Monthly Archives: September 2015

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My Kindle Scout Campaign is Live!

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

I was super excited to get the email telling me that I’d been accepted and that my campaign would go live today. So now I have 30 days to get as many nominations as possible. They don’t reveal the number of nominations unfortunately so I won’t have any idea of just how many are coming in on a daily basis. No idea what their threshold is for acceptance. Basically the most any author can do it submit the best, finished book they can. Avatars & Identity was the first book I managed to find a copy editor for so I can at least be confident that it’s my best work so far. Getting published by Amazon would be a big step forward, of course. Having someone actively pushing your book can only help with getting the word out.

The whole system is pretty cool. Anyone with an Amazon account can nominate up to three books a month. I’ll probably spend some time in the next couple of weeks checking out other books up for nomination. I’ve got two free slots to fill after all! For anyone interested, this is the link to my campaign:

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/2IWW36YM9USU5

Here’s hoping I make the final cut!

Business & Moore, Publishing, School, Writing

Frantic

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

I’m really hoping the frantic pace I’ve had to maintain this past week and weekend won’t be the one needed to get through this semester. It was my first full week of classes. Today is Sunday, and I’m exhausted. I had a paper due today, I’ve got another due (much longer) Tuesday, with two more due soon after. I suppose the hardest part for me is keeping track of each little task required for each class and making sure I get them done on time.

I managed today’s deadline for the paper (an obituary for my non-fiction class), but it really was a struggle. I think it was mostly because the obit wasn’t about someone I knew personally. That made research and fact-checking more time consuming than actually writing the damn thing. Thankfully the next assignment is based on personal experience.

The bit that’s due Tuesday is for my fiction workshop and is a short story based on a dream I had last Thursday. The dream was so vivid and provided such a strong basis for a story that I went to school early to start working on it. By the end of the day I had ten pages done. Clearly fiction is my strong suit.

In other news, formatting and all of the necessary bits for Avatars & Identity was finally done this evening. Which means I was able to submit it all to the Kindle Scout program. According to their info, I’ll hear back from them in a day or two if it gets accepted. Then it’s a month and a half wait to find out if enough readers like it for them to take it on and publish it. Of course I’m hoping to get published as having Amazon push my book for me is a very appealing thought. More importantly though I think it will go a long way toward establishing my presence as an author. That’s the idea anyway. Time will tell.

Writing, Method, Business & Moore, Publishing, School

First Impressions

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Now that I’m in my third week of classes (but only my first full week thanks to our ridiculous starting schedule) and I’ve had at least one session with every class I have mostly put my fears to rest. I like all of my classes, though some more than others. Unexpectedly, I am seriously enjoying my ENG242 English Literature class. It’s one of two required for all English majors and covers English Literature from the late 18th century onward. We’ll be reading “Pride and Prejudice,” “Wuthering Heights,” and other classics. So far though we’ve only gone through selections from Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful and Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man. I’ve been far more interested in this very thick and heavy reading than anything from my previous literature class. My least favorite class so far is my creative non-fiction workshop. Mostly because I’ve always been a fiction writer, and reader, at heart. I’ll read most any story if it’s done well but somehow fiction has always resonated more with me. Still, it’s very early days.

What I didn’t underestimate, and fully expected, was the workload accompanying taking four English classes: one literature and three workshops. I’m already a very busy bee doing classwork. Pile on top the copy edited version of Avatars & Identity that I still need to finish plus the audio book version of Transformation that I need to get through ASAP and I’m swamped. I really wish both of my book items would have been ready for me before school started but thems the breaks, as they say. For now I’m up to date with homework and slowly chipping away at the rest.

Publishing, School, Writing

New Semester, New Beginnings

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

Gotta love coming back after a summer of not blogging only to discover your site has stopped working thanks to a random WordPress update while you were away. Serves me right for being away so long. The good news is everything is almost back to normal. I just have to reinstall two plugins that I had to FTP in and remove just to be able to login. Then WordPress wouldn’t update to the latest and greatest and in fact couldn’t find the update page. After some intensive Google searching though I managed to find someone else who’d had the same problem. Turns out one little line added to a config file magically fixed the issue. Woot!

Now that I’m through an exceptionally lazy summer (where writing is concerned anyway) and I also have my main computer back up and running, it’s time to head back to college. This semester started strangely schedule-wise with classes starting the Wednesday before Labor Day. This meant my first week excluded ALL of my writing classes and included only my required English Literature class. Then Labor Day came along and I still haven’t been to my Create Writing Poetry workshop. Ah well, next week. Next week.

I was actually pretty upset about the whole scheduling thing until today when one of my teachers happened to mention that this semester is extra long and ends on a Tuesday. Clearly they’re making up for their own scheduling stupidity. Would it really have been to hard to start classes on Monday even though it would have been August 31st? Apparently.

The classes themselves have been good so far, though it’s really hard to say at this point how they’ll really pan out. The first sessions are all syllabus readings and constant introductions. Today I had both my non-fiction and fiction workshops. Pretty sure I’m going to like both but man am I going to be busy with three workshops and my lit class. Then there’s my own writing and publishing that I have to find time for.

Speaking of my writing, I just got Avatars & Identity from a copy editor I found on a site called Fiverr (it’s like the eBay of personal services without any actual bidding). Started going through his edits and discovered that at some point in my life I completely ignored what I’d learned about commas. Apparently I’m allergic. (Not really, I just think the so-called rules call for so many commas that they break up the flow of narrative.) Still, I’m accepting most of the changes since I want my book to be on its best behavior when I submit it to the Kindle Scout program.

For those who haven’t heard of this yet, and I’m sure there are many who haven’t, Amazon is becoming a full-on publisher with their Kindle Scout program. The way it works is you submit a fully completed and copy edited novel of at least 50k words with an awesome cover, blurb, and one-liner. They’ll shop it around to a select group of readers. If the readers and Amazon’s own people approve you’ll get to sign a contract. This contract in fact. After reading and hearing about all of the horror stories regarding contracts with the big publishers I was very happy to work through Amazon’s very simple and straightforward contract in fifteen minutes flat. It’s for worldwide e-book and digital audio rights for a 5-year term that renews barring poor sales or voluntarily on the author’s part. There’s even built-in guarantees that if you don’t earn enough through royalties you will get all of your rights back. From a new author standpoint I have to say this contract is a better deal than what you’d get from almost anyone else. I’m super excited to get Avatars submitted and see what happens.

 

Whelp, that’s enough for now. Homework beckons.