In this episode, you’ll learn how to create an e-book from your manuscript, and how to use software to do the “imposition” of your book’s pages so they can be printed out, folded, and stacked into a book.
I just read a Guardian piece about film director Kevin Smith getting removed from a flight for being overweight. Apparently he ‘tweeted’ about the event, and his 1.64 million followers went into a lather on his behalf, forcing the airline to make an awkward apology.
The weight issue aside… 1.64 million followers?! Wow, I’m overwhelmed at having over 800 on Twitter. I’m grateful that so many people can put up with my smatterings of thought and my show-and-tell moments with creative projects, and I hope they get something halfway useful out of it in return, if only some entertainment.
…And I’m hyper-conscious of how I use outlets like Twitter, so I try to stick to some fundamental rules:
Don’t stray too far off-topic from writing, bookbinding, and publishing. If it’s likely to offend people (like complaining about the Pope’s upcoming trip to the UK, a recent temptation) keep your yap shut. That’s not what people follow me to hear.
Be nice/don’t be mean. Yeah, I might get in a clever wise-crack, but ultimately I’m the one who winds up looking like a dick.
Don’t recycle too much of other people’s content. If something’s really fascinating or would be missed, sure, I’ll repost/retweet/rewhatever it, but I know I ‘unfollow’ people who do nothing but root through others’ bins and reuse what they find.
Don’t be too self-promotional. For every piece of content that asks people to do something for me (like read about me or my work, look at something I’ve made, or consider buying something I’ve made), I have to provide three more that are entertaining just in themselves, or that provide something useful to them.
Be human/don’t be a show-off. It’s great to have an outlet for cheering about my wins, but I realise from my own experience that the most compelling posts are often those in which someone admits a limitation or a mistake. If all someone ever does is crow about their greatness — well, they don’t really need my attention, because they seem to be able to give themselves plenty. But when we share the whole process, there’s room to learn from each other, and to feel more empathy.
So those are my rules (which, until this moment, have been mostly unconscious), and they seem to be working to keep people interested in what I’m up to, and keep me from annoying them too much.
And these are the operant words for me: what I’m up to.
Facebook is truly social media: for me, it’s about real-world relationships. Twitter is about people who are involved in the same things I am, who are way out in front with them, or who are just starting to learn about them. It’s a “community of interest”.
One of the great features of Twitter is that it breaks down so many barriers: if there’s someone in your field you admire, there’s a good chance they’re on it.
But this is where it gets dicey: When you’ve got 1.64 million followers, you’re not in a conversation anymore, you’re in a star/fanclub arrangement. There are people on Twitter whose work I like, and some of them write very funny or clever things on there, but whenever I’ve wavered and added them, I soon end up unfollowing them, because I find myself in one of those icky, non-reciprocal situations. You know you’ve fallen down that hole when you reply to one of the star’s messages, hoping to catch their attention and feeling miffed when you never get a response (yet another silly Internet waste of emotion I’m better off without, like message board arguments).
So my big, ultimate rule with social media is that I’m only interested in two-way conversations. By that same token, I want to be available to the 800 people who’ve been so generous as to give me their attention. (I just can’t believe they actually stay with it; even odder to me is that so many remain silent.)
Maybe there’s a point of diminishing returns where you can’t actually keep up with it (say, 1.63 million followers). So what then? Do you leave? I’m not sure.
It’s not that I think those people shouldn’t be on Twitter, but… well, I think celebrity entertainment is spiritually radioactive, so I guess I’ll never understand what people get out of it. At that point on Twitter, you’re not conversing, you’re broadcasting.
Hey, it’s wonderful that a broadcast platform is now available to anyone with a computer. And that platform can grow without limits, whether because of empty famousness or meritorious content. As AJ Leibling said, “Freedom of the press is only guaranteed to those who own one.” Well, AJ, now we all own one. But I’m much more interested in the power of the ‘net to deliver real, accessible experiences and conversations than yet more closed, hyper-mediated ones.
There’s a lot of pressure on creative people these days to be a “brand” and to use social media as a marketing tool. We get tons of advice about how to constantly work the system in the hopes of selling more books (or whatever tchotchkes we’re hucking on our sites or Etsy or wherever). On the one hand, it’s brilliant to be able to reach your audience directly. It closes that loop of being understood and appreciated for our work, yet it can become such an obsessive time-sink that we end up spending every moment desperately trying to keep that beach ball of attention in the air — so much so that we neglect to create new work.
It’s a tricky balance, and I haven’t figured it out yet. Case in point: it’s time to turn off the computer and go make dinner… Just as soon as I post a link to this on Twitter.
I’m half-joking here. I rail on scrapbookers because I hate all the lobotomised cutesy-wootsey, yummy mummy stuff that goes along with the production of scrapbooks — some of which are the most Gawd-awful-looking piles of glitter and ribbons and plastic you’ve ever seen in your life.
I don’t want to be mean, but it’s this type of thing: “I stamped with a HEDGEHOG stamp!!! Yes, ME!! I know, IT’S CRAZY!!!!“ that makes me wonder if some folks have fallen off the top of Maslow’s pyramid into some sparkly pink hole of having too much time and nothing important to do.
I call most scrapbook products “creativity for the non-creative” — packaged-up kits you assemble into exactly the thing in the picture on the front of the package. And the sheer amount of stuff you can buy is staggering. On the show Glee, they make fun of the lead character’s wife having a room full of scrapbooking paraphernalia, but then you tune into the shopping channel and see women fawning over acres of these preassembled bits and pieces, referring to each one by its precious name (“The Kidizzlix Flapdazzler”). And if you’re really serious you can get a container for it all about the size of a fridge.
I, on the other hand, am a bookbinder. This is a venerable trade extending back to the beginnings of modern thought and democracy. I craft each book from first principles, stitching, cutting and…
Oh, who am I kidding?
In every art, there’s some phony division between one camp and another, which to outsiders must seem completely arbitrary and capricious.
I’m reminded of the Grade-D-yet-brilliant movie Shakes the Clown, about an alcoholic clown who’s constantly getting into fistfights with mimes: Mimes are just pretentious fakers, you see.
I’ve collected an embarrassing array of scrapbooking tools in my search to create visually compelling books. A stamp to create an interesting text pattern here, a deckle-edge ripper to make torn pages there… And I’m happy with the results…
…But it’s such a slippery slope into that pre-fab creativity.
I suppose it’s like using a computer: it’s just a tool, until you start identifying with the thing, thinking it’s “cool” or better than another machine, or loans you any personal qualities, or that you need the next and the next one to preserve that halo of new wonderfulness. Instead, you remember all the creative possibilities the tool makes possible, then focus on that instead of acquiring the next bit of tat. The tools are a vehicle for content; it’s only vulgar or pointless when the the tools themselves become the focus of the activity.
Hi, I’m John Rosenman. I’m sixty-eight years old, an English professor at Norfolk State University, and I’ve been writing almost my entire life. Altogether, I’ve published fourteen books, with more to follow, plus over 300 short stories in places like Galaxy, Weird Tales, Fangoria (online), Whitley Strieber’s Aliens, Hot Blood, etc. (Check out my site at www.johnrosenman.com). I write science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and dabble in related areas. My first published novel (The Best Laugh Last, McPherson & Co.) was mainstream and cost me two jobs because of its sensitive racial subject matter. It will be republished in a year or so. My other novels are action-adventure science fiction mixed with romance, bizarre (and I hope fascinating) aliens, and a few cosmic mind-benders. Beyond Those Distant Stars, to take one example, is about a cyborg female who saves humanity from seemingly invincible aliens while trying to find love with an unfaithful pilot. Published by Mundania Press, it just won AllBooks Review Editor’s Choice Award.
I’m a child of the Golden Age of Science Fiction (the 1950s), and in my novels, I try to capture the awesome, mind-stretching wonders of the universe. So in some ways, my SF novels are a bit retro. A common plot is that the main character travels to a distant world and has amazing adventures, often getting involved in an intense romance. In A Senseless Act of Beauty (Blade Publishing), Aaron Okonkwo journeys to a distant, African-type world and gets seduced by a beautiful green alien gal. And that’s only the beginning of his problems.
What I like best about writing is the high I get from it, which is basically indescribable. When it’s clicking, and I’m writing better than ever before, I feel blessed and grateful for what I’m doing and able to do. Another great thing about writing is to find editors and readers who are moved by my vision and actually like my work and what I’m trying to accomplish in it.
But writing isn’t all joy and fulfillment. Sometimes it’s frustrating and demoralizing. Some of my worst experiences with works in progress involve the fact that they fail. No matter how hard I revise, the story just never works. Sometimes it even gets sicker, with more things going wrong with it. This is especially painful when I’m really excited about the premise or concept or make a really good start. The story has promise but for some reason can’t fulfill it. Or to be more honest, I can’t fulfill the story’s promise. Sometimes it’s all just a mystery, as with my short story, “The Great Gumball Machine.” It’s based on memories of my childhood and is steeped in nostalgia. The story should work but disintegrates in mysterious ways about halfway through.
Another bad experience involved my novel, Dax Rigby, War Correspondent. It’s SF on a distant world, and involves a young, charismatic hero. You can find a trailer for it on YouTube and elsewhere, including my website. I work with a writers group and was halfway through the novel when the group grew more critical and my inspiration flagged. There soon came a point where I didn’t know where to take the story plot-wise and otherwise. So I put the novel in mothballs for five months. Fortunately, when I returned to it, the book was reborn, and I (not too modestly) think it’s quite a success.
As for great experiences, I’ve had many. “Rounded With a Sleep,” a story which appeared in Galaxy in Sept./Oct 1994, had a rocky history that was strangely satisfying. It started off as a 3000 word story, swelled to five and six thousand words as I put in more background and local color, then went on a diet from its bloated state and ended at about 3000 words again. But it was much, much better, and to this day, I find its difficult evolution satisfying.
I’ll mention one other great experience. I wrote Inspector of the Cross 22 years ago before I had a computer. It’s about a 3000-year-old elite agent who travels on missions to distant worlds in a state of suspended animation. So everyone ages except him. When I finished the novel, I sent it around. Some publishers came close to accepting it, including Donald A. Wollheim, who critiqued it in a letter. Last summer, I dug the letter and the manuscript out and just started to retype the whole thing into my computer without even reading what I wrote way back when. I find the whole experience liberating and exciting. As I write, new possibilities have occurred to me, new dimensions and plot twists. I can hardly wait to see what I will write tomorrow, and what will occur to me on the next page that I didn’t think of when I was a much younger man.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think Inspector of the Cross will be my best book. Even if it’s not, the excitement I get from revisiting old characters and adventures has reminded me of why I started to write in the first place.
Hi to Hamish’s readers, and thanks to Hamish for having me! I’m Angela Korra’ti, author of the urban fantasy ebook Faerie Blood, published through Drollerie Press. This is my contribution to the blog tour I’ve organized between Drollerie authors and several non-Drollerie authors, in the interests of getting the word out about Drollerie publications — and in exchange, to give other authors a chance to come visit our own sites and tell us about themselves. As an ebook author, I’m naturally interested in hearing about how other folks pursue non-traditional means of publishing. Since Hamish is a DIY author, I thought that’d be a nice fit for a swap of posts, and I look forward to checking out his work.
Meanwhile, I wanted to write about the overall topic of this blog tour, which is, best or worst experiences with works in progress. Those of us participating in the tour thought that’d be a nice icebreaker sort of topic, and that it’d be a good way to introduce folks to all of us.
I’m pleased to say that most of my experiences with works in progress so far have been pretty good. What leaps immediately to mind as the worst experience, though, is trying to get my novel Lament of the Dove started. I made the mistake of asking people for input on it before I got very far–and the feedback I received discouraged me enough that I backed off trying to actually finish it for some time. The lesson I took away from that is that for me as a writer, it’s much more effective to actually finish the first draft of the work and then ask for feedback on how to improve it.
More recently, my worst experiences have been more with not having the energy to work on my works in progress, rather than anything about the actual works themselves. The reason for this: breast cancer, in short, although I was very fortunate to have had the least severe case possible, caught very early. I didn’t have to have chemotherapy, but I did have radiation treatment, a mastectomy, and ultimately reconstruction surgery. And there was plenty enough stress involved to kick an enormous hole in my creative drive.
I’m still working on getting that back, and relearning the daily discipline required to get my works in progress back into actual progress. Best experience? Writing Faerie Blood, actually. I did that book during Nanowrimo in 2003, and I went in after a couple of weeks of sketching out notes on what I wanted to write about. It helped as well that I was throwing everything I loved into this book: music (Elvis Presley music and Newfoundland folk in particular), magic, elves, biking, computer geekery, cats, and Seattle. So writing it was pretty much a breeze. Getting it revised and queried and ultimately accepted for publication at Drollerie was a lot more difficult — but the writing, that was easy!
I’m hoping my next work will get me back to that.
Thanks for reading, all, and if you’d like to say hi and learn more about my work, come visit me at angelakorrati.com. You can learn more about my fellow Drollerie authors on Drollerie Press’s own site.
I was asked at short notice to do a reading yesterday for an arts fair called Hidden Door — a maze-like, multi-floor affair that was pretty darned cool. I decided to read from Finitude, since that’s the thing I figure I should still be actively promoting. I didn’t want to just drone away, though, reading a teaser from my book then asking people to buy it. So I decided to make a game of it. In one section of the book, the characters are faced with something called “Last Flights Day”: The International Climate Coalition Government has declared that air travel is too damaging to the environment (which, in the book’s world, is already very precarious) and that a particular day will be the last opportunity for long-distance travel. On Last Flights Day, you have to choose: Where will you go, once and for all? I handed out fake airline tickets I’d made, each stamped with a unique number, and asked the audience members to tell me where they’d choose to go and why, and I did a draw later, giving out a blank book I’d made and a copy of Finitude.
The whole thing became a lot more fun — on both sides, I think, as the audience was personally engaged with the central idea in the chapter I was about to read, plus we were playing back and forth, dismantling some of that “I am up here and you are listening to me” hierarchy. People’s responses surprised me: I thought they’re be about family, but a lot of them were about place, where they’d want to spend the rest of their days. Here’s what they said: #591088: New Zealand Because you can only sensibly get there by flying; although apparently when you get there it looks just like Scotland and the weather’s just as bad. #591080: France To live happily ever after in a château. #591081: London To find myself and make the films I love. #591089: Moscow To walk home through a tropical North Europe. #591085: Boulder, Colorado It is beautiful, liberal, and has great summers + winters. #591086: Sydney Then I’d be home, & to be stuck there would be ‘no bad thing’. #591091: Home It’s where I want to be and stay. #591098: Australia Fun & sun & surfing. #591094: Sedona, Arizona Sitting on top of a red rock mountain — place I was totally content. Could go every day! #591092: Abu Dhabi My birthplace, which I have no memory of. To see an oil state, post-oil. To race my girlfriend back to Scotland on foot. #591100: New Zealand To be present to people and place. To learn to love. #591093: Wick To be with my beloved in our nest. [Hmm. Who was that now?] I should create some kind of open bulletin board, ’cause I’d love to read lots more of these! Feel free to send me your Last Flights Day destination.
I’ve been looking into making book trailers for my novels, and after searching around, seeing some truly awful ones (full of melodrama, grade-D acting, and criminally derivative storylines), and finding some greatones, I decided this was something I could do. My initial idea was simple, something I could execute quickly. Then I started researching, trying to find film clips that were royalty-free or in the public domain, and coming up with nothing. Not only that, but the project starting turning into one of those endless games of Internet hopscotch, and my ideas were getting more and more complex until the whole thing was utterly unfathomable. The thing that really stumped me was, not being a filmmaker, I didn’t know how to make the thing look coherent, rather than just a bunch of separate, found bits I chewed up and… Well, you get the idea. So it occurred to me that I should draw something. I’ve always doodled, and for a long time people have been saying I should make an illustrated book. I don’t particularly want to, but in this instance it struck me that doing an animated book trailer might be a good way to give everything a coherent look while underscoring that Finitude is, yes, about climate change, but it’s not intended to be heavy or moralistic. Okay. So I was going to do that. But then came an old problem: getting my drawings into the computer. Sure, I can scan them, but scans never look quite like what I drew, the lines end up fuzzy (antialiased), and I wind up spending all kinds of time fixing them to look right on-screen — which never really works to my satisfaction. So I went out and bought a graphics tablet (no, not that Apple thing, a graphics tablet). I was taking a chance, but it paid off, ’cause these things have really improved in the last 15 years. I know, I know. In computing terms that’s a funny idea. The last one I used had a proprietary Apple connector because we didn’t have USB yet. Still, though, some things (like scanners) haven’t really improved that much since I started computing.
My first attempt was this (a promise that my novels are “100% Vampire-Free”):
I was amazed: I could actually, you know, draw with this thing! With the old one, the proportions were always wonky; it wasn’t as bad as using a mouse (which is like trying to draw with sponges strapped to your hands), but it never quite represented what I was trying to do. But the new one — just like using pens and markers, but with none of the fading, feathering, or bleeding that shows up in a scan. (I was also reminded that computing with a pen is infinitely more comfortable for me than using a mouse or my fingers, which goes counter to the current trend, yet reinforces the fact that I draw with pens rather than finger-painting.) Okay, so the next test was to try to animate something. (My projects always seem to involve this element of having to pick up new skills to complete them.) This isn’t the style of animation I’ll be using for the book trailer, but old-fashioned “cel” animation, where you keep re-drawing the same thing with slight variations. It’s horribly time-consuming and pretty rough-looking.
Okay, I’ve been thinking about it, so I’ll post about it: this tablet dealio.
I really don’t get it. I have a computer for creating content; I have an iPhone for keeping in touch and viewing media on the go. The iPad falls into an uncomfortable netherworld in-between that I guess I’m just not the target audience for… And the intended target audience seems to be “people with unlimited amounts of money for constantly buying stuff from Big Media”.
I used to be one of those awful Apple zealots when I started computing, and I’d honestly never used a Windows machine. Now I’ve been in both camps, and I have to say I do like using Apple devices. They facilitate creative work (like making a podcast) that it had never occurred to me to do before. But ultimately, all these things are tools; what matters is what you do with them, not which object you’re seen with. (To quote Chuck Palahniuk, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive…”)
I’m thrilled to find that, facing the unprecedented nuclear blast of iPad hype, I am unmoved, undesiring. It feels like a spiritual win.
Seeing books on this thing makes me want to rush home and print out a real book. Confession: When I buy e-books, I often print and bind them. What Apple shows in their demo looks like a document, not a book. (That wide line-spacing, for starters, makes my eyes want to wander elsewhere.)
I know the traditional publishers are looking at these things with $$s/££s in their eyes, and I don’t wish them any ill. If this is the chemo they need, fine. And if this drives more people to read more (and more diverse) fiction, wonderful!
But the art of making books will not go away, and the hospital-room fluorescence of these ‘pages’ can only underscore the pleasures of real paper and artful typography. I don’t think the skills or demand of book designers will be adversely affected by this development, as it’ll be some time yet before these devices rival the deliberate customisation of a typeset page — if ever they could.
Computer-wise, I used to use Pocket PCs and a small “Ultra-Mobile PC”, so I know the pain of:
using stripped-down versions of programs
not being able to open files my client sends me while I’m on the road
having to maintain more than one computer, and discovering at the coffeeshop that the file I need is at home because I forgot to synchronise
I don’t want to be mean, but it’s this type of thing: “I stamped with a HEDGEHOG stamp!!! Yes, ME!! I know, IT’S CRAZY!!!!“ that makes me wonder if some folks have fallen off the top of Maslow’s pyramid into some sparkly pink hole of having too much time and nothing important to do.
