Tag Archives: self-publishing

Learning From Wilsonia, Part III

Self-publishing The Cabins of Wilsonia led me to new skills, experiences, people, and places.

As with most things in life, it comes down to people. Think about jobs you’ve had: if you are like me, you have probably learned that it is better to do difficult and unpleasant tasks with great people than to do good jobs with awful people.

Publishing The Cabins of Wilsonia was a great project with fantastic people. I took very few people photos while working on the book, but here is a little peek at a few of the folks who influenced, assisted, and added joy to the project.

Learning From Wilsonia, Part I

Publishing The Cabins of Wilsonia filled my life with new skills, experiences, people, and places.

Look at this list of skills:

Using a laptop – before this project, my sole computer experience was on desktops.
Preparing pencil drawings using a scanner, a real scanner, not just a bargain print/fax/scan/copy thing that sounds like a deal until it needs ink (a week after you buy it).
Adobe Photoshop Elements – Adobe is completely non-intuitive to this Apple-girl. Elements is the “easy” version of Photoshop. . . fall down laughing.
Adobe InDesign – even now, seven years after beginning the book, each time I open up InDesign to begin a new project, it feels almost as if I have never seen the program before. I say that I “learned” to use it, but those lessons were hard won and hard to hang onto.

Next time, you’ll see a list of what these skills led me to.

It’s Complicated

Remember in the olden days before computers were common? The idea was that computers would simplify our lives, making everything instant and easy and paperless.

Have you fallen over laughing? Or are you banging your head on the wall?

What does this have to do with The Cabins of Wilsonia?

The book is for sale. You can buy it from me in person, use Paypal through this blog (that button that says Add to Cart), or mail me a check. You can even email me using the contact thing at the top of this blog and we’ll work out something.

But why isn’t it on Amazon yet?

Because it is complicated.

I’ll eventually get it there, but since I’ve been rebuilding my main website since October, I’m kind of tired of messing around on the computer.

Simplify our lives? Hahahahahahaha!

Happy to provide a laugh for you today. 😎

This Mess is a Place

The books arrived Monday afternoon. Two friends came over to help apply cover stickers so I’d be ready for the Tuesday book signing.

Early Tuesday a.m., I figured out the right combination of bubble wrap and box sizes and got those ordered before heading to Exeter.

On Wednesday, I sorted through the pre-sold orders to find the zip codes that were furthest from Three Rivers, got those books signed and set aside. Around 1 p.m., UPS pulled in with the packing materials, so I called my neighbor Robin. She raced over, and we began assembling boxes and figuring out the best way to process as many orders as possible. This is because the Media Mail deadline for arrival by Christmas was that very day at 3 in the afternoon.

When we decided we could wait no longer, we loaded her big car (most cars seem big compared to mine) with boxes full of boxes full of books. We made it! All those distant orders were sent.

On Thursday, I began processing the rest of the orders. I ran out of bubble wrap and had to substitute the packaging materials that I pulled from the cartons of boxes. My husband helped (around attending a retirement lunch for an old work buddy), and then we hauled the rest of the pre-orders to the Post Office.

73 packages, and the tape from the postal register computer dealie was 8′-1″ long! The clerk said it holds the record for the longest tape ever.

All but 3 of the packages will be there by Christmas, and those folks know and are not upset about it.

What It Is and What it Isn’t

What it is:

The upcoming book The Cabins of Wilsonia is an album. It is a collection of pictures designed to show the overview of a cabin community. It is pictures of the typical, pictures of the unique, word pictures of cabin life expressed in stories from cabin folks. It is designed to show the many architectural styles within the community. It is a medley of little details, such as the way the sun lands on something ordinary and makes it beautiful. It shows things that are ordinary to cabin life that may be unusual in “normal” life. It is a picture of cabin life in the 20th century. It is pencil drawings made from photos that I spent days and days shooting, editing, cropping, choosing, and three years putting together. It is the celebration of a very special treasure of Tulare County and Kings Canyon National Park.

What it Isn’t

It is not a directory of cabins. It is not a comprehensive, all-inclusive list of every cabin. It is not a history book. It is not a complete representation of every one of the 214 cabins in Wilsonia. It isn’t photos. It isn’t a list of cabins that used to be there. It isn’t a collection of cabins that currently belong to the Park. It isn’t a hastily thrown together piece of work.

And it isn’t yet in our hands.

Have You Pre-ordered Your Copy Yet?

The Cabins of Wilsonia is not yet printed but it is for sale. If you buy it before September 15, the price is $70, which includes tax and shipping. Actually, the price via Paypal is $69.99 because no matter how I manipulate the numbers, I cannot get it to be $70 even! Or, I could if I changed the shipping to $5.01. . . .

Nah. I’m tired of messing with the computer stuff. I think my Adobe InDesign experiences will have me feeling jumpy about computers for quite awhile yet.

~~So, if you’d like to pre-order your copy, you may do so here using this Paypal button:~~

Final Decisions

Did you know that the more decisions one has to make during the course of a day, the more depleted one’s mental strength and willpower become?

This could be why I feel tired. (Or is it the mural I just finished? Maybe it is that old treatment plant for the neighborhood water system that I helped demolish. . . )

Here is the next slate of decisions before The Cabins of Wilsonia goes to press:

1. Re-evaluate the cover and end-sheet colors when the paper sample arrives.

2. Decide when enough proofreading is enough.

4. Figure out how to convert the whole shebang to a PDF. (Will the computer challenges ever end??)

5. Figure out the price of the book.

6. Figure out the right discount to offer as a pre-sales incentive. You all have to have a reason to hand me your hard-earned dollars before a product is available!

Will I see you in Wilsonia over the Fourth of July weekend?

More Decisions

Look at what I get to decide now:

1. How many books to print

2. What color of cover material

3. What to say on the About the Artist page

4. What to put on the cover of the book

5. What to do with the extra pages that will be necessary now that I’ve written the Acknowledgments and it ran to two pages and now I need to add seven more so there are multiples of eight (not sixteen, thank goodness) but really only six because I forgot about the About page. Phew. Breathe, chicky-babe, breathe!

I’m sure there will be more decisions ahead. Every time I think I’m almost there, the location of “there” changes! That is the world of self-publishing, and I’m THRILLED that I get to make the decisions instead of a publisher.

Doesn’t this deer look a little baffled? I can relate.

Not quitting.

Ever feel like just quitting on being a grown-up? Maybe on quitting all technology?

I finally ordered Adobe Photoshop Elements. Got version 10, because I don’t need the latest version to do two or three “simple” things.

It came. I looked at the box for about a week.

Okay, deep breath. What could be so dadgummed hard about installing it? What’s to fear? i’ve “conquered” Adobe Indesign; this is a baby program, so “they” say. It is Photoshop for “hobbyists”, said with a sneer.

Open the box. Read the little words. See that for Mac, only the 3rd disk is required. Insert disk. Scan the miles of ALL CAPS TYPE THAT IS SHOUTING TO BE READ AND AGREED TO. Agree.

A serial number?? What serial number??

Look over the box and the disks. No serial number. Or maybe it is that one. . . or this one?

Go to the internet. Ask the know-it-all Mr. Google how to find a serial number on this thing. Find lots of sites. Find lots of answers. Find a simple answer that says to look on the plastic case.

Look on the plastic case – AHA! Enter the serial number.

Adobe User Name? Sign in? Say what?? Okay, I must have done this to be able to use InDesign. Try one eddress with my normal password formula. No luck. Try another eddress with my normal password formula. No luck.

Click on “Forget Password?”

Go to Adobe website. Type in eddress (and hope it is the one I used for InDesign). Get a message that an email is coming.

Wait for email. Get email. Set new password.

Learn that my password has too many characters. Redo the “Forget Password”? Wait for another email.

Wish I could quit.

Nope. Not quitting.

THERE WILL BE A BOOK CALLED THE CABINS OF WILSONIA!

I’m sorry for shouting. This is enough to make a preacher cuss. Self-publishing wouldn’t be hard if it didn’t include all this techie junk.

What Is Self-Publishing?

In the olden days, people self-published a book when they had no agent, no experience, no market and no hope of finding any of those necessary elements.

I exaggerate to make a point. There were other reasons for self-publshing, and not all self-published books were as pathetic as that sounded.

When Jane Coughran and I self-published The Cabins of Mineral King, we chose to go that route for multiple reasons: we knew exactly how we wanted our book to look, we wanted to make money and not share with a third party, and we knew our market and how to reach them.

The Cabins of Wilsonia is the same sort of project for me. Now days, there are many assisted self-publishing companies that didn’t exist back in 1998 so the options are much broader than simply going it alone.

Assisted self-publishing means that a company provides limited choices in paper, book shape and format, types of binding, types of covers, and numbers of pictures and pages allowed. They might provide an editor if you pay more, and often they print the books as you sell them. (This is called “Print On Demand”.) They provide an ISBN and a bar code, and they are listed as the publisher. They do limited marketing, using Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and their own company. Sometimes they provide a handful of bookmarkers, postcards and publicity posters. You may have heard of some of these companies: Blurb, Lulu,and Create-Space are a few of the biggies. This type of publishing works well for some, but won’t work for me, for the same reasons as when we did The Cabins of Mineral King.

So, I’m acting as a contractor and either doing all the pieces myself or finding experts to do the work. For example, I am doing my own book design, which includes deciding how it looks, typing out all the text, scanning the drawings, sizing and arranging it all, and using a complicated computer program to get it ready for a printer. Friends and Youtube have shown me how to do these things.

In addition, I’ve hired a professional editor and may rent the brain of The Book Designer. It is my hope that he will take the slack out of my design and point me to printers and binders and perhaps a cover designer so that I don’t make any gross errors, or even any minor ones.

Being my own contractor means I have to figure out all those steps. The type of cover design I used before won’t look good on Amazon, which may not have been in existence in 1998. The printing company I used is out of business, and I can’t remember who the binder was. Last time we had to find a shipping company with a loading dock so the books could be delivered from the bindery. Then Dad and my husband went to Fresno with their pickups to get the books. Now I have forgotten who the trucking company was, Dad is gone and so is his pickup. (Michael’s pickup has 310,000 miles on it but it could go to Fresno for a load if needed.)

Then I had to store all the books and mail them out to fill the orders.

So, still lots to do and figure out.

And that’s the current status on the book process.

Oh, and I have to plan a few book signings.

Wait, did I mention that I need to figure out how to presell the books so I can pay for this?

Excuse me, I need to go lie down now.