I’ve taken a little time off recently to get a few things done in the arena of all things book related. The first thing I did was to get a couple of my titles up on Kindle. I don’t even know if that’s the way you’re supposed to say it. I am, in all things other than typing, pretty computer phobic. My friend who helps me with this stuff talks encouragingly about the learning curve, and I have to admit she’s right. Once you get the process to do one task, doing the same thing over again isn’t too bad.
I thought, as I worked my way through the many opportunities available at Amazon, that maybe I should start a new blog just for my author page. It had been a while since I’d done the set-up for a new blog, but maybe I’d remember. I didn’t think, initially, that I’d want to link to one of these blogs where I write off-the-cuff. That wouldn’t do, would it?
The long and the short of it is that if I can figure out how to do it, I thought I might as well link up to this blog that I left in discouragement a while back. I wasn’t really doing what I started out to do with it. There wasn’t much to tell – no breaking news on the publishing or writing front.
I don’t know if this blog will ever appear on my Author Page (click on Page to view the new Kindle editions) because I don’t understand what is being asked for when I’m asked for an RSS feed. But maybe it will, and I thought you should know.
I rarely get more proud of myself than I do when I solve a technical problem. This is not because I think doing so is terribly important, but because, unlike the me of yester-year, I haven’t given up. I got a new printer a week or two ago and spent six hours trying to get it to talk to my computer. I went to bed convinced I was going to have to call my son and wait for his help. But in the morning I had an idea of what I might have been doing wrong, changed the way I did it, and voila, my printer and my computer got buddy-buddy.
I now write people for help and even when their advice makes my head spin, I don’t understand what they’re telling me to do, or even the words they use, I give it a try. I just wrote three people in three different states to ask them how to provide a link to my Amazon page.
But here’s the bizarre thing: when I accomplish something, it’s usually an accident or comes out of an act of desperation where I just wing it and it turns out to be the exact thing I needed to do.
This happened not only with getting my books on Kindle but when I tried a new video technique where I added narration. I got two good looking and good sounding videos out of the experimentation. I was amazed. My friend who does video was amazed. Then I went back – trying to perfect one of them – and nothing worked. I’d already burned my “movie” and hadn’t saved the audio file separately. I thought, “No sweat, I’ll just re-record it.” Do you think I could get through a paragraph without coughing, wheezing, spitting, mispronouncing words, sighing heavily, or sounding like someone about as interested in what I what I was saying as a person reading a phone book? Oh, no. But somehow, in that happy accident stage, when I was flying by the seat of my pants and seeing what I could do, my narration is close to flawless…not all the way there…but real and lively and without too much sputtering going on.
My favorite poet and one of my favorite writers on writing, William Stafford, says one of the worst things for a poet is to know too much about writing. The same is true about spirit I think. The more you think you know, the more beliefs you hang onto, the more aspirations you have, the less spirit takes you…which is what I think we’re going for. It’s what I’m going for anyway.
I wish it worked that way more often with technology, but I swear to God it kind of has with these things I just did.
A note to aspiring writers interested in Kindle. If you read too much about how to do it, it’ll get far more complicated than it needs to be. That was my happy accident. I’d read about turning my pages into HTML language, unzipping my PDFs, turning Word into HTML and then back to Word. And what’s worse, I tried to do all these things. My act of desperation was inserting the picture of my cover into the plain old Word document and giving it a try. It worked.
So…there you are. I just wanted anyone who might be following this blog to know that I’m venturing into posting it to Amazon (if luck stays with me) and that because of this, I might attempt to say a little more than I do now about…my books! (Or not. We’ll see how it goes, winging it all the way.)
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