"Roundheads and Ramblings"
Getting organized
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Posted on Thursday, October 06, 2011 7:23 PM
The third application in my trinity of software I cannot do without is a program called "Evernote." By rights, it should be called every-note, because that's what it will hold. Like Dropbox, and to a lesser extend, Scrivener, Evernote uses cloud computing to make sure you are connected to your work, no matter where you are. You can install it on Windows or MAC desktops, almost any smartphone, laptops and notebooks, and tablets such as iPad. Every few minutes, Evernote syncs your files with all your electronic devices. You can start to write an article at your home desk, add notes from your iPhone during a bus trip, stop in the library to add some bibliographic entries, and finish the article at your desk at work. Traveling? No problem. Just log onto your account from any computer, and edit that article.
The Evernote design starts with a single note. You give it a title, a tag or two, and start typing. You can attach photos, audio or video clips, data files, websites, and PDFs to that note if you like. Once you have more than one note, you have the beginnings of a notebook, which can hold as many notes as you like. And if you have several related notebooks, you can put them into a stack, which will only count as one of your permitted 250 notebooks.
Let me give you an example of how I use this application. I have a stack for each book I am working on. So, imagine a a stack called "The Road to Frogmore." In that stack are several notebooks. One is labeled "Characters." Its individual notes contain character sketches of each character in the book. There are also notebooks for "Plot Points," "Settings," "Historical Events," "Photos," "Maps," and "Bibliography." There are also stacks called "Beyond All Price," "A Scratch with the Rebels," "The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese," and a mysterious one provisionally called "Gus."
But not all my notebooks are related to writing. I have one on "Trips," one for "Recipes," one for "Media Contacts," and one for "Christmas." All the notes are searchable by their tags, even across notebooks, so that I can turn up a Christmas dinner menu in one and find a recipe for Christmas fruit cake in another. And then I can use those details in a book chapter about Christmas with the Roundheads.
Evernote also prides itself on building a whole community for its users. They have a blog, where users can discuss new ideas, and an ongoing library of instructional videos. They also feature what is called the Evernote Trunk of compatible products and services. As just one example, Crafts Magazine provides whole notebooks of recipes and Do-It-Yourself projects that you can download for free.
If you already have a note-taking program that works for you, you may not want to take the time to move all your materials. But for anyone who is just starting to get organized, I cannot recommend this application highly enough.
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Posted on Wednesday, June 08, 2011 12:45 AM
 Here's the second step in the diagram I published on Monday. Once again, I see some problems. Let's start with "Design Book Cover." By all means, start to think about your cover early. Readers are confronted with millions of choices when they look for a book, and your cover needs to be able to catch their attention quickly.
Try walking into a bookstore with no real purpose in mind. Just stroll around and notice which books catch your eye. Which ones fairly jump off the display table to say, "Hey!" and which ones make you curious once you have taken a closer look? Many factors go into book cover design, and unless you already have artistic ability or design experience, you may not immediately understand why some covers are better than others. Look at how many different elements appear in your favorite covers. Is there just one image or many? Are the colors a hint about the content? Does the cover image wrap around the book from front to back? Do you like cutouts? embossing? glitter?
When you've found a few designs you like, try walking away from them and looking back at a distance. While seeing your book prominently displayed on a bookstore table is the ideal, how will prospective readers actually encounter it? Will it stand out from others of the same type? Will nothing but the spine show on a shelf? Will buyers go online and see only a thumbnail version? And if so, are the elements on the cover big enough to be visible in a thumbnail? All of these are issues you should understand before the actual design process begins.
But design it at this stage? Not so fast! Are you experienced enough to do your own design? I know I wasn't. I had an idea of what I wanted to show on the cover, but it took a professional to do the actual positioning, the trim sizing, and the font selection. Depending on what company you choose to handle the production of your books, you may need to pay for their design services or hire a designer to prepare to cover copy for you. Don't scrimp here. A poorly designed cover can lose a prospective sale in just a few seconds. At least wait until you have production details set before you make a final decision on the cover.
Now, a brief word on copyright. Authors NEVER need to pay for (or even register) their copyrights. They come automatically when you write anything. So don't let anyone charge you for that copyright. Just make sure your manuscript has that all-important symbol:
Copyright ©Your Name
and Year of Publication. It goes on the second page, the reverse of your title. That's it. That's all you ever have to do. You may, however, want to look into obtaining a Library of Congress cataloging number, but your production company should take care of that for you.
That leaves two other optional tasks in this category, but I don't understand why you should even consider NOT buying your own ISBN numbers and forming your own business. Here's why you need to do both.
1. A production company will offer you a free ISBN number, but its numbers will clearly identify that company as the publisher and may even limit your rights to do other things with the book at a later date. You can purchase your own ISBN from Bowker for a fee of $125.00 or so. Or you can buy a set of 10 numbers for twice that. The numbers never expire, so if you plan to write more than one book, or publish in more than one format, get your own set of 10 in the beginning.
2. Forming your own publishing company will make you feel important and make you rich! (Well, maybe not the rich part, but it is an ego boost.) More important, if you don't have your own company imprint, like mine, Katzenhaus Books, your books will carry the name of the production company you choose. Not a good idea, especially when most readers do not understand the difference between a print on demand company and a vanity press. Starting your own business is as easy as just doing it. You don't even have to file papers on it formally until it is making a profit of several thousand dollars. And in the meantime, while you are waiting for your book sales to make you rich, you can at least take your expenses off of your income tax if you are the sole proprietor of a small business. What's not to love?
So there you have it. For pre-publication, start looking at book covers with a critical eye, name your company, and buy some ISBNs. You're in business.
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Posted on Monday, June 06, 2011 12:37 AM
This checklist comes from Shelley Hitz at self-publishing-coach.com. She says:
"Self publishing
is a comprehensive task. Actually there are several steps involved:
writing, pre-publication tasks, formatting, publishing and book
marketing. To help you visualize the process, I've put together a "Self Publishing Checklist" report and mindmap. I'm a very visual person and a checklist like this really helps me wrap my mind around the process."
I'm happy to pass it along. Later this week, I'll be posting a series of comments on each of the sections for those of you who need more than a mindmap. Stay tuned!
Step 1: Writing
Step 2: Pre-Publication
Step 3: Publishing Print Books
Step 4: Publishing eBooks
Step 5: Marketing
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Posted on Sunday, May 29, 2011 9:52 AM
In my car, I have a bag for litter. It keeps the car neat while organizing kleenex and candy wrappers in a single spot. I have a spring-top can under my desk to catch all the random notes I leave for myself as I work. And of course, every cat owner knows how necessary it is to provide clean and well-concealed litterboxes. We all have more "stuff" than we can use. The secret to being well-organized is having a separate little place to put the stuff we no longer need. Now Katzenhous Books has its own litterbox to catch the bits of conversation, the extra scenes, the interesting characters that pop up with no real role to play in the story at hand.
As many of you know, I am in the middle of writing a novel based
on the experiences of the teachers and missionaries who traveled to
South Carolina during the Civil War. Many of them were fervent
evangelicals and took pride their nickname, "The Gideonites". Most were
abolitionists. All of them believed that with proper instruction,
newly-freed slaves could become loyal and productive citizens. They had
much to teach. More important, they had much to learn about their own
ability to adapt to limited circumstances, to meet challenges with
innovative solutions, and to face their own limitations and
shortcomings. My new blog, however, is not really about the new book,The Road to Frogmore. It is, instead, about the people and events that will NOT appear in the book.
Funny things happen to authors in the middle of doing something else. In
my case, certain characters and events from past books keep trying to
sneak into the current manuscript. This new book, like my first Civil War book, A Scratch with the Rebels,
discusses the role played by Union Army soldiers who "freed" the slaves
of the Low Country and then didn't know what to do with them. Col.
Leasure and his Roundhead Regiment from Pennsylvania pop up regularly in
my research, and I keep learning new details of their tour in Beaufort.
While they don't play a real role in the story I'm trying to tell, they
are a part of the scenery, the backstory, if you will.
The same thing happens with Nellie Chase, the heroine of my novel, Beyond All Price. She is in Beaufort when the Gideonites arrive. She struggles with the
same attitude adjustments. Nellie and Laura Towne, the leading character
in The Road to Frogmore, reach many of the same conclusions
about what newly-freed slaves need from their liberators. The Leverett
family slaves who continue to work for Nellie are very likely to have
been related to the slaves who populate Laura's St. Helena plantations.
These are the people who keep demanding a place in the new book. Their
voices resonate in the background of my imagination, and I've frequently
allowed their stories to become part of the first draft of the novel.
And once they are there, I have a hard time saying to them, "Sorry. You
don't belong here. You're interrupting our story. You're stepping over the bounds of what I know to
be historically accurate. You're littering the road. Off to the trash file you go!"
And that's where my new blog comes in. It's a place to send the
out-takes, the scraps on the cutting room floor, the ideas that litter
the sides of the road to Frogmore. I'll be posting a short story or
scene there about once a week. The first one appears today. As each new tidbit arrives, I'll send the link to my
blog followers and to those who have read the previous books. If you
want to be included in that mailing list, all you have to do is leave a
comment below or sign in to the Katzenhaus Books website. I'll be here as regularly as usual, covering a wide range of topics as they catch my attention. But I hope you'll visit the new site, too, so that you can enjoy the sidelights on the Road to Frogmore with me.
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Posted on Friday, May 20, 2011 9:27 AM
To continue the saga of the competing and confusing editions of Laura Towne's diary . . . . . . Some good suggestions have come through, although they have not all appeared here. I have enough mini-assignments to keep me busy all weekend, just tracking down the last bits of genealogy and cross-checking references.
Here are some of the better suggestions:
1. Track down the people who responsible for making the copies and try to figure out their motivation. Were private agendas involved? How much did family members influence the details that were added or subtracted from the original?
2. If the original diary is truly missing, who had it last? When did it disappear? Does the disappearance seem accidental or deliberate?
3. Who managed the archives where all these copies seem to have been kept? What kind of professional training did the archivists have? In other words, did they know what they were doing, or were they just doing "housekeeping" with a bunch of dusty records?
4. Check the notes and bibliographies of those who have written about the Penn Center and the Port Royal Experiment. What sources did they use? Is there any evidence that they ignored certain sources or failed to find confirming evidence for their facts?
5. What does your gut tell you? When you read the various versions, which one rings "true" and which ones leave you puzzled or unsettled?
Sot that's what I'll be doing for a few days. I'm also scheduling a conference call with the one other person who has been working on the same material. We're approaching the events from two entirely different directions, so I will value her different perspective.
Lions-related business needs to be taken care of this weekend, too:
1. A club in our district will be celebrating their 90th year of service with a recognition banquet. I'll be there to cheer the Lions of Paris, TN on to 90 more years. (Those of you who have read Beyond All Price will understand why Paris is one of my favorite small towns.)
2. My Lion-aholic husband has agreed to run the 2014 State Convention, which means that his humble side-kick will once again be handling lots of little nitty-gritty details while he basks in the over-all impact of the event. First up, Monday visits to three potential sites to talk about hotel rooms, meeting rooms, and meal-planning. All of that calls for magical guessing about how many people will show up three years from now and what food and gas prices will do to members' pocketbooks by then.
3. I must find time, too, to do some planing of my own. Just realized that I've taken on two heavy tasks for the year that starts in July. I'll be president of the local Germantown Lions Club in the year of our 40th anniversary, which means throwing a party. (I'll be taking notes in Paris!) At the same time, I'll be 1st vice President of Mid-south Lions Sight and Hearing Service during our CEO's 20th anniversary in that position, which means throwing a party. Sigh!
So that's what I'll be doing amid the on-going diary crisis. Have a good weekend, everyone. I should be back by Tuesday.
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