April 2017

April 27, 2017

Book reviews by Jerry Waxler

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Book reviews by Jerry Waxler

I am delighted to read a recent blog post “Two inspiring memoirs about suffering” by Jerry Waxler, an American author, teacher and advocate for the personal value of memoir to transform our lives.

As well as Trapped Jerry reviewed Sixtyfive Roses, an account of the life and death of a dearly loved younger sister from cystic fibrosis. (Who knew all about her ailments from an early age: in her infancy Sixtyfive Roses was the closest she could get to pronouncing cystic fibrosis.)

As Jerry recommends Sixtyfive Roses so highly, I am reading this memoir on my kindle at the moment, and find it a clear and compassionate exploration of the life of a whole family faced with the challenges of life-long illness and the loss of a beloved family member.  (I shall review it again when I have finished reading it.)

In his review, Jerry writes ‘ each author climbs to the best parts of themselves by enduring the hardship they encounter along the way.‘  Though I am naturally inclined to resist the conclusion that I am ‘lucky’ to have had my ‘disability’ experiences, he very neatly sums up why any of us might endure annoyance, pain and sorrow, and then be able to look back on our less wonderful experiences in a spirit of resignation and acceptance.

Perhaps I can say, I am very pleased to have come this far, and inexpressibly grateful that I shall never have to go back again.  So often, ‘luck’ is more obvious in retrospect, if we manage to keep body and soul together in the meantime.  I know I am very, very lucky to be where I am now, and I believe that writing my memoir has helped me to reach a peaceful place.  The love and support of my friends, family, readers and colleagues is a precious part of that achievement.

Jerry teaches memoir writing, and is passionate about his craft, so I am delighted that he has not only read and enjoyed my story, but is able to review it so favourably.  Thank you so much, Jerry.  I am delighted and touched by your article, and all your positive comments, which I hope will help Trapped to reach an even wider audience.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

 

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April 24, 2017

A lovely way to edit

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A lovely way to edit

Over the holidays, I’ve been learning how to de-format and re-format text for uploading onto Kindle, because I’m going to publish Happiness Matters and Making Miracles myself (with a lot of help from my editor, cover designer and typesetters…).

One Saturday afternoon I decided to sit down and learn how to do formatting, as per instructions in Chris Longmuir’s book – see my previous blog post – and I finally got a handle on the process by about seven o’clock the same evening. Enough of a handle, at any rate, to be able to relax , want to keep learning and to marvel at the ingenuity and precision of the process.

As an added bonus, in the process of learning how to upload books in different file formats, I discover that uploading any of my work onto a kindle is a wonderful way to proof read it, the flat screen clearly exposing any typos, page glitches and blanks that I can then set my hand to sorting out.

I may have read a piece a thousand times, but it never ceases to amaze me what the eye does not see. E-book formats give us the chance to read a book as if for the first time, and to quickly highlight issues that we simply can’t see while at the keyboard: a superfluity of commas, for example, or an over-use of one phrase…. Amazingly, these jump of the virtual page, demanding to be noticed when read on a kindle.

If nothing else, I am grateful to have learned that this is an excellent way to review and crit work.

Having thought about it some more, I don’t think I will do all the formatting myself. I am now paying more attention to how other books are set out by professionals, and appreciating the value of detailed exactitude, and I would rather ask a professional to take that on, and continue learning about the process gradually without the added stress of deadlines and so on: it is invaluable to know how the process works, more or less, so that I can see where and how it fits in the overall process, and understand what I have to do in any particular case, but not so that I can feel I immediately have to become very good at it. Professional skills take years to acquire, so why not ask a professional?

Thanks for reading!

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April 20, 2017

The Joys of Self Publishing

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THE JOYS OF SELF PUBLISHING

As the season turns and I find myself looking forward to a warm Summer, I am also embarking on a new career as an indie publisher, contemplating all the joys of self publishing.

My second book, Happiness Matters is ready to go and all the pieces of the jigsaw are slowly coming together. I have spent the last few weeks learning about formatting – for kindle, Epub files – and setting up accounts on IngramSpark, CreateSpace and KDP. (For the moment, HTML eludes me, but if someone tells me it is a synch and this is how it works, I would be more than happy to give it a bash.)

So I thought now would be a good time to start a new series of articles about self-publishing. It is an  interesting enterprise, filled with tax implications, royalty puzzles, discounts and resellers, but – the learning has lots of advantages, not the least of which is that I can now ask semi-intelligent questions about subjects which until only months ago, were a total mystery to me. It is lovely to feel, at last, that I can contribute meaningfully to the indie publishing debate. And, I know roughly what questions to ask.

It becomes apparent that I cannot leave all this stuff I have to know, to other people. Yes, there are services available to those of us who simply can’t get our heads round any more information, but similarly, there are books available that are a joy to read, easily demystifying the jargon into something easy enough to understand, with a bit of practical application and repetition. Knowing what de-formatting and formatting involve, I can now, at least, decide whether I am confident enough to do that, or whether I would, after all, prefer to pass it to a professional. Knowing what it involves, I feel very confident to delegate.

If anyone would like to read an ARC of Happiness Matters please do contact me. I can let you have a recent version in mobi or as a word document.

Thanks for reading.

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April 17, 2017

Book Review: Nuts and Bolts of Self Publishing – by Chris Longmuir

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Book Review: Nuts and Bolts of Self-Publishing by Chris Longmuir

I could just say, to any novice indie publisher who knows nothing – and doesn’t realise that s/he knows nothing –

This book is a fantastic, easy to read, fun and practical introduction to indie publishing; and anyone contemplating self-publishing should simply go and buy it. And buy the paperback, so you can prop it on your printer, refer to it obsessively, and learn from it, until the book falls open from over-use at certain favoured places.

I could just say, this is one of the best books I have read on indie publishing. (No, it’s not quite the only one, but it is definitely among the best ….) Compact, easy to read and to carry around, easy to love and take to bed in the wee small hours, this book has really helped me so much to lay aside the twin fears of anyone starting out on the indie publishing road, namely, that (a) publishing one’s own books is all too complicated for one to understand and (b) that indie publishing is bound to be too expensive.

Longmuir makes no assumptions about what the reader knows, (which is so refreshing). So she explains just about all that needs to be explained for the serious novice. That might sound like a bit of a contradiction, but we all need to start somewhere. Okay, so in these technological times my age might be against me, but it does also give me some advantages: I know my way around a keyboard fairly well, and I know that there are several ways to find and do things. So I can work out that to de-format a book for Kindle, (before reformatting it, in a mobi-friendly fashion) you can use the ‘find’ and ‘replace’ functions to de-format (which means, take out all the tabs, italics, bold, extra fonts…but leave in the page returns) in seconds.

Nuts and Bolts is gently and helpfully repetitive, so you don’t have to read the whole book again to find a single reference. It also contains helpful checklists.

That there is a definite order to the way of doing things also becomes apparent, but knowing what to do and how and why, is such a relief. And it occurs to me that while I will engage the services of several professionals to help with editing and publishing expertise, there is no better way to get it right than to know a bit about what the whole process involves before making that call or sending that email.

Happiness Matters is my next book, which I am hoping to publish soon, my first outing as an indie author. Meantime, Chris’s book gets full marks from a very grateful reader. Thank you.

 

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