I’m typing this up from memory and with a mid-grade fever, so apologies for any rambling and/or disconnected bits.  What this isn’t going to be, anyway, is a how-to or a step-by-step.  Those are all over the net, and if you can’t type “publish book lulu specs instructions etc” into Google, then I certainly can’t help you.

Speaking of specifications: Step One is read through Lulu’s FAQ. No matter what your skill-level or comfort with uploaders/layout/publishing/design/whatever… well, okay, honestly?  It’s always a good idea to read the  FAQ, anywhere.  When a site makes a FAQ/Help section, it’s because people have frequently asked the same questions you’re going to have, and very often the questions you’re not going to realize you’re going to have until you’re halfway through the process.  Giving it a browse first is going to save you time and headache.  Hell, I’ve been working publishing for a good long while, and Lulu’s Getting Started guides saved me some time.

Lulu’s user forums are, unfortunately, not as helpful.  And it’s a damned shame, but someone needs to go through and take a flame-thrower to a lot of the undergrowth in there.  For answers I couldn’t find in the FAQ, I found that searching the forums lead me to a LOT of dead-end or not-found pages. Very frustrating.  If you can’t find the answer to a problem in the static help pages, you’re a lot better off switching over to Google than you are trying to find it in the forums.

Which leads me to Lulu’s Contact System.  If you’ve got a problem that you just can’t find the answer to in the help pages or elsewhere, then you’re going to want to talk to a real person.  However, we’re all pretty used to getting an automated “trouble ticked received” email when we contact support — but Lulu’s automated response is a little different than most.  When their system sends you a reply, it closes the ticket.  You’ve GOT to reply to the automated response to get through to a real person.  And I get the why of that — a lot of people’s first line of attack is to ignore the FAQ and go straight to a real person, and Lulu are a truly DIY site, so they’re trying to cut down on questions that people could answer themselves with just a teeeensy bit of effort.  But, ha ha, if you’re like me, you’re used to ignoring the automated contact responses and waiting for the real person… which means you’ll be waiting for a good long forever.

As I said in earlier posts, how you go about putting your book together is completely up to you, and what you’re comfortable with.  The Lulu templates will give you a bit less control over what the finished product looks like, but it’s a really good place for the people that are just starting out.  Do you already understand why your inside margins need to be a titch wider than your outside?  If that question just kinda terrified you: that’s all right, but you probably want to start with the templates.  Trust me, your book is still going to be lovely, the important thing for you is just getting your content into a pretty and readable format.

If you are doing the layout yourself (and even if you’re using the templates), the most important advice I can give you is to give it a proofread after layout.  Yes, I know you’ll have already scanned for spelling errors and typos — but you don’t know how your sentences are going to fall on the page until they’re on the correctly-sized page.  You want to look out for widow and orphan control, yes (those last lines of a paragraph that slip over to the next page), but you also just want to look at general readability.  If you haven’t put at least one forced line-break in your book, somewhere, then you could use just a little bit of polish.  And, you know, this probably qualifies as advanced advice — but if you’ve taken the time to craft enough guts to fill a book, I’m operating under the assumption that you want to make it shine as much as possible.

Pictures:  There are a few pictures in Shivering Sands, and they are all right.  What I mean is, if I’d been making a book of B&W photography and my focus was on crisp and clear images, I’d have gone with something else.  But for supplemental images in a book of otherwise, they’re just fine.  Now, I haven’t looked at Lulu’s full-color books, but online reviews (and many photographers in Warren’s network) seem to say Blurb is slightly higher quality (for slightly higher prices. You very likely get what you pay for.)  Since, again, I don’t have first-hand, hands-on knowledge of either, I can’t speak to that with any authority — but, again, Google is your friend.

For B&W text, Lulu is just gorgeous.  They use a good weight and brightness of paper, and the text is very crisp and clear.  We went with the standard paper (instead of the economy-grade) to keep international shipping rates down.  That’s something to think about when you’re picking your size and format — the economy-grade paper will shave some pennies off your final cost, but it’s going to screw your overseas audience.  It’s a choice you’ll have to make — for Warren and I, it was very clear, but depending on what you’re making, and for whom, your decision may differ.

Order a proof copy.  Seriously.  I went over my PDFs of Shivering Sands twelve billion times, and I still missed a straight quote on the back cover the first go ’round.  Yes, it’s going to mean you have to sell a few copies before you start making a profit, but really? That’s better than the alternative of the first person that buys your book not giving you any feedback except “You misspelled your name on the title page, dork.”

And, after you push your book live — wait a week before you start linking it out to the public.  It can take 3-5 days for it to start showing up in the Lulu marketplace search results, and I know you’re thinking but I’m giving people the link so…, but there are going to be people that go browsing through the rest of the site before they decide to buy — and if they can’t find their way back to you, you just lost a sale because you couldn’t wait a week.  See?

Lessee.  I want to get into some general marketing, and a few more advanced notes, but I really am running a fever, and this is running a little long, anyway.  So I think I’m going to push this first part live, and come back for Part Two.  That’ll give you a chance to ask me any questions, too, so that works.

By the by, if you’ve opened a Lulu account to order Shivering Sands, you can already start looking at their publishing tools.  You should even have a sample book they’ve set up for you on your account page.  That’s worth taking a look at.

Now, I’m gonna go fall down for a while.  You go have some fun.

I realize it’s been a couple of days since I’ve posted, so this is just to say that I didn’t stop the planet and get off or anything. My mornings have been occupied by day-job work (as per usual), but yesterday afternoon I jaunted down to the Emerson Salon to get my hair done; and today I moseyed over to the Science Fiction Museum (its offices, rather) for an interview with a marvelous woman from a marvelous magazine.

(I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet, though, so in deference to caution I’ll just be vague and conspiratorial.)

Anyway, each of these events took several hours including travel time to-and-from,* and the rest of my writer-work days have been occupied with the usual time-whittling business emails, phone calls, bill paying, and errand-running. So there are no new words to report on Ganymede, and no one is more rueful on this point than yours truly.

But the night is still young.

______________________________________________________________
* Yes, several hours for the hair. I think it’s worth it, once every five or six weeks, to have awesome peacock tresses. The day will eventually come that I change my mind, I’m sure; but for now I’m happy for an afternoon wherein I am not responsible for anything except holding still while the nice man paints up my ‘do.

PDF-mag, this issue focussing on Parisian alt.culture. 4 euros a pop for this one, previous issues are free downloads.

THE DOSE magazine – Issue 3 (Paris) TEASER

• Extremely Bad Advice: Harassment Resources – National Post
  just fucking genius, really
  (tags:peopleiknow funny )

And I am having the best birthday, ever! Thank you to everyone who has wished me happy birthday on the Twitters, and if July 29th is your birthday too, happy birthday to you!

(Image by Chuck Gamble, found at WIRED's GeekDad blog.)

Photo by Ben Corrigan.

Ryan Francesconi‘s wonderful music has been lilting around the edges of my life since 1995 when we briefly worked together with Dan Cantrell in the Toids, an experimental folk group that riffed off various Eastern European idioms in tandem with Francesconi and Cantrell’s eclectic compositional styles. Back then, Francesconi was one seriously intimidating guitar/tambura/bouzouki shredder! He reveled in playing faster, smarter, better than anybody. He’s a shredder still, and no one can approximate his style… but over the years, wisdom seems to have smoothed over some of the sharper, more Malmsteinish edges of his virtuosity. Lately, the music he makes has deepened into an expression of something far more present, and pure.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on a quietly stunning record Francesconi released earlier this year, called Parables. A series of songs for solo acoustic guitar, it reflects his interest in American bluegrass, Bulgarian folk, jazz improvisation and Baroque lute music. Recorded live (no overdubs!), the music is graceful and green with nods of kinship to everyone from Nick Drake to Herman Hesse to the forests of the Pacific Northwest– which is where Francesconi lives when he’s not trotting the globe.

Speaking of– if you’re a fan of Joanna Newsom, the name Ryan Francesconi is probably already familiar to you, since he’s been one of her key players for several years, leading her live touring performers in the Ys Street Band and arranging/playing on just about every song on her new triple album, Have One On Me. They’re kicking off their summer West Coast tour of the States tonight in San Diego, California. Newsom had this to say about Parables:

“Ryan Francesconi is one of the most awe-inspiring musicians I’ve known. On “Parables,” he distills his many realms of artistry [...] into a beautifully minimalist, poetic, intricate, emotionally realized study of themes, variations, organic counterpoint, and such devastating forays into fractal-metric out-lands that it is nearly impossible to believe he’s picking those strings with just one hand. This is solo music that sounds like an ensemble, an ecstatic and measured reconciliation of West African / Balkan / Baroque / bluegrass influences, which ultimately resembles nothing I know.”

Pick up Parables on vinyl over at Drag City (they’re currently sold out of the CD), or in Mp3 format from CD Baby or iTunes.

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Post tags: Events, Faboo, Music, Personal Style

"…nobody should be older than Warren Ellis except maybe Alan Moore."

Courtesy of crisper (many thanks!) four graphs of the pulp publication data:

And since some folks are asking for further breakdown and I can't do that right now, I've uploaded the original spreadsheets:

• Total list of the pulps
• Romance pulps
• Saucy/spicy pulps
• Science fiction pulps
• Sports pulps
• Western pulps

And, yeah, I know there were probably a lot better ways to do these spreadsheets, both mathematically and aesthetically.

Norman Spinrad just emailed me this link to what appears to be the first of a series of posts about The Publishing Death Spiral, the core of which is this:

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called ?order to net.?

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120….

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you?

Read the whole thing.

Jess Nevins never fails to amaze me.

…if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that? Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet (Yes, I’m a stat wonk, I guess)…

And, at the link, you will find the link to said spreadsheet, as well as all the relevant history, explanations and details.

Title:The Devil You Know
Word: starch
Challenger: @annie_kathleen
Length: 200 words exactly

My twenty-second reboot this year, apparently.

Apparently, of course, because I've no memory of previous reboots. That's the deal: for an incredible amount of money, you sign away five years. And one day you wake up, it's five years later, and you have only the guarantee that there are no outstanding warrants for criminal activity.

But reboots regularly wipe your memories. I know I'm more muscular now and I have dark hair instead of blonde. No idea when that happened; could be yesterday, could be two years back. According to the labels in my room, I insist on no starch when my shirts are laundered. Why? No idea.

I stand in front of the machine, pondering. It's always my choice, you see. They make that very clear.

I could decide not to reboot, say I've had enough. I'd forfeit the vast majority of the fee, but I could do it.

I'd have my old life back.

Or I can press the button, hope like hell that the reboot goes wrong, that it wipes out memories from prior to joining up.

I'm told I've pressed the button eighty-three times previously.

I ponder, decide which is safer.

Then I press the button.

© Lee Barnett, 2010

This story is part of the 2010 Fast Fiction Challenge. A list of the first fifty stories in the challenge can be found here. New challenges can be made here.

The Fast Fiction Challenge - The Book; now available from lulu.com and, if you're in the US, via Amazon.com here; 180 of the best fast fiction challenge stories from the first three years' challenges...

I like to think that if Cranes had formed last month rather than 20 years ago, this is what they’d sound like. "See Birds," Balam Acab.

This is, perhaps, the geekiest thing I?ve done in many a month, but it does help me answer a question that?s been bothering me for a while: if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that?

Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet. (Yes, I?m a stat wonk, I guess).

So, here you go. The link brings you to a spreadsheet I created, covering the years 1896-1960, with seven categories: Overall, Detective Pulps, Romance Pulps, Saucy/Spicy Pulps, Science Fiction Pulps, Sports Pulps, and Western Pulps. (I?d present the information as an easy-to-read table, but?-embarrassingly-?I never learned how to make them). Each entry is for the number of magazines?-not issues?-in that category published that year, so for 1898 there was only one pulp published, in 1931 there were 150 pulps total published, including 28 detective, 24 romance, 8 saucy/spicy, 8 science fiction, 2 sports, and 33 westerns. The number in the Overall category won?t equal the sum of the other categories because I omitted smaller pulp genres (boxing, weird menace) and pulps publishing general pulpy adventure fiction and because some pulps, like Western Rodeo Romance, fit into two categories.



Now, admittedly, this is a hasty and imprecise collection of data-?what would be more useful would be a) the number of pulps published broken down by month as well as by year (can?t be done-?that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps) and b) the sales figures (someone may have some of that data, but, again, that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps). But we can draw some tentative conclusions from this.

First, the pulps didn?t die around 1950. That was the peak post-WW2 year for them. The death of the pulps was a gradual thing, although by 1955 the end of the medium and its replacement by the digest format must have been obvious. Nonetheless, I think it?s fair to say that the death of the pulps and the transition to digests took a while. One obvious precursor was the transition from dime novels to pulps in the 1910s. I don?t have the data to do a similar spreadsheet on dime novels (although, hmm, I could put one together using Galactic Central), but I know, based on the western and detective dime novels, that their death and replacement by the pulps in the 1910s was gradual and not sudden. I think the death of the pulps was like that.

Second, and I know this will be hard for the sf zealots to read, but...sf wasn?t the most important genre for the pulps. (And, please, never write the phrase "the pulp genre." There was no such thing. The pulps were the medium, not the genre). Until 1939 there were more spicy pulps published every year than sf pulps. (Why the number of spicy pulps declined is another question, one I can?t answer). From 1937 to 1951 there were more sports pulps published every year than sf pulps. Westerns clobber sf. And romance pulps...well, this will gall the geeks, but romance pulps were more important to the industry than sf pulps. (And the average pulp romance story was approximately eight times better written than the average pulp sf story, but that?s another issue).

Third, take a look at the saucy/spicy list. The first one came out in 1912. That?s before detective pulps, before westerns, before sf, before romance, before everything except general fiction, adventure, and railway. The saucy/spicy pulps are criminally understudied, not least because they are much less available to scholars than even the romance or sports pulps, but they were around for a long time and deserve further study. Hell, from 1915 to 1924 they made up at least 10% of the entire industry.

Fourth-?the number of Westerns! Criminy! For such a formulaic genre (with a few exceptions) it was remarkably popular. In terms of market share, from 1936, Westerns were the heavyweight of pulps, never making up less than 25% of the entire market.

Fifth, look at the overall numbers for 1929-1931. You?d think that the first three years of the Depression wouldn?t have been a good time to enter publishing or increase the number of pulps that you were already publishing, but clearly people thought it was. I don?t have numbers to hand, but I suspect the economy took a substantial dip from 1931-1933, which would explain the decrease there, but after 1933 the numbers resume increasing.

I?m sure other conclusions will occur to me later, but that?s what I?ve got for now.

I occasionally do these. And today's an occasion. So why not?

A - Act your age? Like most other people, sometimes I act younger than my age, positively childishly in fact.
B - Born on what day of the week? Monday, so I'm told. I don't remember it all that well. I'd put money on the fact that I cried like a baby though.
C - Chore you hate? Filling out memes.
D - Z See answer to C

Interesting though, sparked by something Antony Johnston wrote.

I wonder who I've known the longest online, i.e. who, that I now often interact online with, I've known the longest.

I'm excluding people where the only online contact is by email or IM, because that's just replaced letterwriting or the phone. So that takes out Ian, my oldest friend, because although we email each other, he's not on Twitter and doesn't use Facebook.

And I can't include Laura because although we occasionally "like" something each other has put on Facebook, or chat on IM, it's not exactly as if that's a large part of how we communicate with each other. Similarly, I'm excluding my younger brother because... well, I've known him for 44 years. It kind of skews the results.

OK, so lets set some parameters.

I'm not including anyone I've known for more than 15 years, because I got online in August 1995. I'm limiting it to people I have interacted with, or still interact with, via a message board, forum, Twitter, Facebook or chat rooms.

Obvious answer is people like Warren, Neil, Dave... comics pros with whom I was fortunate enough to become friends after we first met at Compuserve's Comics/Animation Forum, and other friends from Compuserve like Rich Johnston, Alan Porter and Elayne Riggs. (I'm excluding Tony Isabella and Dez Skinn because, although friends, again I only ever really speak to them by email these days)

Despite Colin Murtagh being a close friend, I'm pretty sure we didn't meet for a few months after I got online, and I didn't meet Tony Lee until this century. (Always surprises me, that one - that I've only known Tony that relatively short space of my life.)

So yeah, Warren, Neil, Dave. It's all your fault, mates.

It's genuinely astonishing to me how many people who are important to me as part of my life now... have only known Philip as a fact, i.e. they didn't know me before he was born.

From the Straits Times of Singapore, 23 July 1928.