Photo Scanning Tips for CreateSpace

My heart nearly broke when I checked the resolution of a photo in a client’s family history/memoir I was preparing for upload to CreateSpace.com for printing copies for family members. When I copied the document photo and pasted it into IrfanView (my favorite free photo editor for low-end needs), I saw that the resolution was only 72 dpi (dots or pixels per inch). That’s a small fraction of the pixel density CreateSpace requires. This was the case with nearly all the several dozen photos in the book.

I had the gut-wrenching task of explaining to my client that she had a choice: I could resample the existing images to trick CreateSpace into believing they were 300 dpi . . . or she could rescan them.

How I wished that she, like the majority of people scanning old family photos, knew all along about scanning at a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. Here’s why it matters:

CreateSpace will sound an alarm when it analyzes an uploaded document and finds even one image of less than 300 dpi. For good reason. Lo-res images will look even worse in print than they do onscreen when zoomed above 100%. Ignore that warning at your own risk.

The left photo above is scanned at original size at 72 dpi. The image on the right is exactly the same picture, scanned at 300 dpi. Notice the crisp, clear detail in the high-res version compared to the blurry approximation on the left. That’s the sort of result you can expect with any image printed at 72 dpi.

My client wanted her volume to be top quality in every respect, so she opted to rescan as many photos as she still had available. For the rest, we stuck with small sizes and I resampled the existing photos as 300 dpi to stabilize them for printing. That turned off the CreateSpace alarms, but nothing could recreate lost detail. Still, those photos add value to the story and they are better than nothing.

Many of us scanned hundreds of pictures fifteen or twenty years ago when scanner technology was new and file size a concern. A 3” x 4.75” photo scanned at 300 dpi produces a file larger than the 1.44 megabyte capacity of the 3.5” floppy disks we used back then. We scanned at 72, or perhaps 96 dpi. I have a few hundred files like that myself, with the originals clear across the country, as many of hers are now. Those low-res files will work fine for eBooks and online viewing, but they are not print-worthy.

The tips below will help you get the best possible results for your publishing projects. If you decide to have someone else do layout for you, getting the photos right before you hand over the file will keep costs down and save you lots of aggravation.

Terminology

Resolution – the number of dots or pixels per inch. At 72 dpi, a square inch of image will have 72 pixels horizontally x 72 pixels vertically for a total of 5184pixels. At 300 dpi, that will be 300 x 300 for a total of 90,000, allowing for more than 17 times as much detail.

Resample – this word carries a touch of magic. If you change the resolution of an image, software uses samples from the image to calculate how to best condense or expand information to cover the desired amount of space. Increasing resolution spreads existing information thinner and is unable to add more detail.

Tips for preparing photos for publication

Scan at 300 dpi and 100% resolution – or higher. If you have a photo that’s 2” x 3”,  scan it at 600 dpi or higher to give you a high quality image printable at larger sizes so you can enlarge it enough to let people see detail. 600 dpi will allow you to double the size of the original in print. 900 lets  you print up to three times larger. Most old film photos lack the crisp resolution needed to successfully enlarge more than that.

Resample and enhance. If you aren’t able to rescan those old images, resample them to 300 dpi turn off the alarm.

Size in Microsoft Word to fit space on the page, then copy the image and paste into IrfanView or another editor to check resolution. Resample to 300 dpi at the precise size of the image in your manuscript. Replace the “temp” image with the resized one.

This matters because Word does a poor job of resampling, and images resized within the document generally look terrible when printed. This is partly due to changing the resolution as you resize in Word. Resizing is a nuisance, but worth the effort. I’ve tried not doing it and the results were not pretty.

Crop images with a photo editor. You  can do this in Word, and it might be okay, if you start with a 300 dpi image and don’t change anything else about its size. Check the quality of the image in your proof copy of the finished book.  For best results, crop in IrfanView, Photoshop Elements, or something similar and check to make sure the final image is 300 dpi.

Use an image editor to convert color images to grayscale if you plan to print in black and white. You can print from color or use Word’s image editing function to do this, but it’s not your best choice.

I’ll do another post soon on using your scanner interface. For now, scan big and pose questions in comments.

Write now: take a break from writing and scan a photo or two. Insert it in Word and play around with sizing. Download IrfanView and practice resampling. Tip: Resizing is on the Image menu. Ctrl+R will get take you right there. Have fun!

Lessons Learned on the Amazon Path

No, I have not been on vacation to the Amazon recently, though I wish I had – except not right now during its rainy season. I’m referring here to the unexpected twists and turns on the path to the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) arm of Amazon.com  as I completed my journey toward publication of Adventures of a Chilehead.

I wrote about early details of this project in three posts in June: “Chile or Chile? Check it Out,” “Lessons Learned”, and “Story Album to Memoir.” In July that early manuscript flowed through email to a team of beta readers. After incorporating their sage advice about need for further detail, spots that needed an edit and more, I thought final layout was all I needed to do before the book was ready for publication.

That predictably became complicated, and pressures of preparing for classes I was teaching in September resulted in setting the project aside for more than two months. When I reopened the project in late October, I was stunned. I read a paper copy of the manuscript and realized it still needed a lot of work. Here are a few of the lessons I learned (or relearned) in the process:

Wine, cheese and stories improve with proper aging. This is not news to me. I often open story files I haven’t looked at for months and years and see dramatic improvements I could make. We get too close to our work to be objective. Setting it aside and immersing our thoughts in something else for a time allows us to return with fresh vision and perspective.

In the future, I’ll schedule in these breaks before final publication. I always underestimate the time required anyway.

Expect unexpected glitches. This time the unexpected glitch was a section break meltdown in my print version of the manuscript.  Since this was a print document, having the precise type of section break (odd page, next page) was not as important as having some section break to control page header changes. I did an end run and arm-wrestled that gator to the ground. Then, after all was said and done, I checked online and found the solution.

In the future, I’ll turn to Google right away. 

Proof-read in many modes. Again, this was not news. But sure enough, a paper printout looked different from anything digital. When I read the.mobi file proof from the KDP site, I found several more rough spots that needed further sanding. When I ordered my print proof copy, I filled it with flags. Not until I saw that final print version did I realize I’d failed to check for stragglers (those stray single words at the ends of paragraphs) after reducing the margins by .2”. As long as I was making those changes, I found even more opportunities for improvement.

In the future I’ll print a paper copy of the final pdf version before uploading.

Remember that stories of any size are always a work in progress – like life itself. At some point it’s time to realize it’s as good as it’s going to get. Click the Publish button and get on with it. You can go back and make changes later if you want, but at some point it’s time to turn loose and move on.

So, it’s done. My path finally led to the river. You can purchase your copy of the Kindle version of Adventures of a Chilehead: A Mini-Memoir with Recipes on Amazon right now. The print version should be ready for orders by December 6. I had so much fun writing this book, I hate to see it finished, but it is time to set it free and hopefully watch it soar. I’ll tell you more about some of the elements that made it such fun very soon.

Write Now: If you are working on a story that’s driving you nuts, set it aside. Let it age for two or three months. Pull out an unfinished story or project that’s been sitting around for a few weeks or longer and work on that.  Your old story will sound fresh to you and you’ll quickly find ways to improve it. Meanwhile, your problem story will stir around under the radar and reemerge with fresh energy.

From Journal to Memoir

“I have piles of old journals. Can I use those as my memoir?”

This question comes up in almost every class I teach. The short answer is “No. But you can use those journal entries as a resource.” Here’s why and how.

Take a look at the Tree of Life Writing image in the right sidebar. Notice that Journal Entries fall at the foot, below the ground, out of sight and light. Those journal entries feed into Story, that appears first as Essays and Stories. Those component stories and essays feed into the composite Memoir.

If you are using your journal to best advantage, you write with no boundaries. Your entries may ramble. They may not be coherent. You may omit detail or obsessively dwell on detail. You may write things that will send certain relationships up in flames if you don’t consign those pages to flames before anyone reads them. You may reveal things to those pages that would embarrass you or others, or betray their confidence.

But aside from all that, reading journal entries is usually boring or confusing  for anyone other than the author. In our journals we repeat things, perhaps to the point of obsession and stuckness. We report conclusions and assumptions. We nearly always confine journaling to “telling.”

So how do you convert that material?

Start with lists of key memories and arrange them on a timeline. Then pick one of those memories and find journal entries about that event or the general time period. Read those entries to refresh your memory about details. Use them to get back into the scene. You’ll probably need to sink back into the moment, because you probably didn’t record many sensory details, but recalling the emotions and actions you did record should help you recall the rest.

Write a story about that memory, adding details evoked by your journal entries. In the story you show the action. You describe the setting and other characters(remember, characters may include animals, inanimate objects, nature, place, or other aspects of yourself as well as other people). You use sensory details to get readers as fully involved with the situation as you were.

Your story includes action that ideally involves some uncertainty and tension or conflict. Dialogue is not an absolute requirement, but even if you are the only person around, you can include at least a bit. Have conversations with yourself.

Each sensory detail, each bit of dialogue and aspect of action activates an additional sensory area in readers’ brains and adds a layer of realism to your story, bringing it alive in readers’ minds.

One more layer of realism may come directly from your journal. That’s the element of reflection. Readers want to know more than what happened. They want to know what that meant to you, how it affected you. That’s where those journal entries come in.

On rare occasions you may want to directly quote journal entries. At times, quoting from your journal may add a touch more credibility to your reports of how you reacted at the time, and some snippets may be lyrical and compelling. Use these suggested guidelines to effectively incorporate journal material:

• Use them sparingly. Don’t let them be a crutch for “telling” rather than “showing.”
• Prune them to laser sharp  focus. Use ellipses (...) to show that you’ve omitted material before or after the quoted material, or even within.
• Create composite entries. Some people may have a problem with using journal entries that are not verbatim quotations. This is a matter of personal judgment. Many of us consider journal entries to be similar to dialogue. The intent of the message is more important than literal accuracy. So if you need to distill three or more entries into a single one to give the drift of your thoughts at that period of time, do so and avoid overwhelming readers with what may seem like tedious navel gazing.

So, yes, you can use your journals, but use them primarily as resource material rather than verbatim story elements.

Write now: scan through an old journal and find a juicy memory topic with several related entries. Immerse yourself in those entries to recall your sense of the times and your state of mind. Bring the setting into memory as clearly as you can and notice elements of the setting. What was going on? What were people thinking or doing. What did you notice about the situation? Then use this awareness to write a short story or scene based on that memory, incorporating the details you recall and personal insight you recorded.

Professional Looking Books the Easy Way

When I wrote The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing to help readers begin writing their lifestories, I knew that some readers would eventually be ready to publish story albums – collections of short stories – or full-length memoirs. To help them produce professional looking volumes, I included instructions for assembling and preparing the documents to take advantage of free Print-On-Demand services like CreateSpace.com. I gave detailed instructions for using Styles to simplify formatting and ensure uniform results. I explained how and why to adjust line spacing for easier reading and suggested a number of reader-friendly fonts readily available for free download. I gave instructions for setting custom page size and effective margin settings. You’ll find everything there that you need to know to create a “real” book that doesn’t scream BEGINNER BOOK!

But, I admit it, there is a learning curve, and it’s more effort than many people want to invest. Until now, if you didn’t feel up to the challenge, have the time to try, or have a friend or relative you could cajole into helping, you could either settle for the home-made look or write a big check to a book designer or layout service.

I have great news: Joel Friedlander, veteran book designer, publisher of The Book Designer.com  and author of over 700 helpful articles for self-publishers, just launched a new service offering affordable, professionally designed templates that allow you to produce a polished book project with Microsoft Word. These templates relieve you of all decisions about line spacing, margin settings, header arrangement, font choices and more.

All you need to do is to write, edit and polish your manuscript, paste it into the template, and follow the comprehensive set of instructions to add header information, apply body text and title styles, fill in publication information and so forth. Add a cover and upload to CreateSpace and you’ll amaze everyone with your stunning results.

You may be wondering if I’ve used one of these templates. No, I have not, and I’m not getting a commission or any other incentive from this recommendation, but I know a good thing when I see it. I have used the same process they did to create templates (I even tell you how to create your own templates in my book), so I know how they work. It may be a little tedious, even stressful at first, but it isn’t rocket science, and it’s way easier than starting from scratch. You’ll also find templates for producing eBooks that coordinate with the look of your print project. That alone is worth the cost of the template.

If you are even thinking of someday publishing a volume for your family or the world at large, pay a visit to Joel’s sites. Look through the wealth of general information at The Book Designer.com and download a copy of his free eBook, Ten Things You Need to Know About Self-Publishing. Then click on over to Book Design Templates.com and check out the selections. While you are there, look for the Guides link on the menu bar where you can download copies of his free Book Construction Blueprint and  Template Formatting Guide eBooks. They are “must read” material, even if you don’t plan to use his templates.

As powerful as they are, current Book Design Templates don’t currently include one key element you’ll probably want: automated magic for inserting photos. Fortunately you can find step-by-step instructions for doing this beginning on page 264 in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

You put an enormous amount of time and thought into writing your stories. You owe it to yourself and your stories to make them look as good as they sound.

Write now: take a break from writing and read Joel’s free e-Books, then watch a few YouTube video tutorials on using Styles to ease your way whether you use his templates, the instructions in my book, or wing it on your own.

Tech Tips for Clean Manuscripts

I’m a  soft touch when a friend or relative asks for help getting a manuscript ready for uploading to a Print-On-Demand service like CreateSpace. More than half a dozen times these requests have ended me saying, “Just send me the file and I’ll fix it, but before you start another one, you have to promise to learn a few basic skills.” Then I spend hours cleaning up formatting garbage before applying the simple tweaks that convert it to a lean, clean, beautiful piece of work.

For those who grew up in the typewriter age, it’s natural to position text with spaces, both horizontally and vertically. It’s hard to unlearn some of those old habits, but if you want to take advantage of recent developments in affordable and accessible printing technology, you’ll do yourself and your pocketbook a favor by overwriting those mental typewriter files.

The tips below will ultimately save you time and maybe money. If you pay someone to do your layout, they will charge for the time it takes to find all the places you used spaces to center a title or pressed “Enter” 23 times to make a new page. Ebooks absolutely require a  squeaky clean manuscript.

Things to avoid and why

Using spaces to center anything. This locks you into a specific font and size, and your approximated efforts will lack crispness.

Center lines by using the Center Align icon on the toolbar.

Using spaces (or tabs) to position anything. As above, this will produce variable results.

Options include using tabs (only if you are sure you won’t convert to an eBook format), altering paragraph indentation (right-click and select the paragraph option), using tables or text boxes.

Using tabs at beginning of paragraphs. This advice may sound odd indeed. It has not been an easy habit for me to break. However, as page sizes, line lengths and font settings change, you may want to change the tab setting. Although you can control the tab setting in your paragraph style, using tabs is not advised for eBook conversion, so you’ll retain flexibility if you stay away from them as much as possible.

Set the first line indentation on the Normal or Default style. More about styles below.

Double-spacing between paragraphs. This is okay in a simple, short letter or story, but controlling paragraph spacing with styles is far preferable.

Bone up on Styles.

Entering two spaces at end of sentences. This is a hold-over from typewriter days, and it’s a really hard habit to break. Problems arise when you justify text to make even margins on both sides. Software distributes the extra spacing in spaces, so a double-space can become glaringly obvious.

Routinely use Find and Replace on completed manuscripts to replace all double-spaces with single ones. Obviously this will also kill any spacing you did with multiple spaces – another reason to avoid that technique.

Things to Do and Why

Learn to use Styles. Using Styles seems cumbersome at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll have a level of control you never imagined and save way more time in final layout than you invested in setting up your styles. With Styles you can

• change things like font size, line-spacing, or paragraph. alignment in your entire document with a single edit.
• change chapter or section headings without affecting paragraph text and vice-versa.
• automatically create a Table of Contents.
• save time and money on preparation for publishing.
• ensure consistency.

If you haven’t used Styles, do a YouTube search for your version of Word (or whatever software you use), and create your own class.

Download the Smashwords Style Book. Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, the leading free eBook conversion service, has written a book that details everything you need to know to get your manuscript squeaky clean and prepare it for eBook conversion. His tips work equally well to prepare for printing. He has generously made the book available at no cost.  You can download it as a pdf or any eBook format except Kindle from this link.

Write now: If you’ve never used Styles, open an old document, then watch a couple of YouTube videos, and play around with Styles in your document.

End of the Line for Lulu

For several years I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of Lulu.com for those wishing to self-publish a small number of volumes of their lifestory or memoir. I’ve posted several times about my experience publishing my preschool memoir, The Albuquerque Years on Lulu. 

Over the past five years, many friends and students have followed my advice and lead, using Lulu to publish their projects. I’m now recommending Amazon-owned CreateSpace, the no-fee Print-On-Demand provider of choice. Let me explain why I’ve removed The Albuquerque Years from Lulu’s website.

Without asking for my permission or notifying me, Lulu converted my document to ePub format and uploaded it to the Apple iStore and the Barnes & Noble digital catalog, setting the price at $2.99.

That was not okay with me! If that isn’t illegal, it’s certainly unethical. I immediately removed it from those catalogs.

I was never given the opportunity to review the conversion for formatting errors. The Albuquerque Years includes over two dozen embedded photos, which are notoriously difficult to position in ePubs. When I finally discovered how to download the ePub file, I noticed that the pictures do display between paragraphs, but not always between the ones they are relevant to. It needs some work before I re-release it, probably via Smashwords.com, as a free download.

I never added a “royalty” markup to the book, intending for any interested readers to purchase it at my wholesale cost, which has risen from about $2.79 five years ago to $3.99 today.

To my surprise, tens of unrelated people opted to purchase a paper copy. Today, if the book were still listed on Lulu, the “retail” price would be $7.99. I’m relieved that nobody (including me!) has ordered a copy since this outrageous inflation began. I certainly don’t want anyone thinking I caught the greed bug.

A LiveChat customer service agent (Lulu does not offer the option of phoning them directly, toll-free or otherwise) fed me some corporate line about “the stated current manufacturing price”, but was unable to explain why my wholesale price was lower. I can’t blame him. He’s just doing his job. I refuse to support the executive attitudes behind his explanation.

The free eBook (pdf) dowload link disappeared.

I intended for the pdf version to be free, as it was for over four years. Just before I “retired” the project (I discovered you cannot delete published projects), I discovered that the link to download the free pdf ebook was missing. I have fixed that. The link to The Albuquerque Years in the right sidebar now connects with my personal server for free digital downloads. (Click here now to get your own copy if you don’t already have it.)

Lulu’s pricing has become unpredictable.

Over the past year or two they have begun sending out a steady stream of “special offers” like 10% off, free shipping, 20% off, third book free, etc. Although I’m a die-hard bargain shopper, when I’m ready to buy a book, I don’t want to feel like if I waited another week, the price would drop, and I especially resent having retail prices inflated to cover this system.

By contrast, CreateSpace offers consistent pricing far lower than Lulu’s, free phone support, and they scan your uploaded document for typos and punctuation/grammar errors. Wow! The volumes I’ve seen coming off their presses are first rate in quality. Forums are full of great recommendations. Jonna Ivin is delighted with her experience using them to publish Will Love For Crumbs (see her guest post on this topic). I plan to upload a project myself to give them a whirl in the near future.

Write now: if you haven’t already done so, visualize a completed volume of your life story. It may take the form of a collection of individual stories or a memoir integrating those stories into a unified account. You may be writing more about family history. Perhaps your book will include lots of photographs. Let your vision grow and pull you forward. Set up an account at CreateSpace to add magnetism to that goal. 

Self-Publishing: Running the Numbers

According to Jerry Waxler, author of the Memory Writers Network blog, “I have been attending writing conferences for years, where the advice from established writers has always been to look at self-publishing as a last resort. That advice is now officially ended.”

Interest in self-publishing has never been higher, and it’s entirely doable today. In fact, it’s entirely possible to use a Print-On-Demand (POD) do-it-yourself service like Amazon’s Createspace subsidiary to produce a single volume without investing a single penny in anything other than the cost of printing and shipping.

This no-investment option is perfect for people who are only interested in producing a handful of books for family and friends. It becomes more complicated and challenging when you have a story you want to have noticed (and bought!) by the general public. To gain the attention and respect of the general public takes more time, effort, and – let’s face it – investment of time and/or cash. Below is an overview of publishing elements you absolutely must attend to if you want to have a professional-quality manuscript that will receive the notice you strive for:

Editing
It’s absolutely necessary to have more than one mind and two eyes involved. At the very least you'll need four to six astute "beta readers." At the very most you'll need a professional editor. I use beta readers to check the professional editor's work!

Layout and Design
I've seen some ugly, sloppy books from indie (independent) presses. I mark them down in reviews, and won’t buy from that company or author again. Layout isn't rocket science, but especially if you do it with Word, it takes a huge amount of patience and ability to attend to detail. If you use graphics, you add another dimension of complexity. Precise placement on book-size pages, with controlled wrapping – it’s enough to drive even an experienced user screaming into the night.

You may not even know about details like page and chapter headers, publication data page, Table of Contents (do you need this?) line spacing ... all things that differentiate a professionally produced volume. If you want a commercially viable book, you may need help attending to these details.

Cover
Covers are critical! People see the cover. Even if they don’t judge you book by it, they will form a first impression, whether on Amazon, the shelves of bookstores, or in the library. If you create your own cover, bone up on what needs to be where, and use focus groups of friends to refine it.

Promotion
If you want your book to be noticed, you'll have to send out lots of review copies. To whom? You’ll want too a blog tour. Which blogs? Promotion is a never-ending challenge with more facets than a diamond. You may want to use a publicist.

Cost
All of these services add up. For a 200 page book (around 50,000 words), depending on the level of need, editing will run an average of $3000, maybe more. Layout and design may be another $500 or more. Add another $200 for the cover. With shipping from the printer to you and then to to the reader, 40 review copies will run around $9 each, for a total of $360. So ... you have an investment of around $3000.

You’ll also want to spend about $120 to buy your own ISBN. You can get one for free, but using your own lets become an independent publisher with a name of your choosing. If you use the free one, the Print-On-Demand service will be listed as the publisher. 

A website is another requirement. That will cost another $80 or so per year for a hosted web domain. You'll probably want to pay someone at least $300 to design your site.

Bottom Line

Editing Layout ISBN Review copies Website Web hosting (annual)

$3000 500 120 360 300      80 $4360

Now assume you set the price of that book at $17. The cost to print on a per-copy basis will be around $8, plus shipping to you, so we'll modestly assume your actual net on a per copy basis will be about $7. To recoup your investment, you'll need to sell 623 copies! That's fairly modest, and if you've invested all that income and get decent reviews, it’s an achievable goal. Income from additional sales can go to buy a new computer and fund your celebration party. Book sales probably won’t fund your retirement!

You can control costs by doing a larger print run, but then you also have to store 1000 books (they come 48 to a box, and the boxes are about the size of a small microwave. Figure out where you'll put 22 of those boxes) and cartons of shipping envelopes. You’ll need to mail books out as they are ordered, plus ship supplies to Amazon and ... you'll probably want to invest in fulfillment services which will eat up most of your savings, maybe more. 

That's the reality of self-publishing. If you master layout skills, or barter your layout services for Susie's editorial eye, you trade time, and conserve cash. Which is more important? Which do you have the most of?

These are all factors to consider as you determine whether you really want to publish your own book, and the value of packages of support services if you do.

Write now: spend some time journaling about your hopes and dreams for your book. Run some numbers and think things over. Balance the option of a simpler book for a narrower audience versus making that big splash. Follow your dreams, but don’t walk into total fog.  

A Gift to Yourself

Kim Pearson, an author, ghostwriter and editor, shared a wrenching story on Womens Memoirs. Kim’s jolting experience with an art teacher taught her a lesson for life about the importance of doing our best. Although stunned by her teacher’s seemingly appalling behavior, Kim came to see it as a gift – it instilled respect for excellence in her developing mind.

Kim learned a lesson in seconds that I spent years acquiring. I grew up with a mother who insisted that ever stitch in every garment be perfect, and I sewed constantly. I hated her perfectionism at the time, but came to value it later.

That ethic transfers to editing and making my writing the best it can be on any given day. I don’t curl up and die if a typo or missing word occurs in a Forum or blog post, but I’d just about as soon go out in public with my shirt buttoned crooked or jelly on my face as send sloppy writing out into the world. It’s about more than ego and self-respect. I see it as respect and consideration for readers. I want to make my message clear and easy to understand.

It’s a huge challenge to figure out how to balance this message about the importance of respecting your work by polishing it to perfection with the counter one:

Anything you write is better

than writing nothing!

I shout this message from the rafters in classes of new writers. It is often the key to unlocking the fingers of people who were terrorized by teachers earlier in life.

The balance I found turned out to be quite simple and consists of two parts:

Write first, THEN edit.

Suit the polish to the purpose.

Purpose implies choice. Choice is involved in setting the purpose that determines the appropriate level of polish. To illustrate that concept, think of drinking wine. If you just finished unloading the moving van, any clean cup will do the trick quite nicely. If you’re preparing a formal dinner, crystal goblets are in order.

I give my mother full credit for giving me the gift of choice. You can only choose to do less than your best if you know what your best is. I did eventually learn that it was okay to not spend an hour ripping dense stretch stitches to correct a tiny pucker in the sleeves of toddler pajamas. And it’s okay to leave my journal and experimental drafts unedited.

It all boils down to purpose. When she died, Mother left a secret stash of manuscripts covering the first 19 years of her life. Her primary purpose was to complete a draft. If she had taken the time to perfect every word she wrote, she probably wouldn’t have gotten past the age of six. How glad we are that she wrote first, saving the edits for a later that never came. I could do the editing, but I couldn’t write stories from her private memory.

If you write for yourself in a journal, forget about editing. If you decide to share what you wrote with friends or family, make it the best you can within the time you have available. If you write for publication, do whatever it takes to make it glisten and gleam.

Mastering the craft of editing – not just the basics, but also scene, character development, dazzling description and more – may seem daunting, but the time you spend buffing stories often sinks them deeper into your soul and shows you depths you didn’t realize were there. Ultimately the time you spend editing your work is a gift to yourself, not just window dressing.

Write now: pull out an old story and buff it up. Make it the best it can be. Make plans to read a book on the craft of writing or take a class to hone your skills.

Paper versus Pixels: the Debate Goes On

In January I participated in an experiment to explore the relative merits of journaling on paper versus keyboard. The research project was spearheaded by Amber Starfire, owner of Writing Through Life, a blog and ezine devoted to the fine art of journaling. For one week we wrote by hand. The second week we used the computer, and the third week we mixed the two. 

Official results have not been released, but I was a little surprised by my personal findings. From the time I received a Hermes Baby typewriter in preparation for going to college, I used a keyboard for just about everything but taking notes and signing checks. For over a dozen years I kept sporadic journal entries in ongoing documents, adding to them through the space of a year. 

Three years ago I began journaling on a regular basis, loosely following the Morning Pages model. After spending two or three weeks reconditioning my writing muscles, I fell in love with hand writing, finding deep pleasure in watching words pour from my hand onto paper. They seem more real, more immediate, more connected in three dimensions that any pixels on a monitor ever will. Writing by hand often invokes a meditative state. While writing stories, essays, blog posts, articles, and all that other stuff is still fine on the keyboard, journaling by hand has become something of an obsession. Magic happens. I feel more creative. I don’t recall my muse  Sarabelle ever visiting while my hands were on a keyboard.

But still, I’m up for experiments and try to keep an open mind. I’m aware of the advantages of using the computer. Amber summarized them beautifully in a post about journaling software. 

My experience confirmed my preference for writing on paper, for all the reasons I already knew, but it also reactivated my appreciation of computer journaling. My journals have pale golden pages as warm as morning sunshine. After recoiling from the icy white digital page, I set the page color in Word to palest pink, adding a header of slightly darker hearts. Then I downloaded a hand printing font not too different from my own and used deep violet “ink”. This combination tricked my eye and made a world of difference. My E-journal feels less like “more work.” 

However, I did not find myself drawn into the meditative state. My thoughts remained closer to the surface. This may partly be due to the crisp percussion of hitting keys versus the smooth, analog glide of gel pen on paper. Clicking versus silence. The rhythm and flow are different. Also, the keyboard and touchpad on my laptop are wiggy (I will journal in my comfy chair, not at my desk, however I do it). The cursor jumps around now and then. To avoid chaos, I must often reposition, which breaks the flow.

Focus is a concern. When I write on paper, I’m journaling. That and nothing else. I’m aware that I could type in some of what I write, but that never happens. If I use anything, I rewrite it. When I write on the computer, some tiny portal remains active, reminding me I can easily recycle parts into a blog post, email, or whatever. That keeps one eye on the window to the world. 

For me, 95% of the value of keeping a journal lies in the writing. If my journals are lost or destroyed, so be it. I cherish this break from the keyboard and need it for personal balance. But I think I will be using the keyboard to capture more thoughts that aren’t so deeply personal. I might even invest in journal software for the purpose. 

Write now: try Amber’s experiment for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Then send me an email with the results. If you already have strong feelings about this, post a comment and share them.

Make Your Pages Eye Candy

Appearance definitely matters. This is no less true for pages than people, and I include both digital and paper pages. In a single afternoon I came across four  instances where choices of font, type size, color, or formatting made reading a challenge for me. It’s never a good idea to make reading difficult. It’s way too easy for readers to set your work aside, or click away from it.  Here’s what I found:

A memoir with double-spacing between paragraphs. The story seemed choppy. I finally realized that my eye was interpreting the extra vertical space as a “pause signal.” This format option is standard for business letters and web layout, where your eye needs the space as a marker to remain oriented on the page. But it is not standard on printed pages where it is typically used to indicate a break in thought or scene. 

A double-spaced manuscript printed in the old standard of 12 point Courier. Although they were the standard for college research papers, I never found this form easy to read, and was thrilled when Times New Roman edged out Courier for everything but complying with the demands of old-school editors.  I know the writing buddy who requested the help of my editorial eye will reformat before sharing more widely. By the way, if you are submitting work for publication, follow the submission guidelines on formatting to the letter!

An e-mail from a primitive list-serve that included a 1768 word story submitted for critiquing. It was a wreck with stray code, uneven line lengths, and a system font. I was tempted to pass this one up, but by pasting it into a Word document and cleaning it up, I discovered a delightful manuscript that needed little work. I won’t do that again. It took far too long, but I could not have fully appreciated the story if I hadn’t. In this case the problem was technical limitations of the system, not the preference of the author.

A website with text rendered in a micro-font the equivalent of ingredients lists on candy bars. It was even harder to read because the text was only a few shades darker than the background. I couldn’t even use the standard trick of enlarging the text size by holding down Ctrl while scrolling with my mouse wheel, because the page was displayed in Flash. Did I stay on that webpage? No!

Bottom line: to thine own words be true. Honor your efforts and your readers’ eyes by making them easy to read. Indulge your fancies with formatting, but pamper your readers by

• selecting readable fonts (see The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing for a list of recommended easy-reading fonts)
• using easily read type size
• keeping line spacing between single and about 1.5
• ensuring high contrast between text and background — black and white are hard to beat. 

Double-check your personal taste by showing samples of your layout to several friends. Ask them for an evaluation of readability. Check some best-selling books and pay attention to their layout techniques. Some features vary, like margin widths, header styles, and graphic enhancements may vary but general font and spacing standards stick to the tried and true. Simon and Schuster wouldn't risk their investment and readership by selecting fonts and layout that are difficult to read. Would you?

Write now: print out one of your finished stories and ask a couple of friends for their opinion of its appearance and ease of reading.

Clothes Make the Man

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

— Mark Twain

Did you ever stop to think that the way you visually arrange words and sentences on a page amounts to clothing your stories? 

Before you read further, I invite you do to download my free e-book, Make Your Pages Picture Perfect and take a look at eight “before and after” examples of the difference layout can make in attracting readers’ attention and easing the path of their eyes as they dip into the words.

Move your mouse over the small pink stars on each page. Each has a formatting tip about that aspect of the page. If you see a page you like, use the tips to copy the settings in Word or OpenOffice.  Those pages have a mixture of simple and sophisticated tips. If you are just getting started, use these basic tips to make your manuscripts look professional and easy to read. Add others as accessories, depending on your interest, level of skill and interest.

• Single-space, or use 1.5 line spacing. Double-spacing is fine for editing and mandatory for submitting manuscripts for publication, but not the standard for finished copy. A little extra space does make it easier for eyes to track along, so adding an extra half-space is easy to do and works well. When you feel adventurous, try the customized line spacing options, for example, Multiple, 1.16.

• Do not double-space between paragraphs. This is the standard for business letters, not for text. It is proper and standard to use an extra line or two to indicate a break in the action or a change of scene. When you add extra space between each paragraph, your story feels choppy. Use paragraph indentation instead, either a tab or by setting the Normal style to indent automatically.

• Use page numbers if your story is longer than two pages. It doesn’t matter where you put them, but make it easy for readers to reassemble the stack if they drop pages on the floor.

• Include your name. It can go below the title on the first page, or at the end. It’s a nice touch to also include the date at the end.

• Use a header on all but the first page. Include the title in the header. The page number can also go here. This second level tip is especially helpful for keeping things in order if you have a pile of several stories.

Don't send your stories out naked. These simple tips will give them a well-groomed appearance that shows you respect and take pride in your work.

Write now: open a file for one of your finished stories and apply these simple formatting tips if you haven’t already done so. Try a couple of more advanced techniques if you feel ready. 

Dialogue: The Writer's Swiss Army Knife

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Photo from Victorinox

The more I study the topic of writing dialogue, the more convinced I’ve become that dialogue is the writer’s Swiss Army Knife. You don’t have to know what all the other tools on the knife are for if all you want to do is whittle the tip of a willow pole for roasting a marshmallow. But it’s handy to know about the tweezers when someone gets a splinter, and the little scissors are a godsend for snipping off loose threads and hangnails. Screwdrivers come in handy every now and then, and so it goes. Swiss Army knives prune, snip, and open all sorts of things, and so does dialogue.

Even those of us who are fortunate enough to have dialogue pour forth naturally can benefit from learning more about the functions it serves, and how it works. Some of these functions include

• Setting a mood
• Concisely conveying information
• Adding rhythm and color
• Developing character
• And more

Even if you include dialogue in your initial draft (most people don’t), you are likely to overlook hidden opportunities to put it to best use. Do you know the secret signals for sliding it in the perfect spots? I don’t think you’ll find that answer on the Internet. How do you make it clear who is speaking without including the name every time? Do you know when to use single quotes and when to use double? Should you write about the voices in your head, and the conversations they have? What about the accuracy of the words you put in the mouths of other people?

Ever since I announced this class and the preview call, questions on that last topic have been pouring in. Truth in Dialogue seems to be the number one concern of memoir writers. I will address that topic in the preview call, so be sure to click over to the NAMW site and register for the call before it begins at 6 pm eastern time, Wednesday, August 26. If you register, you’ll receive a link to download the recording, so you won’t miss the call even if you can’t dial in live.

I’ve also written a guest post on this topic which will appear the day of the call on Karen Walker’s Following the Whispers blog.

Please join me on the call, in the class, and over at Karen’s blog to learn more about adding dynamic dialogue to your stories.

Write now: write a story and include as much dialogue as you can recall. If you don't remember what people said, write whatever you think they would have said. Don't worry if you aren't 100% accurate. Just write it!

Financial Costs of Publishing a Memoir

Few topics are hotter among aspiring memoir writers than the debate about the value of going public with your story. Most of the debate centers around the issue of upsetting family and friends. That is a valid concern. Far fewer consider the financial cost, and far too many authors end up feeling discouraged and disillusioned as they bathe in red ink. Let’s take a look at the facts.

Publishing costs vary from one individual to another, and depend on a combination of your skills and your publishing strategy. For example, for The Albuquerque Years, I had the skills to do my own editing and layout and create a professional looking cover myself. Then I uploaded the files to Lulu.com and have finished books available without investing a single cent.

In contrast, I know people who have spent $2000 or more on professional editing and layout services, cover design, and press preparation. Some spent another large chunk of cash on a press run of several hundred or a thousand books and promotional aids. One friend invested over $5000 by the time all the prep, printing and publicity was done.

Is it worth it? For me it definitely was. I never planned to make money on The Albuquerque Years and didn’t add any royalty mark-up to the price. I purr like a kitten with a saucer of cream when someone orders a copy, and a gratifying number have done so.

According to a post on “Sales Statistics” in the blog How Publishing Really Works, average sales stats for most individual books, especially self-published one, are plummeting — hardly surprising, considering the glut of new titles. According to this post, in 2004, Publisher’s Weekly reported that only 83 of more than 18,000 iUniverse titles published that year sold more than 500 copies. It goes on to quote iUniverse VP Susan Driscoll’s admission in the New York Times that in 2008 most iUniverse authors sold fewer than 200 books. Author’s House titles did even worse, with an average of around 54 sales per title.

Let’s do the math. The least expensive package available on iUniverse right now requires the aspiring author to invest $599. Editing, promotion, and other services are available at additional cost. If you sell 200 books, that basic investment works out to $3 per book. It’s not easy to discover the royalty structure on iUniverse, but if you exceed $5-$6 per book, you’ll probably price it out of the market. If you add the cost of professional editing, you are unlikely to break even at the 200 book level.

If you need to pay for editing, layout and cover design help, even with a no-cost Print On Demand (POD) option like Lulu.com or Createspace.com, you’ll have to sell a huge pile of books to break even.

So, where does that leave you? If you feel compelled to write and publish a book about your life, go for it. Go for it with gusto. As you write, keep these factors in mind:

Forget any idea of making a profit. Focus instead on the pleasure of completing a project that will prove satisfying for the rest of your life. If you lose money, consider it an investment in personal education and gratification.

Write primarily for personal satisfaction. Think like a Visa ad: “Editing, $1200. Proof-reading, $300. Layout, $500. Holding your dream in your hands, Priceless!"

Be realistic in your planning. Don’t spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on editing services in the blind hope they will help you sell a book unless you can afford this as a personal indulgence or training. It may pay off occasionally, and it may help you land an agent and commercial publisher, but if you do land an agent and publisher, your per-volume royalty will average around $1 per book, and you are unlikely to get an advance.

Keep hope alive. Even knowing that the chances of having your book hit it big and sell hundreds of thousands of copies is akin to that of winning the lottery, some do. Yours could. Dream big, plan smart, and learn everything you can about marketing books.

There is a back door around these costs. Form a collaborative with other writers, local or on the web. Trade proof-reading services with trusted and discerning friends. Brush up your layout and formatting skills. (The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing has a chapter to help with this.) Join a writer’s group or take a class to improve your skills and get feedback on your plot, character development and other story elements. Use the online templates on Lulu or CreateSpace to design an attractive cover.

With these economizing measures, your writing skills will improve and you can have a book you’ll be proud of, your family will cherish, and you can promote as much or as little as you like. However you publish, please let me know you did it, so I can celebrate with you.

Write now: do some research and come up with a balance sheet on what your anticipated publishing cost would be with various alternatives. Then devise a plan for getting your story into print.

The Season Is Upon Us

Sometime in the next couple of days I’ll have to venture out of my lair and into the commercial sphere. I know things will be changed. The Halloween decorations will be gone, replaced with red and green Christmas decor. It’s that time again!

This brings a couple of lifestory-related thoughts to mind. One is to urge you to write about holidays past. The focus right now is on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

You don’t have to write whole stories if you don’t have time, but as you think of them, jot some notes. Remember those index cards I keep harping on? Keep a few with you for this purpose. You might include a title line (which may change when the actual story is written, or not be used at all if you incorporate the memory in another story), and perhaps a few words or sentences to jump start the flow when you get back to it. Story idea lists are another option.

The other thought relates to gifts. A book of your stories would make a stunning holiday gift. If you haven’t started yet, it may be ambitious to envision one hundred polished pages printed by Lulu before December 25. If you already have a pile of stories, you may be able to weave something together by then, following the guidelines in Chapter 11 of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

Grandchildren may be among the most appreciative recipients, especially if the stories are about your happy memories that include them. They love to see lots of pictures, with themselves prominently featured.

If you need help inserting pictures in your stories, turn to page 264 in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing and follow the instructions. I do suggest you be generous in the sizing, especially if you are working with standard 8½ x 11 inch paper. It’s difficult to see details in tiny pictures, and they tend to look lost on the larger page. My experience with The Albuquerque Years proved beyond a doubt that it’s far better to avoid the temptation to resize the picture in Word or OpenOffice and use a photo editing program to resize it to the precise size you want in your document. None of the pictures I edited in the final document printed well, and I had to redo them, “the right way.”

There’s more to the gift angle than just your own stories. Nearly all of us have relatives who are so full of stories, everyone keeps urging them to “write those stories down.” They keep looking away and muttering. Wrap a copy of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing for them and place it under the tree. I know of several instances where this has worked to get the ink flowing. A typical comment:

Thanks for sending the copy of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. It was just what I needed to get a sense of how to get started and go about it. My wife and kids are thrilled that I finally got off the dime and urging me to stick with it. Thanks to you and Sharon for the nudge.

You better believe my little heart went pitty-pat when I read that unsolicited testimonal in an e-mail. Few things are as rewarding as confirmation that your writing hits the target.

Write now: about holiday memories through the years. Did you have an especially memorable Christmas? Get the gift of your dreams? Do any holidays stand out as flaming disasters? Write stories, jot ideas on index cards, or expand your story idea list. You needn't be limited to memory stories. Write about your reaction to the ever-advancing onset of Christmas. Remember when stores weren't decorated until after Thanksgiving? What about the super-sizing of gifts? Expound on your pet peeves and joys.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Framing Your Story

Few people think about layout in connection with writing stories, but it can play a critical part in helping your reader enjoy the story. People generally frame pictures before hanging them on the wall. Carefully formatting your stories before you distribute copies is much the same.

The most common formatting question I hear is, “Should I double space between paragraphs?”

“Since you asked, the answer is no.” If I’m not asked, I don’t comment.

Double spacing between paragraphs is not wrong, but it isn’t the accepted standard for publication. I have concluded that after leaving school, most people write nothing but checks, business letters, and e-mail. Double spacing between paragraphs is the accepted standard for business correspondence, and perhaps most office reports have drifted into this standard also. Thus the tendency to write stories like business letters.

Taking a historical perspective, when I was in school, professors required that term papers, theses, and other academic documents be type-written, with uniform double-spacing throughout. Paragraphs were indented five spaces. Odd as it seems in this electronic age, that’s still the standard for manuscripts submitted for publication. I don't keep up with term paper style requirements.

The other place you see double spacing between paragraphs is websites. It’s harder to read on-screen, so it’s important to keep paragraphs short and leave lots of white space when writing web content.

Your stories are not business correspondence, and they probably aren’t academic documents or website content. My recommendation is that you use the standard found in books — single spacing with indented paragraphs. Save the extra spaces for times when you have a major shift in thought or scene change within a story.

There are a few other things you can do to make stories easier to read:

• Increase the line height a bit. I give detailed instructions on how to do this, and examples of various settings in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

• Increase margins to keep line width shorter, making it easier for the eye to track across.

• Select a serif font, such as Georgia, the one you are reading, rather than a serif font like Arial. I use Georgia rather than Times New Roman (the standard on all word processing programs) because a wider font is easier to read. (Check the book for examples of several that work well.) A web search for “free font download” will turn up thousands of fonts, most of which are decorative, but you can find some that are good for extended reading.

• Use a comfortable font size. Twelve points is the standard, but depending on the font you choose, you may want to go up or down a point. All three fonts in the previous paragraph are the same point size, and you can see that they look different in size.
  

Purists also ask how much they should indent. This is entirely a matter of personal preference. The word processing preset, from typewriter days, is half an inch, but most publications use far less.

In general, let your eye be your guide. This is your story, and you can lay it out any way you wish. Just remember that picture frame analogy — good layout sets your story off to advantage and makes it easy to read. It’s worth finding a format you like, then sticking to it from one story to the next. You can make that easy by using a template, but that’s another post for another day.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Debugging Quotation Marks

One of the most common punctuation problems writers face is with quotations marks. In Everything You Always Wondered About Punctuating Dialogue, posted last July, I covered the proper punctuation of dialogue, but there’s a little more to the matter.

On the computer you have a choice of the “old-fashioned” straight quotation marks (" ... " ) or “curly” (typographical) quotation marks (“ ... ”). Today nearly every word processing program is set by default to insert curly ones, and this can pose a problem. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the mark inserted at the beginning of a quotation has the “tail” up. The mark at the end has the “tail” down.

Our eye becomes so accustomed to seeing them the right way, we only notice when they are wrong, for example, “I said yes, “ she told me. Or, ” No, I do not want to go.” This fluke is caused by a stray space. Your program uses an opening mark if it’s preceded by space, and a closing one if it’s preceded by another character. Most often it’s the ending one that gets turned around because without noticing, you enter a space after the period before you insert the ”. To fix the problem, simply delete the incorrect mark, check the spacing, and retype the mark as it should be.

If you ever need to enter a closing mark after a space, as I have done four times in the above paragraphs, type the mark first, then back up and add the space afterward.

You have the same challenges with single quotation marks, also used as an apostrophe. It looks odd to see it‘s with the mark backward because someone caught the extra space, but not the upside down mark.

Although word processing programs use curly quotes by default, e-mail programs typically don’t. This will only matter if you paste passages from e-mails into a story that is mostly written in Word or OpenOffice and the e-mail has straight quotation marks or apostrophes. I faced that challenge in my book manuscript. I’d forgotten that some stories began life years earlier as e-mail, and they kept turning up through several edits. The simplest solution for more than one or two replacements is to do it with search and replace, searching for (space)" and replacing it with (space)“ and "(space) with ”(space). Of course you know to use the spacebar to enter the (space) ... .

In case you are wondering why those old marks persist, Shawn Hansen over at The Grammar Police would be delighted to explain that the straight marks are properly used with measurements. In fact, until the advent of the typewriter, typeset documents used curly quotation marks with words, and inch and foot marks with measurements. I daresay not even one percent of all readers would notice anything awry if you wrote that your father was 6’ 2”, but technically you would more properly express that as 6' 2".

And now you definitely know more than you ever wanted to know about those ubiquitous little curly gizmos.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Countdown: 45 days until the release of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing on July 1. Stay tuned for ordering details.

Just an Hour a Week

This is a day that the Lord hath made.
Let us rejoice and write stories in it.

— Sharon Lippincott

I've had a busy week. Our daughter was here for Thanksgiving with her toddler and husband, and shortly after they left, I came down with a bug (fortunately short-lived). Consequently, I haven't spent time writing for a week now. This could have been a disaster for the blog, but fortunately I had a small backlog that I could pop into place with a few clicks of my mouse. My backlog is now depleted, but it won't stay that way long. I woke up with my head simply buzzing with blog/story ideas.

Knowing all too well how important it is to honor my muse Sarabelle when she pays me a visit, especially such a bountiful one, I headed straight to my computer and started half a dozen new posts. If my backlog gets too full, I'll simply post more often for awhile.

One of the insights she gifted me with was the fact that I now have ninety-four posts in this blog, which began on February 7, 2006, less than ten months ago. That's an average of approximately one post every three days. The posts average 407 words. A page of normally formatted text (Times Roman Font, 12 point, normal line spacing, one-inch margins all around) will average around 660 words per page. A page following my recommended formatting* with a wider typeface like Georgia (used in this blog), 11 point, with 15 point line spacing and one-inch margins all around will average about 550 words per page, 500 with chapter titles and section headers. Given these statistics, the current contents of this blog would fill about 80 pages with my recommended formatting.

I seldom spent more than twenty minutes per post, sometimes less, so I wrote about an hour a week on this blog. In about forty weeks I've written and edited around eighty pages of text, spending only an hour a week doing it. That's two pages per week, or about one hundred pages a year.

Just think what you can do if you write just an hour a week for, let's say, ten years! Even if you write at half the speed I do, you'll have an amazing stack of pages. Now, isn't that news enough to get those fingers clicking? Rejoice and ...

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

* Full details on this recommended formatting and how to use Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Write or WordPerfect to make it happen are included in my soon-to-be-released book, The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. Stay tuned for ordering information.