Bringing Pick Your Path Books to E-Readers

When e-readers came out, it seemed that choose your own adventure style books would be an obvious choice.  Rather than having to go to a certain page that corresponds with your choice, you simply press a button.  It would be the book version of a video game.

It turns out, it wasn’t that easy.  Since there are no page numbers in e-readers, one cannot program the book to go to a certain page.  It has to be programmed in.

I met some people online who were making a program for this, and I joined them in creating content to go into their application.  Since I’m building on the Relic Worlds universe, I made three books that followed Lancaster and Little Jack.  The program turned out to be a failure for several reasons, but I had put so much time and effort into these, I didn’t want it all to go to waste.  So I set about finding a way to make them work with e-readers.

At first it was beyond me.  Their program had been quite complicated; an entire app dedicated to choose your own adventure style books.  I needed a programmer, or at least a pre-made template.  I looked high and low and couldn’t find anything.  The answer seemed so close, yet so far away.

Then I was talking with a friend of mine, Brent McKibbin, who’s a bit of a tech genius, and he said it was pretty simple.  All it took was making the various pages you needed to go to into chapter numbers.

You see, all e-readers have a table of contents page.  Each entry has a link to its corresponding chapter.  So you already have linking pages from there.  In a choose your own adventure style book, all you need to do is put those links in the choices readers make.

The first step, of course, was to create the choose your own adventure.  (I call mine Pick Your Path to avoid copyright infringement.)  I will be posting a blog with a link here at a later time going into detail about how I lay out and create a choose your own adventure style book.

Second, I lay it all out on the pages.  After every list of choices I have a page break.  At the start of every segment, I have a new page number.  I do not put page numbers on every page.  This makes finding them easier.  After writing the segment, I place the choices, providing the page numbers they correspond with.  This will, of course, become the paperback version, as the page numbers and choices with the page numbers will correspond correctly to a physical version of the book.  (Note, only place page breaks after choices.  Never place page breaks anywhere else.

Third, I select the first sentence of every segment and make it a chapter heading.  (I’ll put the technical aspects of this in another blog and connect it here.)  I title each chapter heading after its corresponding page number.  (Leave the page numbers there for now.)

Fourth, at every choice, I select the choice and link it to the page number it’s supposed to go to.  I then delete the page number listed after the choice.  (But I still leave the page numbers at the tops of every page.)

Fifth, When I have gone through and linked every choice with a page, I then delete every page number from the tops of every page.  Now, when a reader reads my book, they’ll go through the beginning, then reach the point where there are choices and it’ll stop.  The choices will be highlighted, and when the reader touches one of them, it’ll take them to that choice.

At this point, readers will be able to swipe to the next page past the choices.  This can be left there with an explanation at the beginning that readers aren’t supposed to do this.  However, it can be blocked through technical means.  This is a bit more complicated, which I’ll go into in the technical entry.

Preditors Editors

When I was at Comic Con this year, I approached the booth for Penguin Publishing.  Even though I'm a proud independent publisher, I'd like one of my books to be traditionally published to get my name out there.

I had a book I knew they would be interested in, but the agents were refusing it; some because of blatantly racist reasons; (it portrayed an Italian American as a hero rather than a gangster, with which they openly said they didn't want to take any part.)

I got a manager to speak with and told them the situation, saying I'd like to send them information about this so they could decide for themselves.  The manager said she liked the idea, but she stubbornly stayed with company policy.  It would have to come through an agent, and therefore they would never take a look.

One of the employees overheard me, and secretly handed me a note with a website.  It ultimately didn't help me, but it's a good site for seeing reviews about agents and the like.  It's at:

http://pred-ed.com/

Huffington Post Talks About the Shifting Landscape of Book Reviews

My mother sent me this wonderful article from the Huffington Post talking about the changing landscape not only of publishing, but of spreading the word regarding books; primarily through reviews.  They even bring up a topic I spoke on earlier; that of the need for bloggers not to ignore their own kind and review other self-published authors.

See it here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19/self-published-book-reviews_n_3467890.html

Heading to Nebraska for a Couple Weeks

I'm going to Nebraska for a couple weeks to do some signings, talking, teaching, and even take place in an 1800s period base ball game!  Here are the dates:

Friday, October 10 - 9:00 am - On the radio on Friday Live on NET radio, being interviewed by the great Genevieve Randall.

Saturday, October 11 - 1:30 - 3:00 - Appearance at A Novel Idea.  I will be signing copies of The American Game and Relic Worlds, and will be beginning to take pre-orders for the upcoming Two Gun Hart, which is due out next March.

Sunday, October 12 - 1:00 - ??? - Signing copies of The American Game at Arbor Lodge in Nebraska City.  I'll also probably take part in the vintage base ball game taking place on the yard.

Friday, October 17 - 1:00 - 2:30 - Speaking at the OLLI at UNL.  Taking place at NET.

Sunday, October 19 - 1:00 - ??? - I'll be at Bennett Martin Library for the 12th Victim talk.  (I actually won't be speaking at this one, but it should be an interesting event that I recommend everyone go to.)

Putting Together an Audio Book

Audible now distributes independently published audiobooks, which is great news for us independent authors.  Now all we need to do is read our books into a microphone to distribute them, right?

Turns out, it’s a bit harder than that; at least for those of us who have a bad stammer and aren’t used to acting.

The first thing we did was made my computer cabinet into a mini studio.  My neighbor at the time I did this happened to be a semi-professional recording artist.  Though I didn’t have a recording studio, I have doors on my cabinet that can be closed in around me, and when he put blankets on each door and above me, the recording into a mic in front of my screen looked great.  I read the book off the monitor as I spoke just above the microphone.  (Staying above it reduces pops; as does having a sock over the microphone.

Reading wasn’t so difficult; although I struggled with my mild form of dyslexia, stumbling over my words constantly.  I would have to fix it in post.  This involved going through after I was completely done and cutting every point where I stammered.  Recording took weeks, but post took months; so much so that the entire process took me more than a year and a half.  Now I know why audiobooks are so expensive.

I had done this one myself instead of getting an actor because I wanted to see the whole process.  (Also, for some reason, when I started it I thought it would go faster that way.  And I’m in the book, so I figured it would sound better when I said “I” to actually be the one speaking.)  I learned partway through that you can go to Audible and hook up with a reader through them.  Audible even splits the profits between you.  That’s what I will be doing from now on.

Researching Pro Bono

When researching my first non-fiction book, Pro Bono, I had a slightly unfair advantage.  I was starting with a story that my family has been involved with for decades.  I drew from stories I had grown up with, some of which I had lived through.  And a large amount of it came when I was doing a small documentary about my family.  It just happened to be when my grandmother was diagnosed with a fatal tumor, and everyone from the family flocked into town.  I never finished the documentary, but I did get a very thorough record of everyone, especially my grandfather, who everyone worshipped.

This was a baseline.  But I needed to be fair in the story.  This was about a controversial story that my grandfather happened to be wrapped up in.  I needed to do as much as possible to be objective, and see the opposite side’s point of view.

The first thing I did, as I do with most of my books, and all my non-fiction works, is I broke it into chapters.  I thought of what made appropriate breaks in the story, and I started each chapter at these points.  I determined the basic concept of each, then wrote down all the information that I would need for them.  By each piece of information, I wrote down every source I could think of for it.  I then approached those sources.

When it comes to a case that’s nearly 60 years old, it’s hard to get first-hand accounts.  Usually, you have to go to people who were assistants, or the children of one of the people.  Each time, I tried to get any documentation they had, such as phots or records.  Luckily, one of the most important people, Ninette Beaver, (who was a reporter that followed the story from beginning to end and even wrote a book about it,) was still alive and was able to tell me a lot about her experiences and what she saw.  I also got the only remaining copy of her documentary Growing Up in Prison.  It was on a format of tape that no longer exists, and there are only a couple places in the world that could even transfer it.  It was expensive, but worth the price as it was a piece of Nebraska history.  (I later placed this documentary on Youtube and have so far gotten more than 10,000 views.)

Perhaps the most important aspect of getting the story straight and unbiased was going to the Nebraska Historical Society where I was able to look at the original trial transcripts.  Purchasing this was, again, expensive, but well worth it, as it’s the only record of a case of great historic significance.  It’s also lucky, as most cases do not have their records preserved so well.

The problem at this point was I had the microfilm, but no way to look at it.  The best way to be able to would be to have it on PDF.  That meant scanning each page at the library and saving it as a JPEG, then combining them all into one big PDF… All 1,000 + pages.  I was luckily on unemployment at the time, so I went to the library for a full week, 40 hours, and scanned one page after another.  It was one of the most tedious things I ever did, but I got the entire thing on PDF.  I placed the first hundred pages on a website and offered to send it to anyone who wanted to see it so people could check my book for accuracy.  I then made sure to include this public record in the book in several chapters.

It took a lot more bringing together of several sources than I thought it would, but it was worth it.  On that book, more than any other, I want to be able to show everyone my sources, because I’m claiming that someone who many think was guilty was actually innocent.

The American Game Available for Free on Kindle This Weekend

The American Game will be available for free on Kindle this weekend as part of a KDP Select promotion.  It will be available for free on the Kindle from Friday, September 26, until Tuesday, September 30.  It can be found at:

http://www.amazon.com/American-Game-Jeff-McArthur-ebook/dp/B00LJII7GG/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1411618014&sr=8-1&keywords=The+American+Game+Jeff+McArthur

It may seem counter-intuitive to give away one's books for free, but each download counts as a sale, and if there are enough, it can get onto the best sellers list, at least in its category.  This helps with exposure, which leads to even more sales.  I will try to remember to post download results this weekend.