Idle Gossip

In the office for a bit of self-imposed overtime.  I didn't get as much done in my first week back as I would have liked and I want to make up the deficit, so by necessity this post will be brief.

Conservation, my first ebook, as been live on Feedbooks.com for about a week now and it has already gotten more (truly) worldwide attention than it ever got on Smashwords.com.  I'm not sure why that is because a lot of people seem to use Smashwords, both for publishing and for buying books through their distribution network.  Why Conservation only ever managed to reach 7 downloads is beyond me, but I'll take whatever attention it receives through Feedbooks.com.

Because of that success, I've been looking more closely at a different online retailer--Lulu.com.  They operate in the Print On Demand (POD) niche but they also do some brisk business in ebooks.  I've checked out their site and it looks good.  I've read a few reviews from authors and they seem satisfied.  The biggest plus for me is that they have some good and understandable documentation with respect to helping foreign authors get set up with the IRS with various tax numbers for remittance and withholding exemptions.  The site even indicated that their support staff will help with questions, something Smashwords refused to do.  When I'm ready to retail books again, I will go to Lulu first.

Picked up a new 24" monitor last night for use with my laptop--$129 LCD HD by Acer.  On the stand I built last year it sits at the perfect height for me and with all the on-screen real estate Scrivener looks great.

Speaking of Scrivener, I have started creating a project bible for all the stories that will appear in the Epoch Universe.  I discovered quite by accident that, unlike Word, when you open a second Scrivener project, it is launched in a second, separate window.  I also discovered that I can drag and drop text files between those windows.  This means that as I start to develop characters and settings in the active project, I can drag them over to the project bible and keep everything in one place--coordinated nice and neat.

I am more excited now about writing than I have been for a long time.  The "success" that Conservation is enjoying, coupled with new tools has in a way rejuvenated me, shown me a light at the end of the tunnel.  Expect more output in the weeks and months ahead.

Christmas Past and Writing News

Sunday morning in Cornwall and it's snowing lightly.  I'm here on the last of my holiday vacation, visiting my parents as I do a couple times a month .  The Christmas decorations are put away and we disassembled the tree and packed it in storage for another year.

Christmas Past

The tree we've used for the last fifteen years is a six foot artificial fir.  It's a fine, thick, robust tree decorated with multi-coloured lights strung up and down the branches, but it's a heavy beast and awkward to haul up and down the basement steps and we almost didn't use it this year.  My parents are getting older and, as autumn turned into winter, they started thinking a smaller tree would be more practical so they bought a three-foot table-top tree that they would display in the corner of the living room on my grandmother's old claw-foot end table.

When I heard about this change to our family's Christmas tradition, I kept my thoughts to myself.  I always loved that tree, but if they wanted a smaller tree that would be easier to manage then I was behind it.  (Fortunately,) They ran into a problem as soon as they started trying to decorate it.

Many of the decorations that they had collected over the decades, including heirlooms from my mother and father's childhood, didn't fit on the little tree.  There was no room for my father's white cathedral or his little bluebird.  My Aunt Norma's 12 Days of Christmas ornaments, cast in pewter, were too big for the branches.  And you could forget about trying to hang my sister's "Baby's First Christmas" ball.  They conferred and it went straight back to the store where it came from.  A few days later, I arrived for one of my regular visits and the old fir was hauled out and decorated to much fanfare and deep appreciation. :)

Writing News

"Conservation": Initial Success?

"Conservation" seems to be faring much better on Feedbooks.com than it ever did on Smashwords.com.  If FB's analytics are correct, as of this writing "Conservation" has been downloaded 38 times in just under 24 hours.  That may not sound like a lot, but let me put things in perspective: "Conservation" was live on Smashwords for nearly a month and got no more than seven downloads, despite being admitted to the Premium Catalogue.  

I think I may have blogged about using Feedbooks to build a readership in previous entries.  I know that that had been the plan in my head, but the siren call of the dollar lured me away.  The amazing performance I'm seeing now confirms that it was a mistake to use Smashwords at this time.  I say "at this time" because I still think Smashwords has value for independent authors, but authors who have established themselves.  In a year or two, after I have more stories to offer, I may try my hand at it again, either with Smashwords or Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing Program.

"Cool Water": Outlined and In Progress
"Cool Water" is now fully outlined in my Feedbooks interface, all five parts.  The only change from my previous post about this is that I have opted to drop the prologue, everything else remains the same.  I'm excited about this story.  After long weeks of struggling with the plot, letting it lie while working on detective fiction, then struggling with it some more, the story feels like it holds together well.  It feels like a story I would enjoy reading.  In the end that's what a storyteller should aim for, right?  Write to entertain your toughest critic: yourself.

Small Step Sideways

In a previous post I talked about my short story "Conservation" being available for sale on Smashwords.com and other online retail outlets.  In a small step sideways, I have depublished that story from Smashwords.  I, as a Canadian indie author, must find a way to navigate the US's revenue taxation scheme (or face it's wrath) but I'm finding it difficult to navigate Smashword's FAQ with respect to foreign authors.  Being averse to wrath, of the legal or biblical sort, I thought it best to take a step back and regroup.

It's disappointing for me to have to depublish anything, but I look at this as an opportunity.  I can hit the reset button and start over with a different self-publishing site.  My goal at this point is to build readership and articles that I have read all indicate that indie authors do this best when they offer their ebooks to the world for free.  So far the best site I've seen for free self-publishing is Feedbooks.com.  It has an easy to use interface an there's no tedious format checking/correction to work through.  It's write, click and publish.

So, as I said, a small step sideways away from writing "for profit" and back to writing "for me".

Milestone: An Outline for "Cool Water"

I now have an outline for the first of Charlotte's "Cool Water" stories. I've been struggling with this one for quite a few months, never finding the right plot or characters, but I had a breakthrough on the drive home last night. When I left Ottawa, I started talking it out in the simplest of terms and by the time I got to Cornwall I had half the story worked out in my head. I finished the other half of the outline this afternoon. I think the most important achievement is getting an outline that I am confident I can work with. There are five movements, a prologue I had never planned on and a denouement.  If I can work up a movement a week, I should be able to complete the story by the end of January or the first week of February.