On A Lesson in Self-Publishing

Happy New Year, culture lovers!

For a number of you, you may not know this: I’ve been writing in my spare time. What started off as a short story to get a dream out of my head has blown up into what is now a six book series called The Cosantóirí Chronicles. There are plans and outlines for at least one-and as many as three more-books in the series, guaranteeing I’ll be writing more for at least the next year. The “average” book when I get done is in excess of four hundred pages each, including a glossary; in nearly two years I’ve written six of these. That’s three a year, average.

So you know: These books are not Christian Fiction. These are more Sci-Fi/ Fantasy, where there are moral people. They tend to be the kind of books I like to read-but I’ve said before these aren’t for children or immature teens. I choose to be a Christian that writes-not a Christian Writer-because I truly feel that the storyline I’ve been given is a gift. 

Late last month, I quit writing (after completing book six in the series) and did some editing. My supervisor at Master’s-Dr. Dennis Frey-has told me for years on end that “There is no such thing as good writing. There’s only good editing” and he’s right. Boy, is he right. (He’s right a lot by the way, and I don’t say that just because he’s the president of the school I work for.) Part of that editing was to take the time to create both Kindle and iBook editions, instead of just ePub editions, so I could enter both the Kindle Publishing Direct and iBookstore markets. 

But after creating three iBooks I’ve chosen to not create any more for now, and to focus instead on Kindle versions. There are several reasons for this, which I’ll explain below. But you need to understand that up front, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. I like the fact that iBooks Author now has a prose-only template. The program itself is easy to use; I can take a completed document and turn it into am iBook in roughly two to three hours. That’s the only upside, however. The negatives are many, at least to me:

1. The interactive nature of an iBook is fantastic. You can click a link and it will take you to a glossary description of that term. That means I have to create and populate the glossary. It’s also what takes better than half the time to create an iBook from a finished document. That takes time away from editing and writing other books in the series. By going with Kindle, it creates a .mobi file in a matter of seconds-and the only downside to it is that the reader will have to turn to the glossary in the back, just like I do when I’m writing and editing.

2. iBooks Author requires you to use an iPad to check the formatting for your book. In addition, it seems that any book you create using the program is only readable on an iPad. That’s great for sales of Apple product...but lousy business for a self-publishing author who does not own an iPad. (Yet.) iBooks is Apple-specific, and while I don’t have an issue with that, there is a marketing issue. There are Kindle programs for iPhone, Mac, and Windows that allow you to read the books you download, which allows for a broader acceptance of the work to be read. 

3. The iBookstore requires that each iBook has its own International Standard Book Number-or ISBN-number. That’s not inexpensive; $250 for ten. As I see six completed books-and maybe one to three more-that’s $250 for a bulk assignment. Right now, that’s money I simply don’t have. Kindle Publishing Direct simply assigns an ASIN number (Amazon Standard Identification Number) and is done with it. Of course, if I just want to sell ePub editions on my own, I don’t need either one.

4. Finally, I have to look at what is an easier sale. Not everyone has an iPad, and so just doing a version for that as a self-publishing job is more time and effort than it’s worth. It’s not a matter of being lazy. If I had to start all over again, I’d probably write each volume as an iBook and then export it as an ePub as well. It does become an issue in that it takes away from the rest of my life and the rest of the work I do. 

If all I did was write for a living, I’d be all over iBooks Author. I like it; it’s an easy enough program to use. But for me the downside outweighs the positives right now. I may change my mind later on, though, and finish the set out in iBooks. (But only after I get an iPad to check the product out on.) 

A final note: another good e-book program is Calibre. It’s available for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and as a portable system. They recommend a donation; I do as well. It’s a little clunky-but powerful, and will open all e-books except for iBooks.

Enough for now.

Updates, iBooks, and What's New

Yes, I did remember I have a blog. I’ve been busy lately...more on that toward the bottom.

Every so often, I slow down and take part of my work day to run virus checks, malware and spyware checks, battery checks, and updates on the trusty MacBook. I do this during the week in case something goes wrong; I feel like I get better customer service during business hours than on weekends. (Not to mention I was camping this last weekend, and thus, not able to do the updates.) These updates inevitably take the better part of a morning, but always ends up giving me a laptop I can trust to do what I ask of it. 

The other day was one of those days. I’d put it off long enough, but with the update to my checkbook program, I didn’t have an excuse to put it off any longer.

Now, before you all snicker at me and remind me that “I thought Macs don’t have a lot of issues”, you need to understand: I work online, opening things that my students send me. Sometimes as many as 40 of these things daily. And bless their hearts, a fair number of them would be horrified to find out that there’s a nasty bit of code-a virus-attached to their homework, a little gift they don’t even know they have. While that code doesn’t affect the MacBook, it can reside on it-and then get sent to others with a Windows based computer. With as many students as I deal with, that could translate to a large number of computers that could be infected pretty quickly...plus some of the school’s units.

Add to that all the e-mail I get from barbershoppers, friends, loved ones and so forth-some of whom have admitted they don’t know much about computer viruses, much less computers-and you can see why I carry malware, spyware and anti-virus programs. It’s more to protect everyone else than myself.

Those all got updated because the operating system was updated. That means I am now running Mac OS X 10.7.4, otherwise known as Lion. That little chore-updating just the op system-took me the better part of two hours. Most of that is because I had to download Lion from the App Store...the download alone ran nearly an hour. I went and got some tea while it downloaded, came home and installed everything. 

I like it well enough...though I have had to make a few adjustments to my workflow. The two most obvious changes are Mission Control-the replacement for a switching program called Spaces-and another program I like better, called Launchpad. Launchpad lets me find my applications a lot faster. Mission Control-now that I’ve tweaked a few things-will actually be an improvement over Spaces. It’ll take me a few days to get used to the new op system, but it will be worth it as the MacBook seems to be running cooler and a little faster.

I still have one program to update, but that will have wait until my next paycheck. Fortunately, the programs I use the most were the latest versions, so I didn’t have to upgrade those.

The nice thing about all this updating is that I don’t have to patch everything every week. The downside is when I have do have to update, it can take some time and money. But it’s well spent in that I have a MacBook that can run rings around a Windows 7 computer, even now. 

The added benefit-and the one I’ve been the most wanting to play with-is a little gem called iBooks Author. A few of you know that in addition to writing a dissertation over the last year, I’ve also been writing some fiction on the side. It’s more science-fictionish than Christian, for various reasons. The main thing here is that I now have the ability to create both an iBook and an EPUB version of my books. I’m working on the iBook formatting for book one now; editing is taking some adjustments. Font changes, text size, and a few other tweaks that can happen now that I can see what a finished product will hopefully look like. It should remain about 300 pages in length, if all goes well. The EPUB version will have to be re-edited, and may end up about 350 pages plus. 

More about this little project when the first book is ready to go. I have three volumes completed that need to move into the final formatting, and am still writing a forth volume as well.  

Enough for now.