editor can do that for you (well, pretty much, anyway). Good beta readers bring out the very best in a manuscript and make publishers and professional editors look upon you with a  warm glow in their hearts.

Why? Because they know that you are going to bring them a well-prepared manuscript and that you are a professional writer who values constructive criticism. They know that you bring them a well-prepared manuscript they can turn into a marketable product without having to put up with some damn incompetent prima-donna who thinks every word he or she ever wrote is absolutely perfect right where it is.

I’ve got a plan…

 

Unfortunately, so does everyone else. At least, anyone with half a brain has some sort of plan.

The big advantage I’ve got is that my plans are based on knowledge and hard-won experience. You know, the sort where you lose your shirt until you figure out what you did wrong and promise yourself you’ll never do THAT again as long as you live.

So let’s jump right into the nitty-gritty, get our hands right down into the grease and muck and see what’s what with this plan of mine. I’m kind of proud of it.

I spent most of last winter tying up the loose ends in “Lonesome Cove” and getting it ready to send to the publisher. And doing a bit of research on how I could increase my sales in the face of a collapsing economy. It ain’t pretty folks, but this boy has got to eat and pay his bills, and he’s in no shape to dig ditches or flip burgers.

So I had to think my way to some measure of increased prosperity.  And just in case you’re wondering how that’s working out for me, I’m still thinking.

I’ve been testing the waters of the Kindle Select program over the last few months, and frankly, I am impressed with the results I’ve seen. To say that my sales have increased ten-fold would be close to accurate, but perhaps understating things just the least little bit.

“Lonesome Cove”, my fourth Terry Rankin novel, is going to be published for he Kindle some time in April, and I plan to use the royalties from the Kindle sales to cover the cost of a paperback version that should be out in the fall of this year.

In order to attract some attention to the launch of “Lonesome Cove”, I will be setting up a ‘blog tour’ to run during the week or ten days prior to the launch, and at the same time set up a free download of the Kindle version of “Twisted Key” to run for two or perhaps 3 days about a week before “Lonesome Cove” becomes available.

And no, I will NOT be giving away copies of “Lonesome Cove” for the foreseeable future. However, when the paperback version of LC is available later this year, I will set up a promotion on my web site that will include free, signed copies of “Lonesome Cove”. I just don’t have any details on that yet.

While all of this is going on, I am happy to say that “A Silent Star” is moving along. I could even say that it is moving along right on schedule, but I don’t work to a schedule, so there. I write in the early morning, late afternoons, early nights and any damn time I feel like it, and when I don’t feel like writing, I do something else.

I enjoy writing, and absolutely refuse to force myself to do what I enjoy. I WANT to enjoy writing. I do NOT want to lose the feeling that it is fun. If I write well enough that you enjoy reading my novels, keep in mind that I write well because I enjoy what I do.

It’s a win-win situation for everyone.

So if you ever start to feel aggravated at my slow production, cut me some slack. I’m probably building something, or reading a good book, or playing solitaire or out shopping for my next boat.

But I’ve got my current manuscript simmering in the back of my mind. I promise.

I threatened to fire myself …

--- f I didn’t post something today. I’m a  lousy boss and an even worse employee. Or maybe I just lack any motivation.

In all truth I have been exceedingly busy pulling my ends together all week long. You know how it is; you get up Monday morning, spend all day accomplishing things and fixing problems, go to sleep and then when you wake up Tuesday morning, you find out that somebody has screwed up your life while you were partying in dreamland and you have to run around and fix more stuff.

Well, when you’ve just moved from one city to another, sent one novel off to your publisher and get started on a new project right away and still have to deal with all the fiddly bits involved in that move, the problems you have to deal with are immediate and simply have to be done right then and there. In fact, most of  your time is spent dealing with stuff you should have been doing while you were packing, moving and unpacking.

You don’t have a schedule; you’re playing catch-up with your life. Schedules are for people who don’t stand their lives on their pointy little heads every year or two. Schedules are something you can only dream about having. Schedules are the stuff of legends and happy-ever-after tales and maybe even science fiction. Schedules are for accountants and wedding planners and bankers. Real people, not itinerant writers.

So there. Stop whining.

I got an email the other day from the nice people at Amazon. They told me that I may be found in violation of my exclusivity agreement with them. It seems that KOBO (www.kobo.com), an on-line retailer was selling one of my novels in violation of the aforementioned agreement.

I have done very well with Amazon since I joined their Prime Program for eBooks, so I leapt into action (actually, I just clicked on the hyperlink in their email) and visited that on-line retailer’s web site. Not only did they have “Twisted Key” listed as one of their eBooks, it was listed as retailing for $7.99, marked down from $9.99. What a deal, huh, folks?

Amazon has all of my novels (with my permission and according to MY pricing) marked for sale at $3.00.

It took two days and two phone calls before that retailer pulled “Twisted Key” from their list. I have no idea how long they had it for sale or how many copies they managed to sell at their ‘marked-down’ price, if any. I have no idea how much money they stole from me, the author.

But they are not selling it any longer. Thank you for catching that, Amazon.

I am now back to work on “A Silent Star”. Full time. I was supposed to  deliver a few chapters to my co-author at the end of this week, but I was distracted by the ‘meaningful discussion’ I had with KOBO.com and a few health-related issues (meaning finding a doctor and getting all  he files and paperwork sorted out with them). So Tony will get that material at the beginning of next week. KOBO cost me time, and it’s time that is the only non-renewable resource we have.

Time really is precious. Don’t waste it. Not even a minute.

Well, I went and did it again

(Scroll down to the end to see the cover art for “Lonesome Cove”!)

I hated it the first time, too. Just as much as I hated it this time. And I knew – I knew I was gong to hate every minute of it. And I went and did it again anyway.

Not that I had any choice in the matter.

Needless to say, I’m referring to rebuilding my web site for the second time in a month. At least this time I DO get a blog page (not that I’ve figured out how to get a blog onto it yet) and I DO get analytics (not that there’s been any traffic on the site yet), and not that it looks particularly good or even in the same ball park of what I want it to look like.

But www.garyshowalter.com is  Live. It’s up there, it’s been Published, however you want to say it. My web site is out there once again for all the world to see. And just as soon as I get around to adding in the keywords and metatags on the pages folks should be able to pull it up in google, yahoo and any other search engine. Some day. Better be soon, too.

And there’s even a Contact Us form at the bottom of the nav bar. Wowie. Am I big time, or what?

There is an awful lot of work to do still. The Home page has an irritating table on the right side that just has to go. I’ll stick on another page and put the contents where they belong – on a page of their own. I don’t have an Events Page, either, so that has to be added, and I still need to get all of the book cover icons inserted and linked to the correct book pages on Amazon for punch-through’s. And a dozen other little odds and sods.

And the colors are – well, not attractive. I’m no diva when it comes to color coordinating stuff. I just do not pay any attention to that sort of thing. But even I can see it is not what I want it to be.

And I’m supposed to be a writer, not some geeky web site builder. Actually, I spent years in web site building and testing. I even did it for a very profitable living. But there is a very good reason I do not do this stuff for a living now. I do not enjoy it, not the least little bit. All that fiddly, hunty-pecky stuff sets my teeth on edge.

Enough. I’m ranted out for the evening. If you would pretty please with sugar on go to www.garyshowalter.com and poke around for a bit. Please, use that form on the Contact Us page and let me know what YOU think I should do. Especially if you have any opinions on the colorizing issue. I sure don’t.

Here’s an interesting thing that actually has to do with writing stuff. Sorta. I finally got the cover art photographed for “Lonesome Cove”!

Here it is, without any of the graphics in the way. All of my cover art is painted especially for my book covers by Mickey Summers of Silver Springs, Florida and used with his permission.

Neat, huh? Mickey Summers is a great artist. Thanks, Mickey!

Ah, closure at last

 

Kinda-sorta, anyway. www.garyshowalter.com is more or less complete after a frantic few days of live chats and phone calls to the support teams at www.register.com. The last little hurdle to overcome (other than the still-ugly color combination) on the web site has been conquered.

For some truly bizarre reason, the ‘blog’ wound up on my home page rather than on the ‘weblog’ (so styled by register.com) and I had no idea how to move it or delete it or even hide it. I was so unsure of why it was there rather than on the blog page that I used their blog post utility to post a short test. Sure enough it was posted to the middle of my home page.

A quick call to tech support had the tech lady stumped for a few minutes but she did come back with a solution that worked and the blog was in fact automatically moved by yours truly to the actual blog page in a matter of a few seconds (hint- it’s in the site layout options, but you’ll never find it on your own).

So, it’s more or less done and I’m even going to post this entry to the web site blog page to prove it.

I’ll spend part of tomorrow fiddling around with the colors again to see if I can come up with something I can live with. Everything is is more or less the way it will remain for the nonce (no, I have no idea what a nonce is or how long it lasts).

Have a great weekend.

My Web Site and Business Email Address will be unavailable for a few Days…

 

My web site (www.garyshowalter.com) and business email address (gary@garyshowalter.com) will be unavailable for the next few days while I move (again, sigh) to a new web site hosting service. I am sorry for any interruption of service, but this will be the last time I have to do this ( I hope hope hope it is!).

Microsoft's new Office 365 hosting service is not at all what it should be, as I have mentioned in a few prior posts. I made arrangements just a few minute ago to move my domain name to another hosting service. The Web site and email address will be back on line in a matter of a few days.

I do thank you all for bearing with me through this nightmare; I am reacting to, not initiating, a major screwup. I wish it were otherwise, because all of this mucking about with building web sites and moving them all over the damn place has absolutely nothing to do with writing (and re-writing) novels and building a readership.

But, as I have mentioned several times, being a writer – producing novels, short stories and so on, is not the be-all and end-all of writing for a living. Life do tend to intrude at the oddest of times in the life of ever writer, and this is one of those times for me.

Being a good writer enables you to produce a Product. Great. Congratulations. Now what? Now that you’ve spent a year or two years creating a Product, whatcha’ gonna do wit’ it?

Well, boys and girls, you gots ta sell that lil’ puppy and make yo’sef some bucks sose yer kin writes some mo’ of them book things, and then yer gots ta sell them, too.

And part of that is Managing your Resources, such as web sites and email address. Because if you can’t, or don’t want to learn how, you have to pay someone else to do that for you, and then you have to write lots and lots more of them book things and sell lots and lots more of them to pay someone else to do what you COULD do all by yourself. Of course, when you do it all by yourself you don’t have so much time left to actually write any more, do you?

Which is why I started this part of my rant by mentioning ‘Resources’. Time is really the most precious of the resources we have and just about the only one that really is finite (in a really big way, to0). Your choice, of course, but since my dollars and sense (Yes, I mean ‘sense’) are so very limited, I do as much of the housework as I can stand.

Which is why I am building my web site and setting up my email server all by my little old self. Again.

Thank you vey much,  Microsoft.

I have worked in and around computers since 1971, and I have developed over the years some very well-founded and well-justified biases and prejudices for certain companies and products. Microsoft is way at the top of several of my lists of biases and prejudices. I truly do love to hate that company. Especially now.

February will go down in my personal history as a  very ‘Interesting’ month.

I wouldn't have minded if we’d skipped it entirely.

It’s Friday night, and I’m Beat

 

“lonesome Cove” has gone out the door – twice, in fact, because I had to add some stuff to the ending. Now I’m thinking of adding more, but I’m afraid my publisher will go into a hissy fit if I send her another version before the second is even edited. That’s a good reason to do absolutely nothing on LC until I hear back from the editor, I guess.

But the ending does bother me…

Yesterday I started on that novel I’ll be co-authoring with Tony Attanasio. Tony’s got quite a background – he served in the Marine Corps, worked as a detective sergeant with NYPD in their Organized Crime Unit, spent ten years with DEA where he worked in a lot of the trouble spots and acted as the DEA liaison with the CIA on some very interesting cases.

He’s been declared an expert in international drug trafficking by the New York State Supreme Court, the U.S. District Court in Miami and by the German Supreme Court in Bavaria.

He’s written several books and worked as the organized crime advisor ton Robert De Nero’s movie, “Ronin”. He’s received numerous awards in the field of law enforcement and government, including seventeen awards for valor from the NYPD and from several foreign governments as well. Tony is a certified Florida Department of Law Enforcement Criminal Justice Instructor. If you want to know more about this very interesting man, check out his web site at:

http://www.s2institute.com/content/_pages_about/_instructors/attanasio.php

I’ve spent the last two days going through the material he sent me on the novel we’ll be co-authoring. It’s titled, “A Silent Star”. I’m not going to divulge any of the details at this stage, but I will say it covers what happened after the attack on the U.S.S Cole (DDG-67), one of the Arleigh Burke class destroyers.

A 35-foot boat laden with the explosives RDX and TNT with two bombers on board rammed the USS Cole port amidships while it was refueling in Aden harbor, ripping a 32-foot by 36-foot hole in the hull and causing extensive internal damage. The ships crew lost seventeen dead and forty-seven injured.

The attack occurred in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, at eleven twenty-two on the morning of October 12, 2000.

Our story will be about the lives and actions of some of the people involved in the search for the perpetrators following that attack. From what I have read so far, it is going to be a very interesting story, indeed. It is a novelization, and names and circumstances will be changed to protect their identities without diluting the harsh realities of these valiant individuals.

With any luck at all, it will be released later this year for the Kindle. I have no idea of a publication date for a paperback version, but believe me when I say this one will be out in paper, as well.

“Lonesome Cove” is in my publisher’s tender care

 

And will soon be passed over to her editor, who’s hands are not so tender. But at least the manuscript is out of my hair. I spent most of the previous two days in a final round of editing and a bit of rewriting and expanding descriptions and dialogue to clear up a few issues in some parts.

Once again, I am exhausted and suffering from a male version of post-partum blues. Two years I carried that thing around with me. If I wasn’t actively writing in the MS I was sure as hell thinking about the next few scenes or researching or daydreaming (yes, damnit, daydreaming) about how the plot was coming along and where it had to go next.

Nine months? Give me a break. I wish my novels only took nine months to assemble. Of course, I don’t have pain in places where I don’t have places (being a guy and all), and I’m sure as hell not going to get up in the middle of the night and feed the manuscript or pat its little back until it burps or change its dirty book cover after it craps itself.

Have I mentioned to you that I am so very, very glad I am not a woman? I was present at the births of all four of my children and shared as equally as possible in their first ten years of so; I’ve changed any number of diapers and had my shoulders covered in baby puke (and other stuff). I’ve paid my guy dues a few times over.

But still, both the baby raising and the manuscript are over and done with. Until the kids come to visit and my publisher’s editor sends the MS back with her markups. Let’s hope they don’t get here on the same day.

In the meantime, I’ll be starting serious work on a new novel I am co-authoring with a gentleman who has very deep knowledge of organized crime, gangs and the DEA and CIA. It’s based on a true story  and should make a fast-paced and very interesting story. And it should be done and ready for the publisher in six months.

But I am becoming very aggravated with Microsoft over their new web site hosting service Office 365. It is a muddle, and none of the tech support guys have a clue about how to straighten things out for the thousands of small and middling businesses struggling to move their web sites over to the new platform. And little old me is right in there with them.

Poor, poor, pitiful me.

But I am a writer, and I’ve got a blog…

Yesterday was absolutely Wonderful, and Today is ramping up to be just as Nice

 

I got up at 3 AM yesterday and left the house for the drive to the Inverness Book Festival. I live in Deland, Fl, on the East coast just inland from Daytona. Inverness is on the West coast. You know how some people 'hunt & peck' on keyboards, right. Well, that's how I navigate Florida roads...

Inverness finally showed up in the windshield at 7:30. I checked in with one of the boss ladies, found my table and spent the next forty minutes getting all my little rubber duckies in a row. Between catching up with a few of the other authors I knew from previous events and meeting lots of new ones (and drinking another much needed cup of coffee), I was ready a few minutes before the hordes of readers started to trickle in. And we were all busy for the rest of the day.

Not only was the room packed with authors and readers, there were two rows of marquee tents set up outside. It was one of the very best-organized events I have been to in the last few years.

Inverness, in case you are not familiar with it, is a small town  just inland from the West coast of Florida, close to Homosassa Springs, It is also the center of several retirement communities in the area and folks over there just love to read (oh, goody!)

Kathleen Walls, my tent mate at several events last year, is not only an author, she is a publisher of other authors. I was able to get into the Inverness Book Festival through her connections with the festival. Thank you so very much, Kathleen!

Kathleen is also going to be my publisher for “Lonesome Cove”.

One of the first visitors to my table spoke with me for a few minutes and then wandered off to look around for a bit. I suppose there were thirty authors in the room with me; authors of books on  living a spiritual life, poetry, making a business out of your music, historical fiction, mysteries, how-to politics and so on. quite an eclectic groups, actually.

Well, that lady I mentioned above came back about half an hour later and bought all three of my novels. That one sale covered the cost of my trip across the State. Then all I had to do was sell one more book to cover the gas back to Deland and another to cover my lunch and I’d be all set.

By the time I left Inverness that afternoon I not only covered the cost of the day in Inverness; I came home with plenty of cash.

I stopped in Silver Springs on my way home, to see the cover art for “Lonesome Cove”.  Mickey Summers is an amazing fellow; former educator (art) in the Marion County school system (30 years), former Ranger with the Florida Park system, naturalist (he spends every minute he can outdoors, and in Florida that means walking in forests, swamps and bogs) and he knows the history, geology and ecology of Florida better than you know the back of your hand. And he paints, too. He is a naturalist painter who can tell a very long story ( a picture is worth a thousand words, you say? That’s nothing to Mickey’s paintings) with a single picture.

Well, I didn’t have my camera with me, so the cover art is now here in Deland, waiting for me to pull it out of wherever it got packed for the move down here. It’s here, somewhere. I know it is. And I also picked up the MS for “Lonesome Cove”, as well. Mickey not only does my cover art; he is my first line of defense against my own stupidity in things like ‘choose’ instead of ‘chose’ and ‘bored’ instead of ‘board’, and having a character driving a red Ford pickup in one para and then putting him into a gray Buick sedan in the next.

Mickey checks dates, places and timing with a calendar, map and stop watch. And then he’ll draw a sketch, if he needs to, just to figure out if my descriptions of the layouts of scenes, rooms and the movements of characters is a bit too confusing for him. No kidding. he has saved my butt this way too many times to count.

So I’ve got my work cut out for me for the rest of this week; review the editing and make corrections, and then get the cover art photographed (yes, I can do a pretty good job with a camera and some photo editing software).

Then I print out a hard copy of the MS and get it up to my good friend Lesley in Jacksonville for a second look-see before sending it off to the publisher, who will have her own editor go over the MS before they start pre-production work

Have a great week. Oh, yes. I forgot. For those of you who plan to watch the Super Bowl today, I do hope you enjoy the game and the commercials. I’ll be sitting on the couch, too. And my team is guaranteed to win, so there (and no, I’m not going to tell you who that is).

I’ve posted a few blogs about moving my web site over to Microsoft’s Office 365 servers, so here is the very last on this issue: my new web site is finally up (www.garyshowalter.com) and everything – including my business email, works just fine, thank you so very much. At least, I think it does, which leads me to a request I have for you.

If you’ve stuck with me so far, please do me a very big favour ; on my web site there is a “Contact the Author” button on the left side of the window. It opens a short contact form where you can enter your name, email addy and stuff like that, and add a little note. Please do that for me. I

f you would like to be kept abreast of the progress on “Lonesome Cove: and further writing ventures I have lined up via a Notification List of readers I maintain, please let me know that specifically in the text box provided on the form.

If you do not make that request, I promise I will never send you an email for any reason (not because I do not like you and appreciate you, because I do. But if you do not request to be added to that notification list, I will not harass you with unwonted emails).

On my part I promise to never, ever, buy, sell or trade your email address to any person or agency or otherworldly being for anything, including gold, silver or Cheetos. Ever, I promise.

Update on “The Big Move”

 

Only it’s not a ‘Move’, exactly. It’s more like trash the old one, redirect the domain name and then build a brand new web site from scratch.

Unfortunately.

And it is a pain in my behind. But, as I mentioned in my last post, I was not given a great deal of choice in the matter. A few months ago I contemplated doing this very thing, but reconsidered after getting a few prices from hosting services and getting an idea of what would be involved in shifting my web site to a new host. I was unenthusiastic about the prices and downright staggered by all of the work involved.

I was right.

But I must say that Microsoft offered me such a nice deal  - with nasty implications if I failed to take them up on their lovely offer. Those nasty implications included finding another host for the web site, paying their monthly hosting fee, and still having to do all of the work by my lonesome. But their pricing was such I never even considered NOT taking the offer from Microsoft.

All things being equal, I am much better off staying with Microsoft for the hosting.

So this morning I began to build the web site. I’ve trimmed it down a bit, used ‘zones’ on a few of the pages for the sake of organization, and all in all the site is much better organized than the old one. So as of right now, all of the pages are there with buttons along the left side for navigation and I am reasonable satisfied with the look and feel.

But I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how to set up a blog on the site. So I posted a question to the techies, and I’m waiting on a response.

The domain name change should take effect in 24-hours from just about right now, and as soon as it does I’ll publish the web site and we’ll all get to take a look at it together.

Won’t that be exciting?

Not really, but I’m looking forward to it anyway.

So, if you would, say around three o’clock tomorrow afternoon (EST, that is), type www.garyshowalter.com into the URL bar at the top of your browser and give the web site a look-see. You can drop me a line at gary@garyshowalter.com and let me know what you think. Click through the pages and try to open one of the PDF files on the “Novels” page to see if it opens. I’ve got the first three chapters of my new novel, “Lonesome Cove” up there now…

Let me know, pretty please with sugar on, if something does not work.