Eden to Amazon

For as long as I can remember, I’ve made up stories. I’d sit in an airport and make up stories about the people that walked by. As I drove past houses, particularly interesting ones, I’d make up stories about the people who live inside. The most poignant stories were always about the people with neglected gardens.

As I’d drive or walk by a house with a neglected garden, I looked to see whether the bones of an excellent garden where underneath the weeds. I’d look for specimen plants—exotic creatures that take special nurture. I’d spy out meandering foot paths or artfully planted foundation plants. And, of course, if I spied out the bones beneath the neglect, the story I told myself would become tragic. Often, it would run like this. A dear woman (all woman who garden are wise, aesthetic souls) planted and cared for a lovely garden. One day, disease or death struck. And now her husband can’t bear to be out weeding and mulching because it reminds him of her. And now the garden lies in disarray—a physical reminder of love lost. (Yes, my younger daydreams were melodramatic.)

Now that I am older and wiser, I know the truth because my garden has gone from Edenic to Amazonian. (Okay, it was never Edenic, but this is my blog post so I’m allowed a little creative license.) And the cause of the neglect isn’t debilitating disease or death or even a bad case of the flu…it’s writing deadlines. When you’re looking for passive voice, mixed metaphors, etc., there isn’t time to trim the roses or weed the Bermuda. (I tried Roundup, but it must’ve rained before the poison dried. Grumble, grumble.)

In any case, Screwing Up Alexandria is now pubbed, and I’m out in the garden with shears and shovels (yes, some of the weeds are that big). And soon I’ll banish the Amazonian takeover. But, I am a little wistful because I’m wondering how many other writers who drive by my house are going to have their tragic stories ruined. Sorry.

(Okay, so please tell me that I’m not the only one who makes up stories about gardens.)

Yeah, okay, so this isn't my garden. It's one of the gardens at Versailles.
But a girl can dream, right?

Screwing Up Alexandria!

Screwing Up Alexandria is here! Click here to buy it.

Book three of the Screwing Up Time series is now live on Amazon. It went live late Wednesday night—two hours after I uploaded it, which was amazing.

Even more amazing, yesterday a writing friend emailed me a screen shot and said, “Have you seen this?” I hadn’t. Screwing Up Alexandria was #1 in sales in one of its categories.

I’m excited to see how sales go today.

Here’s the cover art and book blurb.

Time traveling has never brought Mark Montgomery anything but grief. And then, things get worse.

When Mark comes home from Babylon with a coded tablet, he never dreams someone would be willing to kill to get it. But they are.  So Mark and Miranda kidnap an ancient cryptographer named Nin and take her to the Library of Alexandria to decipher it.

The search for the truth of the tablet takes all of them to the most dangerous time on earth. And when Nin ends up on an altar surrounded by blood-thirsty crowds, only Mark can save her. And he's blind.

Also, A. B. Keuser interviewed me about Screwing Up Alexandria. Read the interview here.

Christmas Muzak

I’ve admitted to being a little anti-holiday. But I do like Christmas. I like remembering Christ’s birth, drinking spiked cider, and watching my kids decorate the Christmas tree (a great reason for having teenagers). But I really don’t want to start Christmas early. December 1 is early enough.

Do Christmas trees in all their faux, spangled gaudiness have to arrive in stores even before Halloween? Aren’t American consumers spending enough on costumes and candy?

But the worst thing about the Pre-December Christmas celebration is the holiday music. When I’m shopping for turkey and cranberries, I really don’t want to hear the store’s PA systems blasting “Santa Baby” and “Jingle Bell Rock.” I mean, there’s nothing that makes me less cheery than knowing for the next month and one half I’ll be hearing the Chipmunks squeak out “Frosty the Snowman” whenever I visit a store. I don’t know about you, but nothing drives me out of a store faster than Alvin and his buddies.

There are about six weeks left of the pre-Christmas madness. I’m reminding myself that I can get through them because, aside from the trips to WalMart for food, I can pretty much avoid hearing about Rudolph’s shiny nose by shopping at Amazon. Hmm. Maybe that’s why Amazon has become so popular. Everyone thinks it’s because you can buy Christmas presents on the couch while wearing your pajamas and get free shipping so you don’t have to wait in line at the post office. But the truth is, everyone shops Amazon to avoid the Christmas muzak. 

E-publishing, the Nuts and Bolts

After being exclusively on Amazon for quite a while, I decided to publish both Screwing Up Time and Screwing Up Babylon on Smashwords. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Smashwords, they are an e-book provider that provides e-books in just about any and every format. If your e-reader is a Kindle, Nook, iPad, Kobo, etc., you can buy books at Smashwords. Click here, to visit the site if you’ve never been.

Originally, I published SUT to Smashwords, but I was disappointed with how the formatting came out. And eventually, I unpublished it. So I was concerned this time about how things would turn out. It went very well. Smashwords has become much easier to work with. And the “meatgrinder,” their affection name for the processor that turns your manuscript into various formats, has been hugely upgraded.

Here’s my hint on how to format your book to upload to Smashwords: Set up an account at Smashwords and buy their formatting guide. It will take you step-by-step through the process. Their formatting is not very different from Amazon’s, except for one big difference—the Table of Contents. Amazon and Smashwords have very different TOC formatting. My suggestion is that once everything else in your manuscript is properly formatted, save your novel in three different files. One the original file without any TOC. Two, your novel which you'll format in the Kindle style. Three, your novel in the Smashwords style. (I called mine: SUT; SUT, Kindle; and SUT, Smashwords. Yeah, very clever, I know.) It’s much easier to add TOCs to a fresh document than remove one TOC only to add in another because the formatting ends up all over the book (take it from someone who didn’t do that on the first book).

When adding the TOC, follow the formatting guides step-by-step. The first time, it will take a while, so find a few hours of uninterrupted quiet. (It may take a couple of days if you don’t use standard formatting for chapter breaks, new paragraph indents, etc.)

Also both Amazon and Smashwords require MS Word for an upload, so if you use something else, translate the file into Word. (Also I couldn’t find any information about whether Smashwords would take a .docx file, so I just used a .doc)

The bottomline here is that if I could do this, you can too. I’m definitely not a techie. The most important thing is to get the free formatting guidelines and follow them to the letter (no room for almost here). If you want to see what the Smashwords pages for my books look like, click on the titles. Screwing Up Time. Screwing Up Babylon.

If you’re looking for the formatting guides, here's what their cover art looks like. 

Good luck. You CAN do this!

Smashwords Style Guide (FREE)

Amazon Style Guide (FREE), called Building Your Book for Kindle.

The Internet Makes Me a Happy Shopper. Sort of.

Photo by Sebastian Ballad from wikimedia

 Let me start off by saying I really, really hate shopping. It’s the crowds. People who wear too much perfume. People bumping each other. The heat of too many bodies in too small a space. Walking around seeing 12,000,000 pieces of clothing, knowing that most of them are poorly made—look, that seam hasn’t been properly finished and will unravel in the first washing.

So I love Amazon shopping. No crowds. I can shop in my pajamas while I drink my mug of morning coffee. No odd smells (unless you count Jezebel nudging me for her morning walk). And if I use my daughter’s prime account, I don’t always have to pay shipping costs.

Shopping bliss. Until I discover that the perfect present is out-of-stock. Or the shipping costs double the price of the gift since it would be shipping from a third party in Outer Boondocks Eastern Europe and isn’t eligible for free prime shipping.

And there’s always the dog nudging me—she still hasn’t been walked. And my daughter who wants me to look over an essay for grad school number three, which wants something different than grad schools one and two.

I can’t forget that I need to start laundry—it’s bedding day. And then Matt and Luke need haircuts before we do the Christmas photo. (Yes, I cut everyone’s hair. And yes, I still haven’t done the photo.) Speaking of Christmas cards, I still have to edit the Christmas letter and get everyone’s approval—this is the time of year where they get payback for every paper/letter/essay I’ve edited for them.

You know, store shopping doesn’t sound that bad.

Riding the Bestseller Wave

A strange thing happened on Wednesday and Thursday. My YA novel shot through the ranks at Amazon. I found out what it’s like to ride the crest of the wave.

Ever since I first published Screwing Up Time, I’ve been trying to market it on a shoestring budget. When other authors said, “My budget for this novel is $5,000,” I said, “My budget for this novel is 5 bucks.” And I was okay with that.

But it’s very hard to get the word out when you don’t have a megaphone. Still, my efforts paid off and I broke small sales barriers. And I was/still am very thankful. Then, I found E-Reader News Today. And they were willing to advertise my novel (given it had enough good reviews and I was willing to sell it at a bargain rate—99 cents) for a part of the royalties. I figured it would be a win-win situation. If the book did well, I’d get a lot of exposure. If not, I wouldn’t have lost a big investment. So I submitted my book.

I hoped and prayed for the best, but kept my expectations very low. The site warned me that YA books aren’t the biggest sellers in the e-book biz. (I already knew that.)

Wednesday came around. I had a couple of sales. Good. By afternoon, I had a few more sales. By evening, I was pretty excited. The sales were really coming in. And by Thursday morning, Screwing Up Time was ranked #6 in Amazon Kindle’s Teen Literature and Fiction. It was only two spots below The Hobbit!

It was the most amazing feeling. People were interested in my book. I had my techo-son do a screen capture so I could savor the moment later because I knew it wouldn’t last. And it hasn’t—this morning my book has slipped to #15, which is still amazing. And the sales are still very good. Who knows what will happen today—Fridays are much better sale than Thursdays. But even if I slide down the charts, that’s okay. For a moment, my book was on the top of the charts. 

Number One

This morning I had an email from a friend, Melissa Pearl (writer of the Time Spirit trilogy) entitled “Just Noticed!!” I opened it, thinking she had some great news to share. She’s had a lot of novel excitement lately—book readings, library interest, etc. But what she notice wasn’t anything about her book, it was about mine.

I’m not one of those authors who knows all the ins and outs of Amazon and their tags, lists, discussions, etc. I always feel overwhelmed by the wealth of information. Plus, it just gives me more to get stressed about. But today it was good news. My book was listed number one in young adult time travel. Melissa was giddy for me. And, of course, I couldn’t find it. So I figured I must have gotten tossed off the list—list rankings on Amazon change faster than the weather. And then, Matt sat at my computer. Click. Type. Click. “Here it is.” And here it is. (You can click on it if you want to see it enlarged.)

I’m beginning to feel like one of those pathetic relatives that everyone snickers about behind their back and says, “Bless her heart, she’s so ignorant.” And what will I do when all the kids move away from home? I don’t want to be the annoying relative who calls and says, “How do I...” I keep telling myself that once I have more time, I’ll experiment and figure out how it all works. But then I remember how I emailed everyone I’ve ever known/contacted including numerous NY literary agents and asked them to be my GoodReads friend. I’m guessing I’d rather be the whining relative than the “scary” author who wants to be “friends” with strangers.