Where Do You Get Images For Covers

I have a novelette I'm in the processing of finishing and knew what I wanted for a cover but thought it would be very difficult to find.

Actually, it turned out to be quite easy.  I found a very simple cartoon figure at a stock image site and it cost all of $2.99.  I could have stopped there but I decided to change the colors and add  a background so there was quite a bit of time investing in Photoshopping to get it where it needed to be.

But I could have stopped there.  So that's the advice of the day.  Go to the stock photo sites and look around.  If you find something that's close, you can look for something similar.  Read the tags for the photos and see what words are used by the photographer or illustrator to describe the image.  It'll give you hints as to what search terms to use.

There are hundreds of thousands of images out there and it can be tricky to find something usable but tags can be your friend.  Try to be specific but broad when you search.  Think of what are the qualities of the image and how you would describe it to someone else. 

A Google or Bing search will give you a long list of sites like Shutterstock, Fotolia, Dreamstime, istockphoto.  Getty is going to be too expensive but most of them charge under $20 for a single image.

It's always good to have a image with a sizable area of negative space.  That means where there's not much going on.  You can put your text there.  I'm not against putting text on the image but there's the chance it won't show up very well.

This works pretty well.  Of course it's the wrong orientation, you need an image that's vertical not horizontal, but it shows how you can put the text in a blank space and how it balances the heavy foreground image on the right side.

If you keep these points in mind, choosing an image will become much easier and will require less work on your part to get a nice cover for your book.

Amazon.es

Opening by the end of the year.

Amazon Spain

Anyone know a good Spanish translator?

There Are No Old, Bold Pilots

As the saying goes in aviation.  In the back of your mind, every time you get into your plane, you know you might not walk away.  But it's so wonderful, so freeing, so perspective changing, that you keep doing it.  And yesterday Jimmy Leeward, both old and bold, didn't walk away.  A tragedy for many people who lost loved ones in the accident in Reno.

But still flying.  It's wonderful.  And I loved the old biplane image I found so I turned it into a cover.

What surprised me as I was working with this image--and it's so old it's on glass not film, was how beautifully sharp it is.  You can't see the details in the small size but once it's 100 % you can see the pilot's facial features.  I would assume the plane is flying well under 50 mph.  It's all old technology but still it's a moving object and it was caught in time.

I'm in the homestretch of the new book.  I don't know if that means 50 pages or exactly what.  I don't write long books, I don't fill up the pages with a lot of nonsense people skip over anyway.  Some readers feel cheated and let me know that they didn't get their 99 cents worth.  Gee.  Sorry!  Not.  What I find actually funny is that with I think Dream Horse I got a review that it was too short.  It's a middle reader book.  It was published by Atheneum.  It's absolutely the correct length, thank you very much.

You don't buy books by the pound.  Or I guess by the byte now.  Dickens wrote being paid by the word.  So if a ...wait, I'll go to the calculator....so here's the math on it.  For a 40,000 word book priced at 99 cents, of which the writer receives 35 cents, that prices out to $0.00000875 per word.  For longer books, lol, you guys make even less per word.  I think that's the math of it but I do have dyscalcula so even with a calculator it's a gamble.

EBook As Stepchild

"But today, if you’re a publisher who knows his company’s work is going to be mostly discovered via an online review or a search engine, does that create an incentive to dial back the expense of book cover design to the point of being almost an afterthought? And is relying on software such as Photoshop and Illustrator to design covers for e-books a throwback to the late ’60s and early 1970s, when every book cover seemed to look almost the same? (Those days certainly made life easy for a designer: set type in Helvetica, add abstract graphic image, move on to next project. Rinse and repeat.)"

This is from an article that seems to be positive about the digital reading experience and yet ...let me Fisk that one glaring sentence.

Him:

"does that create an incentive to dial back the expense of book cover design to the point of being almost an afterthought?"

My translation:

Ebooks are thrown together and cover design is an afterthought.

Not when they can cost $600, cover art is not an afterthought.  It's a bloody marketing tool, pal.

The article is like yeah, ebooks are great for reading the classics and de Tocqueville (which, yes, Mr Elitist, I also have on my Nook Color) but...well there's not that great Book Smell (trademark pending) and carrying a book around makes you look so...bookish.  So in with the In-Crowd.

If you have a Kindle, which someone gave this guy he couldn't even manage to make himself buy a reader, your reading world is in black and white.  That's the past.  The future is tablets.  Color, streaming video, music, games, and every version of Angry Birds available.

I do not love it when people analyze and criticize something they know so little about.

And you just found the Internet Wayback Machine???  Sheesh.
PS it's for websites, not books.

http://archive.org

About the Wayback Machine

Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.

At Speed

It's all happening rather quickly, isn't it?  I wasn't aware of ebooks 3 years ago and now there are millions of them out there.

I have been virtually grilled relentlessly about epublishing this past week by 2 different people.  They want information and I look like a central repository of knowledge.  Disclaimer: I know less than some, more than others.  It's interesting to me how these people are approaching it--cautious enthusiasm.  Is it a gamble or is it a blessing?  Both.  Everything is both.

What will the Kindle Tab do to the marketplace?  What will Christmas bring?  We still need that under $100 reader.  The No-Frills reader could be free if books were more expensive.  How much does a comic book cost?  Shouldn't a novel cost as much as a comic book?  What's should got to do with it.  Readers should respect books more but they don't.  Some don't.  Some do.

Music.  Books.  They seem like the same thing but they're not.  Music on the internet became something without price.  If you can go to youtube and hear just about anything, why pay for it.  Just hit replay again and again until you're sick of it and then move on.  But musicians, theoretically, like to perform and people will pay to see them perform.  No one will pay to see an author read a book.  That's dumb, we all know it's dumb.  So it seems that the only way to get away from the 99 cent price point is if almost everyone moves away from it.  That's not going to happen.

I'd be good with the first month free or 99 cents.  And then go up to $1.99.  I know that's less than the sweet price at Amazon.  But $2.99 when people see prices on everything rise--food, gas, heat, electricity--seems mean.  Netflix raised their prices and a million people left and I was one of them.  What does the entertainment budget for people look like now?  I wonder.  The days of people having a couple hundred books in their TBR library may be over.

Russian Peasants Pose for Camera Photo

Reykjavik Reaction

This is what happens when instead of defending the victim you blame them.  I made that syndrome title up. But it's still a true thing.

I've noticed that it seems very easy to wonder where Kiana Davenport went wrong in order to cause Riverhead to blow up at her and then that's followed by quite a lengthy dissertation on how they never do that or something similar and everything is always so peachy keen between them and their slave master.  It starts out like this "Of course I haven't read the contract and I've actually not read a word she's written and the novel in question isn't even published yet BUT..." 

All of this leads us to believe that Kiana was wrong, even if she didn't realize it when she committed the grievous infraction, and if we don't do that, we're safe.  This reminds me of a Winston Churchill quote "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

So Kiana, for $20,000 was supposed to sit and do nothing for 3 years until her book came out.  That's not living wages.  That advance means you have to have a real job and write part time in order to survive.  I don't know why anyone thinks Riverhead could conceivably be in the moral right on this one.

Is it so great to be published in paper under these conditions?

Sweeping Up

Maybe not the right title for this post but better than the ice cream thing which continues to bring people here looking for I have no idea what.

So Sweeps.  People ask what I do to promote my books and I do nothing.  I would love to have a platform and reach a wide audience, of course.  But I don't.  Anything I would write an article on would be published somewhere no one would be interested in Sweeps or NLM.  I didn't mention my books in the food photography article.  I hate it when people do that.  I really hate it because it seems desperate.  It's not for me, if you're okay with it, go do it full out.  I can't do it.  I'm probably wrong.

Over the weekend at BN there was an increase in interest in Sweeps (actually for all my adult books which have never sold well there, only the middle reader books have an audience at BN),  Sweeps was ranked in the 24,000s.  Which is good.  Summer Horse and Dream Horse are above 10,000 which for a kid's book I think is great.

Then sales of Sweeps yesterday had me writing to my pal, Chris, "WHAT???"  Everytime I looked, it had sold more.

Today the ranking is such a jump from yesterday's 24,000 whatever, that I want to share it with you.

• Pub. Date: November 2010
• Publisher: DashingBooks
• Sold By: Barnes & Noble
• Format: NOOK Book (eBook)
• Sales Rank: 1,486

Sales ranks move substantially when you have a lot of sales in a short amount of time.  So it must be on a list somewhere.

 

Thanks, Ariel.

 

Amazon Tab News

Well.  There we go.  I better put my Nook up for sale while people will still buy it!  We're talking "free" here, people.  You get streaming vid, free 2 day shipping and now free reading with Amazon Prime.  When it first came out, a  couple years ago, I thought "This is dumb.  You can't wait a couple days for a book?"  $80 for the 2 day free shipping?  Sheesh.  But guess what.  If you can buy 1 thing for $10 and have it shipped free 2 day, it starts looking better.  Add in the video thing, now you don't need Netflix at $10 a month.  Add in free older books (whatever older means) and suddenly Amazon is the place to be.

Amazon's coming tablet could feature an annual library subscription model that would let readers access older books, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Citing unnamed sources, the report said the library content would be available to Amazon's Prime customers, who currently pay $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping for products purchased on Amazon.com as well as access to digital movies and TV shows on the site.


According to the Journal's unnamed sources, Amazon would offer book publishers a fee for participating in the subscription program. The company would also limit the number of books an Amazon Prime customer could read without charge every month. 


Amazon Subscription Plan

I think I'm practically an authority by now on solar chargers for ereaders.  As we learned with the Chevy Volt this whole arena is sort of scammy.
The sellers lie.  They say their units will charge your reader but the reality is far different.  As far as I can tell nothing charges a Nook Color so that you could actually read it.  Maybe if you wanted to throw $500 at it you could get something.  There's nothing under $200 powerful enough.  Yes, I spoke directly to the companies.

Update: I got an email from the Powermonkey people and they say their range will charge a reader.  They don't day how long this will take.  They have the Extreme which sells for $190.  That probably will do it in an incredibly slow fashion--and I mean it might take 2 days--but that's still twice as fast as a smaller unit.  Don't forget this isn't set it and forget it.  You put the thing outside in full sun and you have to keep rushing out to track the sun.  When they say direct sunlight, they mean DIRECT.

If Bezos was smart, you could access the Kindle Tab battery so it is easy to change/replace.  It's very difficult, I've read, to get into the Nook.

You're better off having a spare and using that when we are going through TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It).  After the batteries are dead, you ain't reading no more.  Deal with it.  You're probably better off spending $200 on freeze dried food.

I have no idea about the whole cell phone thing; apparently they're so small a solar panel over hours in the sun (provided it doesn't melt which seems to happen with frightening regularity) will charge it.  I don't know who you'll call when civilization collapses.  Maybe you want to say goodbye to someone.  If the EMP hasn't (it will) wiped out all the towers.

We Still Haven't Gotten It

Kiana Davenport

I just read what happened to this woman.  Go there and read for yourself how nutso legacy publishing has become.

Davenport Dialogs

The basics are she signed with Riverhead (she doesn't say that but someone scoped it out) and got $20,000 advance for her new novel.  When the publisher (where is the freaking agent thru all this, huh????) found out she had self-published 2 collections of short stories they had already rejected and had nothing to do with her novel, they brought out the lawyers and demanded the advance back.  After screaming abuse at her on the phone.

I wonder if it's the same editor at Riverhead who told me no one wanted to read romantic comedy novels about 15 years ago.  Wouldn't that be a coincidence.

More evidence of the genius at work in tradpub.  I don't know what else to say.  People who are losing their prestige and power go cuckoo.  This isn't a political blog so I won't show you the many instances from this month alone of that happening in other arenas.  Again we see the elites believing they can treat people they perceive to be beneath them with contempt and legal maneuvers.

Fire that agent.  The agent is...this is the f'ing real world, we're not talking about the agent fairy and the fielding the deals nonsense.  The agent is there to protect the writers' interests.  How is it in Kiana's interests that she's being legally harassed and verbally abused by a multinational corporation?  The agent should have been screaming right back at the editor. The editor, in the first place, has no business speaking directly to the writer in anything pertaining to the contract and fees.

Someone drive a stake through its heart before it gets up and bothers us again.  Like I keep saying "Just die already."

Amazon Kindle Tablet

Based on this article, we know quite a bit more what to expect.  And I expect, sadly, I suppose, that it will blow the doors off the Nook Color.

Amazon Kindle Tablet

Why do I say that?  The size will be the same, touch screen, running an Android OS that Amazon has its way with.  The price will be the same $250.  So what's the big deal?  Amazon is going to promote it like mad and offer a year's subscription to Amazon Prime which is about $80 for the year.  I've done Prime and I was very positive about it.  You get free streaming video.  Hello,  if I got that on my Nook I'd be thrilled.  So that's essentially $100 off.

What Amazon does well they do very well.  You purchase something and they get it right to you.  Last week during the hurricane, I bought an emergency radio and it came 2 days later.  A month ago I bought a can of chestnut puree.  Why buy that from a bookstore?  Because the price was less.  The can was more expensive, but the shipping--because of the Amazon Prime Trial--was free.  I bought the macro lens and returned it with no emotional upset.

To have access to shopping from your reader, streaming video, music and I'm sure other things not yet revealed will make me consider selling the Nook and buying a Kindle Tab.

What will this do to Christmas book sales, kiddies?

Online retail giant Amazon has hinted that it plans to offer its own tablet computer running Google's Android operating system, perhaps as early as October. The research firm Forrester said recently that it expects Amazon to sell 3 million to 5 million tablets in the fourth quarter this year if it can keep up with the demand.

The tablet seems smartly designed to enhance Amazon’s “razor and blades” strategy, which creates a virtuous, reinforcing link between Amazon’s reading device and content. It should be attractive to e-reader buyers. It might well recapture the e-reader device leadership position from the Nook, and perhaps lessen the lost of e-reader-focused buyers to the iPad.  And the bundled Amazon Prime membership should enhance Amazon’s larger retail relationship with its tablet owners.
All in all, the Kindle tablet seems well-positioned to strengthen Amazon’s market position.

Everything Amazon does is to strengthen their position so we know this is going to create waves.


AFAIC, it's expensive.  We need a great reader for under $100.  We need a reader a kid can forget on the bus and no one loses sleep over it.  After all, this economy is not great.  People are in financial difficulty even when there are still people employed at great salaries not realizing millions of people are unable to find a job.

Also AFAIC I'm rather have a Samsung Galaxy but that really is too expensive.  I can shop at Amazon with my Nook.

But I think Santa's elves are building and designing these gadgets.  My fingers are too big for the little pretend buttons.  So someone should consider humans are using these things and they don't have a stylus in hand.  That would be an interesting thing though, a retractable stylus built in...

Bafflement

My most popular post, traffic wise on this blog, is one from months ago and I used the analogy of a certain kind of layered frozen dessert when discussing publishing.  Apparently people are really interested in this dessert and flock here in droves to find out more, only to be disappointed by finding all these ramblings about writing.

How you make it--you freeze the layers separately.  Okay?  Freeze one.  Add the next.  Freeze it.  Add the third.  Freeze it.  Look up terrines for more details.

Unlike other novelists, I find myself strangely uncompelled by all the books out there I can spend my time with.
Not that I have ever been a huge reader of fiction.  Most of my books are either history or cooking.  When I got the Nook, I read a lot of fiction.  Since I like Chinese food and I've never gotten the whole bit about you eat it and an hour later you're still hungry quip, I won't say it's all been like Chinese food but I will say it's been unsatisfying.  It's like when you are invited to a party at dinnertime and they only serve appetizers but no dinner.
You waste hours and then you still have to forage for sustenance.

I think some current books are like tapas.  You go to the tapas bar and you eat all appetizers and that is the meal.  And unlike me, this does satisfy a lot of people.

My pal in England sent me a novel a couple weeks ago--the sort that couldn't be published here because it's not formulaic enough.   Do we give readers what they want or do they come to want what we give them?

I just realized something.  I don't think I've been to the library since I got the Nook.  Worse, I don't foresee going back to the library.  The library is so inconvenient.  You have to go there.  If you don't have anything else to do and it's not a 30 mile round trip with gas at $4 a gallon, then the library is a deal.  Otherwise not so much.  Then they punish you if you can't drive because of a snowstorm or something.  Ten cents a day.  Oh keep the darn books.  I think I'll just read my way through the classics I missed earlier.

I Didn't Know My Own Worth!

Wow!

Dream Horse continues to surprise.  For the low low price, you can have a paperback of it

$65.99 + $3.99shipping

Used - Like New

Seller: gb_book Seller Rating:96% positive over the past 12 months. (1,835 total ratings) In Stock. Ships from CA, United States. Expedited shipping available. Domestic shipping rates and return policy. In very fine condition, like new

or Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.

For approx. $70, this book you can order new for about $10 can be all yours!  Or you can get an original Impossible Charlie for 21 cents.  It is used and if you feel funny about having books that other people have done who knows what with, then you probably should get the paperback.  Or get a kindle copy which no one has ever touched.  That's 99 cents.

Onto that fan mail.  I'm having an interesting exchange with this woman who loves the Bad Apple series  and she is an adult, a young woman in college.  She says she loves YAs because the characters are so complex and the stories are so interesting.

This has been my long held belief-- that you can write much more significant material in a YA, you can get away with more, than an adult book.  Sure some adult material is way out there, but let's try to keep the discussion in the mid-range.

If you write an adult book about 2 people "falling in love" or arranging a lifelong relationship in a realistic way, you'll have a very hard time with it.  Real life is messy, it can be funny and tragic and unexpected and heartbreaking all at the same time.

That's not a "romance".  A romance is the girl likes shoes and the guy is a beast she has to tame or housebreak.  She talks him down to all her friends which indicates pretty much where the relationship is headed.  Divorce court.

So you must be very predictable and give people what they expect.  NLM was a big anomaly for me.  None of my other books come close to that interest and even NLM doesn't come close to its old interest.  It just wasnt what people expected, and very kindly I didn't get 900 1 star reviews reflecting their disappointment.

I stopped reading literary fiction long ago.  I know zombies are popular but the characters always seems anesthetized, incapable of genuine emotion.  Then they had a bloodless affair that didn't wake from from their (obviously clinical) depression.  Maybe I was missing something really significant about all these art novels but I doubt it.

I read Book 2 in the series I started last month.  The 1st had so much promise but this one way undershot the mark for me.  I didn't like the main character in the last book and I pretty much hated him by this one.  There was a shallowness to everything.  I don't know much about French history but it seems to be I've heard about a time period when all the royal types were amoral, bored, gossipy, into drugs and drinking, with nary a thought in their heads.  (Wait.  Isn't that the way royals always are?)  That's what this was like.  Everyone had so much they didn't know what to do with themselves and descended into a base state.  Big bore.  Skimmed most of it which was a shame because I kept looking at my battery icon.  It takes a lot of power to turn the page on an LED screen as opposed to the Kindle thing.  So you're skimming 300 pages and it's more actually because 1 page doesn't fit on a screen, total waste of power and an annoyance.

It'll be made into a movie, I'm sure.

Cecilia, You're Breaking My Heart

I could have called this fan mail.  But I didn't.

Fling got a 5 star review but a complaint about the font.  I use Courier New.  I always have.  She said that I should change back to the font I used with the other books.  Which are all, of course, in Courier New.  So something is going on for her but I did post a question in the Kindle forum and it was answered.

PubIt wants documents in Times New Roman, Arial or Courier New.  They state this quite clearly.  The whole Kindle formatting thing is a bit more on the mysterious side and I can't tell you where the requirements are laid out clearly and definitively.  Except doc and html is required.  No docx.

The Kindle device apparently makes hash of Courier New and really wants this Cecilia thing which I don't even have in Word.  What???
And, upon research, it's not Cecilia, it's Caecilia.
You can download it here.

http://www.fontpark.net/en/font/pmn-caecilia-55-roman/

How about I just use TNR instead.

The second fan mail was less complicated and came through Good Reads.

subject:	Next bad apple book... Please? :)
message:	Hi. I'm just wondering when you are going to release the next bad apple book. It is one of my favorite series and I'm dying to know what happens between Neal and Truly! Thanks so much for being a fabulous author.

Having taken time off from the Bad Apple series, I can't tell her when this will happen but I appreciate hearing from her, (of course!) and offered her a copy of the new book as a thank you.  I don't know when that will be done either but I'm in the last act.  I don't write as fast as I used to but I write smarter. Oh well.

I like these old Soviet propaganda posters.  They're crudely creative and impart a  frisson of  threat.  Yes, that's a paraphrase of what the poster said originally.

Dream Horse

I haven't looked at rankings all summer being preoccupied with so many other things but when I checked to see if the "revised" Nothing Serious file had gone through Amazon yet (no, BN yes) I decided to check on DH.

• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #9,188 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children's eBooks > Animals > Horses
  • #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Lifestyle & Home > Home & Garden > Animal Care & Pets > Horses > Riding
  • #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Individual Sports > Horses > Equestrian

So that's very nice for a book legacy publishing insists is outdated.

ALERT ALERT.  Here comes a tip.

Some woman in England was very put out after spending the equivalent of 99 cents for this book, that it was not for adults.  That was a 1 star review. 

Even if you think it is completely obvious by the story that your book is a children's book, or a mystery or a romance or whatever, put it in the description.  Now I have a line saying middle reader book 9-12 year olds.


With Nothing Serious I put a note that this was the newly formatted, revised and simplified version.  You may be totally uninterested in how much revision was required.  Well, it was very labor intensive.  There were 3 instances of someone's handle which the complainer thought should have a space in it but didn't because some forums don't allow spaces in your nickname, so a space was inserted.  The one instance where Paige rightfully said qveen mimicking Zsa Zsa Gabor was respelled queen.  And I italicized objets d'arts so it would be obvious (it won't be to drunk trolls) that it was a foreign language.   Kindle Desktop Publishing claimed there were many spelling errors throughout but Word couldn't find them.  Wait till it happens to you.

The larger the audience the more drunk trolls and the greater the need for being as specific as you can possibly be in your description.  There will, of course, be a percentage of people whose eyes are normally twirling in their heads anyway and you can't do a blasted thing about it but perhaps by being cognizant (ooo, am I allowed to use such a big word or do I have to simplify that, I need to train myself to write down a little) we can avoid some of these misunderstandings and the angry assaults that result from a misspent 99 cents.

The Inexplicable Hassles of Software

You get to the point where you're screaming "Why doesn't it work?"
And then without doing anything, it heals itself.
How does that happen?

Now I face a hassle with formatting for Amazon.  And I asked them--why it is so hard to get the formatting for you right when it's so easy for BN?  Why do you have so many requirements and they accept docx?

Of all the kittens born here in the last few weeks, none survived.

Goodnight Irene

Yeah I am in the Northeast and my area got walloped badly.  Not me so much but I had to drive 50 miles to get to power/a computer/the internet this morning.  The power company is saying it'll be next week before we have power restored.

I have read a lot, catching up on what I wasn't getting to.  Most of it was research/background for various projects.  I read several biographies and I'd like to talk about them at length later but let me just say there is great tragedy in squandered talent.  It's not cute, funny, noble or brave.  It's just stupid and pathetic.

Amazon's $99 Tablet

The Price Is Right

Well.  LOL.  What did I say?  I said the minute I got the Nook Color Bezos would bring out a cheaper tab and here we go.

Amazon is poised to enter the tablet fray with an Android-powered tablet in late September or October, a source with knowledge of the plans said yesterday.

The device will sell for hundreds less than the entry-point $499 iPad, a feat few tablet makers have accomplished, the source said.

Amazon can take a loss, the point is moving books.  And is Amazon ever going to move tablets and in turn books.  Even in a bad economy $99 for a tablet computer is a fantastic deal.  $99 for a reader that's a 1-trick pony is a "good" deal but not an exciting one.  This changes Christmas big time.

Newsflash: Downloads of Angry Birds soars.


After test driving the NC for about 6 months now, it's plenty big for anything I want to do with it.  I think the iPad is probably swell and great and fun.  But it's big.  Where do you put it.  And does it really replace a desktop or a laptop/something with an actual keyboard.  I'm not writing a book on the Nook or an iPad.  Ain't happening.  I want to be at the PC and type.  Maybe I'm a dinosaur, maybe you "can" write a book or format a magazine or a newspaper on an iPhone but if we're to be reasonable adults no you can't.  The resolution isn't there, you need to see things big.  Maybe in another 5 or 10 years people won't say that.  As a photographer, I will be very surprised to SEE that happen.

The Old, the Dying Off and the New

This postcard was something I worked on yesterday in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Is Konrath really correct that the deal John Locke just signed with Simon & Schuster marks the death knell for legacy publishing?   I'm not as sure as he is.  That S&S gave up the erights is a big deal but will this hasten the demise or are we going to see them struggling along, flailing out for years?  There's a part of me saying "Just die already".  But what does it have to do with me?  Nothing at all.

I suppose some paper books will always have a utility.  I got a couple cookbooks in digital format and really hated it.  Maybe I can get used to it.  And yes, I formatted the Verrine book to not be as bloody annoying as the other cookbooks--it's more like a novel.  And it's not in PDF which is horrid always to begin with.

I'm going to be OCRing one of my backlist books in the coming weeks.   It's a quite intensive process so I expect to be quite cranky about it.  And OCR isn't perfect so you have to do a concentrated proofread to find the mistakes.  That's why I wasn't going to do it at all.  I do have other books in my backlist and it's hard to start working on them for any reason without doing a rewrite/update.  It becomes so involved.  Good for anyone who can avoid all this hassle with it!  That's not me, though.  But since this book is now in another language that I don't speak, rewriting is impossible.

Forget the Hindu translations.  That ain't happening.  Amazon India or not.

Update--The heck with that time waster.  The OCR program couldn't read what was near the gutter even though it scanned it perfectly well.  I'm not going through 163 pages in a foreign language line by line trying to figure out what wasn't scanned correctly.  I have real things to do.

The Whole ISBN Issue

By now, this is a scam or at the very least a monopoly by Bowker.  You can only buy ISBNs from them.  And they are highway robbers.  I think they're free in Canada (they used to be free here, I knew someone who had a hundred of them) and Bowker will charge you about $125 for one here.

What's an ISBN?  From Wikipedia

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a unique^[1][2] numeric commercial book identifier based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering (SBN) code created by Gordon Foster, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin,^[3] for the booksellers and stationers W.H. Smith and others in 1966.

But Amazon and BN have their own identification system.  They don't use ISBN for digital books.
It's true other sites do like iBooks.  They require them.
I say the heck with you, iBooks.  Everyone knows Amazon stocks the most books (most of everything) so everyone already goes there.  The few who don't, so what.  Self-publishers can't even get into iBooks, you have to go through another entity and often pay for the privilege of being listed there.  Big whoop.  I don't pay for anything I can do myself.

Q: Why do you need an ISBN?
A: AFAIC you don't

Q: I WANT one, I won't be happy until I have one.  How do I get one?
A: The problem (monopoly) is that for every version, every edition of your book you need a different ISBN.  If you want a paper book, you have 1 number.  If you have a digital book, you have another.  Ka-Ching!  For Bowker.  (A block of 10 will cost about $300, see how they do that?)

Q: You still haven't told me how to get one.
A: Go to Smashwords and publish your book through them and pay $10.  Done.  That ISBN goes with the book wherever you sell it.  You can unpublish at Smashwords at that point if you want, who cares?  If you want to print, buy it for $10 at CreateSpace.  Done.  This is not that complicated.

Q: That's it?  Why does everyone make such a fuss?
A: No idea.  But what you don't want to do is take the free ISBN offered to you at Smashwords or other such sites.  They will be the publisher of your book until the end of time.  If you don't object to that, do it.

Q: Do you object?  You're the Queen of Free.  The goddess of penny pinching.
A: And I am so proprietary.  I publish my books.  So, yeah, I object.  $10 is the bargain price to pay for something I don't think you need.

Q: I'm so confused.  Maybe you don't know what you're talking about.
A: I can confirm your initial concerns about yourself.  You are confused. 

Are we living beneath the volcano?
The great Jack Bruce

Maybe I Shouldn't Read AutoBios Anymore

Here's a couple thoughts on Lips Unsealed.
Belinda Carlisle--Who knew a human could ingest such vast quantities of drugs and not die.
Morgan Mason-What a mensch!
I think she outpaced Steven Tyler.

Anything more to say than that would be inappropriate.

Writing thought, not tip, of the day.  I think it's very difficult to redeem a character if you've taken it perhaps a notch too far.  I just finished a novel recently (nevermind which one) and I found myself commenting throughout "Idiot!"  "Moron!"  That's the main character.  Someone you might say has very little to no character at all.  Now there's a companion volume and once I started that I found myself saying "Schmuck!"  I read the first couple chapters and then I read the last chapter, but doubt if I'll bother with the middle.  I don't care about the character and the arc anymore.  Any compassion or interest I had in that character was lost.

I think the writer has to give the character something for the audience to hang onto.  Something substantial so you can say "They behaved badly there, but you know there's goodness because of fill-in-the-blank"  I don't want to read about unremitting stupidity, self-centeredness, narcissism and cruelty.  I'm sure those things don't bother many people but I'm sure they bother many people.

I don't know if anything makes a difference anymore.  If at some point everyone who could possibly have a device to read on has one, the audience is so vast if you're found by your audience, what do you care if other people don't like what you do?

You certainly can't write to the drunk troll reviews because every single one of them complains about something else.

I got a nice note from someone who read Not Low Maintenance and thought she had identified the town I based it on.  And even the district of the town.  Bravo, Michelle!  Old Field is not strictly a real town, though.  There are elements of several towns in it as well as fantasy out of necessity.

This is an old photo, 100 years, that I found.  It was handtinted and I kept to that.  I may try to fool around with it some more to increase my knowledge of Photoshop.  Can I make the sky blue and make it look real.  Sure it's possible to fill the sky area with blue but it won't look like the sky.  I think the solution is a gradient.

 

Well, that wasn't hard at all.

Already Gone

Bright and early Monday morning handwringing session.

Will January 1, 2013, Be Doomsday for Publishers?

As Don Henley told the New York Times, what's at stake is "fairness" and "parity." The Eagles lead singer, who also heads a group called the Recording Artists Coalition, was referring to a revision to copyright law, made in the 1970s, that could drastically affect the ownership of some of the cornerstones of classic rock. As the Times explored last week, a "termination right," written into copyright law more than 30 years ago, is now putting certain songs back on the rights block, allowing artists to renegotiate royalty rates on their works or reclaim ownership entirely. The termination right could also create some waves for print publishers, as authors seek to do the same thing as songwriters....

Agent Gail Hochman, head of the Association of Authors' Representatives, said she is "sure that literary agents are watching this news story regarding musicians' rights" and that her group has been sponsoring a number of seminars on the topic. Another agent who sees a storm brewing is Robert Gottlieb. The chairman of Trident Media Group thinks the termination right will especially come into play on the digital front. "Publishers need to come up with effective strategies to convince authors to keep their backlist business with them given the fast changes in e-book publishing occurring in today's market. One way is to offer additional advances with limited rights."

Yeah, Let's have some seminars.  Let's put together a SuperCommittee to study the issue!  And take bribes and reassure each other that all is not as grim as the "Tea Party Faction" of publishing (that would be wild-eyed self-publishers, the yucky kind of people who like freedom and want the heavy boot of the "elites" off our necks) is making it out to be.  Bezos is an outlier!!! 

Screw off, Bobby.  Yeah, find a way to convince us to stay with the dolts who've been  stiffing us all these years.  Wait, maybe they just recognized our value.  It took them, what, 30 years???  Midlist writers have been maligned and mistreated for the last half century.   Now you can have my backlist?   "What am I dumb or sumthin?" to quote Lina Lamont.

I'm already gone.

I Used To Love Going To The Movies

I don't go anymore.  It all seems like crap to me.  I don't even have premium channels on the satellite dish.  Every time they have a free weekend, they run movies that are 20 years old or whatever.  Then I say "I'm not paying for that."  I know they do spiffy new programming about undertakers, mass murderers or vampires.  And someone with cancer.  Ah, gee, no thanks.  I can watch the news if I want to be scared or depressed.

Don't worry, there's a writing tip coming up.

I'm sending the Tokina lens back; you won't have to hear about it anymore.  I know some photographers rely on 1 lens, often a prime, a 50mm or something.  Their go-to lens.  I've always gone with a zoom.  So the 55-200 seems to have great utility for me and perfectly adequate results.  It's hard to break these habits.  The Tokina was fine and terrific but I have the zoom so don't need a lens hanging around in a drawer.  I really love the D7K and the only thing worth changing would be a split screen viewfinder.  When I called Nikon some years back about this the support guy practically laughed at me.  Yeah, that's the kind of attitude you want in your help staff.  Anyway I guess they don't do that anymore.  But it would make the D7K perfect.

Here's the writing tip.  It never ceases to amaze me that someone will over-use certain words and never notice.  Using the same word like say beautiful on the page twice is bad.  Using it twice in the same paragraph is awful.  And I've seen it happen in the same sentence.  Don't do that.

Lifecycle of a Good Idea

Not for the squeamish.

Again, It's The End of The World

Amazon publishing is rolling out its first book under Larry Kirschbaum and again we have the handwringing.  And weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and so forth. Crown couldn't match the offer.  Amazon has tentacles everywhere blah blah blah.

"Traditional publishers do not necessarily believe that. Some are downright nervous about the intentions of Amazon, with its deep pockets and a unparalleled distribution system into tens of millions of living rooms and onto electronic devices.
Some independent bookstores have already said they do not intend to carry any books from the retailer, not wanting to give a dollar to a company they feel is putting them out of business."

That's a smart business move since the whole bookselling thing is like totally 20th century and bookstores are closing faster than you can scarf down a bag of Doritos.  Let's have a bookstore and don't sell books!  That's a novel idea!

Fear On A Stick

Before I started to hate Tom Hanks, I watched You've Got Mail so many times I can repeat the dialog.  It's a cute movie, isn't it.    But the part I didn't understand was why Blondie didn't set up a website for selling her damn vintage kid's books.

I lucked out, won't bore you with the details I'll bore you with more camera stuff later, and got a private library of quite nice books going to the dump some years back.  I sold them on the internet INTERNATIONALLY and made thousands of dollars without trying at all.  I just listed them at abebooks.com and on ebay.  This isn't rocket science (which is good because rocket scientists have become really stupid lately and are talking about alien invasions to save the planet from "global warming".  Have you guys READ the emails from the East Anglia scientists???)

So why didn't Blondie put down Pride and Prejudice for a couple minutes, come up with a website and start selling those books?  Well because I guess there was no internet in Shop Around the Corner, the movie this was based on.  If she actually expanded her business she couldn't keep whining "It's not just business.  It was personal TO ME."  But all is well because the deadtree publishing industry was going to publish the book she wrote.  So she's a freaking writer?  Gimme a break.   (And one final, no really, comment.  She gets into bed wearing her street clothes??  She sat on a bus or a subway after a homeless person sat in that same seat in their clothes that they pooped in.  Now she gets into bed in those clothes?)

All I'm saying is keep up with the times.  There are plenty of opportunities and whining just proves you're not serious about getting on with life.

For me, given where I live--out in the middle of nowhere--I thank Jeff Bezos every time a smiling box balances precariously on my mailbox.  He makes my life easier.

Onto the lens which I have to admit is like sort of a Christmas Eve scenario when you know in a couple hours you're getting presents.  But I tracked the thing and it's in the FedEx hub city.  Sure you could easily make that long drive and get the lens here by the end of the day but with UPS by this point on delivery day there would be a notification "Out For Delivery".  So my Tokina isn't even on the van to be delivered?  How are they going to do this?

UPDATE I don't know if they drove it or flew it but it's "Out For Delivery".  Oh Christmas Morning!  Santa left presents!

UPDATE 2 The FedEx man arrived before noon and gave me my Christmas.  That I couldn't make work for about an hour.  I'm still not convinced this is the greatest thing since macaroni in amusing shapes but here's the first image that I think is visually pretty darn interesting.  (No special effects.  This is the image.)

Nothing Serious

I just did a new cover for my novel, Nothing Serious, so that's quite exciting.

The book was originally, and rightfully so, titled Disconnected.  I think it should still be called Disconnected but that word is too long for me to design onto a space 1000 x 1500 pixels and be understood in thumbnail size.  That's the issue.  There's lots of creative things you *can* do but whether they work in a bookstore or on the net are two very different things.

I did what I could.  It was cute.   It didn't sell.  I did a new cover with a vintage postcard.  The sales picked up but I still think it's laboring under that "dated" perception.

So here's the new cover.  I would have liked the hat to be purple but  after getting halfway there I decided I'd had enough for one afternoon and packed it in.  It's something for the future.

Cover Art Disasters

I was checking some of my books at BN yesterday and they now have the same kind of ribbon that Amazon does "Readers also bought" or whatever it says.  There were a couple books there, obviously self-published.  How am I so sure?  Because they looked like someone who didn't have a clue about anatomy drew the people used in the artwork.

Years ago I knew 2 people who claimed to be psychics.  I won't challenge them on that claim.  Okay.  Whatever.  But he was a "professional artist".  He also didn't know anything about anatomy.  I suppose if being an artist these days is draping orange fabric over everything in sight, you don't need to know about anatomy the way artists of old did.  He illustrated all their books, did all their cover art.  Disaster.  Worse than prawn chips.

I can only say one thing--Don't do this.  Spend $15 and buy a photo.

I'm not sure at all about the thinking that goes into this decision.  Do they actually believe that's good artwork?  Do they not care?  Have they no ability to discriminate?  I think it's a hard sell to have an amateurish cover.  Even if you were Hemingway, I don't think it would work.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Why risk it? 

New Cover for Fling

I loved the original cover, the Russian postcard, but I suspect people perceived it as "dated".  So then I got the photo of the wild geranium and I loved that but changing was more for me than thinking it would actually improve sales.  Why?  Because it was too soft.

As I was looking at photos in one of the stock image sites, I happened on a couple vector graphics that I thought could be made to work.  I bought one and I've probably put 20 hours in on it to get it right for my purposes.  The original had a horrible grey sort of background so I needed to lift the girl off that.  Then her skin tone needed to be adjusted, change her hair color and you get the picture.  It was very labor intensive.

Now I can go back to my novel.

Let's Try To Get It Right

I'm researching for my next novel and found a book I thought might be moderately informative.  The writing is disoriented, all over the place, jumping from one year to the next, one person to the next.  I started to think "What's this book about?"  And given that it's nonfiction, that doesn't seem like a good sign.

But when the writer got the name of a prominent actress of the day wrong, that's when I gave up.

This is Mary Miles Minter.  Not Minton.  It seems to me that anyone who was writing a book and doing tons of research would have found this image on the net.  Not to mention that Mary Miles Minter was involved in one of the most publicized scandals of the era and silent film buffs are still talking about it.  It's not like she's obscure and her name is difficult in the way that Jerzy Kosinski might be.  (He wrote Being There and if you ever hear Chauncey Gardiner referred to, that's where it's from.)


I should have been tipped off when the writer got Adela Rogers wrong.  It's Adela Rogers St. John.  That's her name.  The later in the book it's Adela St. John.  No it's not.  It's still Adela Rogers St. John.


And no, Anita Loos was never a child star in early silents.  While she did do a few turns on stage, she always knew she wanted to be a writer.  Her bio A Girl Like I  is on my bookshelf,  so I think I know a little about her, apparently a whole lot more than the writer of this nonfiction book.

Anita did write The New York Hat in 1912 for D.W. Griffith and she did write the memorable novel in the mid 1920s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes much later turned into a movie (yes, the one that starred Marilyn Monroe). 



When I started writing, it was almost impossible to do research.  It meant going to the library and  the struggle to find a tidbit was daunting.  To find some things, you might have to go to a college library.  I spent hours one winter at the library of Arizona State.  Now you go to Wikipedia.  It takes the amount of time it takes to type the search words.  There's no excuse for making these kinds of mistakes anymore.

But legacy publishing is professional and they do everything so much better than unprofessional, wild-eyed self-publishing numbskulls.

NOT.

99 Cent Price Point (It's The End of The World As We Know It....)

Oh geez, I forgot the embed alert.  I'm posting copyrighted music.  Are we even allowed to listen to this???  Turn your ears off!  The aural police are coming for you.

Here's an article/rant  TheCrisisDocument that maybe you could get thru, I couldn't.  The gist of it is amid the great lamentations and gnashing of teeth--heck, the guy's a musician not a writer, but it could have been said in a quick paragraph--people don't value music anymore.

Well since most of what's currently pushed at us is total crap, he's right, I don't value it.  Um...is there more to say?

Oh yeah and what's partially to blame is iTunes.  With their 99 cent price point.

I've already said I don't like the 99 cent price point.  I already said I think it devalues books in general, mine in specific.  But it's reality, it's what we have to deal with.  If you're not a commercial writer, and I'm not, then this is not the best of all possible worlds.  If you're a commercial writer, you will make your fortune in volume.

This is the free market system.  There are not equal outcomes.  Life is not fair.  You can't legislate it into fairness.  No human is wise enough to do it, although they keep trying as demonstrated by any number of governments around the world in various stages of collapse even as I type this.  You want equal outcomes go to North Korea--everyone eats bark for breakfast and they're all starving.  And none of them have electricity.

Satellite photo at night North Korea at top South Korea at bottom

I'll stop before I get into a philosophical/religious discussion.  The bottom line is you can't put toothpaste back in the tube.  Deal with it.  Make music people will want to buy.  Write books people will want to buy.

Changes

Yes, I changed the Verrine cover already.  And I'll change it again if I feel like it.

I rarely hear the word changes that I don't think of Phil Ochs.  He was a talented and misguided young man.  May have been bipolar, I don't know that he was diagnosed that before he killed himself.  The suicide note said something like "I have no more words".  A loss. 

Verrines: Sweet and Savory Parfaits Made Easy

I got it done.  It seemed like it took forever to get the formatting.  When you're doing something like this, I feel like I'm having an out-of-body experience.  It's overload. 

Barnes and Noble got it live in a couple hours.  Amazon mocked me and said 24 but I know it'll be more like 36 or 48.

Here's the blurb.  I hate writing them.  It's almost as bad as writing a synopsis which I just realized I will never have to do again in my life.  So YIPPEE!

Have you ever wanted just a little something to eat that was delicious and probably sinfully fattening? Don't we all? Some years ago the French invented verrines. A verrine is a sweet or savory delectable. Like the familiar parfait, it's served in a glass but a small one making it the ultimate in portion control. While most of us want to eat well, most of us aren't trained chefs and we rarely have access to exotic ingredients readily available elsewhere. VERRINES: Sweet and Savory Parfaits Made Easy makes it possible for everyone to create luscious treats quickly and with a budget in mind. You don't need a kitchen full of special tools, and you don't need expensive ingredients. You need some small glasses, a sharp knife and a trip to the grocery store. Whether you need intriguing appetizers for a party, a light lunch or dessert, you will find something in this book to help you achieve your goal.

So now I can devote my thinking to purchasing the wrong items on ebay (come on guy, you think I don't know what I'm talking about but French White isn't stovetop safe), fighting with the Amazon Marketplace sellers who didn't ship the book I really really need for my new book, and in general bothering everyone I come in contact with.  C'est la vie.

I think I will probably change the cover since I did this over a month ago and took a lot of photos that I...I'm fickle.  I can like you one day, Miss Photo, and the next day I've moved on emotionally.  Sorry.

Thinking Bigger

Mindrelic - Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

Formatting With Images-- Centering Issue

The cookbook is quite image heavy so I've been putting a lot of hours (contrary to everything the drunk trolls will say--I had to add that) into trying to get everything centered.

You think that center means center.  You think that if you click the center icon, you're done.  I don't know why this isn't true but it's not true for me.

Here's my suspicion of the morning and if someone knows better, please let us know.
In Expression Web, it's not considering the center of the page.
It's thinking of the image as text.  Because the image stands alone like the beginning of a paragraph, Ex Web is applying an indent.

Here's the code for the images from the document.  I've put the code in red so you can discern it from the other stuff but blogger thinks I'm trying to write code so I had to turn it into an image.  Sheesh!

Since it's not text, the program shouldn't be indenting it.  But when I converted the document in Word to html, that's what you get.

What I did was leave the Design mode and go into Code and delete that line in red when it referred to an image.
Then I went back to Design.  Centered and reCentered.

That solved the problem of images not being centered.  I think it also explains why other things aren't truly centered as well but I'm not going back and reformatting everything already published.  Sorry.  Still it's nothing anyone has complained about.  YET.

Magical Heresy

I read the Harry Potter books with the same enthusiasm as did most of the world.  I ordered them from Amazon and received each with that special first wave, none earlier, delivery.  There is no doubt it was a unique literary achievement that will probably never be duplicated and I'm glad to have experienced it.

But.  I just started reading Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

Some years ago there was a spate of body-switching movies (it's a whole genre at this point, I think there's a new one out now that's being panned).  It began with the book Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers in 1972.  That was turned into a movie with a young Jodie Foster and so we began.  Then one day I heard of a movie, Big, that was coming out.  I had a long discussion with my friend, Allen, the fantasy illustrator about it.  Why did we need another stupid movie like this.  It's been done before.  And not well.

Then we saw Big and understood.  This is what thinking things through does for an idea.  An idea may be good, it may be great, but it can't stand on its own.  The writer is there for a reason.  And contrary to the Peter Gallagher character in The Player these things really do not write themselves.

Grossman's The Magicians is the demonstration of that.  Of thought and skill, ability to handle the language, the ability to see into character not just see character.  To read the first page is to know you are in the presence of someone who can write.

Someone will say hey, Potter is for kids and The Magicians is for adults.

And I say So what's your point?

Update:  Interesting, if dated, piece Lev Grossman wrote on Amazon reviews Eaten Alive At Amazon (I rewrote the article title, so ding me down)

Roasted Peaches

It's really easy.
Preheat oven to 350
Cut the peaches in half.
Put in a shallow baking dish.
Sprinkle with sugar.  Dab with butter.
Bake approx. 1 hour.
Do not let juices burn.
Serve warm or chilled with whipped cream or ice cream or something full fat.

Peachy Keen

Every week I think the cookbook will be done and every week I get sidetracked.  That's my news on that.

Here's how I solved the problem of Aldiko not working on my Nook Android Tab.  Try to follow me on this.  I downloaded Moon Reader.  It worked.  I uninstalled Aldiko.  And felt better about it.  The support guy at Nook2Android aka N2A is really nice so I'm totally satisfied with them and not bothering with the hassle of rooting it myself was smart.  Nook2Android

They think I'm crazy at the farm market.  The owner even jokes with me every time I buy an eggplant.  He remembers that I once remarked how shiny it was.  Then he says "Why, you can almost see your face in it!"  He adds the orders up outloud.  It's a remarkable performance.  So yesterday I bought the coolest radishes to take pictures of.  They are just gorgeous.  I also bought peaches.  I forgot to roast one yesterday for the cookbook.  Yeah I thought I was done coming up with new recipes but come on, roasted peaches?  Those are fantastic!

The White Shadow Once Lost Now Found

The first 3 reels of The White Shadow, a silent film made in 1923 by Alfred Hitchcock have been found in a vault in New Zealand.  I know not many people will care, some probably don't know who Alfred Hitchcock was, some have never seen a silent movie.  It's a major find.  It's a big deal to those who care about film history--which leaves out about 98% of the people in the film business now.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8678748/Lost-Alfred-Hitchcock-film-found-in-New-Zealand.html

There was great variety in silent films (unlike today).  There were comedies, dramas, mysteries, adventure, westerns.  Some were very simple, some were very complex and intellectually challenging.  Nothing that comes out of Hollywood is intellectually challenging today.  Some filmmakers thought it was a lark, some took it very seriously.  True art was created and The White Shadow might be good, it might be great, it might be trash, but it's a piece of film history and to regain what was lost is always cause for celebration.

So Many Of Everything

There are so many good photographers.  I was looking around at their websites yesterday.
There are so many good singers.  You see them show up at auditions for X Factor or America's Got Talent or American Idol.
There are so many pretty girls.  They go to NYC to be models.  They go to Hollywood to get in the movies.  (They still make movies??)  Or be on television, there's still television.

There are so many people who think they can write.  And actually they're pretty much correct.
What's his name--sorry---Charles Grodin wrote an interesting book about the life of an actor called It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here.  You can get it at amazon for a penny--it's an old book already.  It's worth reading.
He made some good points that the entertainment business is survival of the fittest not necessarily the best.  The "best" may be too tender to withstand the blatant message of "It would be so nice if you weren't here".
I had some friends at one point who I thought were quite talented musicians/singers/performers but they didn't make it.  They got the breaks, they had the connections, but still they failed.  Now I think they weren't nearly as good as I thought they were.  They were like thousands of others who play and sing reasonably well and perform engagingly.  Something elevates people out of the crowd.  What?

Now there is no one to tell writers (besides the drunk trolls) "It would be so nice if you weren't here cluttering up the place".  I didn't realize all those years that's what editors and agents were saying to most of us.