After a long hiatus caused by illness and technical problems, Perihelion SF is back in business – hurrah! My new robot story ‘Clanky’ features in the latest issue.
Perihelion features a variety of SF stories (no fantasy or horror) that are readable and entertaining instead of pushing a PC agenda or letting you know about some ‘victim’. This sort of SF is getting hard to find.
I Cracked the Meatgrinder!
It had to be done. Today I sat down with the word file of a book and followed Mark Coker’s step by step instructions in Smashwords Style Guide to get it accepted for all formats on Smashwords.
I have previously gone to Draft2Digital and used their converter for my self-published works then uploaded the epub to Smashwords. I want to be on Smashwords because my ‘real’ publisher Alban Lake is there. To be fair, I used all of Draft2Digital’s distribution channels and only opted for the ones they don’t cover on Smashwords.
Unfortunately, while Smashwords Meatgrinder will convert a suitably formatted Word document into all other formats for sale on the site – including mobi for kindles – if you upload an epub all you get is an epub. I wanted more but was terrified of the task of beating Meatgrinder.
Actually, it wasn’t so bad. It took me two and a half hours, from 1 pm to 3-30 pm. As some others have said, if you do it step by step and go for the ‘nuclear option’ at the start it’s possible. The main annoyance was that I went through all 23 Chapter headings making them into a different font for one part and then had to go through them all again to bookmark them to make a Table of Contents. Next time I will do both at once.
And now, Draft2Digital has announced a distribution deal with Amazon. That means that Draft2Digital have all the major book retailers as well as a very easy publishing system.
Is this the end for Smashwords? Will Amazon buy Draft2Digital? Who knows?
Contrary to some sensible advice online, I’m doing NaNoWriMo and am up to 10,000 words.
I started a day late. I posted a Salon article on Facebook to say what a bad idea it was because the last thing the world needs is more trashy novels. Some more positive people said it was a good spur to get the words out as long as you remembered it was only a first draft. The Salon article said that in December agents and publishers are buried under an avalanche of NaNoWriMo unpolished first drafts (and this was back in 2010, it’s bigger now). One lady on Facebook replied that she has done it for eight years and had seven novels taken by publishers, AFTER polishing them.
So, I decided to try it. And it is indeed a good spur. I’m not a natural novelist and I suspect this story won’t run to the whole 50,000 words but as long as I get to the end of it, I’m happy. It will probably be a novella of about 30,000 words. Maybe I’ll keep going and write a second novella just to complete the word count making my own scheme NaTwoNovellasWriMo.
I read somewhere, long ago, that to break an old habit or acquire a new one takes a month. So if one produces 1700 words a day for a month one will have the habit of doing it every day. All those self-publish and make millions advisors say you should bash out 10,000 words a day, a novel a week, in a series of 700 novels about the adventures of Burt the Barbarian or whoever, selling them of 99p on Kindle until you’re rich. If everyone tried that (and I sometimes think everyone is, there are 20,000 new books a week on Kindle apparently) the world would be awash with novels. And…er…it is.
