via Flickr http://flic.kr/p/eQeKae

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I finished Catherine Ryan Howard’s Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing, which I found very valuable when I was working on my own self-published book. Howard’s work is full of useful information about the self-publishing process. She delves into specific details for publishing for Kindle Direct Publishing, CreateSpace, and Smashwords. Having self-published several books, Howard authoritatively offers advice and often does so humorously. It’s a practical guide and an interesting read. It’s an excellent resource for both those curious about self-publishing and those ready to take the plunge.

May Reading Update

The other book I finished was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn. I’ve been a Miller fan for ages and, in the past year or so, I decided I wanted to work through his books again. I’ve read Tropic of Capricorn a few times already. I recall liking it after the first time I read it and then being disappointed by subsequent reads. I don’t remember the last time I read it but it easily was a decade ago.

This time around, Capricorn really impressed me, maybe because I returned to it with low expectations. Having recently read both Tropics, I may in fact be leaning toward Capricorn as my favorite. Tropic of Cancer covers Miller’s years in Paris whereas Capricorn reflects back on his life in New York prior to his expatriation. Perhaps because readers familiar with Cancer know that Miller ends up in Europe after the events of Capricorn, it has more sense of a trajectory than does Cancer. These two works are more essential to one another than most people acknowledge. They both enrich each other and are enriched by each other and are weaker as standalone novels.

Although I envisioned my 2013 reading to focus on newer works, I can’t resist forging ahead with re-reading Miller. I’ve recently revisited Tropic of Cancer, Aller Retour New York, Black Spring and now Capricorn. I plan on continuing in chronological order, so up next will be The Cosmological Eye.

I had begun but then put aside House of Leaves in April. I picked it up again this month, but it is a big dense book, so it doesn’t seem like June will be the month where I do some catching up!

So, I’m up to a modest nine books for this year:

• Anathem, Neal Stephenson
• Netherland, Joseph O’Neill (library book)
• The Buddha in the Attic
• McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13 (borrowed book)
• Empire State
• The Blogger Abides (ebook)
• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (ebook)
• Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing (ebook)
• Tropic of Capricorn

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2. April Reading Update
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Even after getting a smarter smart phone, I still used email because it was simple and it worked. That all ended when Flickr recently updated their site. I actually really like most of the changes Flickr made, but, alas, it broke my workflow.

Today, I started using the Flickr Android app to upload my pictures and then created a IFTTT recipe to push it to this blog. Unfortunately, there are some bugs to be worked out. I sent my picture to Flickr and it posted to my blog and then, a few minutes later, it posted to my blog a second time. Several minutes after that, it posted an older picture to my blog. I’m going to try another pic of the day tomorrow and I apologize in advance if it posts more than once and/or some old picture burps up.

I also push my posts to the Facebook page associated with this blog. Another issue is that the link but not the picture posted to the page.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to iron out these details over the next few days.

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• Growing Change: A Journey Inside Venezuela’s Food Revolution
  
• Login 2 Life

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Because I don’t have any immediate plans to publish King’s Long Search elsewhere, I opted to enroll in the Select program. I offered it for free for four days and am holding on to the fifth day for down the road.

I would say that my initial test of the Select program was a success. With little effort on my part (I did nothing more than write one blog post), 65 people downloaded King’s Long Search. A very modest number for sure, but not bad for just starting out and not really promoting it.

I’m looking at this current project more or less as a test of concept. I was able to put the book out  and it was discovered by a handful of people. That’s pretty much what I was looking for with this effort.

I found the process to be fairly easy. Some of the details of formatting the book and uploading it were tedious but not overwhelming. I hope to outline specifics of formatting and uploading the book later. For now, I just want to provide some sense of the timeline. Once I had a complete manuscript in hand, it took less than a month to go live and I could have expedited that.

By May 14th, I had a complete manuscript that I had revised many times and had gotten some positive feedback on. I had been doing some research on editors and contacted the one I felt was my best option. I sent her a few sample pages and she got back to me the next night outlining her process and fees. I accepted her terms and sent her the full manuscript. She offered either proofreading or a more comprehensive copy-editing. I went with the latter. Her fee includes 2 passes on a manuscript.

She sent me her suggested corrections on May 18th. I went through the corrections and revised those I agreed with (which was most of them) and sent the revised manuscript back to her on May 22nd. She had the next round of suggested corrections back to me on May 24th.

I cannot stress enough how valuable having a professional editor look at my work was. I was amazed by how many mistakes she had found despite the fact that I had gone over that document many times. She had even given me a discount because my manuscript was cleaner than most. Even at that, her suggested corrections were plentiful. If you are going to self-publish, hiring an editor is a must.

While my story was with the editor, I began working on a cover. I know many people suggest that hiring an editor and a graphic designer are essential, and, in theory, I agree. Especially if you are writing genre fiction, you need to have a professionally designed cover. I opted out for a couple reasons.

One is that I have a bit of design experience and I am interested in developing this skill. Since King’s Long Search was a more or less a test case, I wanted to give making a cover a shot. I felt I could get away with that because the story falls more in the literary fiction category and therefore doesn’t have the same expectations as a genre work. I felt I could get away with a simple, photo-based cover since I didn’t need dragons or ripped bodices.

On May 29th, I started making a detailed list of the steps I needed to take to self-publish. I compiled this list based on Amazon’s own instructions and sections of Catherine Ryan Howard’s excellent Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing (2nd Edition). I found Self-Printed to be a great resource filled with humor and good advice. She clearly outlines the necessary steps for self-publishing. Because my book is short and not complicated (i.e. no table of contents, no illustrations or charts, no index, etc), it was a fairly straightforward process. As I mentioned above, I hope to go into more detail about that in a later post, but Howard’s book provides more detail than I’ll get into. Her blog, Catherine, Caffeinated, is also an excellent resource and she recently started a series about “How Self-Published Books Are Made: Start To Finish.”

On June 1st, I began formatting and finished working on the cover.

On June 2nd, I finished formatting and set-up my Amazon KDP account using my existing Amazon account and then uploaded King’s Long Search.

The next day, I signed up for the Select program and set my first promotion for June 7-10. I also set-up my Amazon Author Central profile.

On June 6th, I posted an announcement on this blog and the free promotion started the next day.

On June 7th, I added King’s Long Search to Goodreads and applied for their author program. The next day, I was notified that my author page was available and I edited my profile.

Basically, it took only from May 14th to June 2nd to self-publish. It was a fairly painless process, although part of that had to do with how short and straightforward my manuscript was. It was a good choice for getting my feet wet and now I’m ready to move on to the next work!

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Made only four years after Late Spring, Tokyo Story features many of the same actors in a similar low key family drama. Not only does Ozu use the same actors, but at least two of them have the same character names. Perhaps if Tokyo Story and Late Spring had been substantially different, this issue of two films by the same director wouldn’t be so much on my mind.

The story follows an elderly couple (Chishû Ryû and Chieko Higashiyama) as they travel to Tokyo to visit their children. Unfortunately, their children are too busy with their own lives to spend any substantial time with their parents. The children keep passing their parents around and even send them off to a spa to keep them occupied. Only Noriko (Setsuko Hara), the wife of their deceased son is kind and generous with her time.

Tokyo Story almost feels like a prequel to Late Spring as the film ends in a similar place where Late Spring begins: a widower father living with a devoted daughter.

In my review of Late Spring, I expressed some hesitation regarding my opinion of the film. While watching it, I found it to be slow and not particularly engaging; however, I found myself moved by the understated tale. Tokyo Spring is engaging from the start, has a more involved plot, more locations, and a touch of humor, making it the superior film.

Although I rated Late Spring fairly high (7th at the time I watched it), I am a bit torn about keeping it that high on the list. Watching Tokyo Story reminded me of the aspects of Late Spring that gave me pause and raises the concern about how to address multiple films by the same director. Given the similarities between Late Spring and Tokyo Story and the superiority of the latter, I might be inclined to argue removing Late Spring from the list. I’ve been slowly putting together a list of movies that I think might be worthy of inclusion and I think the final stage of this project might be to watch some of those and make arguments why some films currently on the list should be replaced by others. Of course, at the rate I’m going, I won’t be done watching the films on the BFI list for another year and my thinking could very well change.

So, for now, I’m going to add Tokyo Story 5th and drop Late Spring a couple of spaces.

1. Metropolis (1927)
2. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
3. Citizen Kane (1941)
4. Rashomon (1950)
5. Tokyo Story (1953)
6. The Rules of the Game (1939)
7. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
8. City Lights (1931)
9. Bicycle Thieves (1948)
10. The General (1926)
11. The Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
12. Late Spring (1949)
13. L’Atalante (1934)
14. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
15. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Next Up: Ugetsu Monogatari (1953).

I have not seen Ugetsu and know very little about it.

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Fish Tacos, originally uploaded by Tom Ipri.

aka Tacos de Pescado al Mojo de Ajo

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