Bleargh.... I had shrimp in the freezer and then we had a power outage and then I started to defrost it and changed my mind and then I defrosted it again and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of days and then I cooked it.
And then--surprise!--I was rather ill the night before last.
And then, because my stupidity knows no bounds, I decided last night to have a couple of vodka lemon drops. That was Not A Good Idea. I'm lucky my GI tract hasn't decamped completely.
All of which is to say that, while I have gotten more editing done on Trust, it's not going to happen today. (And then I have real life interfering for a bit--gah.) In hopes of accomplishing something constructive despite having gotten no sleep, I've been reading through some self-publishing blogs. While that's given me some more places I could promote Trang, I can't say that any of them have been exciting enough that I want to link to them and tell you to go read them. Part of it is that contemporary self-publishing is, you know, really, really contemporary--two years ago, it was not nearly so viable. So for most people, they don't have that much to say: Price the book cheap, fret about the cover, market. Lather, rinse, repeat. Not a lot that's startling and original or even particularly in-depth this time.
Although it does sound like I should start hanging around KindleBoards.
That's interesting!
I'm reading through M. Louisa Locke's blog, and she points out something that not only had I given literally no thought to, but that it hadn't even occurred to me to give any thought to: Increasing your book's exposure on Amazon by getting into a less-populated category.
I list Trang as "adventure science fiction," and of the nearly 14,000 Kindle science-fiction books listed on Amazon, almost 7,000 are adventure science fiction. Oh. The only other genre sub-category is "high tech science fiction." I may be doubting that Trang is really adventure science fiction, but I know for damned sure it isn't high tech. (And yes, it is absurd to have only two sub-categories--by these standards, the works of Philip K. Dick are adventure sci-fi.)
The other two science fiction sub-categories are more about how the books are packaged: "anthologies" and "series." Series! Trang is part of a series, and there are only 150 books in that sub-category. So, I think once Trust is in the bag, I will get both books on that list, too.
ETA: She also has a great series of posts on how to edit your own work that begins here.
Getting faster
So, you see that I've changed the cover for Trang again--this is basically placeholder art until I find an artist (I'd really like to use the same artist for the entire series to give it a unified look). As a result, I didn't change the cover of the hard copy, just the e-book for now. At this point, it takes surprisingly little time to toss something together--that was true of the layout, too. It's easy to get discouraged the first time you do something and it takes forEVER, but if you keep at it, you do get better.
Gah
So, I was like, Why don't I fix that pesky table of contents issue? That shouldn't take too long....
TWELVE HOURS LATER
OK, so it didn't take twelve hours, but it took a lot longer than it should have. What really took the time was just figuring out how the hell to do it--really and truly, and I say this as somebody who wasted a great deal of time trying to do it some other way, the only way is to download an HTML editor and take it from there. You need what are called anchor tags. If you download NVU like I did, it's super-easy, and the anchor tags are represented by cute little cartoon anchors. If you try doing it some other way (and really, the coding is no harder than what I use in this blog, so you should be able to), Kindle won't convert the code into an actual link. Instead, it will just leave the code there, because I'm sure readers are dying to learn about The Amazing Adventures of Href.
To complicate matters and increase author stress, neither Kindle nor Nook will show a working link in the preview. With Nook, you can download the final ePub version and check that, but with Kindle I have no freaking idea if the links in the table of contents work or not. They work in HTML. That much I know.
I just skipped Smashwords this time around because they want you to upload Word documents, and I have NO idea what would come out the other end if I did that. (ETA: Score one for Smashwords! They automatically create a linkable table of contents if your chapter heads begin with the word "chapter," as mine do. Definitely a good idea!)
In terms of things that took about as long as I thought they would, I downloaded some stock photos I can use to cobble together a new cover. I did hear back from that artist--he's going to think it over and get back to me reasonably soon. The thing is, one of the blogs agreed to review the book, and Norwescon is coming up, which hopefully will drive some traffic to Trang, so I think it's worth it to throw something together just for the e-books in case getting real cover art takes longer.
And although I didn't get any actual editing done on Trust, I woke up this morning with a great idea for the opening paragraphs just complete in my head. I love when that happens.
Nothing like 14 hours of sleep to improve productivity
Yesterday was a family day, and since my particular family includes young children, I didn't really catch up on sleep. But today with the ringer off things were greatly improved. I tend to need more sleep than the average person, but even for me, when I'm topping 12 hours in stretch, it means I haven't been getting enough.
Not shockingly, I got quite a bit done. I edited the first chapter, although I'm going to go back and take another crack at the very first few paragraphs--I want to up the tension there. I also turned the first chapter into the first two chapters--the problem with writing Book 2 is that you want to include enough background that people who haven't read Book 1 aren't completely lost, but you don't want to bore the crap out of those who have read Book 1. Initially I just crammed a hell of a lot of exposition into Chapter 1 (especially into that first scene that I axed), but now I'm dividing and conquering--Philippe and Shanti are Chapter 1, the general situation among the aliens is Chapter 2.
Since I did nothing productive today
Oh, and I do mean NOTHING productive. I didn't even do any of my bullshit chores. I went shopping. For stuff I didn't really need. It was that sort of day.
(I blame it on sleep deprivation. Between the cats and some extra caffeine I probably should have skipped and some asshole stalker-esque telemarketers who don't understand what the federal Do Not Call list is all about, I've been short on sleep all week. It tells you something about the toll inadequate sleep takes on mental functioning that it took until today for me to realize that I should turn off the ringer on my phone.)
So instead, I'm going to disclose a writer's secret. I learned this from the master, William Shakespeare himself, when I ghosted a Cliff Notes ripoff of Romeo and Juliet. The secret is: If you want to make something look better, surround it with total crap.
Look at Romeo and Juliet from an adult perspective. They're FOURTEEN YEARS OLD. They've known each other for all of SIXTY SECONDS. Is this love going to last? A-HA-HA-HA-HA no.
How do you get the audience to ignore what they KNOW about fourteen-year-old "love" and become emotionally invested in this relationship that would be over by next Tuesday in the real world?
The answer: Surround it by really shitty forms of "love." Dear God, look at Juliet's family. They are horrible. She DIES (or so they think), and they can't dig up any semblance of sincerity. Romeo and Juliet is a fairly terrifying play if you look at the other kinds of "love" on display--superficial, phony, self-serving...it's a nightmare. Compared to the emotional cripples that surround them, Romeo and Juliet are perfection--they're at least striving for something noble. It's touching. (And it's VERY Will Shakespeare, since the plays he took Romeo and Juliet from are mainly about dumb kids dumbly thinking that they are in love and dumbly disobeying their parents and dumbly dying, just like you will if you are dumb enough to disobey your parents. Stupid kids. Get off my lawn!)
Does this strategy always work? Um, is everybody William Shakespeare? No, they are not. There's any number of extremely tiresome stories centered around horrible people where the author strives in vain to make the main character engaging by surrounding them by people who are more horrible and more horrible still to the point of being simple cartoons of vice. Natural Born Killers springs to mind. Sudden Impact tried to use this tactic to sell a serial killer who blows men's genitals off with a gun not just as a sympathetic character but also as a love interest. This technique was the creative drain Deadwood was circling around before it was canceled: Al was bad, but we were supposed to like Al, so Tolliver was worse, and Wolcott was a compulsive murderer, and George Heart was even worse than that, and had the show gone on for another season I can only assume Beelzebub himself would have made an appearance, eating babies' brains right out of their skulls.
So, clearly, to use this strategy successfully, you gotta recognize its limitations: Shakespeare wasn't trying to sell us on a serial killer (as, I repeat, a love interest), he was just trying to sell us on a teen romance. And you know, don't do it over and over and over again--I don't care how good your actors and dialog and production values are, people will notice.
Gee, mister, are you gonna make me a star?
There is someone on a certain Web site who I am not going to respond to there because I think they are probably a troll. If not a troll, then they are either naive about traditional publishing to the point of delusion or are someone who works in it and is cynical and manipulative to the extreme. They are making the "Don't you wish you were Tinkerbell?" argument, and they keep adding names: There's Fawn and Iridessa and Rosetta and Silvermist--don't you wish you were them?
Let's put aside the fact that there is probably NO best-selling author who was earning as much money as Amanda Hocking is at this point in her career--a career that, for the record, is all of 11 months old. (ETA: OK, I looked it up: Apparently one woman got a $2 million advance for a first novel--that was a record. Hocking is estimated to have earned at least $1 million by this point. So, yes, one made more. Were there two?) (EATA: And now Amanda Hocking has a $2 million advance and is ahead again.) There are are probably in this country more people who have made a million dollars by buying lottery tickets than there are people who have made a million dollars by writing fiction.
Don't you wish you were them?
Obviously what you should do is to stop working at your stupid job and plow every last dollar into lottery tickets. It's really that simple.
I did some editing!
Ha! Not a total loser! I didn't do much, but then again, I always start slow. It's the actual getting started that is the important thing.
Just some background on Trust: Right now, I'm working on the opening chapter, which is like what in journalism is called the lede, which is the first sentence of your story. (Publishing and journalism people always deliberately misspell the terms of the trade: graf, lede, etc. I think it's because it makes the words stand out more to the copy editors and proofreaders if, say, the instructions "cut graf" are accidentally left in the final copy.) The lede is the! most! important! line of your story, because in most cases, that's all the reader reads. If you're writing a feature--or by extension, a novel--the lede should have a hook, a not-misspelled piece of jargon that means "something that will make that lazy reader want to read the whole damn thing you just worked so hard on." Features/novels need hooks because there's no pressing reason for the reader to read them--they are something the reader chooses to spend time on, so you need to show the reader that it's worth doing.
So opening chapters are supposed to bring the drama, which makes them hard to write. I used to just leave ledes until the end, but that's less doable when you're writing a novel, so I wrote the first chapter and now I'm beating the hell out of it.
I previously beat the hell out of this entire book, cutting probably about 30,000 words and adding 40,000 more. Why? Well, let me tell you: When I wrote the book, I was like, THIS needs to be INTERESTING! It needs to have ADVENTURE! And DRAMA! So I tried really hard to put all this adventure and drama into it, and the result was a really dull book.
Really!
I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it was true. And the reason was all that adventure and drama wasn't connected to the main plot. I had extraneous characters! I had events that were very dramatic and then never impacted anything later in the book! I had it all! And I didn't need nearly so much!
(You see this in bad action movies all the time. Got nothing to do and nowhere to go, plot-wise? Blow something up, and then have a female character take her top off and show us her titties for 20 minutes or so, and then show Steven Seagal gouging out Tommy Lee Jones' eye in slow motion, over and over again. And I just sit there, thinking, Why? Why was I born? It certainly wasn't to watch this.)
What I needed to do in Trust was to get to the main plot faster. And then, once I was there, I needed to focus on it. This was another problem with the scattershot-action approach: I was neglecting the things that mattered. Things that actually were important to the plot and the book were not being fully developed, because I was too distracted by the nonsense.
Once I focused the book, I went back to my first chapter, and chopped out the first scene completely. Why? Well, I know now what I need to do in that first chapter to set up the rest of the book. The current first scene isn't necessarily more "dramatic" than the old first scene, but it's going to pay off. Trust is no longer an amalgam of unrelated, purposeless action: It's a novel. I'm sure the "not much happens" crowd will like it less, but I like it much better now.
Covers and positioning
I contacted one of those Etsy artists about using some of his paintings as book covers. He may say yes, he may say no, he may do that typical visual artist thing where he doesn't get back to me for a year and then is really upset that I hired someone else. But his paintings are pretty, so go look at them.
You'll notice that they aren't wacky people and wacky aliens, despite my repeated assertions that I must have both on my covers. That's because I've recently started rethinking the wisdom of positioning Trang as a straight-up adventure/comedy book. I filled out a little interview form about the book for a review blog that asked a lot of questions about what inspired the book, and what inspired a lot of it was the aftermath of the September 11th attacks (I was living in NYC at the time)--the xenophobia, the anti-French bullshit, dealing with the stress and guilt, all that. So, you know, while I think of it as light and funny, there are things like repeated brutal scenes of Inquisition-style torture, so perhaps it's not as fluffy as all that.
The other thing that got me thinking is that I got a review on Amazon by someone who did not like the book AT ALL, and the main complaint was that "not much happens." This is a really common complaint made by readers of plot-driven commercial fiction when they read something that is more character-driven or more literary. Much like "Where's the Cher?" it's a complaint that's easy to make fun of*, but actually should be paid attention to, at least from the standpoint of positioning your book. The fact of the matter is that, at least in Trang, I care a lot more about the main character's post-traumatic stress disorder than I do about the wacky aliens.
So I think maybe I should go with a more "serious" cover. I mean, Trang's a mutt, but I like mutts--I like Buffy and Muriel's Wedding and The Atrocity Archives and other works that swing crazily from funny to tragic to terrifying to absurd. So a funny description and a serious cover may be the way to convey that.
*We can make some fun though, right? In Publish This Book Markley quotes from reader reviews of a couple of literary classics. They include a review of Native Son that reads in part, "This book was one of the most boring book that I have ever read. There are one or two scenes in the book that are interesting, but overall the book is boring. BORING. BORING. BORING." and one of To Kill a Mockingbird that reads in part, "This book is so boring! Nothing is going on.... [Y]ou have to go through pages and pages about Atticus's childrens' lives.... Does anyone have any idea why this book even won a Pulitzer?!?!"
Did I read that right?
As I was looking through review blogs, I saw a--I'm not sure what to call it. An unreview? An anti-review? A statement noting that the blog author would never review books from James Frey's Full Fathom Five publishing house because Frey treats the writers so poorly.
And I was like, huh? People are willing to work for James Frey?
Let's review what we know about Frey: He lies. A lot. He lied to make money. He also has a history of substance abuse.
*Deep sigh.*
Dear young writers,
Did you know that not everyone can write? It's true--I worked for an educational publisher, and we hired respected academics to write our books, and most of them, despite their brilliance in their subject matter, could not put two words together to save their lives!
Not everyone can write. Being able to write is a skill that is worth something.
You need to recognize the value of your skill, and not work for any old compulsive liar who comes along. Do you know that I've been freelancing, off and on, for over a decade? Guess how many times I've had to threaten to sue people to get paid, or go to court to collect a paycheck, or just been stiffed?
Zero times. Zero. The most I ever had to do was a quick e-mail to an editor saying, "Have you seen my check? It hasn't arrived yet."
This is not the norm in the industry!
How did I accomplish it? I was careful who I worked for. The minute complaints started wafting through the air that so-and-so was stiffing writers (and nowadays, they'd waft through the Internet, making them easy to find no matter where you are), I put them on my own personal Do Not Call list. If I was thinking of working for someplace, I'd ask around--have you worked for these guys? what are they like? If the answer was anything but "Great!"--Do Not Call. I did not work for dodgy start-ups. I did not work for people who promised glory but no cash.
And I was able to make a living at it. When I say "make a living," I mean a decent apartment, decent food, decent clothes, no calls from bill collectors, stellar credit. I was not a bohemian. I did not squat and go without heat like the characters in Rent.
I have worked for a cokehead--a regular 9-to-5 job that ended when he destroyed his own company. Never again. I never ever worked for anyone who I knew for sure, because it's a matter of public record, was a dishonest person. Because I am not stupid, and you should not be either: The man willing to lie repeatedly on Oprah will not think twice about misleading and deceiving you.
Best of luck!
--Mary
Or, maybe it belonged to chaos
Insomnia, rain gutters, and a power outage that lasted most of the afternoon (!) flat out derailed Trust. Better luck next time, I guess.
Oh, I found some more good Web sites for...this is the hip term...indie authors. Yes, that is what we are calling ourselves nowadays--look at me all down with the lingo. Now get off my lawn, you damned kids! (No, seriously--get off it. I only got a lawn a few years ago, and you would be amazed at the crap (sometimes literal) people leave there--one guy used to park his truck on it until I left him a note, and then he parked it on the neighbors' lawns instead.)
Anyway--I mentioned I didn't get much sleep last night?--back on topic! The Web sites are this guide to e-book review blogs and this blog that alerts subscribers to e-book sales. I'm going to contact them about the Norwescon sale.
Today belonged to Trang, but tomorrow belongs to Trust!
Yeah, I kind of punked out after the formatting drama and spent the rest of the day soliciting reviews. And I am going to have to clean out the gutters first thing tomorrow because I noticed a damp spot on the ceiling. Fab.
Another reason not to procrastinate
You know what happens once you announce your intentions to get right to work? Something comes out of left field and EATS YOUR TIME AND ENERGY.
Today somebody reviewed Trang on Amazon and mentioned that there were formatting problems. Ugh. Some things I don't get, like why this person wants a table of contents. There's no table of contents in the hard copy, because hello, it's a novel--novels written for adults usually don't have tables of contents. I'm wondering if it's a Kindle thing. If it is, I may have to figure out how to format one, but I hear it's a huge pain in the ass. (ETA: OK, I just talked to a friend of mine who owns a Kindle, and she was as baffled by the request for a table of contents as I was.) (EATA: I talked to a couple of more e-reader owners, and apparently not everyone has the hang of the bookmark feature, and they do find it easier to have a TOC because flipping lots of pages can be a hassle. So I'll look into doing that.)
The person also wanted to be able to download the front jacket. Seriously? Obviously s/he hasn't taken too close a look at it, which is fine by me. Maybe once the cover is fixed I'll figure that one out. (ETA: My friend the Kindle Oracle doesn't get this one, either--still, if there's a way, once I get a decent cover, I'll try to do it.)
But the complaint I was willing and able to fix was the lack of paragraph indents, because (I've heard this elsewhere) double-hard-returns in Word turn into triple- or quadruple-hard-returns on an e-book reader. It became obvious when I tried to fix this that having Amazon convert a Word file into a Kindle file just causes all sorts of weird and VERY unpredictable formatting errors, so what I did was have Amazon convert the file into HTML, download the HTML, edit it in Word (which you can do, apparently--I had no idea), and then upload the edited HTML. That seemed to work OK.
After that I tried loading the same file to Barnes & Noble, only to discover once again that the Nook has its own quirks. I quirkified the HTML file for Nook and uploaded it, but then when I tried to do the same for Smashwords, it turns out that they want a Word file. So I'm hoping the conversion from HTML to Word went smoothly--I especially wanted to update the Smashwords file because I know the version there has some typos.
The overpowering urge to procrastinate
The thing about being a writer is, you have to write. And it's always VERY tempting to do something else. For example, I had an idea last night (after a day spent SHAMELESSLY procrastinating) that might let me work up an acceptable cover for Trang myself, despite my utter lack of drawing talent. Also, there are all those new potential sources for reviews. And you know something? I haven't cleaned the rain gutters in months and months, and I should get some cooking done, and I need to plant those herb starts, and the moss needs to be cleaned off the roof of the shed, and I need to finish painting the guest bathroom, and, and, and, and, and, AND, AND, AND, AND, AND, AND, AND!!!
Yeah, the list is potentially endless. It's especially tempting when it's stuff you "need" to do. (Steam the rug! That's really urgent!) Typically, too, the more I procrastinate the more anxious I feel, and then that makes me feel like the unimportant chores I should get done one of these days are REALLY SUPER IMPORTANT AND URGENT--but the funny thing is, if I were to dedicate the next week or so to doing them all, my anxiety would never lessen, because of course I'm ignoring the One Big Thing I'm supposed to be doing.
There's a number of metaphors about this in literature, not surprisingly. The Terrible Trivum from The Phantom Tollbooth was an early favorite of mine--I remember reading "we have pencils to sharpen, holes to dig, nails to straighten, stamps to lick, and ever so much more" when I was about 10 and just being thunderstruck at how true those words were. More recently, I took a part-time job in what turned out to be a fantastically dysfunctional workplace that sucked up a tremendous amount of my energy and time until I resigned (in protest, because they thought sexual harassment was totally OK--I should mention that this was a workplace that served children). My sister asked me how things were going at one point, and I was like, You know, it's such a meaningless soap opera for me, and even when things are going well, it's just lotus-eating.
So while I know people blame this phenomenon on the Internet or on self-publishing (because traditionally-published writers never have to spend time on ancillary tasks), the truth of the matter is that someone who wants to procrastinate will always find a way. (And the cat stomping all over my computer right this moment doesn't help.) You just have to be strict with yourself.
In other words, Get back to work!
More good blogs, and a quandary
This blog is relatively new (fewer than 30 posts! I probably post that much in a week), and yet Victorine Lieske offers some really solid advice about marketing and soliciting reviews (with more good advice found in the comments).
At first, I didn't think this blog would be very useful, because the author tends to free associate, but the entries on self-publishing are really good. Like Joe Konrath, Robin O'Neille/Barbara Morgenroth (I think the latter is her pen name, but I'm not sure. ETA: It turns out that the first name is definitely a pen name. The second name may be a pen name as well, but I'm not sure) is a refugee from traditional publishing and has great perspective on the merits of self-publishing, as well as a realistic attitude toward books, audiences, and publishing in general, which I always appreciate. She also is VERY adept with design and does her own book covers as well as those for other people. (ETA: Having read further through this blog, I shall warn you that she really, really does not like transgendered people. I don't know what they ever did to her, but God, she hates them.)
My quandary is that I just don't feel like it's appropriate for me to be Tweeting away about self-publishing given what's going on in Japan. And yet it seems like everyone I follow on Twitter is just continuing business as usual. But of course for most of them it is a business--they'll still have to pay the rent at the end of the month whether the death toll is 1,000 people or 10,000 people. I can afford to be all sensitive, I suppose. I'm nearly out of Tweet-type blog entries anyway, so I think I'll take a break and get back into it later--it just feels really crass and solipsistic to be out self-promoting under the circumstances.
Covers, pricing, covers, pricing,covers,pricingcoverspricingcoverspricing
Family obligations have been eating all my time lately, but last night before I went to bed I started poking around looking for cover artists. Boy, that was a mistake. It was probably a combination of doing that and watching too much tsunami footage (and today with the nuclear reactors--hang in there, Japan!), but I was having stress dreams about cover art all night. First I tried to look up artist who do sci-fi book covers, and it turns out that there's, like, five of them and two are retired. It seems pretty likely that I can't afford the remaining three, and even if I could, they probably wouldn't be willing to work on an obscure self-published book anyway. Then I tried to look up artists who specialize in self-published or electronic books, and there's a number of companies who do that, but they mainly do what I would call graphic design--putting a bunch of different stripes on your cover and whatnot. That I actually can do--it's the representational art that's kicking my ass.
So I was a little bummed, and then I realized that I'm probably going at it the wrong way: What I really need is just the representational art--I can do the lettering and make it into cover myself. There's going to be a sci-fi convention around here pretty soon, so I think I'll go and have a gander at the art there--maybe I can strike a deal with somebody. (ETA: And I just looked on Etsy and saw some promising things there.)
The other thing I've been thinking of is how to maximize the ad I bought, and I think what I'll do then is have a sale--drop the price of Trang to 99 cents that week (or should I say, THAT WEEK ONLY! ACT NOW! OMFG YOU HAVE TO BUY!--I'll be able to channel Ron Popeil one of these days). Hopefully that will trigger some impulse buys.
Tomorrow--Trust!
Of course, sometimes I'm just naive
So I updated that proposal for a historical biography, and it's ready to be sent off.
When you do a proposal for a nonfiction book, one thing you do is evaluate the market and competition: Are there readers out there for your book? Are there lots of books on the same topic? So it involves poking around a lot and seeing what else has been published.
And let me tell you, while there aren't a lot of good books out there on the specific topic, there has been a LOT of stuff published in recent years in the general subject area.
Which means that there are a lot of publishers out there who are willing to produce a book like mine.
Which, along with reading someone's comment about a bad agent who behaved exactly as my last agent did, has led me to seriously question my opinion of that agent. He has a sparkling reputation--sort of. I looked on the Absolute Write Water Cooler forum, and sure enough, the more-recent entries about him include numerous complaints about him not communicating with authors.
He did not submit my book many places--at least, if he did, he sure as hell didn't tell me about it. And now I'm thinking that if he had, given the number of similar books published recently, he would have been able to sell it.
This really annoys me because I didn't ride this guy because he had such a great rep. It didn't even occur to me that he might have been the problem. And you know something? I know better. The character of Wouter Hoopen exists because I've had so many experiences with meeting people who are famous and fancy and big stars and whatnot, only to discover that they are more often than not self-serving careerists who got lucky one time.
Getting over myself
I was going to title this entry "Nibbled to death by ducks," because I redid the description for Trang (it's funnier, more detailed, explicitly compares the book to similar books, includes an author bio, and for the e-books, includes a word count), and I uploaded it hither, thither, and yon, and that was kind of a pain. I also realized that the hard copy has been distributed and is available all kinds of places (Barnes & Noble has it on a really good sale right now), which involved me having to add a bunch of links to my Web site, which was also kind of a pain.
So I was going to whine about all that, but then I got something to eat, and I realized that Joe Konrath would be like, "Cry me a river, bitch."
So I will simply make an observation: Time spent marketing is time not spent writing. And frankly, since Trang is the first book of a series, if I want it to be a success, I'd better get off my ass and tend to the rest of that series, no?
But having to noodle around with uploads and links for a couple of hours is nothing compared to having to visit 500 bookstores, so I shouldn't complain.
More self-publishing blogs
I found another good self-publishing blog through Twitter, this one by author M. Louisa Locke. (The "M" is, I believe, her first initial--I don't think she's Monsieur Louisa Locke, although more power to her if she is.)
This blog is more like Self-Publishing for the Technologically Inclined, which I'm really not. (I'm not a Luddite, but stuff has to get really useful before I can be troubled to learn about it.) The author is Polish, so some entries are not in English (and not just because it's Techspeak), and I would assume that some of the tech he's talking about is to European standards, not U.S. standards. But if you are a techie yourself, you're probably all over that anyway, so go knock yourself out!
You always wonder if you did it right
About soliciting reviews: It seems like the various review sites and blogs are quite up-front about whether they want you to query first or just send the book, so that's an easy decision to make.
I've read various people say that you absolutely MUST send AT LEAST a cover letter if not a HUGE press packet (which they would be happy to put together for you for a fee) whenever you send out a book. But you know what part of my job was when I interned at that journal that did book reviews? It was to open any package that appeared to contain a book, pull out the book, and throw away the envelope and any letters or packets that were not the actual book (and trust me, I did that without even looking at them--on a good day, I could get the book out of the envelope without even removing those papers). Then I looked over the book to make sure it wasn't about psychics and Marilyn Monroe, and chucked the books that passed that test into a big box, which went to the book reviewer, who decided what to actually review. The letters and (at times quite sizable) press packets never got anywhere near the reviewer.
So, I didn't include cover letters with the books I sent out. It feels weird because they have no way of contacting me, but on the other hand my Web address is on the back jacket, so I suppose they can if they really want to. Plus at least one of the Web sites is set up so that you can track the progress of the various review copies without actually bothering the people who work there.