NaNoWriMo Decision comic

As an addendum to my last post, check out this comic:

[caption id="attachment_125" align="aligncenter" width="730" caption="NaNoWriMo Decision comic -- Debbie Ohi"][/caption]

©2006 "NaNoWriMo Decision" at Will Write for Chocolate, by Debbie Ridpath Ohi, (cc)

National Novel Writing Month is coming: Are you with me?!

Cross-posted from www.HoboMama.com

National Novel Writing Month is coming upon us. Starting Nov. 1, adventurous souls across the world will be writing 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days.

Are you up for the challenge?

I completed my first novel last year, and it's a high that's still going strong.

So if you're a person (like me) who has a stack of unfinished novels (it could be a figurative stack, if it's on your hard drive), take this opportunity to power through and become a novelist.

Go to NaNoWriMo.org to sign up or find out more, and use the last couple days of October to prepare. By that I mean, maybe think about a plot, but mostly just enjoy your last days of freedom!

I realize November is also NaBloPoMo, but I can't do both and function as a reasonable facsimile of a human being. If you can, more power to you.

Just wanted to make sure no one was missing this super fun, super irrational opportunity! Hope to see you there!

Seller Central account for Search Inside This Book

Follow-up / solution / oh-duh-now-I-get-it here: http://www.laurenwayne.com/2010/04/switch-between-seller-central-and.html. Basically, ignore all of the following.

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Just as a follow-up to my last post on Search Inside This Book, I mentioned that you need a Seller Central account to sign up. I already had one, so I just switched my log-in email over to the one I'd given to Search Inside This Book.

Well, now I have a caution about using an existing Seller Central account for Search Inside This Book. I'm no longer using my Seller Central account for selling anything, but when I tried to log in to it to access previous information from when I previously used that account to sell DVDs through Amazon's Marketplace, I couldn't reach the typical Seller Central page anymore, no matter how I tried. It would only default to the Search Inside This Book page, which is a specialized author/publisher-specific interface.

Fortunately for me, this isn't disastrous, since it was a defunct seller account anyway, and I didn't badly need to get into those old files.

BUT...beware if you use your Seller Central account for serious selling that you might want to contact Amazon in advance and ask what's best. I know that having two seller accounts is actually against Amazon rules and can lead to your being banned as a seller. But if Search Inside This Book really does make your Seller Central account inoperable as a seller account for selling on the Marketplace, then you would need a second one specifically for your publishing interests.

So, there you have it. No real advice from here, but a counsel to seek out Amazon's take on the situation. Maybe there's a secret link to access your Seller Central information from the publisher page, or maybe it's something they'll fix in the future.

Search inside the book on Amazon

Now that I'm in the self-publishing world with my little personal book of poetry, I thought I'd share my experiences with Amazon.com's "Search Inside This Book" feature.

Here's the gist of the feature from a reader's perspective, which is that it allows readers to search for keywords and — even more importantly, I think — view sample pages before deciding to purchase.

From an author or publisher's perspective, that's golden. You get to entice potential readers with a few tempting pages from your tome, and those buyers will feel more confident about springing for a book online when they've had a chance to virtually thumb through the pages.

If you want to try out the feature for yourself, go to any participating book on Amazon.com and click on any cover picture that reads "Click to LOOK INSIDE!"

That appealing little icon will appear in small search results, as well, so readers will be able to see at a glance that your title is searchable. If they want to make sure your book deals with a particular topic, they can do a keyword search, as easy as searching a PDF.

Here's a sample participating title for you to play around with: Where the Wild Things Are.

If you click on the cover image, you can choose to look more closely at the front or back cover, flap, copyright page, or the first few pages. If you type in a keyword — "wild," say — you will see a paginated list of every instance of that word in the book, in summary form with the search term in bold.

As an author, you might be concerned about security and who's going to buy the cow if you give away the milk for free and all that. By logging into an unused Amazon account of mine, I discovered that if you haven't bought something on Amazon they won't let you see beyond a certain amount of pages. Even if you are a trusted buyer, if you do a lot of a keyword searches, they'll let you see only a certain amount of pages per day. So the whole text of the book is scanned in and searchable (and an easily transferred candidate for Kindle), but readers do not have access to read or download the full book without paying for it.

So, now that I've convinced you of the appeal of the program for published authors, I'll give you some hard infomation on how to sign up.

You send in a PDF of either your entire book or separate PDFs of your front cover, back cover, spine, and interior. You must send in at least the front cover and interior, and you can leave out any sections of the interior that you wish, for instance if you're still concerned about security. However, that will mean that those portions of your book will not be keyword-searchable, which might affect reader interest in your book.

Amazon was very accommodating and speedy in uploading and formatting the files. It was functioning within two days in my case. They will also deal with low-resolution files, though they prefer high DPI, and they can help crop or splice files as necessary.

The sign-up is connected to your Seller Central account, so if you have a Seller Central account already, be sure to use your Seller Central email address to sign up for Search Inside This Book. If you don't have a Seller Central account, this process will open one for you. Don't worry too much about that; I mention it only because it was a little confusing and opaque to me. The interface for signing up is a series of email exchanges rather than a straightforward web format. That said, the time involved to get everything set up was not painful.

So go offer your books for searching! It takes a few extra steps, but it's well worth it.

Self-publishing your personal writing

Speaking of deadlines, one that's coming up fast is the June 1 deadline for NaNoWriMo winners to get your free bound copy of a book from CreateSpace.

I mentioned before that I wasn't keen on the idea of self-publishing my NaNoWriMo novel, because I plan to submit it for traditional publishing. But, for any writer, there is probably always some art form that was done more for personal pleasure than for publication glory, and a print-on-demand press is the ideal platform for preserving that art for future generations. Even if you're not a NaNoWriMo winner, read on, for I have good news on that front!

In the interests of scrambling, I am compiling 20 years (golly, I'm old) of my poetry into a chapbook for the purpose. I'm laying it out in Microsoft Word, having my graphic design-adept husband craft a cover, and calling it a day.

Of course, first I had to dig out boxes from storage to find some older poems that weren't still (or ever) digitally entered on my computer. I chose a little over 130 poems to be in the book (why not go whole hog, when I'm not sure I'll do this again?), most of them recent, but a sampling from my teenage years. And then I had to figure out how to organize them all.

I threw out chronologically. Do I start with the early (read "bad") poems, so that's the first thing people see when they crack it open? Or do I go reverse chronologically and have the clunkiest poems be the last thing left in people's minds?

No, no, I needed some other arrangement. I considered grouping themes (school, parenting, nature, etc.), or structures (formal vs. informal, or even subdivided such as, sonnets together, sestinas here, etc.). But it seemed like it would be too repetitious for the reader.

It finally came to me. A friend had recently crafted a beautiful self-published book of poetry and photography (see thumbnail to side). Because her photos are primarily macro nature shots, she wisely grouped her poems and pictures into a coherent seasonal progression.

I'm all about stealing what works, so I started making piles. Some poems were easy to sort: a poem with "July" in the title went in the summer stack, and a poem about the start of school went in autumn. Others were more metaphorical — poems of grief made it into winter, and hope for rebirth into spring. A few were more nebulous still. If the poem was mostly happy but not sentimental: That sounded summery to me. Did I sound pensive but not depressed? Fall, I think.

Eventually, I had four roughly equal stacks, and then it was time to make sure that the poems made a nice progression within each season, and leading from one season to the next. So, for instance, the autumn section would end with a poem suggesting colder days ahead. Again, some of this was bordering on esoteric, but it all seemed to work out.

For the week ahead, I'm editing and fine-tuning the layout. And then off my book goes to be printed! My very own proof copy of my very own poetry, on the page in black and white.

I chose to self-publish my poetry because I could submit it for publication, but I just don't want to. I write it because it begs to be written, not for a specific audience, and certainly not a commercial one. Unlike with my fiction! My novels also beg to be written, but I love having an audience in mind, and I don't at all mind revising my fiction to make it more sellable.

So, now for the good news — in perusing CreateSpace's site to determine the nitty-gritty of cost, shipping and handling, and royalty setups, I was pleasantly surprised that the prices for self-published black-and-white books are really astonishingly reasonable. And, they get you an ISBN and listed on Amazon.com automatically. And, because it's print-on-demand publishing, they print up a copy as soon as someone orders it, so there's no need to order a big print run, then store all the inventory and try to sell them all off.

I had been intending just to take my proof copy and run, but it's sorely tempting (and, yes, cleary that was CreateSpace's clever intention!) to buy several copies of my cute little chapbook to hand out to family and friends this Christmas. (Nothing says "I love you" like a vanity press offering!)

I also realized I could offer my collected poetry for sale on my personal writing blog, in case other friends wanted to pony up the bucks necessary to purchase it. If they buy it through Amazon.com, they can even qualify for free Super Saver Shipping. And I can price my paperback reasonably low, while still making a little bit in royalties!

So, even if you're not a NaNoWriMo winner, check out CreateSpace and see if it's a good fit for any of your unpublished works. Getting your own proof copy requires you to pay only the base publishing price plus shipping and handling, and the same goes for any copies you buy for yourself.

So, think about the gems you have languishing in a drawer: a stack of short stories? A fabulous how-to on creating wool diaper covers? You can also self-publish (is that the right term here?) movies and music, so if you have a CD of children's lullabies you've been dying to have professionally produced to give to your kids as a Christmas present (been there, done that), that's also an option.

I'll try to write once I receive my proof copy with an update on quality, turnaround time, and final bill. Happy self-publishing!

Give yourself a writing deadline

One of the problems of being a creative writer without a book contract or editor looking over your shoulder is that getting your work finished is completely up to you. If you're highly self-motivated, there's no problem there. But, for the rest of us, there's usually always something else you could be doing, maybe even should be. So it's a challenge to fit writing into your schedule of work, household tasks, parenting, fun, and you find the days, weeks, months, years going by without your pet projects being completed and sent out for publication.

Or maybe that's just me.

I've discovered that a fun and inspiring way to finish work is to have someone else set the deadlines for you.

My husband was intrigued that a simple PDF certificate was enough to keep me pushing through the intense month of NaNoWriMo. He also noted that I willingly wrote a poem a day for the PAD Challenge hosted by Robert Brewer at Poetic Asides, which this year is also handing out completion certificates.

So he set a deadline for me to finish the second draft of my mystery novel, and promised me a special certificate if I got it done in time. He wondered if that would be magic enough to make me finish.

Well, my friends, he got his answer. I love me some pointless writing certificates!

The wonderful news, then, is that the second draft of my NaNoWriMo mystery novel is done, and we're calling it my reader's draft, because it was finally ready to be read by someone besides me. The grand kinks in the plotting had been worked out, whole sections moved around, and new transitions added. It's much improved, plotwise.

Sam was my first official reader, and there were two pieces of good that came out of that:

     First of all, he read it really quickly, because he enjoyed it. Yea! He particularly loved the character based on him. ;)

     Secondly, he had a wonderful host of suggestions for making it even better, most related to character building. He pointed out fundamentals of novel writing, like the fact that my main character should have a specific goal in mind from the very beginning, something to drive the story forward before the murder solving gets under way. Since it was a mystery novel, I was shorthanding it and allowing the mystery itself to be the only goal; I think it makes sense that that's the main goal, but since my character is an amateur detective, she needs to have something else going on in her life, some problem she's trying to solve, and ideally it should all relate to the murder in the end as well.

I can foresee a lot of thematic revisions ahead, intwining different threads and adding more character development and backstory, and it excites me at the same time it scares me. Maybe another certificate, Sam?

If you want to accomplish a writing project, you could use this tactic to your advantage. Find a person who will hold you accountable and who will present you with a prize if (and only if) you complete your mission. Unless you're closely related to this person, it should probably be financially inexpensive (e.g., PDF certificate) and not too much work to pull off. Or you could always buy yourself something but have someone hold it ransom until you turn in your manuscript. And it doesn't have to be a thing — it could be a fun outing or experience.

Alternatively, as with NaNoWriMo and PAD, you could find a group that's already doing what you want. There are blog posting and photography challenges out there, for instance, and presumably more besides. If you can't find a group you want, create one! There have to be other procrastinating creative types just aching for a kick in the pants.

In related deadline news, the PAD Challenge is wrapping up in a couple days. With racing to get my reader's draft finished, I have been haphazard at writing a poem a day. I more often write a few poems every few days! But it all counts in the end. I love that I'll have 30+ draft of poems by the end of the month (if I get cracking at catching up!). You still have time to get yours in as well. Remember to post in the comments on Robert Brewer's blog if you want your certificate! I know I'm geeked for it!

Photo courtesy Rodolfo Clix on stock.xchng

It's time for the Poem-a-Day Challenge!

April is National Poetry Month, so it's time to start the Poem-a-Day Challenge from poet Robert Brewer at Poetic Asides.

I really enjoyed participating last year and found having a daily prompt gave me just enough structure to inspire me to creativity.

Mind you, not every day's poem was a winner, but I was surprised at the quantity of quality that came out of that month. When you're writing 30 poems in a month, you're bound to create a gem or two!

Here are the full rules for 2009's PAD Challenge. They're enhanced and expanded from the first time around.

Post your poems in the comments on Robert Brewer's blog. If you post at least one poem for every day by May 1 at noon (EST), then you can achieve a completion certificate. (Very NaNoWriMo!) You can fall behind as long as you catch up.

At the end, Robert Brewer and guest judges will pick their favorite poems for inclusion in an eBook. Bonus!

Get started! Here's today's prompt: Write an origin poem.

Photo courtesy N Campbell