Tools of the Trade: Wordpress and 1and1.com

One of the things that I was interested in talking about on my blog was discussing the tools that I used to plan, write, edit, publish, and promote my digital novels.  For this reason, I begin a series today that I like to call the "Tools of the Trade".  Essentially, I'll talk about what I use and why I use them.  One of the challenges that I had when I started writing was that all I had was a pen and a piece of paper.  The last fifteen years have a dramatic shift in how we write, distribute, and promote books.For today, I would like to discuss this website.  One of the things that I've always avoided during my 31 years on this earth is managing my own website.  First and foremost, I always thought that they were too egotistical.  Who really cares about the opinion of each and every person who creates a web site.  Web sites to me had always seemed an exercise in shameless self-promotion.  Just by putting your name of something does not make what you say all that interesting or important.  Note: the author is very aware of the irony of the previous statement due to his using HIS OWN NAME in his domain.  The author accepts the irony and the mandatory round of mocking that it entails for reasons that will be discussed below.However, when I decided to publish my fiction anonymously, it became apparent that I would have to create a website and blog.  Otherwise, how else are people going to find out about my work.  To this end, I patterned my strategy after the fine cellist Zoe Keating.  Zoe Keating is a musician that you've probably never heard of but through her unique music and savvy website she has been able to make a comfortable living doing what she loves while never having to go through a large scale music label.Thus the decision was made and the battle was joined.  There was only one problem.I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.Despite my degree in computer engineering, my videogaming hobby that borders on the obsessive (must get ... double shotguns), my experience in building web sites was limited to a summer working as a CAP Youth Intern on behalf of Industry Canada.  At that time, we used HTML.  WYSIWYG editors had not really caught on and CMS modules had not yet appeared.So I wrote my websites in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  They looked terrible.  They took a lot of time.  And I could ill afford either of these.So I took the logical thing that far too many people are incapable of - I asked for help.  To be more accurate, I asked my friend Kevin Bhookun, an experienced web developer.  He advised that I sign up with 1and1.com.  And so I did.  I bought web space with the domain scottblurton.com (Ego Alert!) used the included Website Builder to build a basic shell. He also suggested that I do my blog using WordPress.  And so I did.  I created my blog at digitalnovelist.blogspot.com.  Thus with the two parts of the whole all ready to go, I tried fulfill my life-long dream of three weeks and integrate the two together.And I fell flat on my face.I went back to Kevin and explained to him the difficulty that I was having with 1and1.com.  He sighed, reached down for a whiffle bat labeled "For Morons Only" and smacked me across the face with it (rhetorically speaking).  He then calmly explained everything for me as simply as he could.You see, what I had missed was the distinction between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org.  You see WordPress.com is a website that will host your website for you using a default yourname.wordpress.com URL or one that you purchase from them.  All of the data that your create or add to the site is stored on wordpress.com's servers.  WordPress.org, on the other hand, is a tool set that you download and install on your server.  So in my case, I downloaded the wordpress.org software package and installed it onto my webspace at 1and1.com.  I then set my domain to the installed folder, de-activated the Website Builder (thank you 1and1 tech support), and activated the WordPress.org plugin.Wow.After the installation, I logged back into my internal WebPress account and everything moved like silk.  Did I want to download and install a new theme.  No problem, just point and click.  Did I want to add widgets to my sidebars?  No problem, just drag and drop and it just works.  Oh no, there is no Twitter widget installed.  What do I do?  Easy, you go to plugins, search for the plugin you want, install it, and then activate it.  No problem.After learning how to code the hard way, the unnerving ease of use of WordPress was astonishing.  I was creating better results with little or no work than I could ever have accomplished by hand-coding it myself.  It was so easy and intuitive.  It was like using an iPhone.  It just worked.Thus in the end, I would have to fully recommend WordPress.  Once installed (which is certainly not intuitive) it runs like Apple had designed it.  Even a web neanderthal like myself has no troubles using it.And what about 1and1.com.  What did I think about them?  First and foremost, WebsiteBuilder sucks.  The faster you can replace it with WordPress, the better.  But as a webspace and a service, I have been impressed.  When I encountered problems on the weekend, their technical support was available and extremely helpful.  Once I told them my problem, they had the problem fixed in ten minutes and helped me to understand what had caused the problem.  As someone who worked in technical support for a year, I appreciate the value of expert and courteous advice.  Thus far, I would have to recommend them wholeheartedly recommend them.  Their service has been excellent thus far.Now, I've got my website ready to go.  It isn't finished by any means, but its a great start that I can no put content into.  There are still problems like my twitter feed is buried at the bottom of the screen but as of this moment it looks great, is easy to use, and allows me to focus on building content.  That's good enough for me.

The Game Plan

To take my manuscript and turn it into a digital novel  is not nearly as easily as creating a blog.  There are number of things that I will have to do in order to get it on iPhones and to attract interest so that people read it.  Here is my game plan for the next several months.Start a Small BusinessAs I am publishing my novel myself and receiving the royalties (we hope) directly.  I will have to set up a new small publishing house.  Fortunately, creating a Sole-Propriety Business in Canada is extremely easy as there is no paperwork.  It is treated as individual income.  However, for tax purposes, I will have to keep diligent records of what I spend and what I earn.  This will certainly be a new challenge for me as I have never run a small business before.Build a Website and BlogThis is an essential step in order to build interest around my novel.  To this end, I have bought a domain and web space from a company called 1an1.  I have already created the blog that you are currently reading.  Now my challenge will be to integrate my blog straight into my website but so far 1an1 is having problems integrating wordpress into their sites.  Hopefully a call to the technical department will help me to figure things out.  The goal at this point is to simply get a professional website up and running.  Once it is stable and I am comfortable with it, I can start adding new features and especially content.  Content will be my primary strategy to attract readers and my big project will be to create, upon my manuscript's release, a wiki for the Evermore TrilogyHave my manuscript copy-edited by a professionalThis is perhaps the most expensive part of self-publishing.  To hire a professional copy-editor to go through a manuscript line-by-line, is extremely expensive, running in the thousands of dollars.  For this reason, most self-publishers prefer to use their friends and colleagues to copy-edit and proofread their manuscripts.  Big Mistake.  One of biggest knocks against self-publishing is the poor quality of the manuscripts.  This isn't to say that a manuscript is bad, but when you spot a glaring spelling mistake, it completely takes you out of the novel, and forces you to question the professionalism of the author.  This is perhaps the biggest reason while most readers do not take self-published authors seriously and nor should they until the quality of the manuscripts improve.  And that costs money.   Lots of money.  But it is an essential step to producing a professional digital novel and no author should do without a copy-editor.In my case, I'm going to spend the next couple of months looking for a copy-editor (if I'm going to spend that amount of money I'm going to make sure that he or she is worth it) by getting referrals from publishing houses.  The actual process of copy-editing should take three to four months.Design a book coverThe next step will be to design a book cover.  Now this is the fun part so I've already gotten started on it.  I've hired my colleague Kevin Bookhun to design the cover for the digital novel.  If you are fortunately enough for someone to find your book on Smashwords, a smart cover design can make the difference between them buying the book and moving on to the next entry.  The cover design is always a challenge because it has to be simple, provocative, and aesthetically pleasing.  With the necessary back and forth needed between Kevin and I to get it just right, this step will take several months.  By summer, I should have an good idea of what the book cover will look like.  This is one of the advantages in digital publishing.  Whereas in traditional publishing the author usually has very little say over the design of the his book, in digital publishing the author has complete control over the end product.Placing the Manuscript onto SmashwordsThe next step will be to place the manuscript and its cover design onto Smashwords.  I've chosen Smashwords because it is the one service available to self-published authors that can get their manuscript onto the iPhone in Canada.  To format it properly for all of the different digital formats that are in use these days, Smashwords feeds the manuscript through a software program called the "Meat Grinder".  This gives the author almost no control over the final end product.  In a perfect world, I would prefer to use Amazon's Digital Text Platform.  Amazon's DTP would give more control over the final product and make my manuscript available to buy on both the Amazon Kindle and the Kindle app for iPhone.  Rather than buying it through an obscure websitem, Amazon's DTP would allow me to sell my novel on the popular Amazon store.  Unfortunately, neither the DTP or the Kindle are available yet in Canada so I will have to stick to Smashwords for the time being.Promote the NovelThe final step will be to promote the novel and try to get people to buy it.  At this point, I'm a little unsure of what I'm going to do for this step.  I will remain open to ideas from my readers as we move closer to the publication date.And that's it, that's the general game plan.  As I move forward, the gaps will be filled in and I expect that I will encounter problems that I had never expected.  But in publishing as in life, if we didn't encounter the odd roadblock, then the journey wouldn't be very interesting.

The Birth of "Confessions of a Digital Novelist"

Hello and welcome to my new blog, Confessions of a Digital Novelist (CoaDN for short). Now you may be asking the most important question that anyone wishing to create a blog should ask themselves.Why?Why on earth would you start a new blog when there already 800 gajillion blogs already out there? What would you talk about when everything under the sun is already discussed ad nauseum in cyberspace?Well, to understand why I chosen to create a new blog, you will have to understand a little bit about my current situation. For the better part of a decade, the exact duration escapes me, I have worked on my debut novel, Evermore: Call of the Nocturne. After ten years following first conception, it is finished and I am extremely happy with the result. It is complex, fast-paced, and exciting. It conceives of a world that is unique to literature, fills the world with fascinating characters, and lets them explore themes and issues that work on multiple levels. It is far and away the best work that I have ever done or ever will do. It is my masterpiece.And it will never be published.You see, once I had finished the manuscript, and trudged through eight revisions of the text. I sent it out to every publisher I could think of.And nobody wanted to publish it.For you see, I had failed to understand that you need three things to get published: You need Talent, You need Marketability, and You need Luck.Now, I am talented and Evermore: Call of the Nocturne shows that. However, when I decided to write it, I was focused on creating the best novel that I was capable of. I, for the most part, ignored marketability. Whereas marketable novels align themselves into genres, I blurred them. Whereas marketable novels utilize tropes, I dissected them. Whereas marketable novels tell the same stories over and over again, I subverted them. In the process, I created a terrific novel but it is a novel that would only appeal to very small number of people.And as for luck, I have never had much success with luck.Also working against me was the consequences of the revolution that is the Personal Computer. The invention of the personal computer, and the rise of scores of software designed to help write the novel that you’ve always had inside, the number of prospective authors has exploded over the last twenty years. At the same time, the number of books available to the public as remained the same or in some cases decreased over the last twenty year as books have been forced to compete with more interactive forms of story-telling such as video games. Thus whereas thousands of authors had been competing for tens of millions of readers, now millions of authors were competing for the same number of readers. The result has been that the odds of getting published have gone from difficult to astronomical, akin to winning the lottery.Now you can’t blame the publishers for this, although many frustrated writers do. The publishers are in difficult battle for survival. They don’t have the luxury of giving new authors a chance, although some do. They need books that they know will sell. They need books that are safe and already have a dedicated reader base. Hence the transition from pure-writers to platform-based writers, that is from writers who have only ever written fiction like Philip K. Dick to writers who have built up an audience base either through journalism, film production, or reality TV like Lauren Conrad. This is coupled with the fact that the publishers’ “slush pile” has grown from thousands of new novels a year to millions of new novels a year. To sneak through this clogged grate, when everyone else is trying to do the same requires not just talent, but an act of god. There is simply only so much space for authors under the traditional publishing model.And so, my options exhausted, I saw the futility in continuing my efforts to get my work published. Then one day, I rode a bus in Ottawa and saw a curious sight. Three separate individuals were reading books …. on their iPhones. Three of them, on a single bus. Thus arose my curiousity, so I bought an iPhone, went home, and began to read the ancient classics that were available for free on Stanza.I was blown away. The reading experience was much better than I expected. The small page sizes kept me actively engaged in the story as I flipped quickly from page to page. Instead of losing my place, Stanza remembered it for me. Rather than lying awkwardly down with a book, reading in bed and in the dark become comfortable and soothing. To my surprise, I enjoyed reading on the iPhone far more than I’ve ever enjoyed read a book.What my fateful trip on the bus demonstrated was that the iPhone had created an entirely new market of readers whose demand could be met without going through a traditional publisher.It was at that moment that I made a decision. Rather than let my novel, a work that I had spent a third of my life writing, go to waste, I might as well try to sell it to consumers directly through their iPhones.Once I examined the technology available and decided to give this crazy idea a shot, I also came to the realization that my journey from manuscript to direct download might make an interesting tale to follow in a blog.Rather than write about videogames or movies or music, ground well-covered by millions, I could write about something unique. I could write about something very few people were experiencing.Thus Confessions of a Digital Novelist was born.Over the next year, I will write about my experiences, my trials and tribulations, in taking my manuscript and turning it into a professional product available in the palm of your hand. As I proceed, I will talk about my strategies, the technologies that I use, and the steps that I will follow. I hope that by doing so, I will create a community around digital publishing and tread a pathway that others will follow.Publishing is entering a period of transition. Much like music and movies before it, digital publishing will transform our industry in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Through this blog, I hope that you will join me in exploring this undiscovered country. I hope that you will follow my Confessions of a Digital Novelist.