Karen Sandler

Category: Strongly Held Beliefs

  • Taking a Risk

    My husband and I spent the week before last helping my son and daughter-in-law move into their new house. New to them, that is. The house is close to 90 years old, and has many of the “glitches” you’d expect an old house to have. Maybe more than glitches in some cases.

    I knew there was another house they’d looked at in the area and from what I recall from the Realtor’s photos, it was a newer, less glitchy home. I really liked the looks of that house and the fact that it was right next to a park. But when I asked my son about their choice between the top two, he said, “Well, there was the safe house, and there was the interesting house. We chose the interesting house.”

    I bring this up because it made me think of the whole issue of taking risks, not only in life, but in writing. If I’d been the one choosing the house, I’m pretty darn sure I would have picked the “safe” house. Yes, it was more of a suburban tract home. It didn’t have much in the way of intriguing features (unlike the “interesting” house, which has wonderful windows, a stately entry and living room, and a dining room with a cool little built in china cabinet). The safe house looked comfortable, but it was a bit blah.

    To connect this to my writing, what if I always chose the comfortable, but blah? Would I have ever sold a book, let alone the 20 that I’ve sold in my career? Would readers have eagerly looked for my books, read them with enjoyment, sighed with the satisfaction of experiencing a good story if I’d stayed “safe?” I’m thinking not. I’m thinking I’ve been better off taking the interesting road rather than the safe one.

    How about you? Do you take risks in your writing? Do you create characters, scenes, stories that are safe, or are they interesting? It might end up being more work, a more difficult endeavor. But in the end, when you take the interesting path, you have a much better chance that the book you’ve written, the literary house you’ve built, will be wow and anything but blah.

  • Adventures in the e-Trade – Part 2

    I decided to start my foray into self-publishing with my two Berkley Jove Haunting Hearts books, Unforgettable and Night Whispers. These were the only two books for which I did not have an electronic file. There were my original files, but I wanted to start with the final edited book. That I had only in printed form.

    So I sacrificed one author copy of each book, sending them off to Blue Leaf Book Scanning. Since I was willing to let them cut the books up to make scanning easier, the cost for scanning two 300+ page books was quite reasonable.

    They did a decent job, but it still took a good long time to correct the errors. Besides misinterpreting letters (a cl might become a d), paragraphs throughout were often chopped in two mid-sentence or even mid-word. Sometimes italics became plain text, so I had to flip through the physical book to make sure text that I wanted italicized was indeed italicized.

    I made several passes to correct scanning errors, then at least one editing pass. My cover artist was busy with the covers for the first two books (the final for THE IN-BETWEEN, formerly UNFORGETTABLE, is above), so when the manuscript was ready, so was the cover.

    But nailing down the typos and polishing the prose was only the first step. Next I had to make sure the manuscript was in a format that would easily and correctly convert to Kindle (I’m mainly selling my books through Amazon). I had to make sure that where I wanted blank lines, I had to use the before/after spacing option in Word rather than just hit enter. I had to make sure I was using indents for each paragraph rather than tabs. Without these two crucial fixes, the converter would ignore all my paragraph indents and blank lines. I of course had to do manual page breaks where I wanted a new chapter to begin.

    I then had to wrestle with the converter program I’d decided to use, Mobipocket Creator. In my opinion, the interface is a little goofy and klugy. It asks for information (pricing, for instance) that you will then have to enter again when you put the book up on Amazon. It is not at all clear how to, say, change the cover art or substitute in a new book file without deleting everything and starting all over. I am a very experienced computer user, but many aspects of Mobipocket Creator baffled me.

    I did finally get the book into Kindle format (which I could check out using my PC Kindle reader). I discovered with subsequent books (I’ve done seven so far and intend to do two more) that the best time to check for those final little issues is using your PC Kindle reader. It’s far easier to navigate through the book there than later when you’ve uploaded it on Amazon’s website.

    Once the converted file was ready, I filled in the forms on Amazon, uploaded my cover image and .prc file and waited the couple days for that book to be published. In the case of the first two books, I went ahead and also submitted them to Smashwords as well. That necessitated me inserting certain language on the copyright page, so I had to have a separate version of the book just for Smashwords. Assuming you meet the qualifications, Smashwords will put up your book on Koby, Nook (Barnes & Noble), Sony, and the iStore unless you opt out of any of those venues. It’s been a little trickier getting them taken down (which I’m trying to do, to make these first two books exclusive on Amazon as the rest are), but I think I have it nailed now. Their customer service is not as responsive as I might like, but they have a lot of authors to take care of.

    Side note: Why am I going exclusive with Amazon? Because in their KDP select program you get a couple of bennies: free days (up to 5 where you can offer your book free) and inclusion in their Amazon Prime library. Also, I found it tedious working with Smashwords, and after selling a whopping 3 books there, it didn’t seem worth the effort. I confess to a certain amount of apprehension contributing to the unvanquishableness that is Amazon, but I’m doing well there sales-wise and making some decent money. Hard to pass that up.

    Going back to The In-Between (formerly Unforgettable) and Dark Whispers (formerly Night Whispers), it was a whole rigamarole figuring out I wanted to change the titles and author names after I’d published them. The cover art change wasn’t a problem, since my artist is so easy to work with. And it was simple enough changing the book title and author on Amazon. But I couldn’t make heads nor tails of how to accomplish the same task on Smashwords. Apparently there’s a way, but I never figured it out. I ended up abandoning one account and adding a second one, which led to no end of confusion when I decided to unpublish my books from there.

    So, be sure of your title and author name before you request your cover art and start the publishing process. Otherwise you’ll be chasing your tail trying to fix things when you really just want your book up for sale so you can start building an audience.

    One last note regarding self-publishing. As I mentioned in a previous post, all the books I’ve put up on Amazon are books I’d already made money on, that had already been edited. They’d proven themselves by having been either traditionally or small press published.

    I won’t tell anyone not to self-publish a book they’ve either not been able to sell traditionally, or are choosing not to go the traditional route at the outset. But I beg you not to toss any old bowl of spaghetti against the publishing wall (i.e., to see what sticks). Get the book vetted first by writer friends you trust, or beta readers, or pay an editor if you can afford it. I’ve discovered some dreadful books using Kindle’s sample feature and more often than not, they’re (a) self-published and (b) the only book the author’s written. Pul-leeze, learn your craft first.

    Any questions? Ask ’em in the comments.

  • Temptation: 1, Me: 0

    Generally speaking, I should not stop for yard sales. If I do, there’s a .999 probability that I will spend money. Usually it will be some small knickknack that only costs a couple dollars. But sometimes (like today), it requires pulling out my mad money to lay down some semi-serious cash.

    I could blame it on my husband. I certainly blamed him that time I was admiring a kitten at an adoption clinic and begged him to let me take her home. We already had three cats, and I counted on him to tell me, in a reasonable tone of voice, “No, Karen, we already have enough cats.” He did not. Instead, he said, “Sure, let’s adopt her.”

    Cosette turned out to be a wonderful cat who spent most of her waking hours snuggled up to me. Sadly, a heart condition cut short her life at a young age.

    In any case, you can see that my husband is supposed to be the safety brake to my acquisitive nature. So when we stopped at a yard sale to check out a dining room set (we actually do need a dining room set), I counted on him to temper my temptations. But I’d already seen the school desk/chair when we were scanning the offerings from our car. Close up, I liked it even more. It turned out the price was kind of reasonable and when I made an offer, the counter was exactly what I’d expected and was willing to pay.

    So, I said, “I want this.” Hubby’s response…crickets. Other than opining that he had no idea where in the house we would put it (I said I’d jam it into my office if I had to), he just let me go on my merry way.

    I did pay for it with my aforementioned “mad money,” cash I receive from book sales that I happened to have tucked away. So the purchase didn’t impact our household finances at all. But hubby didn’t exactly live up to his side of the bargain by saving me from myself.

    But why did I want it, from the moment I spotted it at the yard sale? Because (A) I love old furniture. I love that it’s made from solid wood, that it’s well put together. It’s something I inherited from my dad, I guess. He loved to work with his hands and was an amazing woodworker. (B) I’ve always thought purpose-built furniture is particularly cool. The fact that this is a combo desk-chair is so neat. (C) I love its connection with the past. As I was carrying it into the house, it occurred to me that my mom likely sat at a desk just like it when she was in school in the 30s and 40s.

    There’s a divot carved out of the desktop and I can imagine a restless boy like my father carefully drilling out that hole with his pen knife to while away the slow moving hours in the classroom. There’s a big X scrawled across the desk top too, maybe made by some frustrated student who just had enough of the times tables when a beautiful spring day awaited him or her just outside the schoolhouse windows.

    What am I going to do with this desk-chair? No idea. For now, I piled a few of my granddaughter’s books in the storage area under the seat. She’s a toddler and a little too small to use the chair, but I bet she’ll be intrigued by it next time she comes over.

    And maybe I’ll just sit in the chair myself, write out a few times tables and think about the students who once used it. Girls like my mom, who won a contest in high school with the slogan “Don’t be square, the cafeteria’s not the place to brush your hair.” And boys like my dad, who would sit in old stuffy classrooms dreaming about how he would have much rather be running in an open field with a kite, or riding his bike to the ocean.

  • RIP Ray Bradbury

    I think I read Ray Bradbury for the first time in the summer of 1970. I’d had just moved to L.A. to live with my dad. I can’t remember how came across that first book of short stories, or even what the first book was. I just know that after that I read every Ray Bradbury book I could get my hands on.

    I’ve been reading various obits and have come to realize that the stories in those books I read in the ’70s had been written decades before. Yet to me, they seemed timeless, just as immediate as if they’d been written exactly for me. I also thought I’d read just about everything Bradbury had written, but a scan of his bibliography tells me I had a long way to go.

    Of his novels, I’ve read Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes (and wrote a poem using that marvelous title). Of his short story collections, I’ve read The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Dark Carnival, The Illustrated Man, The October Country, R is for Rocket and S is for Space. Maybe some others that I’m not remembering. I tried looking for the books on our overflowing bookshelves, but with time I think those original paperbacks have pretty much distintegrated.

    The thing about reading Bradbury’s stories is that it seemed as if he was describing exactly my childhood. I didn’t grow up in a small town in Illinois (heck, I was raised in Los Angeles). But he managed to capture and distill what it meant to be a child. How those golden summers seemed to last forever, how the chill of an October Halloween night feels on your face, the hopes and dreams of childhood that are largely forgotten once we’re adults.

    Yes, he wrote speculative fiction, but even within those stories his atmospheric description of setting had a way of reaching inside me and getting me emotionally involved. It also made me long to be able to write stories just like that. I’d already decided I wanted to be a writer, but if I hadn’t settled on speculative fiction as my chosen genre, I certainly did after reading Ray Bradbury.

    A few years later, I had the opportunity to hear Bradbury speak at the community college I was attending. I don’t remember much of what he said, but I remember being enthralled. I also seem to recall going up afterwards and asking him a question. But what the question was or what he might have answered are lost in the mists of time.

    I want to pick up his books again. Maybe there are a few on my bookshelves that survived the 40 years since I first acquired them. If not, there’s always the library (they’re having a Friends of the Library sale this weekend) or the local bookstore. I’ll have to find his books in paper because Bradbury only agreed to digitizing one book (Fahrenheit 451) before he died. But reading Ray Bradbury via a paper book, the way I did that endless summer of 1970, seems exactly the proper way to revisit the master.

     

  • Pride and Education

    In the last week, my son and daughter-in-law have both been awarded their PhDs in economics. To say I’m proud of them is an understatement. I’m pretty much doing the Snoopy dance of joy in response to their accomplishments. It’s made even more impressive by the fact that both of them achieved their bachelors degrees in three years rather than the usual four. And they did that by excelling in their high school AP courses so that those classes counted toward their BA.

    On my husband’s side of the family, his dad was an attorney. His mom completed some college. But on my side, both my mom’s mom and dad’s dad only went as far as the 8th grade. My dad didn’t finish high school. He got his GED from the Navy. My mom graduated high school, then attended beauty school. She ended up spending much of her working life as a waitress (although in the last part of her life, she owned a restaurant).

    Of my three sisters, only the oldest one went to college, and she got an AA. I knew I wanted more than that. I remember sitting down with my dad one day, telling him I wanted to go to college. He asked, “But what if you get married and quit?” I told him, “Oh, Dad, I won’t do that.” It seems so old-fashioned for a dad to ask a daughter that question, but at that time, we were on the cusp between women being homemakers only and women beginning to test the waters that only men swam in.

    So I got my BA and later a masters. The first one in my family to go that far. And when I had my own kids, we never lectured them about college, we never pushed them, but it must have been in their DNA. They went straight from high school to college. Leading to a BA for my older son and an eventual PhD for my younger son.

    This blog post is a bragfest, but it’s also me announcing how fanatical I am about education. I feel strongly that kids have to do something after high school, whether it’s four-year college, trade school, apprenticeship. If they want a job that’s going to pay more than minimum wage, that might eventually earn them a profession, they need education. And if there’s any way to do that without a pile of debt at the end, that’s ideal. It sucks that education costs so much at many institutions.

    So I’m going to bask a little in the reflected glow of my son’s accomplishment (and my daughter-in-law’s even though that’s even more reflected). And there will be a massive grin on my face (and a few tears) when they graduate June 14th.