The Internet and the Wired Author

1. What is a wired author?[Return]Presented 22 March SD Writers/Editors Guild

If you tend to have writer’s cramp from busting No. 2 pencils on a yellow legal pad or have had it with white-out and working the fingers to the bone on an old Olympus typewriter, you are a prime candidate to become a wired author.

It starts innocently enough with a laptop computer, lounging around a Starbucks tapping out short stories. Then email and Facebook accounts becomes an essential part of your day. You miss appointments and forget to pick up kids at soccer practice, because you can’t stop typing a new chapter on a third manuscript that’s only half developed. Then the worst thing happens—you actually get a book published. You realize you need to get wired for the Internet age, to float a boat onto the current stream of electronic messaging, build video for YouTube, but most of all, convince yourself you have to have an Internet presence. You have to get connected, uploaded, create product branding, and networked. If this was the 19th Century it would be like owning a horse.

You’re doomed if you own a Blackberry, iPhone, or carry a laptop into the bathroom. You’re begging to be wired and don’t know it.

2. So what, you say?

In the world of academics there is an old saying that goes like this, “Publish or Perish.” There are rules, man. Pay the piper, the writing’s on the wall, all those euphuisms that if gone unnoticed will lead you to an open manhole. Unless you are already famous and a household name among those that buy books, you have to reach out to the world somehow, and the Internet is the most efficient way to do that, not to mention it supports all the other ways to do it. You simply have no choice if you want to stay alive in today’s competitive book market.

There are other wired establishments you want to be switched on to, like radio and television, both of which are very electronic intensive industries. If you only knew how to record your voice to promote your book or even a home video to plug your latest literary success, or knew what format a studio needs to accepts copies, where to drop them off, who to contact to get anything done, then you would be wired. Do you know how to do these things sitting in front of your computer in the comfort of your own home?

You need to know how and to whom to electronically register your books to be included on the sales shelves of the Big Box Book stores, or to be included in the buying lists for Libraries, and a dozen other valued places. It is now standard to register for copyright electronically. The new paradigm for an author is, “Get wired or be ignored.”

If you register for a sales permit, which you should, you have to learn how to file your taxes and California now only allows that this be done electronically. You have been slammed against the wall by a wide screened, ten foot tall computer mouse and he’s got his nose against yours and his pulling on your collar. If you’re fear driven, think of the Geek Squad as the Sopranos and you just cheated a guy named Vinnie. You can’t ignore the 500 pound gorilla in the room any longer standing there looking like a banana. You reached the end of your bit stream and don’t have a buffer to piss in.

3. So How Much of this Techno Jazz do I have to know?

What are you doing for the rest of your life is more like it? You probably thought that if I write a book, they will buy it. Wrong. When you wrote that book, it is more like having your love child. You brought this thing into the world, now you have to nurture it, take care of it, to ever see it grow. You become author-incorporated, editor, marketing, distribution manager, and now, techno geek all wrapped into one or the world will never notice you’re stomping and waving a book in one hand at the side of the road. You stand at the curb awash in last night’s rain water, splashed in your face by the fast moving traffic of life zooming past.

4. So how hard is it to become techno savvy?

If you can get your manuscript styled in Microsoft Word ready for your publisher, you have more than what’s needed to move down the path toward enlightenment. If you own a converter program to make Word files into PDF file, you are involved, your hands are dirty. If you’ve learned how to layout a book in InDesign, you’re a genius. The biggest step is the first one. You have to conclude you need to do this. If you can commit that much desire, you can fall into the rest of it. It is important not to waste time and energy going about it in the wrong manner or resisting the inevitable. It’s harder to unlearn it than to be patient and learn it the right way in a progressive approach that builds your skills.

5. Okay—don’t hit me. How do I get started?

Actually, there is more lecturing and browbeating before we can be properly aligned to drop you into the groove. But in general, I’m referring to support groups, writing clubs, writers’ conferences, and networking with other authors. We are heavily influenced by what others think and what they are doing. Don’t be surprise to find answers in unexpected places, like user group meetings, book clubs meeting in libraries, adult education classes, book stores offering lectures, giving lectures yourself—say on a cruise ship for a free ticket. To disembark on that sojourn, you need to be techno savvy to even run the slide show.

The best way to learn a subject is teach it. One way to learn to teach is learn how to talk in front of a crowd. Join Toastmasters for a year and go through the boot camp of presenting in front of people. After that, it will be hard to shut you up.

Let’s Get Started

1.  What are some wired activities I should participate in?

We all know about websites, blogs, social networking, but how about building your own network by meeting other authors and forming bonds. How do book clubs, writing groups, or even libraries find out about you and your books? That’s why some sort of Internet marker needs to be established. In general, this is called branding not like in a hot iron applied to your backside, but like product branding. I’m sorry it has come to this, but you are nothing more than a product to the commercial world. If you have a pretty face, it doesn’t hurt. If ugly as a can of mud, you may need a skilled publicist.

All forms of publicity are good, but many of these Internet activities are marginal. Let’s agree it is important to have a residence, an address, a place people can find you fast and check up on what’s going on in your career, buy a book, or contact you. That would be the proverbial website.

Blogs are not very effective unless you can establish a following, which probably means you have to sell your soul to radical themes or repulsive opinions. Avoid that. But it is a good idea to go to busy blog sites that are relevant to your books and make comments that include a trail of crumbs back to your website. Okay that’s two reasons to have a website.

Social networks are fine to pass messages to friends and colleges about planned events, successes, schedules to see you at book signings, etc., but don’t make this your residence on the Internet unless you are a teenager and want the world to think of you as such. I’m really pointing a finger at sites like MySpace. Facebook is similar and all the rage now. What if it all shifts to a new site called BackSide tomorrow? All the verbiage invested in Facebook will fall into the bit bucket.

There are dozens of sites to join where you can have a presence without cost. Many of these are designed to have you pay a fee to upgrade their willingness to promote you in some fashion. But you can fly under the radar by being there where you can be seen for free. Then if a book of yours takes off, up the campaign, pay the fee, and let them promote you all they can. Author’s Den is one such place.

Infinity’s AuthorNation.com, Jerry Simmons WritersReaders.com and NothingBinding.com are places to build relations with other people that have a common interest in writing and are free. All are good if you have the time to participate. Here’s a good one: http://bookmarket.ning.com/profile/JohnKremer, which is one of John Kremer’s numerous sites that connect authors. Who’s John Kremer…you should know.

The best way to spend time pointing people to your website is to get others to link to it, and you to them. It’s not called a web for nothing. Go spin some silk. The search engines love this stuff. Go to Google.com and check out all the advice and services they are begging to tell you about. One you might not have thought of is a site map (assuming you have a site). If you do, Google will provide you with a search widget to put on your site, which can be cool and you don’t have to pay your provider for such a feature. The reason Google is being so nice is they want you to upload a configuration file they use to verify your site. This is a good thing, because your site shows up on page one and has a nice intelligent presentation for searchers to gaze at.

2.  Being wired also includes other disciplines that use technology you need to try to master.

How do you record your voice so you can create a podcast to place on your website so joggers can download it and listen to it while blowing out their knees running around a park?

How do you turn a video you took with a camcorder into a YouTube entry or place it on a webpage?

How do I create an ebook upload to Kindle, Nook, or a Sony electronic reader?

IMore on this in a minute.

3. Some of the simple things may save your techno life.

If you’re going to work with a computer, use it to communicate, write your books, and develop Internet presence, don’t be a dope and forget to protect it with an antivirus program. A dead computer won’t do you any good.

If you are a naturally messy organizer, slap yourself in the face and get your act together. Working on a computer effectively demands you stay organized with where things are placed, how they are grouped, and how the files are named or you’re just going to drive yourself crazy and end up sticking you tongue in a live light socket in frustration.

Don’t search for things that don’t need to be searched for. Place a shortcut icon on the desktop to get to the programs you use everyday. Place a shortcut to the MyDocuments folder on the desktop—duh. Don’t place a bunch of random files there. Put them in folders inside the MyDocuments folder. Don’t create a substitute folder to avoid using the MyDocuments folder, because there are a lot of programs that expect to go to that folder as a default path to do their thing. You just make your organization issues harder by trying to trick you computer—dumb. No, the computer is dumb. It’s easy to fool it. Then it acts like any fool and does stupid things like crash and you blame it. No, it’s your fault for tricking it. You don’t get a nervous man to do a tight rope act by screaming at him.

Change the icon names for all these apps that have huge dragged out names like Abode Flash CS4 Professional. Just rename it Flash. Then they all sit in a nice tight group and all the names can be read without having to interpret ellipsis or have to mouse-over to know what it is.

Inside the MyDocuments folder, create a folder for every major category you use the computer for. Rule one—no dangling participles—don’t have a loose file or ten sitting there at the bottom. It will just confuse you. Why is that file sitting there and has no home? If it is so useless—delete it. This computer is your working environment. It’s all about workflow.

Once you’re inside a category folder, change the icons to a cool image for major areas like short stories, manuscripts, agent’s letters, etc. You do this by right clicking on the folder, go to “properties”, then select the “customize” tab at the bottom and click “change icon.” Select one you like and click on it. Set “apply” and you’re done. Now these folders stand out.

Another way to make folders stand out in the MyDocuments folder is to boldface some of the names like PHOTOSHOP, WEBSITE, EMAIL ARCHIVE. All of this is so you can navigate to where you want to be fast. If you do these things, then the computer has been tamed. It’s easy to keep your workflow up and the hair on the back of your neck down. You’ll find you stop gritting you teeth while sleeping.

4.  Learn the lingo

As you progress to where you are now able to produce a website, link it to others, add a PayPal button to sell your books, add hypertext to click and play a MP3 audio of your last radio interview, and place a book trailer video on the home page, then you gain a real sense of accomplishment and you are now a member of the tech savvy wired generation and may even survive the next ice age.

Tips for the Tech Savvy Author

1.  Okay, how do you approach getting a website running?

There are two approaches, but first you have to do two other things: figure out a domain name and choose an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Once that’s done, decide whether to use a template for the site or roll your own web pages. This is where the lingo learning starts or we can’t get to first base.

Each entity or website on the Internet has a name called a “domain name.” Like everything these days, it also has an acronym: URL or Uniform Resource Locator. Yes, it was invented by a committee. But what you want to do is come up with a name that is short, easy to remember, and is to the point.

JaneDoeBooks.com might be good. Maybe even shorter: JaneDoe.com. Or if you only want to promote one book, you could use DevilsAngel.com. Now, we have to see if anyone in the world owns that name. Yes, I said own. You have to buy it. This is usually done at the same time you choose an Internet Service Provider (ISP). They have a searchable domain name database to narrow the selection down to something unique. Open www.goDaddy.com and throw a few names in their domain tester.

So what is it that I’m doing here? The domain name is really a pseudo-name for a computer address, which is complex string of numbers, to uniquely point to your website, but is readable by a human. Computers prefer an address that looks like this: 76.192.34.45. The domain name is filed away on the network and referenced against that number. That number is what’s placed on the network as a string of ones and zeros when someone is looking for your site. The ISP guy has access to the Internet circuitry or networking equipment and stores these names. They also protect the network from the crazies. And they also provide the funding to keep the whole thing up and running. The government and universities no longer pay to keep the Internet going—you do. That all changed by 1995.

Once you’ve signed up with an ISP company, which provides web hosting, and you have a domain name established, you can choose a snappy website template by filling out the walk-through, and now you have an established Internet presence—whoopee!

Or you could take the plunge and learn how to code up the webpages yourself. Yikes! Here’s what will likely happen. You go with the template and then about a year later you want to make a lot of changes. You attempt to do this and the site starts to crumble. Not good. You seek out a company that builds websites for a fee, and they soak you for all the profits you would ever make on the book. Not good, again. You can go with outside site builder that use templates like Joomla and the tangled web gets tighter around your pocket book. These types of sites do a lot. They are over sophisticated for what you need and are meant for professional businesses or a major Internet presence like setting up something like Facebook.

May I suggest, while in this interim from establishing your first cool website to the disaster that it will become, you indulge in becoming familiar with the mysterious world of HTML and CSS. Some people call computer code a foreign language only spoken by Comic Con nerds and aliens from another planet, which makes you believe it would be too difficult to ever master. HTML is a representation of code that is easily learned. The Browser is the one that has to deal with it. That’s where all the complex decoding takes place and that isn’t your problem. So let me appeal to your sneaky inner-self, you’re actually getting away with something way cool here. It’s easier to learn than you think, but requires a concerted effort. You have a year. Don’t you just love how technology is like a nagging spouse? You can never get far enough away to escape the inevitable.

2.  Okay, I now have a website. Now what do I do?

Website pages reside on your ISP’s computer known as a server. A server is just a fast computer or bank of computers with a lot of spinning memory space, running software that can be accessed via the network. To see what’s up there you need to have an app (a program) that uses FTP or file transfer protocol. These little programs are cheap and are basically designed to show your personal computer directory on one side and the directory of the server on the other side that represents your little piece of cyberspace. You select and drag a file (webpages) from one side to the other and that information travels through the network (Internet) and is placed on either your computer from the server or on the server from your computer. Going to the server is called an upload, and coming from the server to your computer is called a download.

Once you get familiar with HTML pages, you can modify them and upload them back to the server to replace the old ones. Power to the people. You can do this anytime of week, any time of the day or night. Servers never sleep. This is where user group meeting are important like AA meetings for drunks.

Assuming you can now manipulate your webpages at will, you can now start to learn how to do more complex operations like placing MP3 files and videos on your site. You might consider taking a real plunge and buy into the Dreamweaver Design Suite from Adobe. That gives you all the tools to go crazy building websites. It includes Photoshop, so you can now get into serious image manipulation. It contains Flash to build video for your site. It includes InDesign so you can do some serious book layout design. It includes Illustrator so you can hire some real talent to draw up graphics for you. I would be surprised if you could draw a circle without a sprained wrist. I know I can’t.

3.  I don’t know if I can do all of this. When will I have time to just write?

Funny thing is, as you go through this process, you meet people facing the same mountain to climb. You form bonds between authors, writers, and readers. You meet people that make movies, people that can get you an interview on television. You get more out of going to conferences and workshops where people are honing these same skills. This whole thing starts to feel like you hooked up to a model railroad building club. You drive your spouse crazy talking about this stuff. Hey, doesn’t that make it all worth while right there?

Busy people do more. If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. You learn to accomplish major tasks without batting an eyelash. You can call yourself a modern author. Ben Franklin had to learn how to build and use a printing press. Don’t be a wimp.

The alternative is to keep writing proposal letters to agents until one actually takes your manuscript. Then wait years, while they find a publisher to print it. If that happens, I admit this is the best you can do to become successful commercially. Much of the grunt work is done by the publishing company. But guess what, you still have to do the marketing and promoting, and get the website up and running. And to do that, well, leads you right back down the path I’ve outlined above. The better your book does, the more they are willing to help you, but it is really like winning the lottery that this will be your story. It’s best to be famous first and then write a book. It’s the American way. Problem is 90% of authors struggling to sell a book aren’t famous and even a larger number never get published at all this way.

If you can’t somehow force the world to notice you, rob a bank, jump off a mountain and survive, anything to develop notoriety, nothing much is going to happen. But what this discussion has been about is you are better off to develop a steady plan to become known locally, build a network, and work up popularity through local books sales as the path to success. Once sales get into the thousands, major publishers will notice you. You are now near-famous enough to at least be invited to pursue stardom under their wing. The art of writing and selling a book is very much like writing songs and selling them to the public. You need to build a sound and a public following, sellout venues with a band you put together, and then approach recording companies. That lights the fuse to blastoff a career and hopefully you can avoid burnout.

Good luck and break a leg as they say in the theater. To Infinity and beyond…