Category Archives: Publishing

Bookselling, Publishing

Kings and curly quotes

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I forgot to show you a picture of the new, fully realized, paperback version of King of Rogaland. So here it is. That’s a pretty good cover, I think.

I also think I told you I’m working on an Amazon edition of The Year of the Warrior in paperback. At the risk of sounding self-satisfied, I’m actually kind of impressed with it. It’s a good story – grabs the reader and keeps the action going. I’m not sure I’ve improved a whole lot as a writer in the 25-plus years since the thing was published.

I was taken aback to discover that the final draft I’m working with – as well as the privately printed version I’ve been handselling for a few years – features “dumb quotes” rather than “smart quotes.” You probably know what that means – smart quotes are the curly ones, curving forward and backward, that you find in printed material, which MS Word usually creates for you automatically. Dumb quotes are what you see in this post. Somehow (I think it must have been during the text’s brief sojourn as a Google Doc) it lost its smarts. And I’m embarrassed to offer the book to the Amazon public in such a state. It would be a blow to my aforementioned self-satisfaction.

So I did a web search and found a method for converting them back. To my astonishment, it worked. Now I’m trying to figure out how to do the one-slash quotation marks and apostrophes.

I’ll probably mess it up. I need to save backup draft.

I’m hoping I can handle the stress.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

The Vietnamese Love Edgar Allan Poe

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A hundred years ago in Vietnam, when the French controlled their education, Edgar Allan Poe was believed to be “America’s literary giant.” They were familiar with eerie stories of supernatural beings, which a long-standing Chinese genre gave them, so discovering Poe was like grandkids discovering Mam-ma.

“Poe’s name evoked liberation of the mind, and he was praised as someone who had ascended from the mundane by the power of imagination,” Nguyễn Bình writes for Literary Hub, offering several examples of Poe’s influence on the nation’s literature.

In 1937, author Thế Lữ began writing detective fiction. “In the story “Những nét chữ” (Letter Strokes), [Hanoi-based hero] Lê Phong told the Watson-like narrator: ‘The stuff about reading people’s thoughts from their faces like Edgar Poe and Conan Doyle said… I’m only more convinced that they’re true. Because I just did so.'” (via Prufrock)

A couple more links for today.

Ted Gioia says the big guys are out to get independent creators. For example, Apple is squeezing Patreon. Google says it can’t find select websites. It’s ugly. Gioia writes, “I’ve been very critical of Apple in recent months. But this is the most shameful thing they have ever done to the creative community. A company that once bragged how it supported artistry now actively works to punish it.”

And is this the best sci-fi classic most fans have missed? “Though it routinely ends up on best-of-all-time lists, somehow, the 1974 science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye never actually seems to get read.” A quick glance at the first of 2200 reviews on Goodreads suggests the book hasn’t aged well.

Photo: Dinneen Standard station, Cheyenne, Wyoming. (John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

Publishing, Writing

Go West Oversea, young man!

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Brandywine Books is indeed your go-to venue for major publishing news! Today, for instance, I find this item, selected purely at random from among the many notices that flood our executive offices:

West Oversea is now available as an ebook on Amazon!

Granted, it was available on Amazon the day before yesterday, too. But in the interim I have worked my publishing magic. WO is no longer a Nordskog Publishing book, but part of my own burgeoning publishing empire.

Tomorrow I hope to get the paper version uploaded.

I may or may not make a splashy announcement about that. Depends on how slow the news day is.

Today was a big day for me for another reason. I finally found myself with a few hours I could call my own, and I went out and bought myself a new laptop. For years I’ve been bouncing from one cheap laptop to another; you may recall me kvetching a while back about how hard the letters on my keyboard were to read, and the fact that I couldn’t view the thumbnails of my saved photos. The keys on this one are white on black – and illuminated(!). And I can see the thumbnails just fine. Seems to have been a matter of digital memory or the flux capacitor or something. I am reveling in the snappy response and the vivid graphics.

Occasionally I get a brief respite in my life where my financial head is above water. This is one of those times. So I treated myself. A parsimonious man I am, son of a haywire farmer. Making a semi-large expenditure is a challenge. But I do use the contraption for work, I must insist.

My only complaint is that I couldn’t plug in the plug-in thing for my wireless mouse. Have they changed USB connectors that much since I bought the thing? I’ve got a replacement coming from Amazon; until then it’s the humble track pad for me.

I also bought a little tensor lamp to illuminate the Sigrid Undset biography I’m translating, so I can work more easily at night.

It’s all conspicuous consumption, I guess. I did, after all, grow up near the home of Thorstein Veblen.

Fiction, Publishing, Writing

A work in progress

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Photo credit: James Tarbotton. Unsplash license.

I have no idea where I’m going with tonight’s post. I just have some thoughts provoked by my paperback book project. As I’ve told you before, all my self-published Erling Skjalgsson books (except for The Baldur Game, still waiting in the wings) are now available as paperbacks, thanks to backbreaking effort on my own part.

Currently I’m working on West Oversea. Its previous publisher, Nordskog Publishing, has transferred all rights to me, and I’m currently going through the manuscript, formatting it as an e-book form. Nordskog was kind enough to provide me with the graphic files for all their neat art, and I’m embedding that stuff now. My version won’t look exactly like Nordskog’s, but it will have similarities.

Which gets me thinking about some of the stuff I sort of learned in library school… some of which I sort of remember. I’ll probably get the terms wrong.

First of all, we studied what a work is. I reviewed True Grit last night. True Grit, as conceived and written by Charles Portis, is a work. Print it in hardback, print it in paperback, make it an e-book – it’s still the same work. If you adapt it as a movie, that’s a different work, because substantial changes have been made. A comic book version is also a different work (if I remember correctly).

But the hardback, the paperback, and the ebook, though the same work, are all different editions. And when it went out of print, and then got printed again, that became a new edition.

The individual copy you hold in your hand, on the other hand, pretty much identical to all the other copies of the edition, but distinct in its individual quiddity and whatever notes you might have scribbled in the margins, that’s called an instantiation.

My new e-book of West Oversea, similar to but different in detail from Nordskog’s, will be a new edition.

This is all complicated by the question of editorial changes. As I’ve been working through the manuscript, I’ve made small corrections. Mostly in punctuation. Very rarely, I’ll change a minor word. I don’t want to go crazy – I feel I must let the chips lay where they fell, even if I could do a better polishing job now than I did back in 2009. Mostly for the sake of the people who already bought it and think they’ve read the work.

I think that makes my new edition a different iteration of the work.

But it’s the same work.

Unless I remember it wrong.

Bookselling, Fiction, Publishing

Paperback woes on a rainy day

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The Norwegian word for “busy” is “travelt,” which always makes me thing of a crowded road. Which is pretty much what I feel like right now. I have a) my “novel writing” work, which currently means formatting books for paperback, b), the magazine I’m editing for the Valdres Samband, the ethnic organization that hired me for this purpose, c) my translation work on the Sigrid Undset biography, and d) the monthly newsletter for my Sons of Norway lodge (which won’t take long but should have been finished by now).

This morning it rained. The first rain we’ve had around here in months. It’s been raining all day, except for when it snowed (alas for the trick-or-treaters!). When I was done with my novel writing this morning, I happened to look outside and found that the first four of my cartons of orphaned books had arrived from Nordskog (see last night’s story). I have an idea the mail carrier was unhappy about being made to carry those heavy cartons, because he left them on the very outside edge of the porch, where the drip from the awning would pour straight down on them.

Some of the cartons were soaking wet; all were damp. I brought them in immediately and freed the books from the cartons. They’re air drying in my living room now, as are the cartons.

Most of the books are fine. A few have covers curled. But I’m getting these things for pennies on the dollar, and don’t expect to outlive the supply anyway.

Ten more cartons arrived this afternoon (perfectly dry, I’m happy to say). Also I finally got my paperback copies of The Elder King from Amazon. I’d been looking forward to that – photo above.

And… I got a surprise. Some moron – and there’s no moron but me on this job – accidentally put the wrong title in the page headers. All the right-hand pages in this edition say at the top that the book is Hailstone Mountain, which it is not.

I wouldn’t have this problem if I’d done the prudent thing and ordered a review copy for myself before releasing it. But I lack the patience. Now I have this.

It’s easily fixed. I’ll republish it tomorrow. Which means the book will be briefly unavailable. The few copies already sold will go down in history as errata, no doubt to become sought-after collectors’ items.

Bookselling, Fiction, Publishing

Start the presses! ‘King of Rogaland’ in paper!

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The hits just keep on coming – as many people must have said in the radio business, but I don’t think I ever did, back when I was in the game.

I am forging my way through my Viking books, and can herewith announce that the paperback version of King of Rogaland is now obtainable from Amazon.com. This completes the whole set (sort of, details below), except for the final book, The Baldur Game, which still awaits its cover art.

And then there are the first two books, which present complications of their own.

West Oversea, Book 3 of the series, is in an odd limbo at this juncture. Nordskog, its publisher, is – sadly – going out of business. They have kindly returned all rights to me, and are selling me their entire stock of paperbacks at a steep discount. That’s about 20 cartons at last count. I’ll have my little house packed with them, I guess, which is (I think) the final stage of deterioration in a self-published author’s life cycle. I’m working now at formatting the book for an Amazon version of my own. I think selling this stock of Nordskog paperbacks through Amazon would create a distribution challenge for which I’m not equipped. So I’ll just create a fresh one, and sell my Nordskog volumes at Viking events. I expect they should last me another 40 years or so.

And then there’s The Year of the Warrior. I’m currently getting the paper version printed by a private printer, but I’m going to try to get that one out through Amazon too. I think it’ll be cheaper, but the juxtaposition of Baen’s electronic version with my paperback will, I have no doubt, raise unanticipated problems.

We suffer for our art in many ways. This is not one of the worst. Yet.

Publishing, Writing

Hobgoblins of my mind

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Avaldsnes Church (my photo). The dark shape toward the left end of the nave is the last remaining standing stone. They call it “The Virgin Mary’s Sewing Needle.”

Tonight’s topic is one I’ve been thinking about ever since I began formatting my novels for paperback. The fact that I’ve forgotten about this topic every evening when the time came to compose a post probably says something about me personally – specifically about my reluctance to admit my mistakes.

Because my mistakes are my topic.

Specifically, my inconsistencies.

In my books.

Emerson (who knew something of suffering, since his parents named him Ralph Waldo) famously said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” This has given great comfort, over a couple centuries, to many people looking for excuses.

Which brings us to me.

One thing (one of many) that has bedeviled me over the years, as I’ve worked on my Erling Saga, was a sneaking suspicion that I was describing things differently in different books. I have avoided this problem by assiduously refraining from re-reading them. But the process of formatting for paperback has forced me to read each of them, and I’ve discovered that my fears were justified.

Shall I share some of the inconsistencies? Will that depress others as much as it depresses me?

Be strong, and read on if you dare.

The character of King Olaf’s marshal, Bjorn (the sagas do not give us his father’s name; I had to make one  up for him), is described as dark-haired on his first appearance. In King of Rogaland he is suddenly fair-haired and bald.

Closer to my heart are the standing stones at Augvaldsness (Avaldsnes) on Kormt (Karmøy) island. This, as I’ve explained more often than you care to recall, is the location of my great-grandfather’s home church. Only one of those standing stones still stands today, but originally there was an array of five. In one of the Erling books (I think it was The Elder King, but I’m already not sure) I said only two of those stones were standing at the time, and the others were just stumps. But in King of Rogaland, based on a reconstruction of the Viking Age farm from Norway, I put all five up again, adding a lame excuse that Ailill’s memory is vague, and he thinks the magic of the place has affected his perception.

And now I have to live with it.

Well, if Conan Doyle could live with forgetting where Dr. Watson got his wound in Afghanistan, I can probably live with these things. It’ll give future Walker scholars something to debate. Or laugh about.

Bookselling, Publishing

The ‘Mountain’ in my hand

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The package arrived yesterday. At last, after many a year, I can hold a paper version of Hailstone Mountain in my tremblous hand.

The book is thinner than I expected. I suppose that’s because of the 6”x9” format – more words per page. I’m used to thinking in terms of what’s called “mass market paperbacks,” the roughly pocket-sized books you generally see on racks in stores (or used to). For some reason, we self-publishers seem to gravitate toward a larger size. Perhaps we’re compensating.

Maybe the cream paper that I didn’t select would have been a little thicker, too.

In any case, my books are my children, and I’ve known this one only electronically up to now. Like having a kid whose mother took custody and then moved to California – you only know him through Zoom calls. Now at last he’s made his way to my doorstep. He needs money, of course.

I wonder how I should deal with selling these things at Viking events, as one by one they get instantiated in the physical universe. My bestseller at events is Viking Legacy. After that, it’s The Year of the Warrior (the paper version I have printed, not yet available on Amazon). West Oversea comes in third. This one follows in the sequence. I figure demand for each successive book should be smaller than for the previous one. I anticipate carrying a couple cartons of the later books of the saga with me to events, but I don’t imagine I’ll have to stock as many of those. It’s already a lot of cartons to lug around.

At the festival in Green Bay, I was signing somebody’s book and they complimented my handwriting. This surprised me. I’ve always considered my handwriting awful, for the practical reason that it’s hard to read. My writing may possess a certain grace of form, but it’s not pragmatically effective.

I wish my art to be useful as well as aesthetic. But not enough to write slower.

Authors, Bookselling, Publishing

‘Hailstone Mountain’ in Paperback

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This is to announce the momentous (or mountainous) news that my novel Hailstone Mountain is at last available in corporeal, paperback form.

I’m working at getting all my books incarnated, but this is a start.

Publishing, Uncategorized

How now, Minot?

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It seems a little silly to promote my upcoming appearance at Norsk Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota (video above). It is a long way away for most people (even me, come to think of it), and most of those who attend make special arrangements ahead of time for travel and accommodations. However, I think it might be easier to get in now than it has been in the past – Covid did a number on the event, and they’re trying to rebuild.

So if you happen to make it there, I’ll be in the Viking Village, more or less east of the main entrance, with books to sell. Also, at 2:45 pm each day, I’m scheduled to be interviewed about my fascinating work on the Familie Fjord stage at the south end of the mezzanine.

I’ve never done that before. My renown is spreading, obviously.

I’m still trying to get Hailstone Mountain set up for paperback release on Amazon. Currently I’m having trouble with the cover art, with which Phil Wade is trying to help me. With great patience, I might add. I’m sure he has more pressing things to do.

I just reached page 100 in the book I’m translating. That puts me right on schedule in my working plan. I shall savor the moment, and celebrate by putting in more work.

Have a great weekend!