Story post from Shooting Star

I don't know why this passage appeals to me so much.  They've come through a massive storm during which their windshield is broken by a forceful wave, and they have no generator, no desalinator, no drives, no controls - nothing, until Federi finds a manual helm hidden under the console.  It's a night straight out of the seafarer's hell.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Let me go and see what I can do with the power generator,” said
Wolf.
Federi stopped him.
“We have drives now,” he said. “Wolf, the rest I’ll manage.
Thanks a stack.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“You’re the Captain,” smiled Wolf and teleported out.

That’s right, thought Federi, staring through the porthole at the
dark waves. He moved back to the bridge, to relieve Virian and send
her back to sleep.
Come what may, he had to stay awake. Battling the helm did it
for him.
How on Earth had Adamson got hold of a crew of were folk from
Shrn to hunt the Solar Wind? And what favours and money could be
of interest to a fisher person?
Glenn Wilson was tied up in the gun lounge. Federi had put S.I.
Lucy in charge of him, loading her poison compartment with one of
the vilest assassin poisons in his possession. The last thing he
needed was the creature freeing itself and going around eating the
crew. The crew – the familia!
It occurred to him that he’d split the little cyborg, given her
double orders. She was to supervise both the fisherman and the open
flame of the distiller. He wondered how she processed this. He
hoped she’d check on both at regular intervals, rather than simply
dropping one order in favour of the other. And if she dropped one
order – he hoped it was the distiller. He trusted the open flame more
than the hostage. Hell, and he couldn’t even let go to check...
couldn’t wake up Virian another time... he hadn’t known that
Morrigan needed sleep at all...
Paean was suddenly by his side. He shook himself out of his
dream-like state. He must have sat down at some point; and he must
in fact have dropped off, because the ship was bouncing around on
the choppy waves like a rabbit. But Paean’s hands were on the helm
now, and she was wrestling the control for the ship back from the
sea.
And over the sea was the most welcome sight of them all – the
pale grey glow of first dawn.

*

 

One of the sweetest things

Arcana, by "gipsika", on the first page of 2 search options of Epub Bud!

Arcana on Epub Bud, on the first pages of both "fiction" and "recently added" in the browse screens.

This is amazing! What a feeling! Meanwhile "Arcana" was a small, fast NaNoWriMo project, challenging myself whether I could write a novel in a month.

 I wrote it in 9 days. By the time Les and I had finished the final polish and editing, it was around the 25th of November. So not only did I write a novel within a month, I got it print-ready, and uploaded to Amazon and Honeymeadbooks, all in a month.

 When Afrihost (the server for Honeymead) wobbled, I also posted it on Epub and Scribd in order to have working copies to refer to.

 Let's see where this will take us :-)

Reinventing the wheel

Blooming 'ell.  No sooner have we put our books at that place in Hwood (that I even advertised on Facebook - free publicity for them) and we add in a CD, and the "other" lady calls me and tells me we must pick up the CDs again - they don't want to sell CDs because of risk of theft.  But... they have other people's CDs there.

In the same breath she tells me that she'll give our books one more month and then we must pick them up because no copy has sold yet.  But I've seen clearly that there's one copy less of our small book than I left there on consignment.  What about that copy?  Was it stolen...?  

This right after the primary lady there and I were talking about launching something there next year.  

Well, who cares?  It's a cute place, I'm sure a launch would have been nice, but I'm sure there are hundreds of cute coffee places that would welcome the patronage of a launch, first and foremost Karoo Cafe who already hosted two of ours.  

It strikes me that I'm trying to reinvent the wheel.  By now I have a few pet hates where it comes to sales words:

• "consignment"

• "SOR"

• "90 days" (both ways:  90 days for them to pay me, and 90 days for the books to be displayed before they are returned.)

"Them thar's fighting words!"

There are large book chains that pay cash upfront.  Time to talk to them.
I'm sorely tempted.... but never mind, all it means is that P'kaboo will have to look for sales avenues other than SOR, consignment and all that other rubbish.  

To rest awhile, perchance to sleep...

Today during a check on our fav bookshop, I counted our books on his shelves and noted that a good number of them have moved since last recon.  This is lovely news.

Decided on a (hopefully better) strategy for 2014.  Will it work?  Well that remains to be seen.

In the interim hubbs has started another book site online, namely exactly for that kind of book P'kaboo won't place, but which entertains us (only we don't want our kids to read it).  An over-18 bookshop, called Honeymead Books. Ebooks only; that is until enough ebook copies sell to warrant a paper run.

This sounds counterintuitive at first, as our paper books sell consistently better than our ebooks, but it might just work a lot better, who knows.  We have 3 juicy titles in there by now, from 3 different juicy authors.

But as for me, I'm a bit punch-drunk (no, that's not the Christmas punch we're going to have on the 25th).  I can't look printers in the oi any longer.  Clearing up I found two more copies of books well-written, carefully edited, beautifully designed, laid out and printed - and then bound in such a bloody mess that they are not sellable.  The binders can stuff up a book and lose a publisher money!
One is bound upside-down and back-to-front, to be turned on its head and then opened from the back and read like a Japanese picture novel;  and the other - unspeakable, the pages are in complete chaos, as though the insides were dropped, hastily gathered up and stuck any which way into the binding by the jolly binders.

That's a bookbinder I'll never use again!

So I've done this for now

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2013 was an awful, horrible year in which nothing at all was achieved (and I nearly died).

2014 will start with new karma.  I'm throwing out all old proof copies except the most essential ones; they're all going to the second-hand bookshop.  Unbound printed proofs in great A3 sheets are designated for paper mache.  The kids are happy about this.  I've moved "P'kaboo Corner" to where I can see it.  Done my stocktake...  low on all stock, that ought to be good news.  Perhaps putting books on "sales tables" is a hasty idea and should be put on ice first.  (Don't fess yerselves, I'm not that desperate!  Sales table!  Fie!)

So right now I'm relaxing and, if anything, writing, and focusing on Christmas and what must happen before the new year precipitates.

There used to be a best-selling book in Zimbabwe:  "Next year will be better."  Wonder if there are any copies of that one.

My wonderful editor

One of the most precious people I've found in the process of self-publishing is my editor:  Leslie Noble.

They say, nomen est omen.  The man is indeed noble.

Not only is he an excellent editor - knows his way through the labyrinth of the English language like an intrepid archaeologist with incentives - knows byways and passages I had no idea about.

For my own piratical purposes even better, he is a yachtsman with hands-on experience of flying a sailing yacht, surfing a freak wave, and all the moods and idiosyncrasies of the ocean.

Most importantly, he's a Noble knight on a white charger where it comes to rescuing a distressed damsel from going to Cuckoo Home (it's somewhere in the Transylvanian Alps, I'm sure).  The file that was driving me round the bend yesterday?  Around midnight it won against me and I gave up on it (LibreOffice Writer, Winword 2007 - neither could help me) and launched it in a missive to my noble editor, with a plea for help.

This morning as I open my emails, the file is back - all fixed!  I could take it exactly as is and upload it to Amazon, no further tweaks required!  How's that forya?

Les, thank you.  Your help is absolutely indispensable and worth gold.  And diamonds!

I don't know if anyone sees these posts but if you do, pls be aware that Les is also our most prolific author - having written Tabika (1 and 2), Baa Baa Black Belt, Regina, Forest Circle Quest, and the "Immy" series of 5 delightful toddler-shaped multimedia toy-boxes parading as books.  The stories are so cute that as adults we smile and chuckle as we read them.  Definitely worthy of our little ones, much more so than a lot of the toddler literature that is currently out there.

Here are his books:

http://www.pkaboo.net/tabika.html
http://www.pkaboo.net/tabika2.html
http://www.pkaboo.net/baa.html
http://www.pkaboo.net/regina.html
http://www.pkaboo.net/fcquest.html
http://www.pkaboo.net/immy.html

He is also a composer (Immy features a Peter-and-the-Wolf style themed musical background of his own composition) and his classical-style CDs are on our web shop too:

http://www.pkaboo.net/quests.html

(The photography featuring on the covers of these CDs is also his own.)

Aaaarghh Createspace!!

Though it's not really CreateSpace at fault.

It's Word for Windows, and sectioning.  I'm trying to upload a perfectly good manuscript - mind we already had a P'kaboo print run for it, and I know the book has formatting issues - but not the ones I didn't expect at CreateSpace.

The real formatting issues of the book:

The margins are a teensy bit too small for comfort.  That is, the outer margins.  There's enough gutter.  (Not saying that it's gutter literature!)  And:  The binders here in SA don't seem to get perfect binding right.  The glue is stiff - it should never be with such a thin book.  Which leads to breaking of the spine when it should be flexing instead.  Highly annoying.  But those are printer-binder issues; not file issues.

And:  It is not A5.  Making the printing a bit of a nightmare as the text has to be reduced onto the page, to fit the smaller format.  For me that's an issue.  It's the last small-run digi format book I'll ever create in a non-standard format.

But Amazon doesn't work in the A standard formats; its format that comes closest is in 6' x 9' imperial inches.  (I'm wondering now, are they the inches of a Roman silk trader, or of Julius C, or of the American president...  - OH, they are 2.7 cm?  Standardized to a metric measure in other words?  LOL.)  Never mind the furlong-per-fortnight issue.  I had expected, and got, margin issues with my A5 file with the too-small outer margins, and I fixed those.  I expected serious issues with the cover format (as that is in the non-standard size); surprisingly I got none.  They resized the cover.  We'll see how well that worked when I see the digital proof.  But here's an issue I did not expect - didn't pick up myself, on the doc file:  Pagination!

Ok.  Get a matchbox, empty all the matches out and then try to stick your brain into that.  That's how I feel about a pagination issue.  Apparently in parts, the pagination is completely missing!  Why???  Because the book has been sectionalized.  Was that necessary??

If Word were GIMP, I'd "flatten the image" so that the whole book becomes 1 single "section", and repaginate.  I don't know if Libreoffice (Linux) has such an option, but my guess is, not.  Does Word even have that option?  And once I do, I'll have to repaginate the table of contents, manually, again..............   *SIGH*

This is not my favourite part of publishing, of helping other authors onto a platform.  Definitely NOT.  If I were a rich company, I'd employ someone with a certification in Windows to do all the formatting for me and I'd pay them not to get creative about it!  So, nose to the grindstone, I'd rather be editing Solar Wind 6 - Romania, but wtf, that table of contents is calling....  urggh...

(please pardon the very teenage spoilers, this is practically a teenage temper tantrum, I'm learning a lot from my kids...)

hopefully back

my kop raas...

slave to good coffee

This is one abandoned blog!  There are many reasons; but recently, the saddest is that I had nothing to post.

I've been through literally months of set-backs.  Because this is a bit of a journal-style blog (from the 'orses mouth one hopes) I'll just list a few here, not as a pity party but to clarify to myself where on Earth I could have lost such a lot of time!

• My health went awol.  What we thought was a stomach ulcer was treated with PPi's which (most probably) finished off my gall bladder en route to damaging my liver.  End result: a costly and concussive stay in hospital, the dwaal of which I'm still working to get out of.  Slowly my energy levels return; I still freeze though, day and night.  Yup. Now to find a way back to being young.
• Once out of hospital I worked my backside off to catch up all missed lessons... still nevertheless 2/3 of my studio "jumped ship", each student for their own reasons.  Such diverse reasons as matric, workload, and neck injury.
• right, those were the two worst.  Now for the good news.

Increased sales

For some surprising reason, books have started moving.  Not hugely; but they do.  These are paper book sales, mostly direct sales, and the "volume" sales are to music shops.  Our two little music runners, "Violin Tunes" and Alan Solomon's "Not Another Scale Book", seem to be quite popular.

We also managed to sell a few Solar Winds (various sequels).  The nudge is quite clear:  This is not an experiment any longer, it's a business and we'd better get thinking in lines of proper marketing.

Sales are the lifeblood of the business.  Without sales I might as well close shop.  So, increased sales are excellent news.

Projects

P'kaboo has been in "project overload and results under-performance" for nearly a year (or more precisely, since its inception).  

• Need to relaunch "Freedom Fighter" along with the next sequel, "Raider", which needs to be printed.
• In fact we're out of print copies of Freedom Fighter; first mini-run is sold out.  This sounds grand but these are microscopic runs; nevertheless we're honing down our figures to become more market-specific.  There's no point in printing thousands of books if sales are a trickle. 
• With the relaunch of "Freedom Fighter" I should launch a paper version of "Mercury Silver"; the book needs to be promoted to libraries, schools etc.  It's really a very quirky collection, I loved putting it together.
• Violin Tunes 2 is so far a pipe dream, until I've made friends with the music program.  I'm using a different program this time, as Cakewalk can't handle slurs, fingering and all sorts of other nice stuff.  Cakewalk is really a recording program and the notation function is an afterthought.
• "Not Another Scale Book" needs to be put together in its non-handwritten version (without illustrations, oh well).  I've got the tools for it now; was missing the program (my Acrobat was erased with my hard drive back in my Windows days).  PDF Shuffler or PDF Chain will do it though.
• I want to start another short-story or perhaps, poetry project.  I loved Mercury Silver, it really had that energy to it.  
• Need to make a catalogue of all our books, for Bargain Books (and other places).  And perhaps, get some more flyers out, now that we have multiple more titles.
• Thinking of putting my own short-stories into a paper format too.

Get my head clear

The most important thing is for the owner of P'kaboo to get her head clear of the hospital fog.  I've started retaking my life; I'm reconnecting with Pretoria's music circles (in line with P'kaboo's whole mission of getting young stuff out there, a young conductor contacted me and I helped him find more players for his orchestra, which has grown into a high-quality chamber orchestra and will hopefully grow more as he puts on more shows).

I've also retaken editing the SW series.  There are one or two stories I've been writing in the interim, one because it simply happened, and one because my daughter challenged me that I can't write about vampires (which I can but I find them boring).  Predictably, the "simply happened" science fiction story has a very clear direction, thrust, and that immense creative energy that predicts a story that writes itself.  And the vampire story is contrived and painful, and fails to go anywhere.  It's a non-starter.  Maybe I really can't write about vampires.  There's another little story lurking in the woods, a really spooky one, which promises to be quite short; I can see its ending.  But it moves much better than the vampire story.

Energy matters

This is something I observed.  Certain jobs take it out of a person where others feed you, energize you.  Music in any shape energizes me, I can live on that energy.  So does writing; and funnily, web programming.  Writing is a pretty selfish kind of energy though, I'm still not quite sure why we do it.  (Because otherwise the voices in our heads don't shut up?)  What amazed me was the energy that spun off from Mercury Silver.  Now to find a way of making that niche into a thing I can give enough time because it doesn't only feed my spirit but my family...