In this week’s episode, Alien Interpretation, my boy, Ian, came through with flying colors for the win and that jerk, Jerry, got booted. (Tara got booted, too) What jumped out at me was how Ian won and why the Jerry got booted. The correlation between the episode and what’s going on in publishing right now is downright spooky.

Patrick gives Ian some pointers on how to realize his bat-creature.

Ian is very young (he looks about twelve to me) and he’s nervous and intense and eager and insecure, and he’s also immensely talented and creative. Jerry is a blowhard. Twenty years experience in the field, knows it all, has his way of doing things and nobody can tell him different. He is also very talented and creative. As far as he’s concerned, he’s got nothing to learn. During the episode, he was harassing the two youngest, least experienced competitors (Ian and Sue). He mocked their skills and inexperience, and their nervousness.  When Patrick Tatopoulos, one of the judges, acting as the client, consulted with the artists, I noticed Jerry was very smug, too busy demonstrating his know-it-all attitude to pay much attention to what Patrick was saying. Ian, on the other hand, practically crawled inside Patrick’s skull. You could see it in his eyes how hard he was paying attention and absorbing every word Patrick had to say. Those attitudes showed in the final reveal. Jerry’s creation was solid, but dull

he judges' critique of Jerry's alien provoked a defensive reaction.

without any spark of specialness. Worse, he muffed the coloring of his creature and when the judges questioned his choice, he gave them a snotty answer about how he didn’t see any need to give the client expected results. He’s an artist with vision, after all, and he knows best. In contrast, Ian stretched the limits of his skills. He suffered some setbacks that could have been disasters, but he consulted with his buddies RJ and Rayce, who are very open to the idea of helping their fellow artists, and Ian came up with brilliant ways to turn his disasters into triumphs. During the judging, he was nervous, unsure. He looked at his creation and knew it was good, but he wanted it better and he essentially said so. The judges named him this week’s winner.

That’s the lesson for traditional publishers. You guys are Jerry. You’re looking down your noses and snickering into your martinis over those silly little self-publishers. You’re smug and set in your ways and you think you have nothing to learn. The indies you disparage with their eagerness and nervous energy are doing something you’ve forgotten how to do. They’re learning. The most important thing they’re learning is how to please the customer. While you are producing safe, stodgy same old-same old stuff you know is best for the readers (who cares what they want) indies are branching out, taking chances, connecting to readers and actually listening to them. They’re getting better. Do you read indie work? You should. I read a lot of it. Indies are growing, nurturing their talent, honing their skills. They’re turning their weaknesses into strengths.

Every time I read one of your articles assuring the reading public that you are still relevant, that readers need you, that writers need you, I laugh. Especially when you start talking about curating books. That is some funny shit, guys. If you don’t know why it’s funny, well, guess that makes you the butt of the joke instead of being in on it.

Ian managed to turn some hurdles he faced into advantages in rendering his bat-like creature.

Before I go to the tips and tricks I’ve learned, Mark Coker offers the Smashwords Style Guide, for free. I suggest you download it. What I’m covering pertains to a simple text file without graphics, tables, charts, or anything fancy. The Style Guide covers almost everything about uploading a book to Smashwords. Then, if you want to do some fancy stuff, and learn a bit of HTML coding, I suggest you check out Guido Henkel’s series about formatting your ebook: Take Pride In Your eBook Formatting. (After reading what he has to say, you may decide to forget all this do-it-yourself nonsense and hire him)

STEP ONE: Pre-nuking

• First do a Save As so in case something goes awry, your original file is intact
• Next turn on the Show/Hide feature so you can see the formatting codes

In the pre-nuke stage you are going to remove all the extra spaces and tag your italics (which will disappear when you nuke the file). You’re going to use search-and-replace.

1. Tabs: in the search box enter ^t and leave the replace box blank. Do a “replace all” and all the tabs will disappear.
2. Extra spaces between sentences: in the search box hit the space bar twice and in the replace box hit the space bar once. Do a “replace all” and the double spaces will turn into single spaces.
3. Extra spaces at the end of paragraphs: in the search box enter space ^p and in the replace box enter ^p. Do a “replace all” and that should get rid of the extra spaces.
4. Extra spaces at the beginning of paragraphs: zoom the view to about 130% to 150%, then scroll down through the manuscript while you watch the left margin. If you see any space dots, delete them. (this is actually quicker than it sounds–those little dots jump out at you)
5. Tag your italics: in the search-and-replace box open the “format” box, open “font” and highlight “Italic.” Now under the search box it should say: Font: Italic. Leave the search box blank and hit Find Next. That will take you to italicized text. I tag italics with “ii” because I’ve yet to use a word that has a double i in it.

Now your manuscript will look something like this:

Now you are going to nuke the codes out of the file. Do a “select all” and copy. Open Notepad (it’s under Accessories in your Microsoft programs). Paste the file into Notepad.

Now you are going to open a new document in Word and to it you are going to apply the Style Sheet you created for ebook files. What? You missed that post? Go look here to see how to make a Style Sheet. In the example I used, the only real changes you want to make for an ebook Style Sheet are single spacing and reducing the indent from .5″ to either .4″ or .3″ depending on your preference. (I prefer .3″)

Once the Style Sheet is applied, go to the Notepad file, Select All, Copy and then Paste the text into your new document.

Now you are going to use search-and-replace to make the formatting pretty. Open the Find box and make sure you turn  the Font:Italic feature back to Font: Regular.

1. Curly quotes: to make all your quote marks curl in the proper direction, in the search box type “ and in the replace box type “ then hit “replace all.”
2. Apostrophes: to make all your apostrophes curl in the proper direction, in the search box type ‘ and in the replace box type ‘ then hit “replace all.”
3. Ellipses: to join up the ellipses, in the search box type … and in the replace box type … then “replace all.”
4. Em dashes: to make proper em dashes, in the search box type –(oops, WordPress auto-formatted. That should be hyphen hyphen) and in the replace box open the Special character box, find “em dash” and click it. ^+ will appear in the replace box. Hit “replace all.”
5. Italics: use the search feature to find your italics tags. Highlight the word/s you want to italicize, italicize them. When you are finished, do a search-and-replace for the tags. In the search box type in your tag (mine is ii) and leave the replace box blank. Do a “replace all” and that will remove all the tags.

Now the only thing left to do to complete your file is to set up a separate Style Sheet for the title, chapter headings and scene breaks. In this Style Sheet you might want to increase the font size to 14 (to be on the safe size, don’t go any bigger than that), then bold and center the text. I call this Style Sheet “Header.” Go through your manuscript, highlight the desired text and apply the Header style. If you want a page break after your title page and between chapters, use the Insert Page Break feature in the menu bar. If you want to space the chapter headings, use no more than three paragraph returns.

I think using one extra space above the scene break and then no extra spaces after the scene break looks better on my Kindle. That is up to you. I don’t recommend using more than one extra paragraph return in any case.

There you go. A clean file that you can import directly into Smashwords or convert using Mobipocket Creator and then you can upload that file into Amazon.

A little side note, I’m still struggling with an elegant solution to properly spacing em dashes. I think I’m on to something. I’ll keep you all posted.

Have fun formatting!

I’m not a professional formatter. I don’t know the fancy stuff (yet), but I read a lot on my Kindle and I know what a properly formatted ebook should look like. I have seen some stunningly beautiful ebooks. I have seen total messes. None of the messes made the text unreadable, but they did diminish my enjoyment of the stories.

Many writers don’t want to mess with formatting their ebooks. I don’t blame them. There are good, reliable pros who can do a bang up job for a reasonable price (before hiring a formatter, ask for a list of titles they’ve done, then go download samples onto your ereader to check the quality). But, what if you want to publish shorts? Epublishing is a good way to get your short fiction and essays to market. Shorts, however, are not a great paying market. It could take months or years to recoup the cost of professional formatting. Learn to do it yourself and you can find new readers for a low cost. You don’t have to know how to do the fancy fonts or graphics in order to produce a good-looking, format-error-free, straight text ebook.

What you do have to do is pay attention to details and understand where errors come from. I’m guessing that 99% come straight from our word processors. So, if you get the source file in your word processor right, then chances are excellent you’ll end up with a good looking ebook. Manually rearranging text in your word processor creates problems down the road. The following graphic shows why. If you use Word, you have a Show/Hide feature in the menu bar. It looks like a Paragraph mark. I circled it in red. Click it and you can see the formatting marks in your manuscript.

In the top sample I manually arranged text. (A) shows where I used the space bar to center text. (B) shows double spaces between sentences. (C) shows extra spaces at the end of the paragraphs. (D) indicates a Tab. In the bottom sample I used a style sheet. Notice no extra spaces anywhere, no extra code. (E) shows a second style sheet that centers text.

Amazon usually justifies text for the Kindle (I don’t know what Nooks, iPhones and other gadgets do). When you have extra spaces, it gets factored into the process. (Remember computers talk to each other. One says, “Here’s what I want,” and the other might say, “Yeah, but this is what I’m gonna do.”) Even extra spaces between sentences or at the end of a paragraph can cause the program to “jump” a line, leaving blanks in the text. And using the space bar to center text? You could end up with blank pages. And the Tabs? Conversion programs apparently have a special hatred for Tabs. The ereader could go along fine, ignoring the Tabs for several pages, then all the sudden decide what you really mean is to block indent the text.

The solution to this is using Style sheets. They give you consistency and fewer opportunities to insert unwanted codes for conversion programs to misinterpret. Even if you aren’t going to format your own ebooks or even self-publish, get in the habit of using Style sheets anyway. More and more agents and editors prefer electronic submissions. Using Style sheets will lessen the chances of your electronic submissions turning into gobbledegook on the agent’s or editor’s computer or gadget.

I wrote a post about how to set up Style sheets in Word. You can look at it by clicking here. It’s very easy to do. Once you create the Style sheets, you set ‘em and forget ‘em. More difficult is getting out of the habit of using Tabs or the space bar to manipulate text. If you want to format nice looking ebooks, that’s exactly what you need to do.

In my next post, I’ll talk about something really fun: Nuking your manuscript to get rid of unwanted coding, and using search-and-replace to make everything pretty again.

Not a bad system. Lots of eyes on the manuscript, fewer opportunities for typos and bloopers to slip through the cracks.

Self-publishers are at a disadvantage in that regard. Funds are tight and editors are expensive. Many indies have to get creative in bartering for services, engaging beta readers, and exchanging proofreading with other writers.

The smart indie learns how to copy edit.

That goes for experienced writers, too, who have left traditional publishing to strike out on their own. Judging from what I’ve seen, many of them aren’t obsessive-compulsives who compare original pages to the copy edited manuscripts to see what the changes were and why they were made. They sent in their quirks and copy editors fixed the quirks and the writers didn’t pay much attention to what the copy editors did. Without a copy editor, their quirks are showing. Need to put a stop to that nonsense.

Copy editing is a skill anyone smart enough to write fiction can learn. Today, let’s start with the most basic of basics: Punctuation.

Get a style manual (White & Strunk’s The Elements of Style is short, sweet and easy to understand). Read it, study it, take it to heart. I use a sad-looking and tattered Webster’s Ninth Dictionary I’ve been using for over 30 years. It rarely lets me down.

I’m not going to write a primer on punctuation. A style manual will tell you everything you need to know. Study it and learn the rules of punctuation. Apply those rules to your work.

Instead, I want to discuss something I’m seeing a lot of in self-published works. Writers trying to use punctuation for effect or for pacing in ways that call attention to the punctuation itself. A copy editor would strike such shenanigans with a red pencil, and for good reason. Punctuation that attracts attention distracts the reader and weakens the prose.

Think of punctuation as wait staff in a restaurant. Their job is to seat everybody, maintain order, get the food to the right diner at the right time, and keep everybody happy and content so they can enjoy the dining experience. Wait staff remains in the background, doing their job without drawing attention. Punctuation for effect is akin to the wait staff suddenly breaking into song or line dancing or marching through the restaurant with sparklers singing Happy Birthday. It’s obnoxious. If the food is good enough, diners tolerate it, but unless they’re under ten years old, nobody actually likes it.

The three marks I see most often abused: Dash or em dash; ellipses; exclamation points.

I’m a huge fan of all three. There is a fine line between effective use and ineffective use. They are what I consider “strong marks.” They alert the reader and put them on notice that something must be paid attention to. So, if they are overused they become the literary equivalent of car alarms. If they are misused, they confuse the reader and jerk them out of the story. Do that too often and your book could end up in the DNF pile.

The RULES:

DASH (two hyphens in a manuscript, a long dash in published form–indies, remember to use search-and-replace to convert your double hyphens into em dashes during ebook formatting)

1. usually marks an abrupt change or break in the continuity of a sentence
2. is sometimes used in place of other punctuation (as the comma) when special emphasis is required
3. introduces a summary statement that follows a series of words or phrases
4. often precedes the attribution of a quotation
5. may be used with the exclamation point or the question mark
6. removes the need for a comma if the dash falls where a comma would ordinarily separate two clauses

Rule of thumb: Use the em dash to indicate interrupted dialogue or to set off a parenthetical thought or clause in narrative. If  your pages are crawling with em dashes, ask yourself what exactly is it you are trying to do? If the answer is, you’re going for an effect (rapid pacing, disjointed thoughts, choppy movements) it is time to question each and every em dash. If the usage doesn’t coincide with the above list, strike the em dashes.

ELLIPSES: Three periods (When formatting a file for an ebook in Word, use the search and replace feature to make a proper ellipsis. Enter … in the search box and … in the replace box. Word will create a joined ellipsis for you.)

1. indicates the omission of one or more words within a quoted passage
2. indicates the omission of one or more sentences within a quoted passage or the omission of words at the end of a sentence indicated by using a period after the ellipsis
3. indicates halting speech or an unfinished sentence in dialogue (no period, though a question mark is acceptable)

Rule of thumb: Use sparingly. Ellipses are NOT for authorial throat-clearing or to pace the action. If every line of dialogue contains ellipses, you need to rework the dialogue. Try to avoid using it in narrative. Remember that most readers associate ellipses with omission, so if you overuse them, your readers will be wondering what isn’t there instead of paying attention to  what’s on the page.

EXCLAMATION POINT:

1. terminates an emphatic phrase or sentence
2. terminates an emphatic interjection

Rule of thumb: Use your indoor voice, please. Using an exclamation point is the equivalent of shouting. When you use it in dialogue, be aware that your readers are “hearing” your characters shout. If you use it in narrative, the readers will feel as if you, the author, are shouting at them. So every time you come across an exclamation point in your writing, question it. Unless you absolutely have to use it to make your meaning clear (as in, the character is actually shouting) strike it.

Now go sharpen those red pencils and hit the pages. Find your annoying little punctuation quirks and squash them like bugs.

This month, something clicked. I caught glimpses of what Joel sees, and the thought processes he uses to design a cover. How typography can be used to set tone and mood and enhance an image. Why some covers work in print, but not for an eBook. Glimpses. Just enough to get my brain churning and wondering if I could figure out how he does it.

ATTENTION: Graphic artists, designers, pros, anyone else who actually knows how to do this stuff, please stop reading here. I get rather giddy and silly when I figure this stuff out and you’ll be rolling your eyes and thinking I’m a total goof. Which is okay, because I am a total goof when I get in these moods, but I don’t need anyone pointing it out.

Anyhoo, I have a short story I’ve been thinking about self-publishing, so decided to make a cover for it using some of the principles Joel laid out. I have a basic photo program for my camera and I have Microsoft Paint, neither of which I know how to properly use. The nice thing about basic is that even the clueless can achieve a result. Maybe not a good result, but a result nonetheless. So off I went bopping around Google in search of a nice image.

I wanted a scroll (simple, striking image that actually says something about what the story is about). I found one I liked (liked it a whole lot, which is important later). In my photo program I sized the image, brightened it (dull colors just get duller the smaller the image on screen) and cropped it. Joel hasn’t talked a lot about the shape of eBook covers, except to say that when a white cover bleeds into the background the effect can be diminished. My thought was that since a scroll is essentially rectangular, if the white background does bleed away, the shape is still right, but it’s unusual enough to stand out a bit. So when I loaded it into Paint, I didn’t put a border around it.

Next step typography. Yikes. Paint offers a huge list of fonts to choose from. What it doesn’t provide is an image of what the font looks like. So there I am, click click click. Ugly. Spindly. Lightweight. Odd. Unreadable. Whoa, that’s weird. Click click click. I found one! Simple, bold and weighty without looking as if it had been laid on with a trowel. Very readable, too, with no bleed between the letters. I liked it a lot (also important later on). Getting everything lined up and laid out so it was readable and striking was relatively easy. I put some thought into choosing the type color. I wanted it to stand out, but not be so bright as to look cartoonish. Paint offers “custom” colors. So I mixed up a bold, dark red with brown overtones that I thought complemented the scroll background color even while it offered solid contrast. That was fun.

Next, I wanted a small graphic. I wanted it to look hand drawn. Now I know why the computer artists get the big bucks. Drawing in Paint with a rollerball mouse is hard. Even making a proper circle with the circle tool is hard. I drew and redrew (undo undo undo undo) and played with the Pencil, Brush and Spraycan tools (undo undo undo), until I finally produced a little graphic that worked.

I loved it! I mean, yeah, fine, it didn’t look polished and professional. Okay, it screamed amateur. But what the hell, I am an amateur. The important thing was, I’d applied the principles I’d gleaned from Joel: Simple, clear, readable, striking even in thumbnail size, and says something about the tone and mood of the story.

Now that I had it, why let it go to waste? I had the story written and at almost 4000 words, that was long enough to publish as a satisfying single.

Problem Number One: I didn’t own the scroll image I’d lifted from the internet and didn’t have permission to use it for my book cover. I have a habit of renaming images I download so I can find them easily on my computer. Unfortunately, my renaming makes it difficult to return to the source image. Do you know how many scroll images there are on the internet? About a billion. Do you know how difficult it is to find again that one perfect image I love so much? Shit. I suffered a larcenous moment, telling myself, oh hell, who would know? I would know.

I found a nifty site called Dreamstime Stock Photography that offers free and cheap images. They had a very nice scroll image that only cost me $4 for a royalty-free license.

Problem Number Two: Remember me click click clicking through all those fonts? Did it ever occur to me to jot down the name of the font I liked so well? No, it did not. (That is why pros get the big bucks–they think about things like that) Paint, unfortunately, is stingy with clues. So there I had to go again, click click click.

I had to recreate my little graphic, too. Another couple of hours fighting with the stupid rollerball mouse. I wanted an image that looked hand-drawn, but NOT as if it had been hand-drawn by a drunk. Easier said than done.

scroll image copyrighted by Olena Chyrko

Nobody is ever going to think a designer the caliber of Joel Friedlander designed my short story cover. I’m still rather proud of it and believe I managed to incorporate the most important elements of good design. I learned some valuable lessons and am getting a clue as to how graphics programs work. Do I have the bug to learn more? You bet, I do. And it’s all Joel Friedlander’s fault.

seed bead octopus on anemone

I gave myself a good scare last night. DD1 had come over and she was talking to me. I was chatting with a friend online. I was trying to figure how to make a Word file from Scrivener so I could email an outline. In the midst of all that, I clicked something and wrecked my WIP. Holy crap! I’d managed to remove all the folders and put everything out of whack. I was frantically moving stuff around and even brought up the tutorial and was going through that. By the time DD1 left and my friend went offline, I was practically in tears and cussing a blue streak. The only good part was the old man showed the wisdom to leave me alone (I have a few sharp things on my desk). I couldn’t figure out what I’d done or how to undo it. Finally, I shut it down. Disgusted and depressed, was I.

When I woke up this morning, I realized exactly what I’d done. Before I even had my first cup of coffee, I was at the computer. Sure enough, I fixed everything. Whew. I also learned a few more things about how the program works (I started using it a few weeks ago).

beaded bottle: Under The Sea

That got me to thinking about how I learn. I can’t sit through a lecture without daydreaming, doodling and making spitballs. I think in 3-D patterns, connections, layers, circles and threads, and what would happen if instead of inserting Tab A into Tab B, one were to rotate Z and tie everything together that way? When I was a kid, I aced multiple choice tests in school not because I knew the material, but because I could spot the patterns the testers used. It would take me just a minute to figure out the test creator put in two ridiculous answers, one trick answer and the correct answer. Ergo, eliminate the ridiculous and the trick and the correct answer is whatever is left. What I did learn, I learned by doing. I needed activity to make sense of the patterns I saw. Like spelling. Rote memorization put me sleep. Instead I went through the dictionary and figured out English words have roots. The roots have spelling and phonetic rules that affect American English. That was a pattern I could “see” and it also made me a pain in the ass during spelling bees because instead of asking them to use the word in a sentence, I’d ask about its root. (teachers didn’t like having to look up words in the dictionary) I couldn’t abide rules, memorization, recitation and artificial structure. What I needed was to know was what was possible and the materials necessary to figure how to get there. I needed to know the why of things to figure out the what. Once I’d figured something out, I immediately wanted to know what else it could do and could I make it do it? I was the 4th grader who brought pocketfuls of sand in from the playground to mix with tempera paint because I’d read about frescoes–then ended up in the principal’s office for wrecking the classroom paint supply.

Do I need to tell anybody how much I hated school?

Even as an adult, I don’t do well in a classroom setting. I still can’t sit through lectures. Tutorials are wasted on me and written instructions don’t tell me much. I’m still more interested in an instructor’s psychological makeup than in the material being taught. (I figured out my American History teacher in high school never read papers from girls who had nice penmanship. He just gave them an A. I received A’s for vulgar tales about his sexual liaisons with farm animals.)

The point of this post isn’t about the fact that if I were a schoolkid right now, they’d dope me up on ADD medication and put me in Special Ed. The point is, my brain is unique and so is everyone’s and we each have our own way of learning new things.

If I have any advantages at all, it’s that one) I’m stubborn, and two) I’m not terribly afraid of mistakes and muddles. Doing something the “right” way isn’t nearly as important to me as figuring out how to do it my way. Nor am I as interested in results as I am in process. I do a lot of fiddling around just to satisfy myself on how things are put together and seeing if there are new ways to do them. I honestly don’t consider said fiddling a waste of time.

Which brings us to writing. Doesn’t it always? I have only one real “rule” in writing: Don’t bore the reader. Avoid that and your writing will work. Perhaps not in the way you intended, but if the reader is interested, you’ve succeeded. I see far too many writers–perhaps ingrained by formal schooling–far too concerned with doing things the “right” way. They want a method that works. There are methods that work sometimes for some people. Muddling through also works. Sometimes. Sometimes you have to trash the whole thing and start over. And that’s okay. You’ve learned something. I see danger in doing the same thing the same way every time. It produces a “safe” product. That’s good for washing machines and fast food hamburgers, but it makes for dull fiction. I’m always trying new things, new ways of doing things. Like Scrivener. I’m visually oriented and it’s a visual type of program, so I thought it was worth a shot. I’m still learning how it works and why it does what it does, which makes for some nerve-wracking experiences like I had last night. But that’s okay. The worst that can happen is I actually lose my writing. Then I’d just have to recreate it, which I’ve done a time or two before. If I’d relaxed last night, I’d have remembered that my best solutions tend to come after a good night’s sleep anyway. I should have known I’d wake up knowing what to do.

Your brain doesn’t work like mine. Your brain works like yours. Even so, the next time you catch yourself saying, “Oh, that’s too hard,” immediately rebut: “You can’t know unless you try.” If you find yourself asking, “What’s the right way to do this?” Recast that into: “I bet I can figure out a way to do that.” If you find yourself feeling stuck and stale, shake yourself up by coming up with a totally new method. If it works, great, if it doesn’t, at least you learned something. Don’t be afraid of mistakes or looking foolish. Whatever you do, don’t listen to the fearful, the rigid, or the pedantic who insist you sit quietly in your chair and DO THINGS THEIR WAY BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY RIGHT WAY. Hit ‘em with a spitball and do whatever is right for you.

*If you’re curious as to why there are photographs of an odd looking bottle… I had a bottle and some beads and some rocks, pearls, coral and other odds and ends, so with neither plans nor instructions, I started sewing beads on the bottle. Then it began looking vaguely watery, so I made a coral reef with seaweed. Then I had to figure out how to make fish and a jellyfish and an octopus. Why? No good reason except that I had a bottle and some beads and I wanted to see if I could do it. It’s how my mind works.

**grouchy post**contains swears**it’s February, so sue me**

I keep seeing articles from social media experts and now I’m seeing links to information for “social media seminars.” It’s pissing me off. You know why? Because the underlying message to all that expertise is: How to be a spammer.

I’m a writer. I need an internet presence. I get it. Name recognition is vitally important. I get it. Establishing a fan base is vitally important. I get it. Everyone wants some attention–attention is the gold standard. I. Get. It.

You know what else I get? It’s out of control.

A few weeks ago I unfollowed a twerp on Twitter because he was junking up my Twitter feed with Buy My Book, Like My Book, Please Buy My Book, Have You Read My Book, Review My Book. That was it. Nothing else. Then, after I unfollowed his whiny ass, my feed got junked up with his “friends” retweeting his beggary. I unfollowed all of them, too. When I get a notice that so and so is following me on Twitter, I always look at their profile. If all they’re doing is chanting Buy My Book, I don’t follow them back. Quite frankly, I wish they wouldn’t follow me. What’s the point? They’re so busy begging they aren’t reading my tweets anyway. I have a confession to make, I actually read my Twitter feed. I follow links, check out interesting books, buy some interesting books. I know, I know, that makes me stupid and uncool. Cool people apparently use all kinds of buffers and tools and shit to make sure they get noticed, but they don’t have to stoop to noticing anyone else.

You know what else makes me uncool? I only follow people I think are interesting. It doesn’t matter if they follow me back. I do not care. Twitter is not a numbers game for me. All those social media gurus writing articles and teaching workshops on how to increase your Twitter following? Bite me. You’re adding to the problem. You’re feeding the disease. You’re creating a monster filled with tone-deaf mass hysterics who aren’t listening to anything except the scared voices in their heads.

Then there’s Facebook, which is where I play with people I actually have a relationship with. After I got over my initial shock about the big changes FB made recently to the timeline, I figured out how to divvy up private and public posts and how to make sure I’m not overwhelmed with game scores, Farmville requests and the like. I follow a few of my favorite authors on FB so I can get their news. But you want to know how they get on my favorite author list? They write damned good books. All those yahoos sending Friend requests and Like requests and group requests so you can junk up my FB timeline with your spam? IGNORE.

I’m not going to say much about blogs, except for this. If all you’re doing on your blog is promoting your books, it’s a bore. You’re a bore. Especially if the only time you update your blog is when you have a book to sell.

Which leads me to what really set off my grouch-meter today. Yesterday I wrote an article about Pinterest, and how I can use it to make virtual bookshelves and story collages for my works in progress. This morning I get a comment laying out how authors can use Pinterest as a promotional tool. NOOOOOOOOO! No. No! No no no no no! Pinterest is fun. Got it? It is a fun, amusing and useful site. The minute it turns into a spam fest, which is exactly what the commenter proposed, it will not be fun or amusing and its pain-in-the-assery will far outweigh its usefulness. (dear spammer in training, I deleted your comment)

Stop it!

If I were a “social media expert” this is what I would say: If you want attention, do something interesting and earn it. Quality not quantity is the real measure of success. Never forget the “social” aspect of social media. If you aren’t listening to others, why the hell do you expect anyone to listen to you? Nobody wants your spam. Let me repeat that. NOBODY WANTS YOUR FUCKING SPAM.

One of the most attractive things on earth is a person having a good time. Who doesn’t want to join in the fun? So find something you enjoy doing and give the rest of it a rest. If that makes you feel stupid and uncool and as if you aren’t doing it right, then come on over here and talk to me. Don’t worry about all those people doing it right, because trust me, they aren’t even listening.

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest, it’s a social media site with bulletin boards. Users pin images acquired from the internet, photo albums, and each other to create visual displays of favorite art, furnishings, food, you name it. It’s a feast for the eyes. I already spend too much time on Twitter and Facebook, so I don’t actually need another social media site.

But…

As soon as I saw it, I thought, “Larry!” (I’ve named my Kindle, ‘Larry.’) I’m a visual person. I need visual clues to jog my memory banks. Ever since I acquired Larry the Kindle and have purchased fewer print books, my only regret is that I no longer have books and book covers to serve as reminders for what I’ve read. I like to look at books, and enjoy the memories they rouse of favorite scenes and characters. Black e-ink words on a gray screen just don’t do it for me.  Pinterest lets me create a virtual bookshelf. Here is a screen shot of part of my board called Short Stories:

Short stories on Larry the Kindle

After getting carried away with Short Stories, I created a board called “Reviewed Books.” Those are the covers of books I’ve reviewed over on my other blog. I need to go in and clean up the captions (still learning the ropes), but now anyone who is interested in the book can go check out the review.

Then–and then! It hit me. For several books I’ve written, I created collages. Big messy collections of images clipped from magazines and glued to poster board. What the characters look like, buildings, clothing, even symbols for emotional arcs. I’d end up adding photos, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes and even feathers or flowers or interesting leaves. They were a mess, but they gave me something to stare at and ponder while my story-factory churned words. Visual reminders of what I was trying to do. The hours spent leafing through magazines, clipping images, arranging and gluing were like immersion therapy, helping me clarify what I felt on a gut level and bringing it to the fore. Pinterest is a great place to create a story collage–without the magazines, paper scraps, glue, helpful cats and big messy poster board. Browsing the internet for images is meditative, accomplishing the same thing as going through magazines. I can pin my own photos. I can include notes to myself. While I’m working on the story, I can leave the board up in the background and with a mouse-click have something to stare at while my brain struggles to figure out what it’s trying to say.

I don’t know about the social media aspect of Pinterest. Maybe as I get more comfortable with using the site I can meet some of the people (especially the ones who post recipes and yummy pictures, oh my goodness, makes me drool). I’m still in the “fumble around and wonder what happens if I click this button” stage. So don’t ask me how to use it or if I have any tips or tricks. Pop over and check it out for yourself. If you find yourself as enchanted by all its possibilities as a tool for readers and writers as I am, let me know. I’d love to admire your boards.

SouthWest Writers 2012 First Bi-Monthly
Writing Contest

Personal Essay About Animals

$10 entry fee and cash prizes. Solidly on the up and up. (SouthWest Writers is a reputable organization).  Make sure you read the rules and follow them exactly. The deadline is February 29th. Get writing!

Lynx Sez: Writing about me will probably make you a shoo-in. Don't be stingy with the compliments.