In which I write a new novel

The new book is entitled The House on Summer Street. I wrote it about two years ago, and went through the rigmarole of finding a publisher, but without success. This was back when Kate was still working at an agency, and they all liked it and gave it the old college try, but they just couldn’t swing a sale. Publishing is like that. I had written it to entertain myself, mostly because I like to write, so I can’t say I had particularly tried to do anything to make it commercial. Come to think of it, I had the same problem with Lingo, although there obviously I did have a publisher and ended up doing fine. The problem there was that, while it was on face a science fiction novel, it wasn’t really genre. Plus, while trying to be some sort of thriller, it was also funny (or while trying to be funny it was also some sort of thriller), and unclear boundaries were claimed to be anathema. So it goes.

The House on Summer Street is, perhaps, aimed at young adults. Perhaps not. And I’ve subtitled it, “A Novel With Ghosts.” Already it sounds uncommercial. After failing to sell it, I let it sit for a while, but I’ve decided, what the hell, I’ll publish it myself. Amazon makes it easy enough to do so. They’ll publish any damned thing, which is why they are in the process of destroying publishing as we (i.e., publishers—don’t forget my DJ) know it. I could write about that at great length (and, knowing me, I probably will), but I’ll stick to the main story for the moment.

I haven’t made too many decisions yet, since as one’s own publisher one is in charge of everything. The first thing I decided, though, was to get it copyrighted. I understand copyright well enough to understand that, officially, this wasn’t necessary, but I’ve been doing this for too long not to. And it’s no big deal to get a copyright. You go onto the government website, click a few buttons, and—

It doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. Our fine U.S. government allows you to register and pay on line and send them an electronic copy of the work, except it doesn’t work on Firefox, Chrome or Safari. Of course not. It only works on IE. Imagine that, Mac users. Internet Explorer. Do even Windows users use IE anymore? I’m surprised they didn’t make me use dial-up. I turned off (and on) every pop-up blocker and javascript allower and whatall-you-name-it in all those other browsers before remembering that I do, indeed, have IE on my Windows 7 emulator (with which I tab). That worked (after more pop-up blockers going on and off and javacripts being allowed or not and whatall-you-name-it) so, finally, after about an hour of nonsense that could only be conjured by the combination of government website and Microsoft, Inc., I acquired a copyright for the book.

Next up, the formatting. Amazon has ways it wants you to Kindle-ize your docx manuscript. So I did them. No big deal. Essentially you make sure that there's no long marches of new empty paragraphs (apparently the great unwashed find forced page breaks the kiss of death, given how many times Amazon warns you that you must use them or spend eternity in hell), you format paragraphs to include indents (no tabs) and you allow a little extra leading between paragraphs. And you style chapters as unique headings (but that doesn't matter much in a novel where they're just numbers). And in the end, you save it as a filtered html file, which would be fine if there were actually an option in Word to save as a filtered html file. That was as far as I've gotten. For a moment I wondered if the U.S. government had somehow crossed over into the process, and that I'd have to do the whole thing in IE...

The adventure will continue.