Gorbman.comMerida, Mexico and Seattle, USA General Blog plus reflections on publishing an ebook, plus photo gallery

Writing and electronically publishing a novel

This will be an ongoing discussion of my process in writing a novel and getting it onto Amazon ebooks, which I think is what I want to do. Many people have been very helpful to me in this project, including Lorna Gail Dallin, Don Batchelor, Dan Brown, Richard Pauli, Lennie Martin, Jim Butler, Josh Gatchke and all the members of my writing group in Merida.

I had sketched out the book and written a few chapters some time ago,and then let it sit for quite a while until the bug bit me – hard – about a month ago. Not coincidentally, it was our first reasonably cool day. I think I felt alive again.

Anyway, I’ve been having a great time with it since then and as of this morning, I’m on page 168. Of course that’s not 168 finished pages. They’ve only been proofed once and I have more fact checking to do.

Plus once in a while I decide to add a character, and I have to go back and plunk them in appropriate places in the whole manuscript.

I especially like doing dialog, and I hope I’m not relying on it too much. It is “Show, don’t tell” and I like the way it works but I have to be careful or the conversations can get trite. I try to leave out stuff like, “Oh yeah?” Or, “That’s good.”

The Reasearch

I read most of “2012 For Dummies” which, by the way, does not take a neutral stance. It’s a good source though. And it really is for dummies.

I’ve read bits and pieces of Daniel Pinchbeck, John Major Jenkins, and Terence McKenna, the big three, all of whom are much too detailed and smart for me to read without drifting off.

My favorite written material is the collection of folios by a passionately driven, self-educated local seer named Jose Diaz Bolio, who died in Merida in recent history. I understand he was a bit of a roue and played the piano and the women in nightclubs. He wrote a lot of material about the Maya that was debunked when published and later recognized as good information. Diaz Bolio didn’t speak specifically of 2012 but he had a creepy and insightful view on what it will look and feel like when the earth goes through a profound change and then ceases to exist.

Most of my research has been done on the web. Probably hundreds of hours. A lot of people have excellent websites with great links. See my article published on today’s general blog and look at the links at the end.    I also loved the article A Tsunami of Stupidity on Slate (5/22/09) by Ron Rosenbaum.

The Story

This is a novel set in Merida and Chichen Itza beginning a few days before December 21 2012. It’s about all the groups of people who converge on the city, all with strong differences of opinion.

Our heroine, the same person as in my first book, Madrugada, is Miriam Glass a 45 y/o woman from New York who is a legal investigator in New York. In the last book, she forms an enduring friendship with the police chief of Yucatan, Jose Luis Contreras, and he retains her occasionally as a consultant to help him deal with the difficult gringo community, a task that presents a real chore for him.

Other characters include some of the New Age leaders and thinkers, foreign ex-pats in Merida, Miriam’s buddy Mary the nurse, Martin the night custodian from Milwaukee, a charismatic woman named Lulu Starr, and an enigmatic hippy named William, who was in the other book.

Until just yesterday, I had the murderer pinned down, but then I changed my mind and decided to make it someone else, which involved a bit of revision to set the stage.

When I write, I feel like a puppeteer pulling strings. I can make these characters do anything I want them to. Live, die, be very naughty, be high minded, mess with each other, have accidents, etc.

Basically, Miriam is in Merida at the pinnacle of the 2012 hysteria. There are several murders and she and Contreras (plus all the police agencies, FBI, and several crime labs) work round the clock to figure out who did them before the bad guys get on a plane and disappear and/or kill more people.

During the process, Miriam has heavy duty personal encounters with several other characters. I’ve tried to draw on all the characters’ personae and how their psychological make-ups determine their actions in crisis. There are some heroes, but not who you would expect.

You can read the first bit of the book here, in this section of my site.

Why Amazon eBooks?

It’s hard for a first-time fiction writer to get published in print by a real publishing company. My wonderful agent, Alice Volpe, tells me that these days you pretty much have to be famous in your own right or already be  a successful author. I am neither, so none of the publishers she has submitted Madrugada to have shown much interest. It makes me sad because I think it’s pretty good, probably better than Shit Happens.

So I reasoned that an increasing number of people are tagging the internet for 2012 stuff, and there is very little fiction on the subject (although there is some that I’m ordering). Most of the fiction is dead serious sci fi and the other books are predominantly by people with a specific point of view. My book is a little different – lighter, even funny. And it takes a look at the whole panorama of belief systems.

And I picked Amazon because I admire them and lots of people order from them. I think they’re a smart company. Jeff Bezos has been on the forefront of electronic marketing and saw the potential before anyone else did, IMHO. He also worked harder. (No, I’m not a relative nor do I know him.) There’s a lot of bad chatter online about the Amazon eBooks business arrangements, but I think anything new will have kinks.

Apparently you can make your book available in two formats – as a Kindle book and/or as a straight computer download. You can pick your own price and can charge differently for the different versions. My friend Don says that on the computer download version, Amazon builds in a feature that prevents consumers from copying or forwarding your book. Maybe they’re converted to PDF? Don’t know.

Publication Process

I’ve just started to learn about publishing on Amazon ebooks and will share what I’ve learned. Some of it might be wrong and I could change my point of view and decide to do this another way. But this is where I am so far.

It looks so easy, I can barely believe it. And there doesn’t seem to be any screening process – people looking over their bifocals and saying, “Nah – I don’t think so.” Of course this also means there’s a lot of crap up there, but you can tell which books are crap by the descriptions and summaries, usually written by the authors.

I am humping along on this project because I feel like this publication open access can’t last. They are going to have to put some kind of gatekeeping function on this soon, because as people become more aware of it, Amazon and other companies will be deluged.

All you have to do, it says on Amazon’s site, is upload your file. You answer a bunch of questions on an index screen – name address, etc. But as far as the manuscript is concerned, it looks like they do the HTML formatting if you need it. I’m using Word and will upload in HTML format so it shouldn’t need much attention. I’m trying to find out if I should include my headers and footers, or how that works.

At some point in the process, the writer is presented with a contract agreement from Amazon. I don’t know what it says. I don’t know what percentage of revenue goes to the author. I know they don’t pay for several months from when a book is bought, which has caused a lot of online grousing, but I can understand how it would be problematic to pay early in case there are disputes with the consumer and he wants to “return” the book.

You would think I could find the terms and conditions online, but I didn’t see it.

If any of you out there know about the author percentages and other terms, please comment below.

I have read that the contract is non-exclusive.

You can use an electronic book publishing company to help you put your book up – of course, there’s a price. They do editing, formatting, supposedly some marketing, and they provide you with an ISBN number. However, for about $250, you can buy ten ISBN numbers yourself, which makes you a publisher. You can also get your own copyright for $100. These processes each take ten days to two months.

What to name my “publishing company?” Maybe Publishing Company.

This is too much fun.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 11:17 am and is filed under 2012: Deadly Awakening - Getting An EBook Into Circulation Online. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.