Reasons to Use Full-text Articles

• Increasingly, busy surfers and readers are viewing your RSS articles on a mobile device.  If they have to click on a link that takes them to a web site to read the rest of an article, their experience can be less than optimal:  no mobile version of the site, small web pages, and slow load times.

• Content is still king on the internet, not just at your web site but in your RSS feed as well.  Building a following and reader loyalty is often grounded in offering content that is useful and/or entertaining and not difficult to access.

• Full-text articles increase the likelihood that your message gets read–assuming that’s your point.  If you’re trying to get click-throughs or gauge metrics, there’ll be more to say on that below.

• Readers have already demonstrated they have an interest in what you have to say by subscribing to your feed.  By only providing a summary, you risk alienating them by requiring that extra click.

• Overwhelmingly, at polls and in comments across the blogosphere, RSS readers agree that they want to see the full text.  In fact, some RSS readers will not subscribe to a feed if it only provides summaries.

• If your readers are following lots of RSS feeds, they may not take the time to visit your site.  One of the primary advantages of RSS reader applications is that they aggregate feeds for the sake of convenience and efficiency.

• Users may be more likely to Digg, StumbleUpon, Tweet, link or otherwise share your article if it’s full-text.

• Some busy readers on the go like to cache their feeds and read offline.  In the same vein, if your site is down, the feed is still out there.

Objections to Using Full-text Articles

•  Many people who use summaries in an RSS feed are trying to ensure that readers also visit their site.  If you’re trying to get users to the ads on your site, first consider the enormous amounts of traffic that it takes to monetize a site with contextual ads and, second, consider putting ads in the feed itself.  On the other hand, if you have an affiliate site, then you really want an optimized landing page for people who want to buy what you’re selling, visitors that are typically generated through paid advertising and some organic search.

•  You’ll get more comments on your articles if the reader has to click through to the full article.  First, of course, you’ve got to get the reader to click through, which may not be that easy to do.  However, even with a full-text article, experienced RSS readers will know that the comments can often contain as much useful information as the original article and may click through to see these–especially if the comments are referenced in a future article or post.

•  If users don’t click through, then you can’t gather metrics.  Then again, some of the most metric-driven sites on the internet–professional bloggers and internet marketers–almost universally use full-text articles.

Exceptions to the Rule – There’s Always a Few

• A summary RSS feed is a good way to skim news sources that manage to summarize their content in the title and tag.  Readers can often get the gist of the news from a few short sentences.

• If you post several times a day, then it may be a kindness to your readers to use summary articles.  However, consider writing unique content for the summary instead of just using an excerpt.

• Sometimes the decision comes down to the length of the post.  Really long posts, or posts heavy on images, might best be left at the web site and a summary sent out that outlines the entire article.

There is no strict set of guidelines that publishers can use to decide whether or not they want to provide a summary or a full-text RSS feed.  However, one rule of thumb that webmasters have used successfully for years has been trying to imagine what they themselves would want out of a site.  By putting your readers experience at the forefront and offering content that is genuinely of value, you put your site on a much faster track to success.

Bonus Tips

• Whether you use summary or full-text articles in your RSS feed, subscribe to it yourself.  You may be surprised by what you see.  Not only can the formatting change, but be sure to check links back to your site, ads, and also social media share buttons.

• To change your RSS settings in WordPress, navigate to Settings > Reading, and then select “Full text” or “Summary”.

• To change your RSS settings in Blogger, navigate to Settings > Site Feed > Allow Blog Feeds, and then select “Full”, “Short”, or “None”.

• In LiveJournal, full text is the default.  If you want to change it, you’ll have to use the Admin console.

What I Like About the New Vook

• Gone are the short dramatizations that repeated part of the text. Instead, there are mini-documentaries that relate to the chapter. I wasn’t against the dramatization, per se, but I had not liked the way it repeated the text, providing no new content. It makes sense to me that this version of the Vook didn’t have them.

• There is now a clearer separation between the story content and the ancillary video material. Once I figured that out, I took out my earphones while I was reading, which is more comfortable for me.

• There were still images included with the text of the book.

Still Image from the Text Part of the Vook

• The videos were high quality and added quite a bit to my enjoyment of the whole Vook experience. Including Gothic Historians for a Gothic piece was fitting as were the older silent-film type clips with voice overs. It was a nice balance between engaging visuals and talking heads.

The beginning of the first video.

• I like the new slider at the bottom to help me navigate at a faster clip through the text. Gone are the up and down arrows at the top that didn’t really do anything for me.

I liked the slider on the bottom for navigation. The up and down arrows are replaced by the chapter number (3, in this case), and I can have white text on a black background. The blue link leads to a dictionary definition.

• Unlike the previous Vook that I’d read, the navigation was consistent and worked fine.

• White text on a black background–hurray!

• The icon for the app was easy to see and it was relevant.

What I Didn’t Like About the Vook

• I wasn’t able to place bookmarks, which has been a standard part of the ebook experience and a feature that I tend to use.

• After stopping and restarting the app, the text of the book doesn’t pick up where I left off. Again, I think this is pretty much expected in any ebook. Likewise, when I went to the table of contents for the book, I couldn’t easily get back to where I had been reading.

• The app bombed twice during the videos. This was never an issue with the previous Vook, but the OS has changed, I’m sure I’ve installed and uninstalled lots of apps, and you just never know where conflicts can arise. It was annoying but I’m not sure I can really fault the Vook. Oh, wait–even as I write this, the iTunes store has offered an update for “typos” and “persistence”.

• I was initially confused by the non-fiction video content at the top or end of a fiction chapter. I think this confusion probably stems from my previous experience where the videos shown in the book were dramatizations of the text. After watching the first video and checking the others, I simply read the story, then watched all of the videos afterward.

The thumbnail for the video shows Anne Rice in a coffin and I was confused since I thought it might be a dramatization of part of the text.

• I’m not sure if the gravedigger in the video about the black plague was a character or not. I’ve decided that he is, although he was so unlike the silent film actors that I couldn’t quite tell.

• Most of the videos end a little abruptly, which is fine, but I was hoping for something a little less abrupt on the last one. I call it the “last” one, although you don’t have to watch them in order.

• A final niggling detail: the video titles in the table of contents didn’t match the title as shown in the video. Oh, this is picky, I know.

Nice Improvement

I enjoyed this Vook much more than the first one and not just because it’s by Anne Rice. Some of things that I had wanted are now here (white text, video that adds context instead of repeating the story). Some items on my wish list are still missing (can’t read text in landscape, can’t listen to my own music while reading). Overall though, I was encouraged by the changes that I found and I’ll probably start to actively look for more Vooks that I might enjoy.

His arrival in Philadelphia is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature: the bedraggled 17-year-old runaway, cheeky yet with a pretense of humility, straggling off the boat and buying three puffy rolls as he wanders up Market Street.
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

John Wilkes Booth awoke Good Friday morning, April 14, 1865, hungover and depressed.
James L. Swanson
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer

Vatican propaganda notwithstanding, Peter was never “bishop of Rome.”
Thomas Cahill
Pope John XXIII: A Life

“I promise you four papers,” the young patent examiner wrote his friend.
Walter Isaacson
Einstein: His Life and Universe

Popular myth has it that one of the most remarkable conversations in modern literary history took place on a cool and misty late autumn afternoon in 1896, in the small village of Crowthorne in the county of Berkshire.
Simon Winchester
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

In the early nineties (it might have been 1992 but it’s hard to remember when you’re having a good time) I joined a rock-and-roll band composed mostly of writers.
Stephen King
On Writing

If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement with its author and try to identify the sins and deformities that animated him to write it (and I have certainly noticed that those who publicly affirm charity and compassion and forgiveness are often inclined to take this course), then he or she will not just be quarreling with the unknowable and ineffable creator who–presumably–opted to make this way.
Christopher Hitchens
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

I am not all here, it’s true.
Terry Brooks
Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life

The title of this book differs by only two letters from that of a book first published in 1988.
Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow
A Briefer History of Time

In November 2008 the surviving members of the original Monty Python team, stunned by the extent of digital piracy of their videos, issued a very stern announcement on YouTube.
Chris Anderson
Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who their prime minister is.
Bill Bryson
In a Sunburned Country

What should we have for dinner?
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemna: A Natural History of Four Meals

Anybody else have non-fiction line they’d like to throw out?
Do any of these lines make you want to read the book? Or just the first paragraph?

It also de-emphasizes the blog aspect of the site, since I do less of it.  More and more, I apply the time that I have to the work-in-progress and other writing duties.  I think it’s “putting the platform before the publishing” to spend too much time on blog entries and not enough on outlining, drafting, and revising.  The same goes for social media.

Of course, now that I’ve relegated the blog to an interior page of the site, I blog.  It must be that I feel the pressure less.

The fact is that writing something long (like the WIP) has accompanying longish periods where, were I to blog about it, I’d say the same thing from day to day, week to week, and even month to month.

Enough of that.  Time to write.

I have blogged, commented, and tweeted about my great admiration for ebooks, and my great desire not to have to move boxes of books ever again.  I have also been a purchaser of digital books.  It would seem, however, that I am also “an unusually active book customer” and so deserving of a limited-time offer: buy a 6″ Kindle for $249 and, if I’m not happy with it, get a refund AND keep the Kindle.  Say what?

Yes, you read that right.  Essentially buy it in the next few days, use the Kindle with my Amazon account, send an email within 30 days that I’d like a full refund (including shipping), and get my money back.  It’s a free Kindle.

Well, I’ve seen them in public and always kind of wanted to try one.  But one of the reasons I’m an active ebook buyer is that I’m pretty darn satisfied with my current ebook reader–my first generation iPod Touch.  It fits in a pocket or purse easily, it also has games, movies, music, news, RSS feeds, e-mail, and the web (if I’m near WiFi).  I’ve had it for a couple of years now and it has yet to show its age.  It’s got about thirty audiobooks on it now and about thirty ebooks as well.

Well, who knew that “free” could be so clarifying.  I like gadgets, but I think I’ll pass on this one.

Anybody out there like their Kindle more than their iPod or iPhone?

Embassy Vook Cover

As a big proponent of the e-book and a fan of technology in general, I took a look at the Vook, the new e-book with embedded video.  I bought Embassy by Richard Doetsch for $4.99, downloaded it to my laptop, and then put it on my iPod Touch.

What I Like About the Vook

It hijacked my workout.  Typically I read RSS feeds, listen to podcasts, or watch videos on the elliptical. It’s no big deal to keep track of what the elliptical is doing while I read, listen, or watch.  The Vook, however, made me lose track of whether I was supposed to be pedaling backward or forward.

I also thought the price was decent. True, Amazon is arbitrarily setting their e-book prices at $9.99 and lower and many authors are offering e-books for free or almost free in their bids to garner new readers. Even though Embassy is 128 pages long, I thought the additional video and the new technology made it worth a try.

I liked the ability to change the font size and I also liked the mini table of contents for just the video.

I liked the extra video of an interview with the author. Although there’s a connect icon at the bottom of the Vook that leads to links to web sites and such, this video is the best way to connect with the author.

What I Dislike About the Vook

Let’s start with the biggie:  the video repeats the text.  Because I was so engrossed in the story, once it got moving, I skipped one of the videos.  I eventually went back to see what I had missed, but by that point in my reading/watching I had learned that the videos didn’t advance the plot or add new information. One of the reasons I read thrillers is because of the fast pace and the page turning.  If I’m going to have to take time to watch a video then I either want to know that (1) it advances the plot and I won’t be reading the same information or (2) that I’ll have the option of jumping back into the story at a point after the video information is given again.

Much of the time, as I’m reading, I’m wearing my earphones for no reason.  If I’m wearing earphones, I’d like the option of a music track, being able to choose something of my own, or even a choice of ambient sounds.

Navigation through the text was inconsistent. Although I could use a swipe motion to go through the pages within a chapter, the swipe would not take me to the next chapter.  Although a single click forward would go through the pages within a chapter and also go to the next chapter, a single click backward would skip back to the beginning of the previous chapter.

Another way to get to the next chapter is using the up and down arrows. You can also see where to change to the font size.

I liked being able to change the size of the text but I also wanted to reverse the text to white and the background to black.

The text portion of the Vook is not readable in landscape mode.

The embedded video isn’t truly embedded.  More than likely the Vook app is making a call to the iPod OS.  What does it mean to the reader?  The video is only in landscape mode.  Yes, the video is larger in landscape mode, but when I have to rotate my reader to see the video, I’m pulled out of the story. This drawback might be solved if I could read the text in landscape mode as well, but I’d rather have the option of  the video being smaller and being truly embedded so that I can just click on it and it plays right in that spot of the Vook.

The Video Link in the Text

The Video You See When You Click the Link

What I Wish They Had Done

I wish the video portions of the Vook had higher production values.  I was glad that there was music in the videos, and occasionally actors on screen who spoke lines, but it seemed like there weren’t any foley artists, i.e., no professional sound effects.  The first video in Embassy of the couple running down the street sounded like it was actually their shoes, which is virtually never how movie sound effects are done.

I wish they had placed some preferences for the Vook in the Settings area.  But mostly what I’d want to see there doesn’t appear to be available in the Vook yet (ambient sound, etc.).

I wish they had designed an icon. I couldn’t make out the thumbnail of the app, but it turns out it’s the cover of the book. It’s completely indistinguishable as an icon. Icon design isn’t easy, but I think it’s worth the effort.

The Vook Icon

I wish the videos told a sort of mini-story without the text.  One of the things I liked about the Vook was the mini table of contents just for the video segments.  It made me wish that, if I were to click on each of those videos in succession, that I’d have a mini-version of the story as well.

The Video Table of Contents

I wish there had been some still images.  Call me old fashioned, but if the video isn’t going to advance the story in a way that text doesn’t, then a still image would work for me.

Take Away

This is version 1.0 of the Vook and I’m encouraged. It’s a solid app and contains several features that I’ve come to expect from both e-books and videos, although the two together are not yet seamless. Five years from now Vooks will undoubtedly look very different. I think it’s possible that some of what I’ve highlighted above will come to pass. However, the best part of evolving technology, for me, is all the things I don’t see coming and haven’t got a clue about. I’m ready for version 2.0.

Has anybody else tried a Vook?

Is the non-fiction more successful in terms of content delivery?

But I’ve found a  new way to feed my addiction.  It’s called TitleZ.  Yes, you have to register with an e-mail address but I have yet to receive any spam from them.  When that changes, you’ll know.  Believe me, you’ll know.  Here’s an example of their output, based on my two tattoo books.

TitleZ Sales Rank Data

You know you want to try it, so go ahead.  Plus, you can look up any title or author, not just your own books.

But, if I wanted, I could stop any time.

Peek-a-Booo!

These pop-up books by my friend Marie Cimarusti are so incredibly fun!  Fabulous to give as gifts to friends who are parents of toddlers, they make me look like I know what to buy for the little ones.  Every single one that I’ve given has been raved about.  It’s a total kick to watch the wee ones unknowingly mimic the peek-a-boo as their parents unfold the pop-up. Sometimes, they do the pop-up themselves because they simply cannot wait to see it.  If you order now, you can still get it in time for Halloween!

And the law was gravity, writer friends.  And when the law won, it was the biggest pain in the neck.

For about a month, I flouted the usual rules of an ergonomic work station and just worked, and worked, and worked.  There was much happiness, since work is writing and writing is great.  Then my vertebrae said that I would not be working as much.  It puts a hitch in the giddy-up, that’s for sure.

So, of the 3.6 average people who see this blog, how have you solved the ergonomic quandary of the I-mostly-sit-for-a-living work life?

I believe that there is a law in the universe for backups:  frequency is directly proportional to data loss, i.e., about the only time you really get serious about doing backups is when you’ve had a crash and lose your files.  Or, to put the less negative spin on it, the more often you do a backup, the less data you lose.  You know it.  I know it.  It is a law after all.  We’ll call it the Universal Backup Law.

Flirting with Disaster

In July of 2005, a Harris Poll survey found that 35% (more than a third) of US adults with personal and professional digital information stored on a laptop or desktop, never backed up their files.  Never.  Not once.  Zero.

Per the Universal Backup Law, in the event of a theft or a crash, they are guaranteed to lose data.  In fact, per a corollary to the Universal Backup Law, the crash gods will take special pains to find them.

Are you one of these people?

Are you a writer?

If you’ve answered yes to both of those questions, read on.  Otherwise, feel free to test your verbal skills and donate rice here.

The Writer’s Special Dilemma

People are really annoyed to lose digital data that they’ve paid for:  audiobooks, movies, TV shows, music files, ebooks, and all the rest.  Ooh it’s annoying.

Other people are really distressed to lose personal information:  address books, financial stuff, and very cool RSS feeds.  How tiresome to enter it all again.

Some people are traumatized by losing photos:  the kids, the folks, the wild office party from three years ago.  Maybe you should have printed some.

But writers, when they lose what they’ve written, it’s pretty much the end of the world, or at least that work day.  You know that, as a writer, you will never, ever, in a million years of constant writing, be as brilliant as you were when you wrote those perfect words, capture exactly the same thing that you captured when you first wrote them, and you will certainly never be able to remember what you wrote, verbatim, even if it was only three minutes ago.  It is calamity on a vast scale.  By the way, compulsively hitting the save button is not really a backup.

Let us agree that manually doing backups is a pain in the ass.  We’re not here to talk about automated backups.  We’re here to talk about cheap.  So, let us agree that backups are a pain in the ass.

But, as writers, let us also agree that losing writing, no matter how small the amount, is a small butcher knife twisting slowly in the lower abdomen that brings your writing momentum to a full stop.

Which pain is worse?

Free Is A Good Price

So what is a frugal writer to do?  E-mail yourself.  Yahoo! Mail offers free and unlimited mail storage (Gmail offers about 7 GB).  As a writer who wants to back up writing, let me give the Tattoo Encyclopedia as an example.  As a finished Word document, it clocks in at 713 KB.  Yes, the good thing about writing is that text documents are generally very small.  You could send it as an attachment or possibly even copy and paste it into the body of the email.  As far as attachments go, you could even attach photos.

The hitch here is that you’re limited to a 25 MB email message.  Depending on the resolution of photos, that’s not a lot of photos at once.  Then again, this is really about cheap writing backups, not how to back up your life.  Note that a lot of articles will tell you to use free services like flickr and Photobucket to store your images, but neither allows you to store high resolution images or long videos.

Thumbs Up

If you’re willing to fork over enough cash for a Disney movie on DVD, then you can afford a thumb drive.  In my quick survey of the top 25 thumb drives (aka, flash drives) sold at Amazon.com, you’ll see that for about $15 you can buy 8 GB of storage.  Doesn’t sound like a lot of room?  Again, from a writing example, virtually all of the research that I did for the Tattoo Encyclopedia was dumped into a Filemaker Pro database.  It contains every image and piece of text that I gathered as research for the book (some 1,500 entries), plus the text for the actual book, everything that tattoo artist Greg James illustrated for the book, and I add to it all the time as I come across things.  The file is currently 155.5 MB.  I could store 50 files this size on an 8 GB thumb drive.

You’ll see from my table, where I calculate dollars per GB, or bang for the buck, a 16 GB thumb drive wins out (a Kingston at $27.47) for costing only $1.72 per GB — these are all USB 2.0, by the way.  Don’t be too charmed by that number though.  You don’t really generate superlative bang for the buck until you buy many GBs.  A 500 GB external drive might cost something between $75 and $125, but the bang for the buck comes down to a paltry 15 cents per GB on the low end.

Since we’re being frugal writers here, you could look at it both ways.  Why pay $1.72 per GB when you can pay $0.15 per GB.  But, if you haven’t got $100 laying around for an external drive, maybe you could swing $15.  So, while I don’t want to spend $1.72 per gallon of gas when I could be paying 15 cents per gallon, I can probably afford to fill the tank on a Vespa but maybe not the tank on a motorhome.

Now

If you are one of those mind-numbingly huge contingent of people who do not back up, don’t wait for the perfect solution.  Don’t wait for automation.  Don’t wait for the rest of your digital life to fit into your backup plan.  Put your writing somewhere else, anywhere else, right now.  The crash gods are watching you.

All in One

The first and most fabulous feature of Scrivener is that it puts my research, notes, outline, and writing all together in one screen.  Looking back on it, I think this is one of the reasons that I used to use Filemaker as a writing environment.  As you can see in the screen shot below, of my latest tattoo symbol article, I’ve got my research listed on the left, my notes and outline on the right, the article on the top, and the current piece of research that I’m using at the bottom.  Sorry the type is so wee, but I wanted you to see the whole thing.

Scrivener Screen Shot

This arrangement isn’t just eye-pleasing.  Like any good multi-tool, it’s time saving. The biggest improvement in performance that I have seen in my writing (out of the many I’d like to see) is my efficiency.  I work primarily on a 15-inch laptop so real estate is at a premium.  I am sick of opening and closing windows, juggling five applications, and hitting various function keys to see everything that’s currently running.  Sick of it, I tell you.  My favorite thing about Scrivener is how it has eliminated the need for much of that and how much faster I can work as a result.

Compact

When I say that Scrivener brings all of my writing materials into one location, I mean one file.  One.  Whether I’ve imported text files, PDFs, TIFFs, or what have you, they all end up in my one .scriv file.  Now, if you decide you want to take a geeky look inside that file by ‘showing the package contents’, you’ll see all those individual files are still there as separate entities.  But if you don’t have a clue what that last sentence means, then skip it and be happy.  Everything that you have imported into Scrivener, or created in Scrivener, is in one file and you can take it anywhere you go.

Lightweight

Despite stuffing my Scrivener file with all manner of research, notes, outlines, versions, descriptions, and actual writing, it boots like a dream.  Unlike another prevalent piece of writing software, who shall remain anonymous but whose initials are Microsoft Office, have your coffee ready when you sit down to write with Scrivener.  Even files with 60,000 words seem to pop.

Portable

Let’s say you want to share your lofty thoughts with a friend but they don’t own Scrivener.  Scrivener seems to understand that it doesn’t exist in a Scrivener-only universe.  Among its export choices are RTF, RTFD, DOC, DOCX, ODT, FDX (I have never used Final Draft, or any other screen writing software, but Scrivener has many features that seem to have to do with this type of work), FCF, TEXT, and HTML.  If you decide to ‘compile’ your manuscript and have Scrivener do some fancy formatting for you, you get even more options.

Built-in Magnifying Lens

I would never buy a Swiss Army Knife without the magnifying lens.  It’s one of my favorite parts.  The same is true with Scrivener!  Check out how Scrivener helps to save my eyesight, day in, day out.

Scrivener Enlarged Print

And yes, I like the little scissors tool alot too but I couldn’t think of anything clever to say about Scrivener that really worked for those.

But Wait, There’s More

Although a Swiss Army Knife doesn’t have a built-in camera – yet – Scrivener does.  But don’t think of it as a camera, think of it as a super cheap backup system.  You can take a “Snapshot” of your work in progress and go back to it at any time.  It’s just a pull-down menu away, built right into the software.  You’ve got to do it yourself because it can’t be made to happen automatically (there are autosaves as you work though), but I did say it was a super cheap backup system.  I take snapshots before major edits.

Saves Money

But don’t take my word for it.  Go get your 30-day free trial.  That’s what I did.

What was bothering me?  It started with the dashboard RSS feeds hanging on “loading …” and then never loading.  I wasn’t horribly bothered by that, since I don’t look at those RSS feeds alot.  But then, I wanted to automatically update a plugin that had a new version.  That upgrade hung on “downloading” the zip, but the zip file in the plugin folder on the server was always 0 KB.  Likewise for an automatic re-install of WordPress.  It would just hang.  I finally decided that I’d better better get to the bottom of these weird problems and see what was really happening.  By that I mean, I started Googling all kinds of strange words and phrases.

Then, luckily, something in my dashboard really broke.  Yes, luckily.  When I tried to configure one of the RSS feeds that wouldn’t come down — just change it to show a couple of posts instead of five — I got the almighty 500 error – Internal server error from my ISP, 1and1.  Hallelujah!  I thought  maybe I was running out of memory and maybe needed to allocate something more for mySQL (oh, this whole process started with me backing up the mySQL database through phpAdmin, just like WordPress recommends).  So, I started Googling the 500 error on 1and1 along with WordPress and I ran into a great thread at drupal.org.  It recommended editing the .htaccess file by the adding the following:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Apparently, Apache will use PHP4, unless you ask it to use PHP5.  Wordpress, of course, wants PHP5.  So, I made the change to the .htaccess file and, all of a sudden, after many hours of chasing down everything that wasn’t wrong with the site, everything started working again.

Wow.

Now it’s time to — you guessed it — put all the plug-ins and widgets back in place, while compulsively checking the dashboard and the front of the site, diddle Atahualpa yet again, re-create some customized widgets, and on and on.  And compulsively check the dashboard and the front of the site.

Of course, the printers key has a more descriptive name and one that will actually help you locate it:  the number line.  So, if you flip open your book, you’ll see the back of the cover to the left and the title page to the right.  Turn the title page over and you’ll then see the copyright page.  Somewhere on the copyright page you’ll find the number line, strangely resembling, of all things, a line of numbers.  The lowest number – they aren’t always in order – is the number of the printing.  As the number of printings goes up, the printers key gets shorter.  For the second printing, for example, the number “1” will disappear, but all else will remain the same.

Copyright Page

So, in the example above, taken from Rites of Passage by Van Gennep, there is a red box around the printers key.  This is the 13th printing of that book and it was printed in 1996.

If you’re thinking that the whole thing smacks of something archaic, you’d be right.  This is a system that was born sometime after World War II, but more than that, it harkens back to the time of the Linotype slug.

Many people theorize that the numbers disappear because that’s the most foolproof way of amending the copyright page.  You’re less likely to have an error if you’re just removing a number rather than trying to add one.  While true, there is also the physical reality of the mechanism that was used to print books, starting in the late 1800s.

The Linotype machine (“line of type” machine) did exactly as the name suggests.  It produced a single, solid, metal line of type.  Each word in the line was assembled by an operator, using individual metal block letters and spacers, and then the machine would actually use molten metal to weld these pieces together into one single piece from which a single line of a book (or pamphlet or magazine or what have you) could be printed.  It’s a process also known as hot metal printing.

The shrinking number line scheme, while also less likely to introduce errors, makes the least amount of work for the publisher.  Instead of creating a new Linotype slug for the number line, the last (or outer) number in the existing line (the lowest number) could be filed off and the slug used again.  It’s a wonderfully economic system.  But I can’t help but wonder how the digital era of book publishing will change it.  There is still the argument that it’s a method less prone to error, but what about the cost savings in ink when you stop printing all the numbers in the line and just print one?

Month 1 – I started writing a proposal.

Month 3 – The proposal and query letter were finished.

Month 4 – I sent out twelve query letters.

Month 5 – I sent out one proposal.

Month 6 – I sent out twelve more query letters and one proposal.

Month 7 – I sent out one proposal and signed with my literary agent.

Months 8, 9, & 10 – I rewrote my proposal and sent it to my agent.

Month 12 – My agent received an offer from a publisher and I signed a contract with them in month 13.

Month 25 – I submitted the completed manuscript to the publisher.

Month 26 – I created a web site.

So, here, at the twenty-seventh month, I received a call from my editor saying that she was no longer my editor.  Simon & Schuster was downsizing and she was a casualty.  What a crappy phone call for her to have to make, but she tried to be upbeat and she was incredibly kind.  In the end, she said a new editor would be in touch.

But I had to wonder about that.  The Tattoo Encyclopedia had been her idea.  There was no guarantee that anybody else would find it interesting.  Plus, in the downsizing, the remaining editors already had their own projects keeping them busy.  Unfortunately, there was really nothing for me to do but wait.

Thankfully, the waiting was relatively short.  The new editor, Amanda Patten, did indeed contact me and we started work about a month later.  During the following months, a few things about the book changed.

The first thing to change was the title.  The title became The Tattoo Encyclopedia:  A Guide to Choosing Your Tattoo. I was opposed to the title change for a few reasons.  (1) I had never intended to write a guide, per se.  In my mind, a guide was narrative and not an A to Z reference.  (2) I had written brief entries that were in keeping with a dictionary, having kept in the mind the original idea for the book.  They didn’t seem as comprehensive and lengthy as might be expected in an encyclopedia.  Plus, I’d always been told that ‘encyclopedia’ was just the working title.  And (3) I couldn’t spell encyclopedia.  But, the publisher wanted the title and I discovered that I had very little say in the matter.  Although we disagreed, Amanda was entirely polite about the whole thing.  I felt that she had really tried to see my point of view and I knew that we were both just trying to do our jobs.  Even so, my whining meter was pegged.

The cover for the book went from a woodcut clipart file of a book with a scroll in front of it to several examples of Greg’s art superimposed on skin tones.  The font used on it went from a couple of standard serif fonts on a solid background to a badass font on bands of red, orange, and black.  The attention to detail in the final cover was awesome, down to the small pair of cherries on the spine.  On this issue, my whining meter did a step-function and dropped to zero overnight after several weeks of being pegged.  Greg and I had resigned ourselves, after several e-mails and conversations, to the first cover.  Then one day, the final cover, the one on the book today, arrived in the mail.  It came as a complete but welcome surprise since I had no idea that it was even being worked on.

Indeed, preparations and plans beyond my ken had taken place, and they had been based on a projected word count of 70,000 words: the physical size of the book, the cost of the paper, even how many books would fit in a shipping box came from the word count.  You may recall from Step 8 in this series of posts, that I had vastly exceeded this number.  It was now time to pay the piper.  In essence, Amanda and I had to find a way to reduce my text by about a quarter.  Should we take out some of the entries or reduce the size of each one?  In the end, we had to do both.

Along with grammar and spelling corrections, we repetitively reduced the length of the manuscript, mailing it back and forth, back and forth, marking with red and blue pencils, while her assistant did a great job of fact-checking.  Amanda poured over it, examining every sentence with the kind of detail, thought, and patience that made it seem like it had been her book idea instead of one that she’d inherited.

Here, my timeline for the book breaks down.  We spent some number of months working on The Tattoo Encyclopedia and I don’t have a record of when we finished, since we didn’t do it electronically.  However, having started the editing in approximately Month 30 of my timeline, we finished a few months later, call it Month 34 in the timeline.

I can say for sure, however, that I received my first copy of the actual finished book in Month 44 of the timeline.  Fourty-four months, nearly four years, after I had started to write the proposal for a book about tattoos, I received a physical copy of The Tattoo Encyclopedia in the mail.  I do not have a clue as to how this compares to the average in the industry, if there even is such a thing.

Looking back on the process makes it seem like much more work than it felt like at the time.  It helped to be working with wonderful people.  It also helped that I really enjoyed my topic and the process of research and writing.  Despite the fact that I made mistakes and needed to accept compromises, I am still glad to have had the opportunity to have done the book.  There must be a million different paths to this same end and, now that I’ve posted my example, I look forward to hearing about the paths that other writers are taking.  Best of luck to you on your path!

As I awaited word from the editor at Simon & Schuster regarding my mighty tome, I decided to create what is today called an online platform, but at the time was just a web site, when blogs didn’t exist.  It wasn’t something I was doing just for fun, although I did enjoy it.  Creating a web site was one of things that I had said I would do in my proposal as part of my promotion and marketing plan.

To that end, I acquired my domain name, selected an ISP to host it, and created a small site called TattooSymbol.com that crowed about the upcoming publication, although I had no release date.  There was some information about the book, some information about me, and some information about Greg (who did the illustrations for the book, in case you’ve missed the previous posts).  I gave a couple of examples of tattoo definitions and then left it at that until the book got close to release.  Initially, I coded all of the HTML by hand, switched to an entirely PHP driven site when it started to get unwieldy, then switched to GoLive and all of its tools for updating a large site, and now I use Dreamweaver.  I also select and prepare all of the images myself.

That web site has gone through a few major morphs, but it somehow attracted attention from the start.  I did nothing in terms of publicizing it, nor have I ever, but it’s about tattoos, and that’s just a really popular topic, especially on the web. Today, it gets about 7,000 unique visitors every day, over half-a-million page views per month, and I still add fresh content there on a regular basis.  In fact, 15% of the visitors there are returnees.

Today, I call the fledgling TerisaGreen.com site my online platform.  Using WordPress, the Atahualpa theme, and several plug-ins, I was able to easily incorporate all kinds of cool features, including a blog and comments.  At its heart, the TattooSymbol.com web site is for people who are considering getting a tattoo.  My intent for the TerisaGreen.com web site, however, is to make a dialogue possible, about all sorts of topics – including how to get a book published.  So, let’s get back to that topic.

In month twenty-seven of my effort to get a book published, after creating a web site and traveling steadily if laboriously down the road to a real live book, there finally came a bump.  I received dire news from my editor at Simon & Schuster.

Next post:  Step 10.  Working With The Publisher

In my timeline of how to get a non-fiction book published, wherein I started writing the proposal in month one, I started writing the book in month thirteen.  Thank god I hadn’t started writing the book that I had proposed, since that’s not the book that the publisher wanted.

I had the following mandate for The Tattoo Encyclopedia:  1,000 entries, 70,000 words, 300 images, done in twelve months.  I was working full-time plus teaching a class at UCLA.  Tattoo artist Greg James had a waiting list of clients that was and is, literally, months long.  To say that we were stressed that year is just silly.  My panic button finger was starting to get gangrene.  I’m pretty sure that Greg stopped sleeping.

One constant source of support, though, aside from my husband, who is glorious, was my literary agent, Jane Dystel.  She called me every month.  We talked about my progress and how things were going, and she’d offer encouragement.  She was checking on me – I knew that.  But I always looked forward to these calls, partly because my finger was on the button and I really was making progress, and partly because she understood what Greg and I were trying to do.

However, I began to realize, as I filled my database with research and writing on 1,000 different tattoos, that each entry was going to have to be brief.  Really brief.  The book was also supposed to include an introduction (I was going to work prehistory and history into it somehow) and also summary sections at the end that grouped similar types of tattoos together (animal tattoos, Celtic tattoos, Japanese tattoos, etc.).  When the editor and I had talked about the book being a real reference, we had somewhat arbitrarily landed on the number of 1,000 entries.  I eventually came to realize that I had conflicting criteria.  I needed each entry to define the meaning (usually multiple meanings) for a tattoo, adequately enough for a reference.  In two thirds of these entries I also needed to describe the tattoo itself, since there would be no image.  But, in each entry, I’d only have an average of 60 words.  The paragraph you’re reading is already 165 words.

So, I decided to err on the side of writing entries that were too long, but that covered the essentials of a tattoo’s meaning for someone who was considering it as their tattoo.  When you’re making your tattoo choice, it’s impossible to have too much information.  It’s a tattoo for crying out loud.

Finally, though, twelve months after we began, Greg and I finished on time but my word count had ballooned to 100,000 words.  I was thinking that the publisher was getting some kind of deal, paying for 70,000 words but getting more.  I thought that would be a boon.  Boy was I wrong.

Next post:  Step 9.  Creating My Online Platform

It turns out that my proposal for a book about how tattoos can communicate all kinds of messages (it was tentatively titled, Unveiling Tattoo) had crossed Lisa’s desk just after a proposal for a dream dictionary.  She then came up with the idea of putting the two together for a tattoo dictionary, starting with A and finishing with Z.  Although S&S wanted a book about tattoos, they wanted it to be a reference book.  And, as a reference book, it had to be fairly substantive, i.e., have numerous entries.

I knew that Jane had already beaten long odds to get the proposal as far as it had gotten.  It was a far cry from what I had proposed, but I jumped at the chance to write it anyway.  I said I’d be glad to write a tattoo dictionary.

The next step was talking to Lisa and making sure that we both understood what the tattoo dictionary was going to be about.  I was on board, right down the line, right up until she said that, like a dream dictionary, it didn’t need any images.

No images?  In a book about tattoos?  Hmmm.

I then talked with Jane (this is all happened on the same day, by the way) and I begged for images.  We talked about the number of dictionary entries that Lisa had in mind, as well as a word count, a due date, and the amount of the advance that they were offering.  It all seemed good except that I really felt that a book about tattoos that didn’t have any images was going to be about as appealing as dry pasta.  We hashed out how many images I thought I might need and I reasoned that it’d be ideal to have an image for every entry but acceptable to have one for every third entry.  I then made frantic phone calls to tattoo artist Greg James and he graciously agreed to do the drawings.

Jane got S&S to agree to one image for every third tattoo definition, but they insisted that all of the images had to be line art, without color and without grey shading, black lines only.  It was a severe limitation to Greg’s artistry, but once again, he accepted graciously.

In the end, Jane not only got the book hammered out to everybody’s satisfaction, she got the advance more than doubled.  Yes, that’s right, more than doubled.  I was already flying high, but this was so totally and completely a surprise that I couldn’t help but howl “You rock!” into the phone.  Despite the fact that I must have burst an ear drum, she managed to laugh.

I signed the contract not long after and, in my timeline of how to get published, where I started writing my proposal in month one, this was month thirteen, and the real work was about to begin.

Next post: Step 8.  Writing The Tattoo Encyclopedia

So, in a couple of iterations, I rewrote the proposal for about two months, almost as long as it had taken to write the original.  Did I mention the rewrite was extensive?  While I was working on it, I referred to the following books, most of which I had bought when taking the proposal writing class:

Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book by Susan Page

How to Get Happily Published by Judith Appelbaum

How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen

Writer’s Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing by Jean M. Fredette

Getting Your Book Published: Inside Secrets of a Successful Author by Robert W. Bly

The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality (Wiley Books for Writers Series) by Lee Gutkind

In my timeline, where I had started to write the proposal in month one, the rewriting process occurred in months eight and nine.  Then, in month ten, the proposal received its final blessing and I sent to Jane.  You can see it here (PDF, 4.36MB).  It is many, many times better than my first proposal.

Next post: Step 7.  The Book Offer from Simon & Schuster

To recap my timeline:  At the end of month three, I had my finished proposal and query letter.  At the beginning of month four, I sent out twelve query letters.  Now, in month five, I received one request for the proposal.  I sent it immediately and, in keeping with my plan to send to agents exclusively, I waited to hear back, and it was a pass.

So, in month six, I sent out twelve more query letters.  I received another request for the proposal in month six, which was also a pass.  In month seven, I had a third request for the proposal – and then something wonderful happened.

On a weekend, I don’t remember if it was a Saturday or Sunday, we got home and there was a voice mail from Jane Dystel, saying that she’d like to represent my book.  After shouting to my husband, followed by jumping up and down, followed by some whooping, and then more jumping up and down, I replayed the voice mail.  And yes, it was just an excuse for more jumping and whooping.  Jane had left a phone number where I could get in touch with her and that’s what I did, as soon as I could breathe normally.

Out of all the days in my writing life, this is the day that I remember the best.  Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

Next post: Step 6.  Rewriting The Proposal

I had two search criteria as I poured over the listings:  agents who (1) were interested in representing non-fiction and (2) mentioned that they would work with first-time authors.  I netted about two dozen listings.  Where I could, I sent e-mails, and for the rest, I sent out letters with SASEs.  Among the agents that I had picked, I had no particular preferences or ranking.

From the start of writing the proposal to this point was twelve weeks.  But at this point, I now switch from using weeks to months – you can guess why.  So, at the beginning of  month four, I started sending out query letters.  I didn’t actually send them out all at once, but instead did two batches of twelve, separated by about three months.  Why?  I had read that agents like to have an exclusive look at the proposal and I thought that if I did that, I’d increase my chances of success.  I now know that there are varying opinions on this approach.

Next post: Step 5.  Responses To My Query Letter

Before I wrote the query letter, I had to decide if I wanted to contact publishers directly or try to get a literary agent.  That was pretty much a no-brainer for me.  I had met authors, in person and online, who had not used a literary agent, and they had varying stories of success and not-much-success.  But I think that after having been exposed to and part of several types of industries before I decided to write a book, I had already decided that I didn’t want to learn another type of industry, even if it were possible.  The world of book publishing was, and still is, inscrutable to me.

Also, in general, I am very much in favor of paying an expert professional for their knowledge, contacts, and experience.  I have found that from plumbing to taxes, and everything in between, I save money in the end.  Sometimes the money amounts to the time I save that I can then spend working on something that I know how to do.  Sometimes it’s the real bucks that flow back to me that I would never have known about or to which I would never have had access.  Almost every time, though, I avoid the headache and stress that come from trying to make decisions that will have a very real impact down the line.

So, trying to find a literary agent was something I most definitely wanted to do.  To that end, I wrote and rewrote my query letter, in the tenth week of my online course on how to write a non-fiction book proposal, and you can read it below in a PDF.

Query Letter

Next post: Step 4.  Querying Agents

The class was one quarter long at UCLA Extension (where there are three quarters per year), i.e., the class was ten weeks longs.  Although the specific class that I took was called Writing Non-Fiction That Sells, they have since changed the names of their classes and now also offer more weekend workshops.  Plus, the course offerings vary from quarter to quarter, so it’s impossible for me to post a link to a specific class.  Here is the UCLA Extension web site though.

The good news about many of the classes offered in the Writer’s Program is that you can take them online.  The bad news is that they can cost upwards of $500.  Because I was also teaching archaeology for Extension, I was able to take one class gratis for each one that I taught.  That made the online class pretty affordable.

So, in the first nine weeks of the class, while I was working full-time (and then some), I developed a book proposal for a non-fiction book about tattoos.  Although I had begun with an idea that was more the archaeology and history of tattoos, I quickly changed my mind after the overwhelming feedback that I received from the instructor and other students was a collective digital yawn.  I moved instead to a topic that was more about how tattoos communicate messages, and proceeded to run with that.

Each week of the class, we worked on a specific part of the proposal (overview, style, a detailed outline of each chapter, the audience, competitive books, about the author, marketing and promotion plan).  At the end of nine weeks, I had this proposal (PDF, 120KB).

There are, however, a couple of caveats about this proposal.  First, this is not the proposal that was sent to publishers.  That version comes later.  This is the version that I sent to literary agents, when requested.  Second, virtually all of the data is now completely out of date.  And even though parts of it make me cringe in hindsight, I offer it as a real world example of what an online course on writing non-fiction book proposals can produce, even if you work full-time.

As always, I like to emphasize the bite-size nature of each step in the process of getting a book published.  Even writing the proposal was done one section at a time, but also on a deadline.  To look at the entire list of steps to be accomplished can be daunting.  My own experience was much more plodding and short sighted, just concentrating on the step ahead of me.  In hindsight, that really worked in my favor.

Next post:  Step 3.  Writing A Query Letter

Illustrating Lithics Step-by-Step (PDF, 36.7 MB, i.e., takes a while to download)

Best of luck in your illustrations!

The idea of writing a book about tattoos was not mine.  I knew I wanted to write a book, because I had just finished writing a dissertation (and had enjoyed the hell out of it).  So, when casting about for an idea, I had naturally drifted to topics that suited my training in archaeology.

But I was also being tattooed in this same time period – a process that took about one year on the calendar.  Over the course of many tattoo sessions and about 50 hours of actual tattoo time, I had ample opportunity to chat with Greg James, the tattoo artist who was doing my tattoo.  When I mentioned that I was interested in writing a non-fiction book, he suggested that I write one about tattoos.  I had already done the research.

It was a brilliant idea.  As someone steeped in his industry and art, he had given a lot of consideration to many of the topics that I had researched in order to make a good decision about my tattoo.  He was (and is) also at the top of his industry and had been featured in books, magazines, and documentaries.  He knew what he was talking about and a book idea was born.

It was then up to me to review the current books available on tattoo, which I had already done getting ready for my tattoo, but this time with an eye toward what an archaeologist might be able to convince somebody to publish.  I immediately gravitated toward the history, archaeology, and anthropology of tattoos and started coming up with outlines for various tattoo books.  Ultimately, I settled on a mixture of these approaches, as you’ll see in the proposal.

So, you see why I never tell people that they have to think of a great non-fiction book idea.  You’ll also see, in later posts about writing the proposal and also the offer from the publisher, that my idea changed over time and then didn’t end up being the book that I wrote after all.  Even so, this was Step 1. I had an idea and I was excited about it.  In a process that can be long and fraught with pitfalls, I think excitement is important.

Next post: Step 2.  Writing A Non-fiction Book Proposal

And, to steal my own thunder, there is nothing special about me as an author or my first book.  In short, I did what everybody else does (unless you’ve already got a TV show):

1.  I got an outstanding idea for a book.  Note that I didn’t say I came up with the idea.

2. I wrote a book proposal, which included an extensive outline and many other things.  I will be posting it online so that you can see it.  It took exactly nine weeks to write – I’ll explain how I know that.

3. I wrote and rewrote a query letter.  I’ll post this too.

4. I found prospective literary agents who met my criteria and sent my query letter to them.

5. I received a few requests for the proposal and then rejoiced and jumped up and down when a literary agent offered to represent the book.

6. I rewrote the book proposal to my agent’s specifications.  I’ll post the final version.

7. My agent got an offer from book publisher Simon & Schuster and I signed the contract.

8.  I wrote the manuscript, Greg James did the illustrations, and I sent it to Simon & Schuster.  This part of the process took twelve months.

9. I created the TattooSymbol.com web site.

10. The manuscript was edited at Simon & Schuster, rewritten, edited again, and then published.

Easy huh?  Well, it’s not easy but it’s not complicated either.  Each of the posts to follow goes into the details of just how each step was accomplished.

Next post: Step 1.  A Fantabulous Idea for a Non-fiction Book