Kai Zen: Overhauling My Publishing System.

A reader.

Louis Shalako

No true adventure can ever happen without sacrifice.

Nothing good in life comes easily.

You get out of it what you put into it.

***

While we talk some, we listen as well.

Having learned quite a bit, we’ve set aside April 2014 for an overhaul of our publishing system. For one thing, not all titles appeared in all stores. Looking at that brought up other questions.

One thing that needed to be addressed was our blurbs.

***

Time Storm (What I have now.)

Short blurb

Althea is the source of piezo-temporal crystals, which distort time and make interstellar space-flight possible. The Company has a monopoly. The planet is uninhabited. Everyone has a secret. With a small wintering party, life's pretty boring until everything goes terribly wrong. On Althea, staying alive is half the battle.

Long Blurb

Althea is the source of piezo-temporal crystals, which distort time and make interstellar space-flight possible. The Company has a monopoly, and the planet is uninhabited. McNulty dies unexpectedly and Freddie Smith is acting strangely. Everyone has a secret and it's only a small wintering party looking after the Complex. Life 's pretty boring, when everything goes terribly wrong. Mickey Greenwood and his friends must race against time to save the others, on a planet where just staying alive is half the battle.

***

That was the first pro marketing image I ever bought, yet another issue that needs to be addressed.

***

On the Nature of the Gods

(Short)

If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome. Right now he’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one of the toughest men who ever lived, and his sexy mutant girlfriend, Miss Kitty.

Before (And this only part of what was probably the worst blurb ever written.)

Jeb is one of the toughest men alive, and he demands respect. After a personal humiliation at the hands of the New York City cops, he sets out on a trail of vengeance. In company with his intuitive horse Rooster, it leads him to the evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff, the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome.

After

If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome. Right now he’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one of the toughest men who ever lived, undefeated in over a hundred bare-knuckle bouts. Hope Ng, her nefarious rescuer Rufe, and the sexy mutant Miss Kitty are all under his watchful evil eye. Luckily for them, the ghost of Tecumseh takes an indulgent interest.

After that, even

If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome. He’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one of the toughest men who ever lived, undefeated in over a hundred bare-knuckle bouts. He's also got the hots for Jeb's girlfriend, Miss Kitty. Hope Ng, her nefarious rescuer Rufe, and the sexy mutant Miss Kitty are all under his watchful, evil eye. Luckily for them, the ghost of Tecumseh takes an indulgent interest. Rife with the bizarre juxtaposition of psycho-sexual elements, On the Nature of the Gods is simply unforgettable.

***

The only rational claim we can make is that the new blurbs are somehow better than the old blurbs. What we are trying to achieve is ‘sales copy’ rather than just giving the whole plot away in the product description. 

That’s not to say that they are good, and they are almost certainly not great. But they are better.

All of this has to do with passive discoverability, where a better blurb will do a better job of speaking to a customer who is browsing one online bookstore or another. Assuming that one does tweet or post a book link once in a while, a better blurb still does a better job with more active marketing.

Here’s the pain-in-the-butt aspect of all this: once we have a new blurb up on Smashwords, our job is not done. Then we get to stick it up on Amazon, and then Createspace, assuming we have paperbacks. We must also remember Google Books and OmniLit, and Kobo or Lulu, or any other platform we are using. It doesn’t stop there. Assuming we have image/link type ads on our blog, we had better update our blurbs there, and in my own case, in the past I have forgotten or even neglected my website. All those blurbs will have to be fixed up as well. Admittedly this is only copy/paste work but it has to be done and it has to be done thoroughly.

Bear in mind this author has five pen-names and seven or eight blogs. That's why I set aside a whole frickin' month.

Also, speaking in terms of continuous improvement programs, 'Kai-Zen,' a new, more professional author bio must be posted all over the place, including at the end of each book. A newer, cleaner-looking front matter design must go into all back titles.

If a Table of Contents is now required for iTunes, then old stories aren’t going to make it in. If they are already in iTunes, any kind of update can blow them out of there again as they’re one of the more stringent retailers in terms of internal review processes.

Now, imagine if you will, a universe where some guy has at least 73 English-language titles…plus a few French and one Spanish. Imagine rewriting all them frickin’ blurbs and loading them up on all channels…and going through every .doc file, trying to get them all to look nice.

In one brief note, when I clean up a file—a title, I put Apr14 in the file name, that’s April 2014. I’m using the original .doc file as downloaded from Smashwords.

The next time I go looking for something in my files, I can lay my hands on the most recent one. For all intents and purposes, virtually all other file versions can now be eliminated except POD files and anything that’s exceptional for any other reason, say an unpublished work/WIP.

***

Here’s my old front matter design, it’s kind of centered and arrowhead or diamond shaped. It was also all squashed together. The first few titles were really bad.

The Case of the Curious Killers

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

Copyright by Louis Bertrand Shalako 2010

Cover art copyright by Louis Bertrand Shalako 2010

ISBN 978-0-9866871-2-9

http://shalakopublishing.weebly.com

This Smashwords Edition is published by Shalako Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased; or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.

***

Not very good, in some ways.

Now it looks more like this, bearing in mind the title is black and linkless:

The Case of the Curious Killers

Louis Shalako

This Smashwords edition copyright 2014 Louis Shalako and Long Cool One Books

Design; J.  Thornton

ISBN 978-0-9866871-2-9

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased; or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.

***

My new bio looks like this:

Louis Shalako began writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines. His stories appear in publications including Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.

This was the old one.

Louis Bertrand Shalako began his career writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines, such as The Delhi News-Record, Brant News, The Nanticoke Times, Ontario Tobacco Grower, and the Fire and Safety Equipment Quarterly. A notable writer of darkly humourous speculative fiction, his works have appeared in six languages. His stories appear in publications as diverse as Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. With a unique voice and gifted story-telling across genres, Louis takes the reader on a magic carpet ride and a compelling read. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.

***

Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Luckily, hard work is something we understand.

No honest effort is truly wasted.

A dollar earned is a dollar earned.

It’s all about showing the reader a good time.

***

Here we is on Scribd.

Someday I really ought to consider a professional mug shot.

Oh, well.

Them’s the breaks.

***

See you laters, alligators.

And there's plenty more work where that came from.

END

Not your usual rant.

(A page from Time-Storm. Nothing here to fix.)



This is not your usual rant.

No, this is a far more lucid and sophisticated sort of a rant.

Troubleshooting Messed-Up Table of Contents.


The other day I uploaded my latest novel, ‘Time-Storm,’ to Smashwords. According to my practice, as soon at it was converted, I downloaded Kindle and Epub versions of the book. I flip through them page by page.

Chapter Sixteen was listed twice in the table of contents, and Chapter Twenty-Two was not listed at all. This has happened before, and it’s no big thing. I went back to Smashwords, clicked on ‘un-publish’ for this title, and then went through my file. I fixed the chapter numbering. I also noticed indents in the front matter, as I had decided to try left justification. I could have just taken it out. For whatever reason, I use a 0.25 indent, although it seems to make no difference on certain platforms and certain operating systems. I centred that up the way I usually do it. Then I re-uploaded the file. Same thing—I checked the Kindle version first, and the chapter numbers were screwed up.

What the heck was going on? I only have one version on the desktop—it’s not the wrong file. Short story long, first I had to delete the very first download from Kindle for PC, that’s a free reading app. It was in my Kindle Library. But the Smashwords download appears on the desktop as a blue-coloured, book-shaped icon. When I clicked on that, it opened up the Kindle app and Kindle presented me with the first file. It took two and a half hours to upload a book, and an image, to write and post the blurb, etc.

File Permission Revoked.


It gets better. When I went to check my blurb, maybe make it a little longer, it wouldn’t open. Apparently I don’t have ‘permission’ to open the file! Honestly, it looks like a computer glitch, possibly due to the age and decrepitude of the machine. I lost three images and a couple of files there—one of them the latest and most up to date version of my newly-published novel, ‘Time-Storm.’ That is the file, modified slightly, that I would have used to make an .html file for upload to Amazon. I lost the marketing image. I lost images for another two books as well.

A file dragged and dropped into the same folder became un-openable. I just grabbed some old thing from anther file. Hopefully it wasn’t too important. It’s gone. The good news is that I managed to get everything still in good condition out of that folder and into others. When I try to delete that folder, it won’t even go into the recycle bin. It sits there on the desktop, defying my best efforts. Without that image, putting an ad at the top of this page is problematical. I’ll probably just make a new one.

Back Everything Up.


So, the thing to do is to back everything up as soon as we write it. Put it on a disc, print it out, or e-mail a copy to yourself. Do the same with important photos.

I really only have one unpublished novel left, and it is safe enough. All of my short stories, (hopefully,) are backed up in various ways. That’s not to say that losing a file permanently would not be an inconvenience, because it is. I spent six weeks or a month re-writing and editing ‘Time-Storm.’ I do have an older version somewhere.

But, luckily for me, I got a fresh file from my Smashwords account, and I’m getting pretty handy with the tools.

***

Active blogging.


Now, in terms of active blogging, one thing I see from my stats page, is that if you stop producing original content, and stop posting, the page hits drop off pretty dramatically. The odds of creating a viral piece of literature would appear to be slim. It takes persistence and constant attention. It also takes thoughtful targeting as to audience.

However, there is an exception in terms of content-type. My short little piece, ‘Kobo Not Recognized by PC,’ keeps showing up in the analytics. There’s a simple reason for that. People buy new Kobos every day. They take them home, plug them into the PC, and try to get it going. If that story generates five or ten hits a week for an extended time, it stays on the first page of the relevant links longer, and ultimately more and more people will hit on it. Another one, ‘Formatting a 5 x 8” POD on Createspace’ is a good example of fairly short, specific, how-to articles that are helpful to a specific audience, that are not just all positive attitude and having little or no substance.

These are all white-hat techniques for SEO.

The discoveries are sort of accidental, but we know better now and we will put some thought into discovering a tight little audience somewhere, and then writing something that serves their needs. Let’s face it: on the right hand side of my blog are product images and links to my books and stories…right?

Photos are important to a blog or website. Pinterest looks for photos, and we see a fair bit of traffic from there. In the above photo, spell-check and grammar-check are turned on. This is a good feeling for a writer, to see that nothing there needs fixing. This blog post was written in Word, and copied and pasted into the Blogger interface. This is all part of active blogging.

And, I promise not to drag and drop it into that contaminated folder, and neither do I plan on sticking the contaminated folder in any other folder...

Next Novel in Mystery Series.


‘Cause that would just be stupid. Since Friday, I’ve written about 2,000 words on the second of the Inspector Maintenon mystery series. I will be following SOP, Standard Operating Procedure until that is published. The character was originally created in the short story, ‘The Handbag’s Tale,’ and the first book in the series is ‘Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery.’ They’re available from Amazon and other fine online booksellers.