Irony or poetry?
“When wireless is perfectly applied… …we shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”
— Nikola Tesla
From an interview in Collier’s Magazine;
January 26, 1926
—We don’t claim to know it all. No one can. Sometimes you just need to know what, where, when, who, why, maybe how or how much. Where to seek literary information?
—Let’s start with local (to Sheboygan) libraries…
Sheboygan Falls Memorial Library
…and the need to look up a word or do some quick research—
Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)
—What about when polite discourse and research fails?—
(A disclaimer: The following two links contain what may be characterized as “inappropriate” or “obscene” content. You are advised to connect to them at your own risk. It’s wise to remember that the English language is under constant mutation that no central governing board has jurisdiction over. How language and meaning evolves is subject to its usage by the people. William Shakespeare was perhaps the greatest liberty taker—effectively, he invented modern English and slang by breaking more rules and offending more sensibilities than were thought to exist. One should bear this in mind whenever the definitions and roles of “Proper English” are discussed. Insofar as children discovering this material, rest assured that they already have, and are already the main architects of modern vocabulary. After all, parents were the ones who insisted their offspring have smartphones as standard equipment… for safety and security.)
National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) is a challenge crazy writers take once a year, November 1-30. The goal is to crank out a 50,000 word manuscript in 30 days. It doesn’t have to be a final draft—just a minimum 50k word count. Our president Linda Shimon jumped into the pool in 2015 and made it to 53,000.
—About this self-publishing thing—
There was a time when DIY (do-it-yourself) publishing meant walking your manuscript from the writing stage through the editing, revision, final draft, internal graphics, cover art, printing, copyright, distribution and promotion stages either through a “vanity” press or ALL BY YOURSELF, and spending at least a few thousand dollars to wind up with a few boxes of books, of which maybe five of your friends would happily buy a finished copy (hooray!), two strangers would buy copies (big hooray!), and 50-60 were given away as gifts… or review copies. That’d leave you with about 433 books to sell… somehow… or find that many libraries, prisons, schools and waiting rooms to deposit them at. After all, what does the spent money matter when you could be the next J.K. Rowling or Steven King?
“…E-books comprise 30-35% of all US book sales. Furthermore, 60% or more or all US book sales (both print and digital) happen through an online retailer…”
Well, unless you’re extremely lucky or you do the 24/7 legwork for a year or two, you can expect to have those 433 books in the closet for a long time. The key is distribution, one of the two hardest things (the other is promotion) to do in arts and literature. However, technology and internet commerce have been big game changers. Yes, you still have to slog through the writing and editing stages BUT, over the past ten years, a few (so far) reputable companies have popped up to help independent authors get their work out in the public eye. For sale, even!
“One could say that distribution through these channels is free. You don’t ‘pay’ until your books start to sell.”
A dream come true? No. But these companies go a long way to eliminate the nightmares that make self-publishing an expensive disappointment. They are not publishers themselves, but they do provide a platform where authors can get their works into online catalogs and distributed through entities like iBooks, Barnes&Noble, Powell’s, etc—in both e-book and print formats. Each company has their own system and procedures for doing this and they offer various levels of service and prices. Some are extremely economical, some are a bit more expensive. It all depends upon what you need (and how much work you can undertake on your own). Likely, you’ll find them all reasonable if you’re serious about getting your project out there.
There’s a lot of information to wade through if you want to consider this approach. Below are links to some of these companies. Take a deep breath, you won’t understand it all on the first encounter; it’ll take awhile, be patient. But then, if you managed to whip that 60-120,000 word manuscript into shape, you’re used to reading, editing, revision and research, right? Of course you are.
If you want to cut to the chase and hire someone to do the job of self-publishing your book, two companies you may want to investigate are:
And here’s a blog post by Jane Friedman (from early 2015) that has significant self-publishing information related to the above links. It’ll probably answer a lot of questions you’ll have after exploring some of those sites.
No, I didn’t say this stuff was easy. Neither is writing —SPOT
With self-publishing there’s a thing called print-on-demand (POD) that lets you produce as few or as many books as you either need or want. But what do the mechanics of the process actually LOOK like? This is not an advertisement or endorsement, just an example:
More useful links to come…
Sheboygan County Writers Club 