FIne Tuning.

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2011

All Rights Reserved


Since publishing my first two ebooks back in September 2010, much has been learned.

The most recent questions revolve around the use of pdf download files as free giveaways or retail products.

The problem is that while a pdf can be a beautifully formatted document, for flowing-text devices or the desktop reader equivalents, it is not only unnecessary, but right justificaton stretches or 'squishes' the text when there are few words in a line. Oddly, the tag end of a line composed of a few words is unaffected.

A half-baked solution is to simply tell the people looking at the product, 'This version suitable for PC viewing using Adobe,' or 'This version intended for mobile devices.'

The pdf's on Smashwords have ragged right margins for two reasons, the first of which is that they are derived from your original .doc file, which also has ragged right edges for conversion to Epub and Mobi, etc. They have ragged right edges to be read in a portable device. Pdf's are supported in virtually all devices, portable and otherwise.

A question arises when someone buys a pdf copy from Smashwords.

What if they read it on a PC or laptop?

"Can't this guy format a simple document file?" they may ask.

On Lulu.com, I have pdf's of products for giveaway purposes. I did this for two reasons. On other platforms, I would be giving away Epub or Mobi, and I would prefer if people buy those. At $0.99 I don't see a problem with my attitude! But if someone downloads a free pdf from Lulu and it has right margin justification, and if they try to read it in a mobile device, the text may be 'squished' for that reason in some places.

The problem is one of labeling. None of these platforms really allow a lot of space for extra product description. Of course, it can't be too long to begin with. A lot of potential customers would find the explanation boring, and educating consumers is time consuming.

So the obvious answer is to dump pdf's altogether. This brings up another issue.

How to give stuff away for free without having it become a time wasting process of shooting e-mails with attachments back and forth. There are some issues of privacy and other risks on both sides involved here. To give stuff away on Smashwords goes through all distribution channels. This seems pretty logical, and why in the hell didn't I do it that way before?

On Smashwords or Kindle, and on other platforms, it is possible to set the price for 'free.' The logical choice would be Smashwords, as it puts the product out in a number of formats. Only one problem--no right hand justification is possible. Because they might read it in a portable device...right? And if they read on a home PC using Adobe, they'll wonder why I didn't justify the right margins. This is no-win for me.

As time goes on, some platforms will become more flexible with an eye to gaining a competitive edge. Using Smashwords as an example, it would be nice to use the system to sell Epub, Mobi, and other formats, and to give away pdf's, all nicely formatted for reading in Adobe without having to worry about 'customer experience' issues.

Virtually everyone has Adobe on their computer. Convincing people to download Kindle for PC, Android, or whatever, (free downloads from Amazon,) or Mobipocket, or any one of a hundred other possibilities, and then read the product in that interface, is part of the job.

I say that because on my home PC, the product, when used as intended, (but maybe not as instructed,) seems all right.

Should I just put a short explanation in the front matter of every edition? But why tell anyone in the first place?

I've had one book returned for unknown reasons. None of these platforms seems to give this kind of feedback. That would be priceless. I don't ever want to argue or try to convince a disappointed customer. But it sure would be nice to have this vital piece of data.

What is surprising is how long it takes to figure some of this out. I am working on my own, and simple time factors come into play.

***

Right now I am managing at least five learning curves that immediately spring to mind. These are writing, editing, publishing, marketing and the whole tech side.

The sensitivity training is going pretty well too. We sell a book once in a while, and that's important.

It shows us what is possible.

***

Space Web.

“’ow are you feeling, mate?" asked Cor Blimey.

He continued rubbing the tired feet of the first mate. Michael Bubble was playing softly in the background, and it wasn’t a recording—it was the real McCoy, complete with banjo and xylophone accompaniment.

Rapudah Thebewdah sighed in pure bliss, the hiss of the aromatherapy program a silent reminder to get her credit limit raised.

“Fine, thank you, captain,” she practically shivered in a sober and objective analysis of the facts.

“Oi! Don’t wet nuffink spoyo wet,” said Cor.

“All right, all right,” she said, putting her teacup back on the rim of the samovar and seven-headed hookah combo, a fake family heirloom from the 1950’s in Grand Rapids, as she always said.

There was a companionable silence as Cor prattled on silently, lips moving in fretful counterpoint to the lonely thoughts rattling inside of his brain-bucket right there beside the door.

“Sensual,” she said.

“Come a gyne?” he said.

“Sensual,” she clarified. “I feel sensual.”

“Buggah me dingo,” said Cor. “So do Oi.”

***

As Cor inserted the dental-floss needle to administer a cooling, mint-flavoured douche to the spleen, the ship lurched, once, but once was enough and zero would have gone unnoticed.

“Two and two togethah and Oi think we’s just hit something! Buggah!” said Cor, all his efforts rendered nugatory by the unexpected come-uppance of the good ship Bonnie Dune.

“We had better have a look,” sighed Rapudah, noting that the pitch and yaw readouts were way up in the red.

So that was okay, then.

“Wot is that?” said Cor with unusual clarity.

The rueful pair stared at the display. It looked like something cylindrical or tubular was stuck to the hull plating up near the nose.

Swinging the external camera head around, Cor showed Rapudah the thing, or stuff.

“Why, that goes on for parsecs!” she gasped. “What the heck is it?”

“That’s not the word Oi would have used,” noted Cor lugubriously, there was another word, and it was one which he probably couldn’t even spell.

As the ship rotated and spun around, Cor was struck by inspiration.

“What should Oi do?” he asked.

“Throttle down!” she suggested languidly. “It’s just a waste of fuel at this point.”

***

“Wot the bluddy heow is thet?” blurted Cor.

An abstractly patterned grid or net appeared to be strung in space.

“It looks like a net!” Rapudah gasped, womanly bosom heaving with sternly expressed emotions.

"Aw wuss,” noted Cor. “A bluddy spoidah wib! Buggah!”

Briefly, for a short period of time, their eyes met in inscrutably silent query…

“Whudduhyah think, muthah?” Cor said to her in an interrogative fashion.

“Let’s have a look,” she ventured.

And nothing ventured, nothing wasted.

***

The slightly transparent filament was indeed stuck to the forward port nichrotrowettlicker, er; assembly.

“So woddah wy goonna do neow?” solicited Cor in an eclectic comment on the state of the Cosmos as a hole.

“Torch it off, maybe,” suggested Rapudah. “Before it rains, or something.”

“Rhynes? Rhynes? Aw yew mad, wooman?”

As Cor engorged his fanciful gaze upon the lovely mien of the chick he was banging, her jaw dropped and she pointed o’er his shoulder.

“Ah!” she screamed, and then she was saying stuff like, ‘Eaugh, yuck!” and clinging to poor old Cor like a bluddy limpet.

Gracelessly swinging around on the maneuvering jets as was his custom, Cor saw the biggest bluddy space spider the erstwhile pair had ever encountered, before or since.

“Buggah me dingo,” said Cor in awe, as the thing reeled them in from the vicinity of a big gas giant with a ring system that made his hemorrhoids look sick.

“We’d better get out of here,” noted Rapudah in a kind of pissed-off objectivity.

Still, it wouldn’t do to be eaten by the thing when they could so easily get away…maybe.

***

Rapudah had a plan.

“We’ll suit up,” she explained. “You go out there and kill it with the spear-gun, and I’ll keep the airlock open.”

“Roight!” said Cor. “And then wot?”

“Then we can cut the thing off,” she patiently and angrily explained.

“Oh! Roight!” he said. “Woy do you need a suit?”

“In case you forget to close the door again,” she noted sweetly. “Remember last time?”

“Buggah me dingo,” noted Cor in acknowledgement of this deep and fundamental truth.

***

So that’s what they did. Not only that, Rapudah figured the skin would fetch a Kazillion space-pence at the auction house on Earwig Nine.

“Well, you’ve earned your reward,” she said, chucking her clothes in the general direction of the galley where Cor was boiling lots of water and tearing up sheets for bandages.

Cor came into the room with a cheerful, expectant look on his homely visage.

“We could have some oice cream, muthah,” he said. “That woo’on be so bad roight about now.”

***

Photo: NASA/ESA

His Blood Ran Cold.

My book 'Core Values,' in Kindle for PC. May be language unsuitable for minors.



My product in Kindle's publisher preview. An excerpt from 'Thirty Years Gone.'


by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


Today I downloaded Kindle for PC again. The idea was to thoroughly check all of my products. This only makes sense. I was a few pages into my latest release, the short story, 'The Handbag's Tale,' when I saw that there were half a dozen lines all screwy. The text was written in 12-point and that is a certain size in the desktop PC reader. But these few lines looked like maybe six-point.

My blood ran cold. The word 'irritating' and a few cuss words come to mind. And so then I went to Smashwords and downloaded the Mobi version of every book, and stuck them into the Kindle for PC. They looked beautiful, again. I flipped through every page of two books, and checked fully half of the third, and zipped through at random concerning the last two books. I could not find a problem. These are the source files for the Kindle files, right?

So then, I went back to Kindle and tried to download a sample of 'Core Values.' That worked fine. When I opened it up, it said, 'Smashwords Edition' inside, which is just plain rude to Amazon! So then the old heart and respiration went up markedly.

To make a long story short, what you need to do is to go to Kindle, your dashboard, and click on 'edit details.' At the bottom of the page is the preview, which I always use anyway.

All the first four books were fine--they all say 'Published by Shalako Publishing' inside.

For whatever reason, I uploaded a revision to 'Handbag' last night. I used the preview--too many problems with version control in the past months have taught me some tough lessons. Right now I can't fix it--I have to wait and see if it's broke.

You can't do anything while the process is incomplete.

All I can do is pray sometimes. So far no one has bought that short story on Amazon. There was a missing word, right in the first couple of paragraphs. Published on the weekend, somebody bought one on Smashwords. Sorry about that! Let me know and I will replace it. But will the new version have the flaw when reading it on my desktop?

There is the need to market, promote and advertise my product. That is very, very hard to do if I have questions and doubts, constantly revolving around in the back of my mind. In that sense, today's mock panic attack may have some value. I was in the grocery store, and I saw a kid's school notebook for $0.99. It might be handy to get one and write out a simple checklist or God I don't know what! Also putting dates in the file name would help if I did it consistently to the same file. I just dumped over half a meg from the recycle bin.

I have no effing idea what was in there and I don't care.

Apparently, if you download Kindle for PC, it sort of takes over your filing system and converts a bunch of other Mobi-type books to a Kindle look-alike. I opened up one folder and was startled to see about twenty Kindle Editions in there, and I sure as hell haven't downloaded that many free samples of my own books. I'm still trying to figure out how that works, but Amazon doesn't care about Smashwords or Mobipocket or whatever. Why should they? That may be why I uninstalled Kindle for PC some time ago. What might be fine for a general reader is a pain in the pattooties for a self published author, especially as you go along and get more titles.

Yet I have to check the product once in a while.

Tonight I ate steak, salad and new potatoes for dinner. That has to count for something. It sure beats Ramen or lining up at the soup kitchen.

New Product Development.

cShalako 2011


Over the weekend here at the skunkworks we were focusing on new product development. While the actual product is simple enough, we had some tedious quibbles with quality control, and then version control.

Then we impulsively revised our pricing on a mere whim.

Now the reader is privileged to witness the codeine-fueled ravings of a lunatic on the subject of 'The Handbag's Tale.' This is an 11,300 word short story, which was subbed to the best market and rejected.

Being unwilling to settle for second best, I thought I would just have some fun with it, which to be clear, is better than first best...right?

Inspector Maintenon and Sergeant Levain are on the lookout for an inept burglar who works by the light of the full moon, and they know that being the end of the month, his rent must be due.

Stumbling upon the still-warm body of pudgy playboy banker Emile Danton, the pair are presented with a pretty puzzle.

I dropped formula for a kind of artistic feel. I like Dada art, which might include a fur-lined cup, spoon and saucer. 'Found' objects for sculpture, painting on glass.

Look, the thing was fun to write, okay? That's all I'm saying. There is a theatre mentioned in the story, which came into being in 1923, and the only trolley or tram I can find in Paris went out of existence in 1924. That's a pretty narrow time frame, but there are no political or current events mentioned in the story. As for whether or not a few wealthy people would use horse-drawn carriages to attend a funeral in 1924, it is certainly possible.

If I was seriously worried, I would simply drop the theatre from the story! What also strikes me about the story is that it is a lot of dialogue. In that sense, maybe I could have done it as a play. I wouldn't know how to type that up, unfortunately. It will have to wait for another day!

The real motivation was that I could produce another ebook, which I like doing, and share it with people if that's what they want to do.

My operation is continously evolving. Now I have another book to put in my free rotation, which is essentially a new thing free every month.

There are always questions of version control, quality control, and there is not enough time in the day.

While I definitely need to produce new books, stories and poetry, I have serious thoughts on the business side.

That's simmering on the back burner for now.