Sal, Captain of the Baby Guards or My Adventures in Self-Publishing I

So, after much hard work and trouble, I have finally published a children's book. This book is a labor of love about a toddler who has a wild imagination. It teaches children to confront their imagined fears.

I hired someone to format the book but had nothing but disaster with her (to be continued on the next thread...). So, my book that was supposed to be finished by the end of September and marketed in October for a November release is just now getting uploaded into CreateSpace and Kindle (sigh) and has yet to be marketed. I also still need to have it translated and create the hardcover version (which costs $99 and you then have to buy the books from CreateSpace and sell them yourself). *CreateSpace no longer offers this.

Now, when I published my Teaching Guide on the novel Cheaper By the Dozen, I paid CreateSpace $25 to buy extended marketing (although this is not "real" marketing in my book it does open up options). I was perfectly happy with this option. This time, I was initially excited because extended marketing was "free." However, selecting this option meant that the least I could make the list price for my book was $9.99 (Amazon is selling it for $8.99 - go figure). I would rather pay the $25 and be able to charge less.

Thankfully, I can set my own prices on Kindle - well, sort of. I wavered between the 35% commission and a $0.99 cost or the 70% commission and a $2.99 cost. I felt the later was better to start. Not necessarily because I want to make more, but because I feel the book is good enough to charge that much. I do not think I could charge any more than $2.99 for an e-book simply because it doesn't cost anything to publish it (aside from marketing).

Yes, despite the fact that my social media targets adults and adults only, I wrote a children's book - well, maybe the person that I am hiring to market it can help figure that out. Don't worry, I am not planning on changing anything about this blog to market it. I just wrote the book many years ago and wanted to put it out there. However, if any of you are interested or happen to have children or grandchildren that need an extra stocking stuffer (or Kindle stuffer?), here's the Amazon link.

And here's my favorite pages:

Typing Speed

Some of you might have noticed that I added a typing speed checker at the bottom of my blog so you can check your typing speed. This is only a rough estimate because it is made with random quotes which are much easier to type than random words.

If you want to write, you need to be able to type. I found a cool online typing practice website too: www.keybr.com. You can go there and practice so you improve your speed.

Typing is a vital skill for anyone who wants to be a writer. Yes, you can write everything out on paper (I used to only get inspiration with a pen and paper in hand), but not only is it inefficient because you then have to type your work  before you can do anything with it, but it is also inefficient because you have to keep track of it and moving one section to a new spot is a lot more difficult.

Whatever your method, at some point as an author you need to type, learning to do this quickly and efficiently will save you both time and money in the end.

What would you do?

So of the past three editing jobs I have had, one was a content edit and two were "grammar/ punctuation."

I have talked about this before, but the "grammar/punctuation" were actually content edits in disguise. So what would you do? These people hired me to do a quick, easy 3 day job and paid me to do a quick easy 3 day job, but in the end I had to spend a month doing a content edit, send it back to them, and then do a regular edit. (I had to send it back to them because eventually it gets too red and marked up to deal with anymore.)

The other problem is that one of these people did not know how/did not want to use the track changes feature. She returned the paper to me with all the changes still marked and then in the email said - "I don't want to change this, this, this, and that, but everything else is good." What!! Not only did I have to spend extra time going though and fixing her manuscript but I also had to then spend several hours going through the changes and accepting only the ones she wanted. I am not talking a couple of hundred changes, I am talking tens of thousands of changes.

Of course it becomes impossible for me to finish these manuscripts in the time I estimated. I have finally finished them, but I still have the content edit for the guy who actually hired me to do that. I, unfortunately, work on a first come, first serve basis and he was the last person to put his money in. Sad.

What makes the story even more tragic is that the lady already docked me on feedback for timeliness - really? When you give someone a manuscript with thousands of errors and want them to fix it, it is going to take time - it is also going to cost more. But, the first time an author gets their manuscript edited professionally, they should expect thousands of changes. Beta readers are not paid and cannot do this for you for free. The guy, whose manuscript I returned today and who is probably also going to dock me for timeliness, used beta readers before sending it to me.

Beta readers are good to send a manuscript to after you have had it content edited. They will pick up things the content editor missed. Once an editor becomes familiar with a story it makes it difficult to find the errors. Then, you need to send it in for a grammar/punctuation check which should turn out maybe hundreds of errors. Finally it goes to the proofreader who should pick up tens of errors and formatting errors.

I still do not know what I am going to do the next time I get a "grammar/ and punctuation" editing job and find out they need a good content edit - do I just fix typos or do I actually insert numerous comment discussions about the things that don't work?