Author Archive

A Chicken Scratchings reader expressed frustration over hiring a professional editor to fix the problems with his manuscript before self-publishing the book. When the book was printed the author found several typos that he thought the editor should have caught. Was he right or wrong?

I can shed some light on the subject; after all I’ve been in printing and publishing for 35+ years.

1.  Typos are like car accidents – no matter what you do to prevent them they still happen. The first car accident on record happened in Ohio in 1891. Since there probably wasn’t another automobile in sight the driver hit a hitching post (no one knows if alcohol was involved). Even though there weren’t enough cars in existence to have a crash, a crash still occurred. Typos will happen. That doesn’t mean you should ignore them. No. You should make every effort to find and crush them, but to save yourself some grief, just remember, you probably won’t succeed.

I read a blurb in a trade magazine years ago where one of the major dictionary publishers said that they go through  132 proofing steps every time there is a new edition, and they still find errors. That doesn’t mean authors should slough off grammar mistakes and typos, but they shouldn’t beat themselves up over it either. Just be sure to fix it before the next printing.

2.  What you need is a divided personality. Except for a professional athlete perhaps, does anyone have a bigger ego than an author? If we didn’t believe in the value of what we write we wouldn’t write at all. We’ve worked hard to hone our skills and we believe that our book is a jewel just waiting to be discovered. Self-confidence is not a bad thing until it gets in our way. It is hard to see a dangerous pothole in the road when we are blinded by the headlights of our own egos. How many people try out for American Idol believing that they can sing and go away defeated and insulted when faced with the truth. We’ve all picked up books that are so bad we wonder how they ever got published. Before you trick yourself into believing something untrue, seek professional input.

3.  Never, never, never send your book off to print without professional editing. I don’t care how good you are, no one, and I mean no one, should try to edit their own book. As human beings we all have a kind of blindness associated with our writing. Our wonderful, creative minds generate the words we put on the page. This same mind can look at a sentence we’ve written with an error in it and we will mentally correct the mistake so that it passes by totally unseen by us.

A writer who deems himself/herself able to edit his/her own book is like the attorney who represents himself in court. The attorney has a fool for a client and so does the author. I know, it isn’t easy to let someone tamper with your baby. Carefully consider your choice of editors. Select one you respect enough so that if they call your baby ugly, you may not agree, but you’ll be inclined to listen.

4.  What is the editor’s job? That’s a good question and the answer is — it depends. Don’t ask for a light edit or proofreading only unless you have had a heavy edit first. Proofreaders check for punctuation, spelling errors, and standard grammar usage. Heavy Editing or Copy editing involve such things as checking sentence structure, diction, sense (vagueness), mixed metaphors, use of passive voice, and flow.  Ghost Writing and Book Doctoring involve something more intense. This type of editor will analyze the book and make the changes or write the copy if the author isn’t skilled. When should you call in a Book Doctor? If you know your skills are weak call one in at the very beginning, or if during heavy editing it becomes obvious that major structural changes need to take place.

Is that all? Not hardly, there are technical editors, indexers, photo editors, acquisition editors, etc. What an author needs to take into consideration is that publishing a book is a complicated and difficult task. No matter how professional the editorial team is, no one is perfect. Mistakes will be made, but everything is correctable. After all, printing is just ink on paper.

5.  You have only yourself to blame if you don’t carefully select your editors. If you are being traditionally published you don’t have a choice. Self-publishers on the other hand are required to choose unless they go to one of those Internet book mills. You know the places who advertise low prices, speedy production, and quality work? If they can put their services on sale you can bet that their services are bottom of the barrel. Don’t let your precious baby toddle off into the lackadaisical arms of strangers. They may seem very nice, but if your book never gets a chance because it is sub-standard it doesn’t matter how nice the people were, or how low the price was, does it? Don’t cut yourself short.

The God’s-honest-truth is that most self-published books are sub-standard. The Red Hen Association has been formed in part to help and encourage authors improve their quality. If self-publishing is ever going to break into the mainstream we will have to overwhelm it with quality books. Otherwise, we self-publishers will be forever viewed as second rate.

The way to achieve credibility is by writing a blog.

At least that’s what I heard, and you probably did too. Is it true? Will a blog give you a writing career boost? Yes and No. It’s like planting a garden, if you give it the attention it needs to thrive, you will have good results, but if you neglect it, it will wither and die.

Here are some things to know if you are beginning a blog

1.  There are “free” blog hosting services like blogspot, blogger, and wordpress who are happy to have you join their family of bloggers. It costs nothing and they provide templates and other assistance to get you started.

2. What do the templates do? The templates are available to help you create a theme, and set up your dashboard. The dashboard controls all of the content on the blog. The theme is a term used to describe the look of your page. You can choose to personalize your blog by selecting one of many pre-built themes. If you want a site that is totally unique, you may want to consider hiring a web designer.

2.  Is there a downside to free hosting? It depends. If you are planning to use your blog as a revenue generating source, i.e. selling services or products to your readers, you may not be allowed. Also, the way the free hosting services keep it free is they can add advertisements to your site. That may not be a problem unless the ad turns out to be a direct competitor of yours.

3.  Unless you are already an experienced blogger, you may not know what you intend for the blog. The way to avoid having conflicts with hosting services is to host your own. You will have to get a domain and probably need the services of a web savvy friend to help you get set up, and going.

4.  Blogging is dynamic. If you put up a page and fail to nurture it will die. A dead blog won’t help credibility, and could hurt.

5.  How do you nurture a blog? There are two things that must be done. You have to add regular original content — not necessarily daily — but a couple of times a week if you can. The second thing is marketing. Think of marketing as telling people where your blog is and why they should go to it. It’s like being a cyber-carny barker. Some 170 thousand blogs are started daily,  so to stand out from the crowd takes some pretty strong barking.

6.  Do you have to write all of the content yourself? No, but if the purpose of the blog is to establish your credibility, you had better write a good deal of it. There are sites like ezine that gather articles for your use either for free or at a nominal charge.

7.  How much time is required to nurture your blog? Well — that depends. Working a blog can take as much time as you can give it. It can become a black hole. Treat your blogging as a business and do what successful business people do, spend your time on the activities that promise the highest rewards.

The following article was originally posted in The Huffington Post, March 8, 2010. I found it to be very enlightening and thought provoking. I asked the author, Nathan Branford for permission to reprint it on this blog and he very kindly consented. Nathan is a literary agent with Curtis Brown LTD.

One e-reader = how many bookshelves?

Don’t Believe the E-book Skeptics

Originally posted at the Huffington Post

Slate’s technology writer Farhad Manjoo recently wrote a very interesting article about some off-base predictions of yore about our digital future. He focuses on a whopper of a Newsweek column from 1995 (which is actually titled “The Internet? Bah!“) about how the Internet would be a passing fad because, among other things, online shopping can’t replicate the experience of a salesperson, an online database can’t replace a daily newspaper, and the Internet was so jumbled he couldn’t even find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.

Whoops.

Rather than just hardy har har-ing at the article, Manjoo takes a different, and very insightful approach. He notes that the author of the article was hardly a Luddite – he was actually deep in the weeds of the early Internet. The problem with the article wasn’t that the author was dumb, the problem was that he was looking strictly at the Internet of 1995 and ignoring the potential for innovation and change.

Manjoo lays out four principles for more successful predictions about our digital future:

1. Good predictions are based on current trends
2. Don’t underestimate people’s capacity for change
3. New stuff sometimes come out of the blue
4. These days it’s best to err on the side of (technological) optimism

When people make predictions about our e-book future, I find myself mystified that some people are so dismissive of their inevitability. I see blog posts and comments around the Internet from people who look at the nascent e-book landscape and think, “Blech. Expensive grayscale Kindles in a white piece of plastic? No way e-books are going to catch on!” Some people admit that they’re going to be a part of our lives, but do so grudgingly and see them as yet another signpost that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.

Here’s the thing they ignore: e-books are only going to get better.

Move over Nostradamus, here are some predictions about our digital book future:

1. The e-book reading experience is only going to improve.

Sure – not everyone loves the current grayscale Kindles and tiny iPhone reading experience, particularly for books that are illustrated or are beautifully designed. But better devices are coming and it’s going to open up a new era of book design of unlimited possibility.

I remember that my high school English teacher told us that when William Faulkner was writing THE SOUND AND THE FURY he wished he could have published the text in different colors to denote the different perspectives, but obviously that would have been prohibitively expensive for publishers at the time. Not anymore. With the iPad and other devices coming soon, E-books are going color.

Tomorrow’s writers are going to have almost limitless ability to include beautiful color photos and art and interactivity and creative design even in the mass-est of mass market books, the ones that are currently printed on cheap paper and sold on supermarket racks and where the idea of including anything colorful or design-y besides the cover is laughable.

Think of how much a fancy illustrated book costs now and then think about how cheaply that can be done digitally. E-books may be uglier than print books now, but they’re about to get more beautiful.

2. E-readers and e-books are only going to get cheaper.

Sure, right now e-readers are out of reach for much of the population. That’s going to change. Every new technology is out of reach until it gets cheaper. Digital toys that would once have sold for $100 are now given out in McDonald’s Happy Meals. Lower prices for iPad-like devices of the future are inevitable.

And while publishers are currently taking a stand against deeply discounted e-books, the $12.99-$14.99 price point that they are fighting for is still half the cost of a $25 hardcover.

It’s soon going to be possible to buy e-books cheaply on an affordable e-reader device, and they’re going to be more colorful and interactive than most of their print counterparts.

3. Finding the books you want to read will only get easier.

One of the most common fears about the coming era is that no one will be able to find the good books in a time when anyone can just upload their novel to Amazon. It’s the Fear of the Jumble, which was also expressed in that column at Newsweek, where the author complained that (in 1995) you couldn’t even find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar on the Internet. He didn’t realize that Google and Wikipedia would come along to give you that answer in mere seconds.

Already there are sites like Goodreads and Shelfari cropping up that allow people to swap reviews and recommendations about books. People increasingly find new books through blogs, forums, and heck, hearing from an author directly. It was never really possible before for authors to reach their audience directly – now it’s a piece of cake.

Humans are really, really good at organizing things. If we can organize the billions and billions of web pages out there so that we can find what we want within a few seconds I think we can manage a few million books.

4. People are ignoring the digital trend.

I was watching a Seinfeld rerun the other day and there was a funny moment when Elaine hated a movie she was watching so much she called the video store and threatened not to rewind it. I’m going to have to explain this joke to my kids. And then I’m going to tell them about this funny thing we used to have where used to get these things called DVDs in the mail rather than having them downloaded straight to the TV (or wall or inside our eyeballs or whatever we’re watching movies on in the future).

Everything that can be digitized is being digitized because it’s cheaper and easier to send pixels around the world than physical objects. First it was music, then newspapers, then movies. Books are next in line.

5. Habits change

Yes, yes. The smell of books, reading in the bathtub, writing in the margins, a bookshelf full of books, etc. etc.

People will still have that choice and there are some books that simply can’t be replicated digitally. But when faced with a better option, consumers shift extremely quickly. Right now the benefits of e-books are a little murky except for early adopters and those that can afford the devices. But that’s just right now. Pretty soon they’re going to be better (color! design! portable! interactivity! instantaneous!) and cheaper. Readers won’t pay a premium for an inferior print product out of habit and nostalgia in great numbers.

The e-book era is going to be one of incredible innovation and unlimited opportunity, and people who don’t see e-books dominating the future of the book world are ignoring the coming innovation and creativity and affordability. I refuse to believe the skeptics and pessimists. Books are about to get better.

Be sure to visit these related posts: You Can Never Trust An E-Book and How Can You Call an e-Book a Real Book?

I have been mulling over the creative process. Even as I write the words — creative process – I question if process is the right word. Doesn’t process imply some sort of an organized, linear procedure? I don’t know about you, but in my experience, creativity comes randomly and usually at the least opportune times. Many ideas appear in the shower. Pencils and paper don’t fare well under a steady hot stream. Paper, particularly, turns to mush. How do I know? I won’t say, but trust me I do know.

There are also those middle of the night inspirations, the ones where the GREATEST ideas in the world come. All of them, without exception, are atomized by morning mist. Nighttime inspirations, like vampires, can’t endure daylight, so I started taking a pad and pencil to bed. I’d place them conveniently on the nightstand beside me. Sure enough, I got one of those amazing insights and this time, since I was ready, I clicked the pen top and wrote it down — very precisely — letter-by-letter. Now I could return to sleep with full knowledge that the idea, unlike an uncaptureable lightning bolt, was  secured safely in ink.

I was so excited the first time I did it. I woke up anxious to read the revelation given to me so I could change the world. It said, “Hi goberdobink.” Hi goberdobink, was that it? Was goberdobink my precious gift from my subconscious? This was my great revelation? I could have cried, but I didn’t. After all, I reasoned, this was my first attempt; no one gets it right on the first try. Be patient and it will get better. That is what I said to myself to rally the ol’ gumption drive inside.

It’s a funny thing about writers; we use words to talk people into believing the most outrageous things. We can convince them of the existence of time travel, other worlds, and fantastic beings.  Instead of hating us for deceiving them, the better we are at weaving beautiful invisible fabric out of air, the more respected we become. Isn’t that amazing? If you make up stuff in a court of law, you go to jail. If you make up stuff and write it down, people will praise you for it, but only if you do it well.

Where’s the danger? We all know the danger. The writer who comes to believe that their imaginary creations are real, is ready for a fall. Can you say cuckoo?

Stephen King, for example, can, and does, create horror out of the most benign things. In the book, Thinner, a berry pie became a terrifying sinister object. How does Stephen King maintain equilibrium when even dust bunnies (from Delores Claiborne) are malevolent? Wouldn’t you think that he would be as neurotic as hell? He must see evil intent in everything.

Speaking of Stephen King, his book On Writing, which by-the-way isn’t frightening, unless your dreams of equaling his achievements leave you dangling over a cliff when you realize where you are in comparison. But enough about me. In the book he writes about finding your muse. His, apparently, is a cigar chomping little guy who flies around his desk and taunts him. Mine is an impatient, flirtatious nymph I call Fickle Jenny. I even wrote a poem about her:

Fickle Jenny

by Bill Ruesch

Fickle Jenny, she’s my muse,

wakes me up when I try to snooze.

If I take a shower, she barges in,

at the oddest times creates a din.

“Write it down!” she shouts at me.

“OK Jenny, can’t you see

I’m up to my neck in crocodiles?

Goodness, Jen you’re such a trial.”

“Yes, but you love me anyway.”

If I don’t act now, she doesn’t stay.

That great idea like grain of sand is

forever scattered on a stretch of land.

Once it’s gone, it won’t come back.

It’s not like you slide it in stack

and wait for a more convenient time

when you’re ready to start the mine.

What was that gem that Jenny brought?

Too late kid, what was — is not.

I can beat my head until it hurts,

wring my hands like laundered shirts.

“Too slow, pal, you had your chance.

This Jenny-girl has gotta’ dance.”

She disappears without a sigh

and takes my idea to some other guy!

I hear people say that they always knew they wanted to write. Those people often wrote stories as children. To others the writing bug came later. I was in high school. My 11th grade English teacher submitted a poem I had written to a state poetry contest. I didn’t know she had done this, and I didn’t know that I had won some recognition until the school principal called me out of class and told me. I must have appeared totally discombobulated, because this was the first time ever I had been called to the Principal’s office — I couldn’t imagine what I had done wrong — but by the time I arrived, I was sure it was something. I had been known to be a smart-mouth and a passive-aggressive little pr_ _ k. Since all my transgressions, until now, had flown safely under the radar, it was a total mystery how they reached the top of the school hierarchy.

You would have thought my walk down the empty halls, with my mind agitating like a crowd whose team was 2 points from the championship with 3 seconds on the clock, and my hands sweating like the locker room after 2nd period gym class, was a slow walk to the gallows.

I was shown into the inner sanctum. The Principal smiled, rose, reached over the walnut desk and shook my hand. “This must be how they do it,” I thought, “just before strapping the condemned into the electric chair.”

“Have a seat,” he said, still smiling. “Congratulations.”

Huh?

“Congratulations for getting an honorable mention for your poem in the Utah State Poetry Society’s Youth Contest.”

He seemed sincere, but I didn’t have a clue about what he was saying. He might as well have been speaking Swahili.

He presented me with a newspaper clipping and there was my name and the name of the poem I had written circled in red ink.

Later, came an embarrassment of attention. The school newspaper printed my poem, a photo of me, and an interview. The question was asked, “When do you write poetry?”

I responded, “Just when I’m in the mood,” followed by a nervous laugh.

The headline read — His Moodiness Amuses Him. See what I meant by embarrassment? What high school boy wants to be thought of as moody? I wasn’t the athletic type, but I didn’t run or throw a baseball like a girl either. Moodiness was a term reserved for girly-boys. That wasn’t me, even if I wasn’t the fastest runner on the track. I have a long torso and short legs. I wasn’t built for speed.

From that day on, I thought of myself not as a poet, but an occasional writer of poetry. Defining me as a poet took many, many, more years and honestly, I’m still not sure I deserve that particular tag.

How about this for fun?

What about you? You who found the patience to wade through this post, how did you awaken to the writer in you? What is your story?  We could use The Red Hen Association’s website to publish your stories about your paths. Send a jpeg photo too and we will publish your story and your picture.

What is there about business that allows people do terrible things to one another and justify it with, “It isn’t personal, it’s just business?’ Those same people in all other areas of their lives are caring, concerned, and helpful — with the possible exception of driving cars. There’s something about getting behind the wheel of an automobile that turns nice folks into competitive savages.

It has been said that we all have the capacity for good and evil inside of us. I suppose that is true because as a child I found myself doing something mean for no particular reason. I’d like to believe that I’ve outgrown that, and have risen above my mean streak. Mature people learn to replace hostility with nobility of character. Don’t they?

Therefore I was deeply shocked and disturbed when a person I’ve known for many years, and know to have the highest moral values, insisted I stop discussing the immorality of buying book printing from China, because it created feelings of guilt. Huh? Moral people don’t feel guilt if there is nothing wrong and there is something really wrong with Chinese printing competition — wrong, and dangerous to us and the American way of life.

I won’t expound on the China problem in this post, but please go to my post Chinese Printers Play Dirty In Stealing US Customers for more explanation.

Did you ever see one of those signs that said, “Don’t Walk on the Grass!”? If one person or a dozen, walks on the grass it won’t cause any real harm, will it? No, of course not, but if hundreds, or thousands, or if one person crosses that same place thousands of times will it injure the grass? Absolutely.

If one self-publisher, or one traditional publisher, sends a book title to China to be printed will it cause damage? No, but if printing goes overseas as the same rate of other US manufacturing jobs, we are surely on the path to becoming a third world nation. Again see my post for further detail. Is that an outrageous claim on my part? It sure sounds outrageous, even I will admit that. How could it happen? This is America after all, the land of the free.  If it costs too much to buy from this country don’t we have the right to buy from another? Oh yes, we have the right but is it the right thing to do? If our actions today, create a third world economy in the United States, who will be looking out for the disadvantaged in the world? Will China, Iran, or Venezuela step up and set the moral standard? Think about it. What will happen to the world if the United States of America is no longer in a position to help right the wrongs?

The congress and the business moguls have been selling us out for many, many years. Our cities are emptying because manufacturing jobs have been going off-shore. Who benefits from the reduced costs multinational corporations enjoy from cheap labor? Is it the US workers? No, it is the greedy tyrants at the top of the pyramid insisting that, “It isn’t personal, it’s just business.” The same in China. The workers suffer and the elite prosper.

There is only one way to defend ourselves and our way of life, stop buying products made in China. My wife and I are on a diet. I saw an offer for a diabetic cookbook promoted by Publisher’s Clearinghouse that looked promising, so I ordered it. My wife noticed the label on the back saying it was made in China. We returned it.

We went to Costco. They were selling women’s clothing made in the USA. The skirts and tops were more than what we could have bought from stores featuring off-shore goods, but the USA tag sold us.

The two of us are walking on the grass, or in this case, the noxious weeds. We know we can’t have much impact. Alone we won’t stop the ruination of America, but we will do what we can and we invite everyone who loves America to do the same.  Stomp, stomp, stomp.

A successful self-publisher must be a terrific self-promoter. There is a myth that goes; if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. If you believe that you’ll probably buy a genuine Rolex watch from a shady man in an alley for thirty bucks. No one beats a path to your door that isn’t encouraged, excited, and enthusiastic about getting the benefits of your product.

Thomas Edison

In the case of self-publishers, books are the products. Products, no matter how good they are, must be sold. Even Thomas Alva Edison with his marvelous inventions like the phonograph, and incandescent electric light bulbs knew that nothing moves without a sale. What was Edison best at selling? You are right, himself. He was a self-promoter of the highest rank. Electric light was actually invented 50 years before him, but he got credit because he learned how to make it functional, then he tied his name to it and voila Con-Edison was born.

What’s that you say? You aren’t a salesman type. You can’t sell water to a man whose house is on fire. No matter, I’m not talking about going out and knocking on doors. I’m talking about selling yourself by convincing others that the product of your mind, your book, is worth buying and reading. I know a woman in my area, Nancy Miles, who recently self-published a cookbook. This cookbook has the usual mouthwatering recipes with color photos and such, but it also has the added attraction of allowing her readers to go to her website NancyMilesInGoodTaste.com and use templates to create their own family legacy recipe pages. You can literally create a family cookbook with recipes to hand down to other generations. What a great idea!

Is In Good Taste selling well? It is, but if she had taken delivery and kept it in boxes in her garage, it wouldn’t. Nancy has been working the retail store circuit. She takes a book into buyers and shows them why it is different than the other cookbooks they sell. No high highfalutin’ sales pitch, just confidence gained by a belief in her product, and the desire to give everyone an opportunity to do wonderful things for their families.

The title of this post is Lousy Public Speakers Sell Fewer Books which came to me as I realized just how much publishing is changing. The traditional model is based on the publisher buying the rights, incurring all of the costs of  production and distribution, and rewarding the author with a royalty on the sales. The stark truth is that if traditional publishing was the only route, 95% to 98% of the available manuscripts would never get published. What a waste. Nancy didn’t wait for the luck of the draw. She’s out busily creating a market while she’s waiting to be discovered. In the meantime, she’s earning a pretty good living. I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest that her earnings in the first six months are in the neighborhood of $30,000 to $45,000. Remember, she’s doing this on her own, by herself.

Confidence is the key

My point is you don’t have to be a big time traditionally published author to make a living. You don’t have to be Og Mandino who wrote The Greatest Salesman in the World. What you do have to have is a good book, and the confidence to tell people about it. How do you gain that confidence? There are many routes, many coaches, and many teachers, but for my money, there is no better place to start than with Toastmasters. I’ve been in Toastmasters for four years, and I’ve seen time after time people come to our meetings, stand behind the lectern, and shake so badly that they rattle the table. I’ve seen those same people after their fourth, fifth, or sixth speech in the first manual, literally transform themselves into a confident public speaker. It is beautiful. It truly is. And what’s even better is you don’t have to empty your bank account. My club, Precision Speakers, collects $35.00 every six months. That’s only a buck-thirty-five per meeting. To find a club meeting near you go to the Toastmasters International website.

I suggest you get your shy or reticent self to a Toastmaster meeting right away. Get some club speeches under your belt and feel that confidence rise.

I read a discussion item posted by the LinkedIn professional group BookLink . To quote David Bennett who was responding to an invitation to introduce himself, “When I consider the changes over the past 10 years, I wonder how life will be in another 10 years! Incredible! I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by all these new ‘gimmicks’, ‘widgets’, ‘plug-ins’, ‘blogs’, ‘snippets’, etc. that I’d just like to lean back and breathe…” I got that. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t feel overwhelmed, confused, and not quite up to speed?

There are many in cyberspace claiming to know all of the secrets — but do they? Do they really? If you want access to those secrets it’s gonna cost you a bundle. Honestly I wish I had the kind of extra cash to learn what the experts know, but I don’t, so I’m feeling my way around in the dark and shinning a light on anything within reach that I find interesting. Those out of reach will just have to wait. My belief is that once something is learned it changes anyway, so how do you keep ahead?

Photo by Debbievators

My father was a computer programmer. The company employing him as an accountant decided to install computers and tested their employees to see who was the most trainable. Dad and one other man, Norm, got the jobs. Sometimes the computers were busy during the day, so my father would take me with him to keep him company at night. It was fascinating. Computers back then filled a large room and the support machinery took up nearly as much space.  The computing power of these behemoths was less than the typical cell phone now. Unlike computers and printers today which are virtually silent, the old Univac’s with their tape reels, the tractor-fed dot matrix printers, and the punch cards made a loud racket. Most of the readers of this blog will have never seen a computer punch card sent out with billings from power companies and the like. The instructions on the cards were very clear and became a joke, “Do not, fold, spindle, or mutilate.” Of course the reason for this was that the cards had to be returned in reasonable condition for them to feed correctly into the sorter.

By the time the PC tidal-wave hit the world, Dad was retired. He had worked with the computer languages COBOL and FORTRAN. Today’s programmers speak other languages based on many of the old ones, but more advanced. He bought a PC and tried to catch up, but he really couldn’t. Even with his years, and years of programming and systems analysis knowledge the technology moved too fast. He was left behind, but he was retired so it didn’t really matter.

When I get overwhelmed I like to reflect on the past. This blog has made me a little nostalgic. I don’t know how you cope, but writing, especially writing poetry helps me. And since I am a legitimate published poet, I thought it would be okay to share one of my poems with you. Maybe you’ll find some respite here.

Rocking Chairs

I wanted to write about a porch/ the kind my grandmother / had with a view of the street / and chairs enough to welcome / anyone to sit a spell and reminisce / about Tin Lizzie’s, nickle gasoline, / and Roosevelt, while taking turns / cranking the stiff handle / of the wooden ice-cream maker.

I wanted to write about the night / thick with cricket calls / and how just-picked peaches / mixed with rich cream / fresh from the morning’s milking / melted in the mouth like sweet / snowflakes caught on the tongue.

But most of all, I wanted / to write about the thrum / in my grandfather’s chest / as the conversation bobbed / like fishing line on the river / and how an old patchwork quilt / felt when wrapped around / a small boy held and rocked, / held and rocked, until the night/ folded into itself and disappeared.

Bill Ruesch

• What are the chances that your book will become a bestseller?
  

• Is it possible to predict future success or failure?
  

• Is there a sure-fire program that if you follow it step-by-step will take you to the promised land?

I remember a television interview with John Lennon of The Beatles fame. The question asked was, “Do you know when making an album which songs will be hits?”

John Lennon didn't know

John replied that he never knew, in fact the ones that made it often surprised him. I think that is probably true of books too. Sometimes, not frequently, but sometimes, a book succeeds even when the author wishes it wouldn’t. Take the case of J.D. Salinger who detested the success of The Catcher in the Rye, when asked in an interview, “Did you think it would be such a popular book?”

Salinger’s response was, “It’s been a nightmare.” And that was all he would say on the subject.

By a raise of hands how many authors out there would be unhappy if they had his success? I know that I wouldn’t. I’d be jumping up and down and praising the Lord. My dream come true was Salinger’s nightmare.

How can you know if your book will be a bestseller?

How can you know if your book is going to be a hit? You can’t. There are too many factors involved to make anything a sure deal. You can have a beautifully written manuscript, with superior editing, a wonderful design and even though it should sell – it won’t. There just aren’t any guarantees.

Let me give you an example from my own life experience. Twenty-six years ago I was involved in publishing a natural health magazine called The Herbalist. As a service to our advertisers, and a way to monitor ad response, we included a bingo card. For those who don’t know, a bingo card in a magazine has nothing to do with the popular game named Bingo. It is a mail-back card with numbers matching numbers inserted into the advertisements. A reader could circle the number on the ad that interested them. We collected the data and sent computer printouts to the advertisers. Sometimes an advertiser would get pages and pages of response and sometimes they would get very little. What surprised me was the success of a tiny, 1/6th page black and white ad for a book. The ad was poorly designed and the photo used was so bad that it looked like someone dropped it and ground it into the dirt with their heel. It was so ugly we took great pains to place it in inconspicuous places so it wouldn’t ruin the look of our magazine. Month after month this small ugly ad pulled some of the best response. It often out-pulled beautiful, full page, full-color ads.

We tried to come up with an explanation of why this was happening. Someone suggested that the ad looked so cheesy that people assumed it was a bargain. Others thought the subject of the ad was more germane to our readership. We didn’t know what the truth of it was then, and still don’t today. Things work or they don’t.

There is only one guaranteed way to fail

That’s the point with publishing. There is no guaranteed way to succeed and only one guaranteed way to fail. The sure way to fail is to not publish. Maybe J.D. Salinger should have gone this route. It could have saved him a life of seclusion.

Can you improve your chances of success? You bet! There are many roads you can take to promote your book. The good news is, if one road doesn’t work for you another might, and The Red Hen Association of Self-Publishing Authors has been formed to help you succeed by shining a light on the path. We will do our best to help you, but the real magic is to keep trying. Don’t give in to discouragement and keep trying. That’s the best advice anyone can give.

Yesteryear's Posse

It may seem odd to use a word like posse in connection with self-publishing a book especially since in today’s parlance it has come to mean a group of sycophants following the latest glistening celebrity. He who has the most toadies wins. No, I’m thinking more in terms of the Old West when the Sheriff sent out a call for citizen help and good, qualified people gathered to track down and capture the bad guy. They formed a team–a team on a mission–a mission to save the town and protect the womenfolk.

There will be some that disagree with me, and they will have a point, but trying to be the Lone Ranger when self-publishing is a hard road, even still, with the  exception of ePublishing, at the very least a self-publisher will need a printer. How many authors, besides Benjamin Franklin, are able to write and print books? Your desktop printer doesn’t count.

The typical self-publishers book posse consists of these:

• Content Editor (checks for plot flow, and sense–also accuracy of detail)
• Grammatical Editor (looks for typos, grammatical errors, etc.)
• Permissions Editor (checks the author’s right to use quoted or other material)
• Technical Editor (generally for non-fiction works to make sure the technical details are correct)
• Proofreader (proofreading is a skill that requires extraordinary attention to detail. The more eyes on it, the better.)
• Layout artist (takes raw copy and shapes it by selecting fonts, watching for functionality and ease of reading, margins, headers, pagination, etc.)
• Graphic Designer (Primarily for cover design. The objective a great book with a great cover.)
• Production Coordinator/Manager (This person brings it all together. They are the deputy in your posse. They assist in gathering the posse, getting pricing, arranging for shipping, etc.)
• Printing Broker (Serves as the posse’s guide seeking printers who provide the best value. Brokers, unlike company employees, have no self-interest in the transaction, and should there be problems can intercede in your behalf.)
• Printer (A good printer is GOLD, but you need to be careful, especially in this economic climate. Printers are hungry and as a result are going after any work they can get. Just because a printer can do, a job doesn’t mean that they are the best choice.)

After the book has been produced, you’ll need these for your posse:

• Distributor (makes sure book orders are shipped on time and at minimal cost)
• Warehouse/Storage (Where will the books be housed?)
• Marketing (Book sales don’t happen by themselves. What plans do you have to market the book? Who will help? What will you do?)
• Public Relations (includes press releases, interviews, book reviews, etc.)
• Travel Assistant (someone to help you coordinate speaking trips)
• Information Technology ( the Internet is critical–good IT people are a necessity)

Many of these people can serve in multiple ways. You, as the author, will take on many of the roles, and some will be filled family members or close friends, but be careful in your choices. Just because you have a nephew who can draw pretty well, doesn’t mean he has the skill to layout your book or create a K.O. cover. Here is where it gets tricky–be honest with yourself, are you knowledgeable enough to judge? Some of the worst books out there, the kind traditional publishers despise, come from potentially good authors who didn’t have the sense to hire experts. To them the book is incredible, but to a trained eye, it may be a wreck. Pay for professional advice and follow it, even if it takes you out of your comfort zone.

In coming posts I intend to describe the jobs of each of the posse members in greater detail and provide tips on finding and selecting the best ones.

A book that doesn’t sell is  landfill. We don’t need more landfill–what we need are books that get into the hands of readers. Social networking has proven to be an excellent way to reach possible readers and buyers, and The Author Platform (TAP) has developed a step-by-step program for authors to learn the ropes. Just click here to go to TAP and check it out for yourself.