Self-Publishing, Two Steps Forward

 by pinstriped briefs

I’m ready to upload my manuscript to CreateSpace and make a book out of it.

First they ask for the title and information. I fill in the appropriate boxes and save.

Next comes ISBN and copyright. Now it’s time for me to do some research. They provide information and discussion on both subjects which I read. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. It is a number that is unique to a book’s title, that book’s binding, edition, and publisher. It is not unusual to have vastly different books with the same title, but each will have its own ISBN. Libraries use that number as the identifier for each of their books. If you’ve ever had reason to have your library request a specific book on inter-library loan, they’ve used that number to get exactly the book you want.

Now I had to do some decision making. Bowker is the official ISBN agency for the United States. Bowker also offers a self-publishing program. Hmmm. But I had already decided on CreateSpace, and since Amazon is sort of the 21st Century’s Sears Roebuck Catalog, I’m sticking with them. At least for Murder on Ceres. When I get rich and famous I might want to move on up.  

Considering cost and marketing possibilities with Amazon, I chose the free CreateSpace assigned ISBN. I guess that time I worked in the Edmond Public Library has forever warped my perception of books. All of a sudden my book having its own ISBN made it seem more real to me than all those pages of text and that beautiful cover. Kind of like seeing your baby’s official birth certificate for the first time.

Now comes the question of copyright. Okay. All the books I read have the copyright listed above the ISBN. I checked out the information and discussions CreateSpace offers, then went to copyright.gov to see for myself. For a single author, same claimant, one work, not for hire, the current online registration fee is $35. That is doable. The current processing time is, however, three to five months. And I want my book now, or at least sooner than that. The good thing is an author has up to five years to apply for the copyright certificate. And the even better thing is a work has automatic copyright beginning with the date the author can show they wrote it. The certificate itself is useful in court should the writer feel their copyright is being infringed.  

Are you glassy-eyed yet from this bureaucratic maze? Ready to pitch your book to that nice agent again? No, I’m not. Okay, we’ll move on.

Now we come to the Interior. You know, your story, the whole reason for this exercise.

CreateSpace gives you choices. What size book you want to have. They suggest that
6 x 9 is currently the preferred size. I know it will fit nicely on a library shelf. I choose that size and watch CreateSpace’s video on formatting. I follow the instructions, save my document as a pdf, and upload it.

They have a free service called Interior Reviewer. It’s great. It finds errors in the text. Errors I didn’t think about. Certain things don’t translate for them. In my case I had used a symbol, the Greek letter Sigma. If you’re more adept at this than I am, you can do what is necessary to embed your non-True Type symbol. Me, I just made a quick rewrite in those two particular locations.

Did I say “quick rewrite” limited to those two sites? I lied. While I was fixing them I noticed this and that and fixed them, too. Then I realized there were extra spaces, not extra lines denoting space-breaks between scenes, but extra spaces before a sentence or between words. You know when you turn on Word’s paragraph function and it shows all those dots. I couldn’t let it go out with all those. So several hours later with only one Frappuccino, two cookies, and a yogurt I finished. By that time I couldn’t tell if it was a dot on the document or a speck on my screen.

I uploaded it again. Ran the Interior Reviewer and was satisfied that all was well. Then came the cover. Thanks to Grace, I have the cover art. But CreateSpace wants to know if I want the cover to be matte or glossy.

Matte or Glossy? I don’t know. They do offer to send me, for a nominal price, an example of each.

Okay. Send me an example of each. It’ll be here next Thursday.

Good.

I need a break.

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth -- a review

 

 

This is the most inspirational book I’ve ever read. I qualify this statement with the explanation that I’ve been out of my self-improvement stage for at least 15 years. I do not read inspirational books and you won’t find this one on those shelves at the bookstore.

 There are so many quotable statements in this book. I put post-its on the ones that especially spoke to me so I could come back to them for this review. The book looks rather like a porcupine with all those strips of paper sticking out around its edges.

Chris Hadfield was nine years old when he went to a neighbor’s to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon. According to his book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, he decided that very night that he wanted to be an astronaut. That probably didn’t make him a minority of one. But he dedicated himself to that goal, and he achieved it.

The first major obstacle to his ambition was his birthplace. He is Canadian. NASA only accepted Americans into the astronaut program.  There was no Canadian Space Agency then. “But . . . just the day before, it had been impossible to walk on the Moon. Neil Armstrong hadn’t let that stop him. Maybe someday it would be possible for me to go too, and if that day ever came, I wanted to be ready.”

Knowing full well that he hadn’t much of a chance at the job, he started right then to prepare himself. He did what any determined 9-year-old would do. He imagined what it would take to become an astronaut. He must be physically fit and he must fly.

He did have several things in his favor. His father was an airline pilot and flying was a part of his life. His parents encouraged education, responsibility, and good sense.

He flew in space three times – the first two during the Shuttle Era, first to MIR then to attach Canadarm2 to the ISS.

This photo was taken 7/2/2014 from the ISS of Hurricane Arthur

off the Florida coast. The object in the upper right quadrant

is Canadarm2 installed by Hadfield in 2001

His third space flight was on a Soyuz back to the ISS where he served as commander living in space five months, returning to Earth in May 2013.

 He talks about attitude. “Our safety depends on many tens of thousands of people we’ll never meet, like the welders in Russia who assemble the Soyuz, and the North American textile workers who fabricate our spacesuits. And our employment depends entirely on millions of other people believing in the importance of space exploration. We work on behalf of everyone, so we should behave the same way whether we’re meeting with a head of state or a seventh-grade science class. Frankly, this makes good sense even if you’re not an astronaut. You never really know who will have a say in where you wind up. It could be the CEO. But it might well be the receptionist.”

 About leadership. There was an emergency EVA just before he returned to Earth from his mission as ISS Commander. “Throughout the five-and-a-half-hour spacewalk, I felt a bit like a choreographer probably does while watching dancers perform; there was a sense of involvement and responsibility, a feeling of shared risk and reward, but also a necessity to detach and trust them to do their jobs properly.” He expresses pride in his team’s work on that EVA and in himself for “living up to NASA’s belief that I was capable of commanding the world’s spaceship.”

 

 

“Determined as I was to be ready, I was equally determined to enjoy myself. I lack the gene for martyrdom.” 

 



Here he is with his cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity"

with a few changes to the lyrics.

Give it a listen and a watch.