Musings

I've been slowly working on "Prima Donna" and realized that I'm actually writing the "Smack Down" episode.  First draft comment was "try avoid being too technical" and that will be a struggle for a few stories.

I'm also avoiding marketing for almost a week.  The whole reddit thing put me off but I need to get back to it.  I checked the readership figure - 9 Kindle, 2 Play, 0 Kobo.  Insanely curious to know if someone I don't know personally reads and/or likes the stories.

Today reading Forbes I saw a quote attributed to Plato, "Those that tell stories rule the world."  I'd love to know what work this was attributed to so I can go figure out the context.

Toodles!


*** UPDATE ***

Apparently Plato never wrote "Storytellers rule society", it is a quote from Clinton summarizing The Republic.  However in Phaedrus there is "There is truth in wine and children" that is true in so many ways and at so many levels.

The Master Plan

Someone asked if I have a plan or order to the stories I'm writing.  Yes.  For the most part it is chronological based on my experience.  But the topics and themes will change.  I've already rolled a couple ideas into one story.  But here is my "second" outline.  I lost the first.  If you see it, let me know.  Possible titles of stories:

• Graduation/First Job (became "The Beginning")
• Smack Down
• The Mexican
• Executives (became "Talking to Executives")
• Prima Donna
• You Must Learn Control (became "Legacy")
• Playing Nicely with Others
• The Nth Reorg
• Project Managers from Hell
• Cube-land
• The Christmas Party
• Hall Monitors
• The Impressive Clergyman
• Switching Teams
• Assassination
• When Dunning Met Kruger
• Shadow IT
• Last Man Standing
• Up, Over and Down
• Transformation
• Start-up 101

There may be others as I dredge up suppressed memories.

Google Books

Publishing to Google Books was painful.  First, the mixture of my managed domains and personal email confused Google to not let me create a publishing account.  I could not figure out what services to turn on in the managed domain to fix it.  So I did get it going via my gmail account.  However, the new vendor registration does not work with Chrome!  Fortunately for me Internet Explorer understood the HTML/Javascript under the hood, and I was able to set up an account.  But Google wants you to fill in a lot of extra information for the book, including the BISAC code (found via the internet.)  I was not able to fill in the Vendor information without saying I was a company with a personal benefactor, at which point it let me enter my ITIN.  There is other weirdness; the currency conversion.

Wow.  About 1.5 hours to figure it all out for one story.  And now I wait to see if it makes the Play store.

I am now starting to worry about accounting.  I take it if I ever make money on this, I will need to tell Revenue Canada, but that is a problem I'd like to have.

Books via Google are PDF.  That's a good thing.  Not sure how DRM works here though.

*** UPDATE ***

Supposedly the first story is now live on Google Books and Play.  However, it does not appear in the search.  That is not helpful.

*** UPDATE ***

Google told me today it can take weeks to appear on the store.  But my new problem is my last two stories are being rejected due to low quality PDF.  PDF output is the same as my first book; publish, high quality, standard font.  Not much information as to what the issue is but Bianca ,the nice lady on the other end, said she would put them through manually.

NOOK nope.

I tried to expand to Barnes and Noble today and NOOK books.  Everything went okay (well mostly okay, it doesn't like docx too much though it says it supports the format) until I went to create a vendor account.  Canada is not an option - so I cannot sell via that platform (yet.)

*** Update ***

NOOK support got back to my question of "When will you support Canadian authors?" with an answer of "We support US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and Belgium.  Check us out often for updates!"  I didn't reply that where and when are not the same kind of question.  I love service organizations that don't answer questions directly.

Talking to Executives

Talking to Executives is now live on Amazon.  This story sees Mark meet the big bosses to share his ideas...  telling the bosses how to do their jobs better is a great idea, right?

Remember it only takes an additional $1 to fund the kickstarter campaign!  And please tell your friends.

Editors and Spelling

My sister-in-law Becky is a professional editor.  She was generous to offer her services to me so I didn't look silly.  This is one of the main points Kindle makes on their KDP website: use a professional editor.

One of the first things Becky pointed out is my title is wrong.  "Memoires" is a spelling mistake.  This escaped me because my copy of Word and its dictionary says its spelled correctly.  But sure enough, unless I'm speaking french (and missing an accent), it is not the Canadian spelling.  I googled "Memoirs" is correct.

So at first I thought "Well, that's fine.  Nobody has caught it yet, and I'm self publishing."  Then I tried to justify using it, maybe making a story out of it (because who hasn't been thrown under the bus by a spell checker or auto-correct.)  Heck even Google misspelt Google from Googol.  Now Google is a word; a verb and a noun!

Finally I gave in.  So I updated by source documents and cover pages and all the other places I had it spelled wrong.  KDP, Kobo, Kickstarter, Blogger, and Facebook were all very forgiving in letting me change the titles and descriptions.

Now let's see if it makes any difference what-so-ever.

More motivation please: Crowd Funding

I was thinking to myself today "Self, what else can I do to motivate?"

I am skeptical of crowd funding but the brain said "What the heck, give it a shot, maybe someone out there wants to pay you to write?"  So you undiscovered angels; spread the word.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/217827251/memoires-of-a-self-loathing-it-professional

Behind "Talking to Executives"

Some backstory for story three.  After trying to set up the context for "Talking to Executives", I've gone a bit too deep into the justification of why - without actually saying much interesting at all.

When I was at university I did the software engineering program.  It was a cool program because it taught me how to organize my work into a bigger picture and then break down the big job into smaller achievable chunks.  It added all sorts of other goodies like appropriate human-computer interface design, testing throughout the development process, and how to write documentation that average people could understand.  I did very well.  Originally I started in the hardware program, microchip design and asynchronous circuits, but after a year I realized there was no way I would ever get a job here in Calgary in this field.  To get our chips made we had to send our designs off to Edmonton, a city five hours drive north of here.

 It’s strange in hindsight changing from something I loved to something that would provide a better career.  I loved building physical things.  When I was in senior high school I won a national science competition building a robot.  I cobbled it together from TTL chips from a local electronics store, some toy car variable speed motors, and some old fashioned keyboard keys for pressure sensors.  The thing would roam about a room until it hit an obstacle and then change course.  The cool thing is that it had a basic memory and logic to remember where it had been to pick a new route to get unblocked.  It could figure its way out of simple mazes.  It never occurred to me to attach a dust-buster and make millions of dollars as a household aid.

But my love of building complicated hardware did translate into software.  It also started to translate into the real world.  Organizations are big complex things with swarms of moving parts.  Software is the end of the journey, not the beginning.  A company needs to figure out its business processes first in order to build functional system requirements.  Though many of my classmates didn’t care about end users, I felt that to build better solutions I needed to have their knowledge.  I couldn’t do that without building relationships.  And I was a specialist in building software, like the client was an expert in their business.  There needed to be some way we could all play nicely together so that I could enable them, b building things they actually wanted.

A well-defined business process leads to a well-defined software solution.   Effectiveness comes from seeing how well the solution maps to the process.  Efficiency comes from how aligned, integrated and streamlined they are.  To get maturity, processes need to be repeatable.  That means you need to have consistent guidance on how to do things, and people need to cooperate to follow the guidance.  Most important; people need to communicate.  And so I was introduced to continuous improvement philosophies and performance excellence. 

It doesn’t matter at all if the environment in which these things exist isn’t nurturing or condusive to success.  Sure as a skyscraper needs blueprints and is built from the bottom up, a ship needs a captain and is led from the top down.

Apple is not so simple...

Publishing to Apple for iBooks is not so easy.  You need to mail in a GST form to Apple that they file to say its okay to collect on your behalf.  Then you need to go and buy a Mac (if you don't have one already) to run two "free" software called "iBook Publisher" and "iTunes Producer."  The first lets you make an iBook format book.  The second lets you package it for iTunes.  At least this is what I've read on the surface.  I intend to borrow a Mac to try this out.  It is unfortunate I can't just upload a cover page and content.  But then, Apple still uses WebObjects for all their stuff.  Wow.  That attempt at a stateful web technology really should have died ten years ago.

Kobo is good too!

Kobo.  I saw Kobo eReaders in Chapters.  Apparently they own a healthy portion of the market in Canada.  Signing up for self publishing was easier than Kindle (that was really easy.)  Kobo calls the service "Writing Life."  The royalties are better than Amazon for small amounts (45% compared to 30% for Amazon.)

The document to eBook import isn't as snazzy as Kindle.  It ignored spacing formats from my source word document (so I need to go back and add white space.)  The web javascript editor seems totally broken (under Chrome.)  Also, the cover creator isn't as nice.  I went through my picture library to find something interesting and added a title with photoshop.  Guess what the picture is of?  My first fax machine - that exploded when my cat (whom loved to sit on the warm printer beside the fax) coughed up a hairball on said fax machine.  Neat huh?

Click here to download the Kobo version of "The Beginning."

Amazing Kindle Direct Publishing

This was very easy to set up.  I published in an hour.  It helped that the IRS had already been kind enough to grant me an ITIN (when I signed up to sell apps on the Windows store.)

Click me to see "The Beginning" - the first story on Amazon.

Or click me to see "The Mexican" - the second story (also on Amazon.)

The cover page creator from Amazon is very nice, but I wonder about the (C) on the images.  I am too lazy to make a picture but I really liked this one.  Unfortunately I won't use this cover on other services...  CMA.

As of today, I've sold 2 copies of story one, and 1 copy of story 2.  I'm beating expectations!

Linking via Twitter and Google+ has generated no interest, well, I got a few followers of 16yr old girls wanting to be aspiring singer/actresses.

Memoirs of a Self-Loathing IT Professional goes on-line!

Here we go!  I've been threatening my friends for years, supported and inspired by them, to write down all the insanity we've experienced together for the last 25 years.  And its longer too, as some of them go back with me to the Apple ][+ days.

This is an experiment.  I want to see if the short story is truly dead.  I want to see if people would pay $1 for a short story.  I want to see how many of my friends that promised to pay me $1 for a story actually do.  Self publishing is awesome.   But does it work?  I will post my experiences on it here too, and answer any questions anyone might have.

But I often tell myself "Writing a book is one things, but what good is it if no one reads it?"  Well, its therapy.  Really.  I have 25 years of poison to get out of my system.  And who knows - I might actually touch a few people (in a positive, figurative way.)

Thanks for joining me on the journey!