In which I plunge into the not-so-delightful world of e-book and e-newsletter publishing

"I've always wanted publishers and organized crime to swap. That way, you could get books on any street corner, but if you wanted to buy crack, you'd be told that they only made three vials and they sent them somewhere else and then they were shipped back to the dealer." --executrix, speaking in this thread

*** 28 March 2007 (Wednesday)

READ - :30
--Susan R. Matthews: "His Excellency Regrets."
EDIT - 2:15
--"Twenty Thousand Gold Stars."
PUBLISH - 1:00
--Prepare "Twenty Thousand Gold Stars" LJ.
NON-PRIORITY - 1:45
--EAA.

I resigned this evening as director of the Erotic Authors Association and am undergoing the usual sort of letdown from giving up an interesting post. It's part of an overall effort I'm making to free up time for my fiction writing and publishing. Though I know it's necessary, it's still difficult.

I finished rewriting my contemporary novel Twenty Thousand Gold Stars, other than going through a beta report a second time. I can see how my writing has improved since 2001 (when I wrote this novel), but I think the novel still holds up well. It had better, since it's likely to get a fair amount of scrutiny from readers who don't like its subject matter.

I've been rereading Susan R. Matthews's His Excellency Regrets, which is the manuscript version of her novel Hour of Judgment. I feel as though I have the Crown Jewels residing on my hard drive. Ms. Matthews sent me the manuscript versions of several of her published novels when I mentioned to her that I was partially sighted and was having difficulty scanning her books for my own use, because mass market paperbacks are always difficult to scan.

The manuscript version of Hour of Judgment is (in my humble opinion) much, much better than the published version. I mean in terms of the scenes that were cut from the published version; the line editing may be well done, for all I know. I'm hoping that some of the material that was cut from the original edition will be incorporated into the new edition that Meisha Merlin is planning.

*** 29 March 07 (Thursday)

READ - 1:45
--Susan R. Matthews: "His Excellency Regrets."
PUBLISH - 3:45
--Research e-publishing.

Hurrah, it's the time of the year when Fictionwise.com offers free copies of the Nebula nominees for short stories and novellas. I downloaded them all.

Not that I have time to read them. I spent nearly four hours researching whether I should make my online fiction available in e-book form at Lulu.com. While I'm still not sure whether anyone would actually buy my stories - I wouldn't buy an electronic text if it was available for free - I decided to go ahead and try the experiment. It can't hurt. At this stage, even a couple of extra dollars would help.

All that's involved, really, is making cover art. The conversion is simple, though time-consuming enough to justify a token cost.

What I'm looking for is a way to raise fees to publish Rebirth, because I'm ninety percent sure now that I'll be publishing the paperback edition through Lightning Source (the POD printer that all of the major POD self-publishers seem to be working with) rather than Lulu.com. I can still publish hardback and e-book editions through Lulu, but if I'm going to have any success with this book at all, the paperback really needs to have an ISBN and needs to be in the online bookstores. Hence Lightning Source.

Trouble is, I need $270 for a block of ten ISBNs (they're only sold in blocks - well, you can buy a single ISBN, but it costs half that amount). Also, one hundred plus for the set-up fees. I'm currently deluding myself into thinking I can handle the technical aspects of this, so it's just a matter of coming up with roughly four hundred dollars.

Which is more money than I've earned annually since 1992.

On a brighter note, I found suitable images for the cover art for Crossing the Cliff and Right or Right (which I'll issue as young adult e-books) without having to scour the Web for them; they were already on my hard drive. The issue I'm currently battling with is whether to place my young adult sites onto my main domain, and if so, how to keep the domain navigation from becoming hopelessly complex.

*** 30 March 2007 (Friday)

READ - 1:15
--Susan R. Matthews: "His Excellency Regrets."
PUBLISH - 1:30
--Collected links for "Twenty Thousand Gold Stars."
NONFICTION - 3:00
--"The Slash Skinny."

*** 31 March 2007 (Saturday)

READ - 1:15
--Susan R. Matthews: "His Excellency Regrets."
EDIT - 1:15
--"Twenty Thousand Gold Stars."
PUBLISH - 2:00
--Lay out "Twenty Thousand Gold Stars."
NONFICTION - 2:00
--"The Slash Skinny."

I put together my monthly stats report this evening, showing how much time I spent on various activities. The good news is that I've reached my recent goal of six hours of work per day. I worked for 183.5 hours in March, up from 78 hours in January.

The bad news is that fifty of those hours were spent making a couple of booktrailers. Ouch.

In terms of wordage, I was down slightly from February: 9500 words. I'm still struggling to reach my monthly goal of 20,000 words, and alas, I'm not doing enough fiction reading to feed my Muse.

For the last couple of days I've had a cold, so I've been doing painless Web layout work, since my brain isn't up to anything requiring greater concentration. I did undertake the tedious job of checking that I got the chronology right on the two zillion dates in Twenty Thousand Gold Stars. I'm nearly finished now with that project - just one more brush-up on the manuscript, and then I can lay it out.

*** 1 April 2007 (Sunday)

EDIT - 1:45
--"Crossing the Cliff."

Thanks to my cold making my eyes really cranky, I had a short work-day today. I did manage to finish editing Crossing the Cliff. It just needed some minor stylistic twiddling, mainly me cutting down on excessive use of semi-colons.

Overnight, I decided to start selling through Lulu the original slash/femslash/yaoi/yuri market report I've been doing for The Skinny (origslash_news). Ann Somerville (logophilos), who moderates The Skinny, has given her approval. There's no way of knowing whether anyone will buy it, but folks are successfully selling market reports for other genres, so it seems worth a try. It's not as though I'll have any rivals to compete against.

It feels particularly good to undertake this project because my next issue of the report is practically finished (I've spent sixteen hours of work on it so far). So all I need to do is come up with some sort of cover, and then I can upload the results at Lulu. Piece of cake. The only tough job will be marketing it. Not because there aren't any places to market it, but because there are so many places to market it. I can see the marketing becoming a links-chasing game all on its own.

"But at least you may make money this time," part of me whispers. I worked out today that I've spent a decade giving away my writing and editing for free, and during that decade, my entire income has been a grand total of about five hundred dollars. (Waves tax forms to prove it.)

I don't regret a minute of that time. It was philanthopically worthwhile, emotionally worthwhile, and professionally worthwhile. In an ideal world, I could continue not to worry about filthy lucre. Unfortunately, I no longer have the luxury to practice writing and editing as an amateur art (in the highest meaning of the word) rather than as a craft by which to earn money.

Doesn't mean I'm going to give up writing low-paying gay fiction in favor of high-paying technical books, though.

*** 2 April 2007 (Monday)

NONFICTION - 4:45
--"The Slash Skinny."

*** 3 April 2007 (Tuesday)

NONFICTION - 5:30
--"The Slash Skinny."

*** 4 April 2007 (Wednesday)

WRITE - :30
--"Compassion's Keeper."
NONFICTION - 12:30
--"The Slash Skinny."

*** 5 April 2007 (Thursday)

WRITE - 2:30
--"Compassion's Keeper."
NONFICTION - 1:45
--"The Slash Skinny."

*** 6 April 2007 (Friday)

NONFICTION - 2:30
--"The Slash Skinny."

*** 7 April 2007 (Saturday)

NONFICTION - 4:00
--"The Slash Skinny."
FRIENDS/FAMILY - 3:00
--Father and stepmother over.

Well, I got a little writing done this week. Not as much as I should have (one scene), considering that my Muse was buzzing louder than he has for about a year. I just plain got distracted chasing links for my original slash news report. Not a good sign.

(Note the 12-hour Internet marathon on Tuesday. At least that's better than the 24-hour marathons I underwent earlier this year.)

I'll post this issue and see whether I make any money off it. It had better be a fair amount of money to compensate for the amount of time I spent on it this month.

At any rate, I'm finished with this issue. I spent the last couple of days struggling to do cover art; only my father's visit today rescued me from committing mass murder on the designers of InDesign, Quark, and (yes, I resorted to that) Word. The final design was in InDesign, and do you know what I had to do in order to get an image file out of InDesign? Save it as PDF, copy the graphic within Adobe Acrobat, and then transfer the graphic into an image editor. Insane.

*** 8 April 2007 (Sunday)

NONFICTION - 2:00
--"The Slash Skinny."

*** 9 April 2007 (Monday)

WRITE - 1:15
--"Compassion's Keeper."
NONFICTION - 8:45
--"The Slash Skinny."

Finally published the market report (The Slash Skinny). Total time spent on it? Fifty-five hours. We'll see how its sales go.

I still have to send out review copies and sample copies a zillion places, but other than that, I can now turn my attention to other matters. My fiction, among other things. Today (in the middle of last night, actually), I decided on a new goal: One thousand words of fiction a day. If Frederik Pohl was able to produce that for several decades, then I can. I managed to force myself to produce fourteen hundred words early this morning, which pleased me very much. But of course I can only continue doing this if I'm feeding myself other people's fiction, so tomorrow I go back onto my regular schedule of at least two hours of fiction-reading per day - preferably a lot more.

One thing I've been trying to figure out how to deal with is the problem of fitting exercise into my schedule. I need exercise, not only for my health's sake, but because I don't sleep well without exercise, and when I don't sleep well, I'm tired the following day and don't get work done. Yet I haven't felt any great incentive to exercise, and when I do it, it takes away time I'd rather spend on reading fiction. (Except when my Muse is abuzz. He welcomes the opportunity to plot while I'm dancing.)

One of my friends mentioned listening to audio books while exercising, so I'm going to see whether walking around the living room while listening to my computer read a story aloud to me (I'm still in the middle of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) will be a suitable substitute for the dancing I've been avoiding. (I spent a grand total of five hours on exercise last month.)

I'm now officially over my Lenten break from Internet forums (which I didn't quite manage to keep with LiveJournal, but I stayed away from the other forums I'd been visiting daily - nay, hourly). I don't feel any great impulse to return to them for more than passing visits, which is a wonderful indicator of progress forward.