This Crazy Writing Life: Defining Irony In The Time Of Covid

By Steven Womack

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In this month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life, my original intent was to start where I left off with last month’s column on eBook distribution and explore the options and possibilities of print.

That was the plan, but as someone once told me, we make plans; God laughs.

So before we move onto more serious stuff, a little sidebar.

The last half of August saw something we’ve never seen before—two major mystery conferences were taking place in Nashville in back-to-back weeks. Killer Nashville, of course, is now a major regional conference that draws writers and readers from all over the country, if not the world. The week after KN, Nashville hosted Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, the largest gathering of mystery writers and fans in the world.

This was, to paraphrase a conversation Joe Biden had with Barack Obama after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a big effin’ deal… This has literally never happened before. For two weeks or so, Music City became the center of the mystery world.

I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about something. I’ve been pretty transparent about my struggles in the writing career arena. When I left academia in 2020—after the college where I’d been teaching for twenty-five years quite literally closed its doors and went out of business—I’ve been trying to resurrect a writing career that was once almost promising.

So I signed up for both, with great relish.

I was thrilled when I was assigned four panels at Killer Nashville. At Bouchercon—where the competition for panels is somewhat stiffer—I was assigned one. This felt great. It was like the old days, back in the Nineties, when I was a full-time mystery writer and making a living at it.

Then, ten days before Killer Nashville opened, I woke up with a fever about five o’clock in the morning. I tried to slough it off, but after a few hours, I decided to take a Covid test.

Positive…

Everything went downhill from there. I’m an old guy, an immuno-compromised cancer survivor. When I still tested positive and still sick after a week, I cancelled Killer Nashville. A week later, same results.

So long, Bouchercon.

And want to know the irony of this? One of the panels I was scheduled to be on at Killer Nashville was “Handling Successes and Setbacks As A Writer.”

The universe has a weird sense of humor. I had to cancel my appearance on a panel about handling setbacks because I had one of the biggest setbacks in quite awhile.

Define irony…

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So let’s talk about print books and how you indie pub them. We’ll start with a few basic assumptions.

First, most indie pub authors I’ve ever met make most of their sales (and, therefore, most of their money) from eBooks. So if you want to delve into the print arena, just be aware that it’s an awful lot of effort and cost for the least return. For many writers these days, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. On the other hand, there’s nothing like the feel, smell and heft of a real book.

Second, the technical aspects of producing print books are way more complicated and demanding than eBooks. Why? Because eBooks are marked by flowability, which means you don’t have to typeset them. The text just flows out of the ether and into the e-reader. There’s no set trim size. The user actually determines the font, point size, leading, and measure. Actually, in real life whatever device the user is reading them on determines these factors by default and the user can change them if they’re savvy enough.

(As an aside, don’t know what point size, font, leading, and measure mean? Then you’ve got an even higher technical hill to climb…)

Third, be aware that the print landscape is a little more complicated if you hope to sell print books in both brick-and-mortar bookstores and Amazon. No brick-and-mortar bookstore will order a print copy of your book from Amazon and set it on their shelves. For one thing, most bookstores hate Amazon with a fiery, searing, scorching passion. More than that, bookstores depend on wholesale discounts and returnability for survival and Amazon’s not about to help them on that front. So what this means is you’ve got to upload one set of files to Amazon and one to a wholesale book distributor. And then you hope to high heaven the same files will work for both outlets.

Fourth, unless you have a garage the size of a warehouse and deep pockets, you’re not going to go the old school route of finding a book printer to print up a few thousand of your books and then ship them to your home address. Chances are they’ll sit in your garage until the mice find them, at which point you’ll have a bunch of fat, happy mice on your hands. And if you do get lucky enough to sell a few of them, you’ll be buying cardboard shipping boxes, packing tape, and bubble wrap, then loading up the old SUV for a trip to the Post Office or UPS. If you’re not up for that, then you’re going print-on-demand, or as it’s commonly called “POD.” And that, as they say, is a whole nother ball of wax itself.

When I decided to tackle indie pubbing print books, I had a built-in advantage. Early in my career, I spent about a decade working in publishing in New York City and Nashville. I worked mainly in art departments, where I typeset books, ads, catalogues, brochures, and a ton of other stuff. But what I mostly did was interior book formatting/typesetting. I’ve probably either typeset or supervised the typesetting of a few hundred books over the years.

So those terms I threw at you earlier? What do they mean?

A font is the particular typeface you’re using. There are hundreds of typefaces and families of type, but all fonts can be broken down into basically two types: serif and sans serif. Serif typefaces have a small stroke or curlicue attached to the larger, main body of the letter. Sans serif typefaces don’t have these add-ons and the letters are just lines. If you bring up your word processor and type a few words in Arial, then type the same few words in Times Roman, you’ll see the difference. Most books are typeset in serif typefaces, except for certain types like manuals, guidebooks, nonfiction, etc. Most fiction is set in the more traditional serif typefaces, which tend to have, for lack of a better term, a classier look to them.

Point size is literally the physical size of the type. There are 72 points in an inch. Most books are typeset in around 12-point type, with some variations. Really long, thick doorstopper books might be set in point sizes less than 12. Down around 10-point type, though, they get mighty hard to read.

Leading is the distance between the lines, called that because years ago when books were typeset by hand, the typesetter inserted thin strips of lead between the lines to separate them. Most books are typeset with an extra few points on top of the point size. The point size/leading is usually expressed as a fraction, i.e. 12/15. When there’s no extra space between the lines, as in a book set in 12/12 Times Roman, that’s said to be set solid. And for anyone beyond the age of twelve, they’re really hard to read. Almost no one does it.

Measure is the width of the line, which is directly related to your trim size and margins. You want to have some kind of margin on each page; you don’t want the type to run from one edge to the next. You’ve got to design it just right to hit that visually appealing sweet spot. You don’t want too much white space or too little around your page of text. This also affects your page count, which is critical.

So there in just over 300 words is a summary of my decades in typesetting. But there’s a lot more to learn. Know the difference between a widow and an orphan and why you want to avoid both? There’s not room here to get into that, but Google it. It’s fascinating stuff. Trust me.

Once you’re ready to get into actually formatting a print book, where do you start? The easiest way is to get a dedicated app for typesetting, but truth is you can typeset a book on Microsoft Word. I’ve done it. It’s a PITA and I won’t do it again, but when I started six or seven years ago, there wasn’t much else out there. Vellum typesets books, but as I mentioned in an earlier column, Vellum only works on a Mac platform.

And for many years, the go-to software package for interior book design (and many other forms of graphic design) was Adobe InDesign. It does everything and does it well. But like all things Adobe, it’s expensive to start with and requires decades of study on a lonely mountaintop in Tibet to master it (okay, decades? Maybe I’m overstating a bit…).

Kindle Create is free, as is Reedsy’s Book Editor app. I don’t know much about them, though. There are a few other paid packages. Just Google them and get reviews.

I wrote last month about Atticus, which is produced by a company here in Franklin, Tennessee called Kindlepreneur. In the past year or so, they’ve added a print typesetting function to what has emerged as the best eBook formatting software in the business. Every review I’ve read of it is spectacular, but since I haven’t indie pubbed a book since their print functionality went online, I’ve got no personal experience. But if it’s like everything else Kindlepreneur does, it kicks butt and takes names.

We’ve barely scratched the surface on the technical challenges and considerations of print book formatting and design and I’m already out of space for this month’s edition. So I’ll stop here and next month we’ll move on to the differences between an eBook cover and a print book cover, how you make a cover work, and then onto the challenge of making book distribution outlets work for you.

As you’ve seen, This Crazy Writing Life is a grand adventure. Thanks again for playing along.

The Writer’s Playbook: The Drummer Boy

By Steven Harms

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As a contributing writer to Killer Nashville Magazine, I’ve been tapping into my career as a professional sports executive to showcase some very personal stories and observations from my time in the business. Each one has been filtered through the lens of utilizing those moments to correlate topics to discuss in the world of writing. 

Here, I’m going to pivot a bit and pluck a different kind of story from my background. It’s about my journey to becoming an author and getting published. My hope is that it serves to inspire, in some way, all those who are trying to break into the business despite its tendency to be a rather difficult and complex undertaking.

Writing is our passion. It’s a creative expression full of dreams and hopes and wants. Success, comes in many forms. For me, I simply wanted to challenge myself to write a novel and get it published through the traditional process. Would I have the chops to succeed? But that question and dream followed something I accomplished that was a precursor; an undertaking that took me down a road I had never traveled.

As a backdrop, I’m a person of faith and have attended church my entire life. In the early 2000s, my wife and I started attending a non-denominational church that, we came to find out, used creative arts at times in its sermons. Specifically, dance and drama in the form of skits to underscore that day’s message. I dabbled in theater in college, but frankly, never stayed with it and moved on with my career following graduation. Apparently, the acting bug never truly left me, and I ended up volunteering to be in some skits at our new church home. I eventually started writing their skits around 2004 to provide the need for “home-grown” drama, which implanted in me the writing bug. 

Fast forward a few years. I can’t tell you the exact moment, or the trigger, or the catalyst that washed over me one day and placed on me a calling to take a stab at being a playwright and write a unique story surrounding the birth of Jesus. If you are a person of faith, chalk that up to the nudging from the holy spirit. If you aren’t, chalk it up to me being a crazy half-baked dreamer.

The inspiration was quite clear and straightforward, though. The seed of the idea was to create a story using songs of the Christmas season to help drive the plot like a traditional musical does and build a compelling story arc that would touch believers and non-believers alike. The story wasn’t what you’re probably thinking. The target audience was very much adult-oriented, with the main character’s life unraveling in some very troubled waters. I also have zero musical talent, making this idea even nuttier. After a few nights of trying unsuccessfully to get it out of my mind, I dove in.

There I was, like we all sometimes do, staring at a blank screen with that heavy mixture of excitement and dread. You think I would’ve researched simple things like how to write a script, what were the dos and don’ts, generally acceptable lengths of scenes, and on and on. Well, I didn’t. I just started.

I landed on something from my childhood in the form of the song “The Little Drummer Boy.” It’s been a favorite of mine, perhaps my most favorite. I gave him a name–Mozel–and filled my head and notes with his backstory and plot line to get him to Bethlehem on the night of the birth. Along the way, literally a hundred characters came to life. Eight traditional Christmas songs were used to help drive the plot. It took me about a year to complete. 

I never told my church I was undertaking this effort. I simply acted on the inspiration I was gifted and wrote the story. I distinctly remember, when it was completed, I said something to God along the lines of, “There. I did it. You asked me to do this, and, well, I did, and it’s now done.” I never held any purposeful intent to ever let it see the light of day. 

Maybe a few weeks rolled by, and then something happened. The head of drama for my church had professional theater experience and was an advocate for utilizing drama as an outreach to the community. She directed some secular plays annually at our church over the years, with most of those targeted at kids and families (think ‘Wizard of Oz’ type shows). She and I became good friends along the way. We connected following a Sunday morning service, or maybe at a church picnic or something, and I casually told her why and what I had written. She wanted to read it and was adamant that I send it to her. This occurred in spring of 2007.

In December 2008, The Little Drummer Boy made its debut on our stage. All in, the cast and crew numbered around 150. We pulled together every discipline a professional theater needs, including volunteer leaders who captained costumes, lighting, sound, choir, music, ushers, parking, and marketing. We paid a local university’s drama department to build sets, leaning into their expertise based on our stage dimensions and back-of-house capabilities. The show ran for five years with four shows during one December weekend annually in 2008-2010, 2012, and 2014. Over 20,000 people attended the performances, some from nearby states who became aware of it through social media marketing. We gifted homeless veterans an entire section of seats each year. We bused them in from shelters in Detroit. They usually numbered about 300 and were the most energetic and grateful group of people I had ever been around. That alone was worth every minute of our collective efforts to bring the production to life. After those seven years, I pulled the plug due to personal burnout, and wanting the show to go out on a high note. 

But something interesting happened in that final year of the show. That same little voice gave me another nudge around October 2014. Having never written a short story, let alone a novel, it told me to write one, anyway. The inspiration was the challenge, but more so, to task myself with embedding moral principles as the undertow theme within a secular book in the mystery/thriller/suspense genres. Two years later, with an edited manuscript completed, I began my search for an agent and landed at the Liza Royce Agency in New York about five months into the process. The first book, Give Place to Wrath, was published in 2017 as the Roger Viceroy Series, with the second one, The Counsel of the Cunning, released in 2021 after a pandemic pause.

While the books have been critically well-met, the sales haven’t done nearly so, which makes me a member of the overwhelming majority of authors in the world. But I press on with determination and confidence, having shifted to a stand-alone story taking shape now for my third book.

As mentioned at the start of this blog, perhaps there is inspiration for you in the telling of my road to being a published author. Mine was a voice that simply wouldn’t go away. 

As I look back, I truly believe becoming the playwright of The Little Drummer Boy was a deep-dive training experience. I had to map it all out as the playwright and producer, ultimately having to devise a business plan and then follow through with the hundreds of action steps to bring the show to life. Yes, it was consuming, but the results outperformed even my most positive projections. The process taught me there are no corners to be cut, that inspirational story ideas, told well and authentically, will capture audiences, that people in your universe of contacts and relationships will help without question, that sticking to a plan produces results, and that you can jump into the great unknown and find your footing because you heeded a calling to do so.

Give it your excellent best effort. There are readers out there just waiting to dive into your book. Happy writing.