Doing what you love 2012

I'm working my way through the remaining stack of books relating to productivity and happiness which I accumulated during the writing of Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff. Some are new to me, a few are significant works I wanted to re-read, and a good percentage are other books by authors who wrote something I liked a great deal. I flipped through all of them at least a little during the writing process, but now I'm giving them more attention before swapping them away. It's one of these last ones that I'm reading today: Live the Life you Love by Barbara Sher.

In Lesson Five she asks you to think about what you loved doing during your childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. I thought immediately of playing with plastic animals and Fisher-Price Adventure People and the long, involved stories I would make up for them. Turning my mind to adolescence I picture being a dungeonmaster, both running games and, perhaps even more enjoyed, sitting at the desk in my room, listening to music, designing dungeons and the stories behind them. As an undergraduate there was more gaming, but also in theater arts, anthropology, archaeology, and history classes, the process of increasing my understanding of how someone related to their world.

Really, it's a bit surprising it's taken as long as it has for me to start writing novels. :)

The book is out! 2011

Hooray! It was a good weekend. Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff got approved and now is in the iBookstore, the print version can be bought through my Createspace estore, and it's now listed in both Kindle and print versions on Amazon.

With everything now in place I can move ahead on promoting the book. I'm ramping up gradually, in hopes that my early adopters will write reviews that will be seen by other folks as I start driving more traffic to the various storefronts.

As before when I transitioned from writing to editing and formatting, I feel myself changing hats and switching to a new aspect of the job of indie author.

I need to run the numbers again, but my sense is that I need to sell around 3500 copies to pay back my costs. So far I'm about 2% of the way there with the very small amount of publicity I've done, so that's encouraging.

Onward!

Planning through dependencies: A lesson from self-publishing 2011

I'm in the very last stages before self-publishing my book, Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff, and the remaining steps are often exceedingly clear.

For example:

I will be publishing in the iBookstore, but I can't submit the book to them until I set all their pricing terms.

I can't set all the iBookstore ebook pricing until I have determined the book's price for its physical version (in trade paperback through Amazon/Createspace).

I can't set that price until I know my costs for author copies and my royalty share in the different sales channels through Createspace.

I can't know those costs until I have a solid estimate of the book's page count.

I won't have that page count until I do the layout in the print template with something very close to the final version of the text.

I won't have something very close to the final version of the text until I've transferred almost all the copy edit changes into the master manuscript in Scrivener.

I can't copy those edits over until I receive them from my editor when she has finished her main copy editing pass on the manuscript.

Fortunately, I'm expecting those from her shortly.

 

To be fair, I also don't want to submit the book to iBookstore until I have the final version with all the copy edits, but I find the dependency between print layout and ebook publication worth noting.

2010

"The kind of writing I do has always been designed either to elicit a conversation or to provide some framework for thinking about a problem, and you do that better if you're dealing with people whom you don't know in advance and who may not be inclined to agree with you. Usenet is a much better environment for that, frankly, than the Yale campus."
--- Clay Shirky, knocking my socks off again