O procrastination! (a real potential pitfall of self-publishing, and of being me)

There’s one big problem with self-publishing, especially if you don’t require it to pay the mortgage. And that is that there’s nobody giving you any deadlines except yourself.

I decided two, maybe even three years ago to stop being exclusive to Kindle with my ebooks. That meant giving up Kindle Unlimited payouts, which were running maybe thirty or forty percent of my writing income at the time (partly by virtue of running ads on BookBub that were driving that income but also steadily losing me money). Part of this is because I find KU readers have never been as enthusiastic about my quirky-bordering-on-literary stuff as people who read traditional novels tend to be, so the stand-alone read-through was blah.

Yes, you read that right. I made this decision two or three years ago.

Yes, I was writing another book (PRIDE AND PRECARITY, now due out in January), but that hardly took all that time.

And when did I actually start to put my books wide? Well, Kobo got some of them a few months back. But not all of them yet.

Draft2Digital got THE AWFUL MESS finally earlier this month, which means that book is now available at Apple and many other retailers. But I still have to add the rest of that series, plus the rest of the backlist.

Part of the delay was that I wanted to go straight to Apple, but navigating my iTunes accounts and my various Apple IDs (one for an iPhone I haven’t owned for over a decade, connected to an email address I don’t have access to anymore) proved to be beyond me.

I find things like that so discouraging that I will often turn away from them for weeks, or months, or forever. I’ll just go read, or something. (Yes, I’m already at over 100 books this year on Goodreads. Including some really good ones recently.)

Then there’s the paperback, which I took out of expanded distribution years ago because I was making about 25 cents a book, mostly off other vendor’s sales of it, since they could beat my price. I knew I needed to go to Ingram Spark for wide distribution at a better profit level, but that introduced a whole new level of technical agony about ISBNs, covers, etc.

paperback edition of THE AWFUL MESS

Yes, Amazon considers this nudity bad enough to bar this book from being advertised on their platform.

I finally started it with THE AWFUL MESS last month, because Shepherd.com had asked me to write something for them that would feature it. However, it appeared I’d need a new cover first. Ingram has different spine widths and I can’t currently afford to go back to the original wonderful designer (plus his lovely cover gets dinged all the time for being too sexy).

So I polled my newsletter subscribers about two possibilities for that new cover.

And they were evenly split.

Which called for way more procrastination while I agonized about it.

(Also, I suddenly realized how few of my newsletter subscribers are still getting my newsletter, which was a whole other traumatic episode and required a whole lot more stuff to do that I’ve been procrastinating for years.)

But a choice had to be made, and then once I made it (based solely on what would make the best back cover background), I had to actually make the cover. That took another while. Because I don’t use Photoshop often enough to remember how to do things fast. But by God, I finally got it done.

Then I finally went to upload the cover yesterday, and all my earlier work to set up the book had disappeared and Ingram told me the book I’d started to upload COULDN’T BE UPLOADED, only transferred from KDP, because that ISBN had already been used.

This meant I didn’t even need that new cover I’d just slaved over. Unless I put it up on KDP … where it would require a different spine width using a different template.

So anyway. The transfer has been requested for that one and the two other Lawson novels and now we’ll see what happens. Yay for me not procrastinating that for yet another month, I guess. But it could take another month to go through, assuming Amazon doesn’t refuse to do it or something.

Speaking of Amazon, they’ve been terrifying a number of indie authors lately by refusing to believe their books are actually their books just because some random hacker has made a copyright claim, perhaps to extort money or steal books or, who knows, screw with a competitor. The Zon won’t necessarily accept an author’s actual copyright registration or long history of publishing with them as proof, either. It’s a Kafkaesque horror show.

Meanwhile, the only reason I’ve made as much progress as I have recently, I suspect, is that I said yes to teaching a 12-week composition course this fall and can’t afford to mess around any longer. I’ve got to pour all my spare energy into prepping a class I haven’t taught for three years into a very different weekly format that could go online at some point if polio really takes off or something. (Meanwhile, I still don’t have access to the college electronically.)

Wish me luck with all of it, please. Or maybe just roll your eyes and remember that there’s a reason traditional publishing still has a lot of fans among writers.

Onward!

(Possibly quite slowly.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some good books about grieving

Recently, I was able to read a pre-publication copy of a book about grieving by Amanda Held Opelt, and I’m happy to share my thoughts about it here. Especially since Amazon in its wisdom wouldn’t let me post my review because they’d noticed “unusual activity” on the book. (Ah, yes, a strong pre-marketing campaign by the publisher, God forbid. I’m almost glad to see this happens to traditional publishers as well as self-publishers.)

Anyway, as I noted in my longer Goodreads review,

This is an interesting exploration of grief and the rituals associated by … the surviving sister of Rachel Held Evans, the wonderful Christian writer who died tragically young when her case of the flu turned deadly. Opelt has also suffered miscarriages and worked in war and disaster zones around the world, so she’s also familiar with loss in other ways.

If you are a Christian (perhaps especially someone in a liturgical tradition), you may take great comfort in this candid discussion of grieving. If you’re not, you may still find it hopeful and moving, but the religious content may be a bit much for you.

…Each chapter devotes itself to a tradition, one that we carry on today or one that we have lost or that is specific to various cultures 0r times (examples include keening, covering the mirrors, telling the bees, etc.). Sometimes it’s a bit academic; other times it’s heart wrenching to read about Opelt’s actual experiences with actual losses. It’s probably not a book to read all at once, given the subject matter, but to work through over a period of time.

Reading it reminded me of some other books I’ve read on the topic. My favorite is A GRIEF OBSERVED, by C.S. Lewis. I have to admit a lot of Lewis’s popular theology books, like MERE CHRISTIANITY, don’t do much for me. They strike me as glib and smug and full of arguments by analogy.

But in A GRIEF OBSERVED, all that is torn away in favor of telling the painful truth about a devastating loss and what it does to Lewis’s relationship with God. You get to really watch the man wrestle with darkness, and you can’t help but be moved by it. (The movie SHADOWLANDS does a good job of representing this on the screen, though it’s more about the whole relationship.)

A very nontraditional book on the subject, one that claims it is fiction, although I have my doubts, is NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS, by Patricia Lockwood. As noted in my longer Goodreads review:

At first, with this book, I thought I was reading extremely disjointed but often funny, sometimes just glib takes on the internet, here called “the portal.”

…Eventually, however, a heartbreaking and heartwarming story of hope and loss and family and humanity emerged. Ultimately, I found it very moving. Recommended if you can cope with a nontraditionally-told story that is very much grounded in (and commenting on) our time.

Grief for people and also for a community or a way of life is the undercurrent in the beautifully written THE HIRED MAN by Aminatta Forna. It’s about a bleak topic, yet retains a stubborn hope. Also quoting from my Goodreads review:

A remarkable novel about war and its aftereffects, set in an inland part of Croatia that was once part of Yugoslavia and saw some shelling and some genocide. And yet life goes on, until an English family blunders onto the scene years later and unknowingly sparks memories neither the town nor our narrator (their handyman and neighbor), nor the guiltiest parties still present necessarily want to relive. There’s joy but also rising tension.

If by any chance you’re as much of a fan of Tim Farrington as I am, you might also want to check out his self-published novel SLOW WORK (affiliate link), about a man who carves grave stones. I think it is beautiful, if not terribly commercial.

Far more commercial is the recent novel, REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES (affiliate link) by Shelby Van Pelt, a warm small town novel about enduring grief, recovering family, and redeeming old losses. Also, there’s an octopus, and it’s wonderful.

So, any recommendations from you? I’d love to hear them.