Sweet Weasel Words | Crawford Smith

The Real Deal!

Published by Crawford on July 11, 2019

I got my first hardcopy proof of Jackrabbit today! Hooray! This is a pretty big milestone for me. I’ve been wanting to get a book in print since, well, I was a little kid and thought Dr. Seuss was the shiznit. I seriously started working towards it in 2008, so this has been eleven years in the making. It’s really pretty awesome to be able to hold a book that I wrote in my hot little hands!

The only problem is that now I’ve got to read it – again! As much as I enjoy this story, and am fairly pleased with how I pulled it off (due in no small part to Jen Huston’s editing), I’m getting mighty tired of reading it at this point. I feel fairly confident that I got most of the grammarly/contenty issues squared away before I ordered the proof, I still want to go through it one . . . more . . . time to make double-extra-sure. Mostly, though, I’m just interested in making sure the formatting is acceptable.

Right now, I’m on track for an official release date of July 22, 2019 – the 85th anniversary of the shooting at the Biograph where “John Dillinger” was killed.

An ISBN of My Own

Published by Crawford on July 9, 2019

Or, actually, ten ISBNs plus a bar code, all for the low, low price of three hundred and twenty bucks.

As a wanna-be author, I had always wanted an ISBN of my own. As a soon-to-be self-published author, I found out just how much of a scam the ISBN system is.

First, ISBN stands for International Books Standard Number. It is meant to be a unique identifier for each published edition of a commercial work. An e-book, a paperback and a hardcover of the same book will each have a different ISBN.

In the U.S., ISBNs are doled out by a company called Bowker. Of course, there is a cost, and as I found out, the pricing follows a very curious economy of scale:

Got that? One ISBN costs $125. However, 1000 ISBNs costs $1500, for a unit price of $1.50. How can such a discount occur? Because they’re just fuckin’ numbers!

Bowker’s got a monopoly on this market and they squeeze ’til we turn purple. It’s a scam, man. Sure, for a big publishing company, shelling out for tens of thousands of ISBNs at a buck or so a pop is chump change. But for struggling self-publishing authors, it feels like we are being taken advantage of. (Yeah, I ended that sentence with a preposition. It’s idiomatic, plus I’m in a pissy mood.)

Of course, there are alternatives, but they kinda suck. First, you can just go without an ISBN, but that severely limits the author’s ability to sell the book. Also, if you’re going to publish through Amazon/KDP, they will kindly provide you with an ISBN free of charge. Of course, Amazon didn’t get to be the behemoth it is by giving stuff away, so you can bet that there are strings attached to their “free” ISBN. Basically, if you accept their generosity, you are pretty much restricted to selling your book through their channels.

So in the end, I ponied up the money for 10 ISBNs plus a barcode (another Bowker scam), even though I really only need two or three ISBNs for Jackrabbit. Guess I’d better keep writing!

Easy Reedsy

Published by Crawford on June 26, 2019

Throughout the process of preparing Jackrabbit to go to print, I have been availing myself of an online service called Reedsy. I initially used the service to find someone to edit the manuscript. I ended up engaging the services of an editor named Jennifer Huston of White Dog Editorial Services. She was great to work with, and incredibly thorough. She lives in the Chicago area, and was able to correct some of my geographical errors, as well as many others.

Of course, this kind of quality does cost some coin. Between the editing and the cost of the cover art, I had pretty much blown my production budget for this project. I was concerned about how I was going to typeset the book, as I knew I was going to have to do it myself. I had head any number of sources say that MS Word was a bad choice. Adobe InDesign seems to be an industry standard, but is fairly expensive. I did shell out twenty-five bucks for a discontinued publishing application called Serif Page Plus. It looks pretty good, but I didn’t really want to take the time to master a new software package.

Then I noticed than Reedsy offers a typesetting called Reedsy Book Editor. I was a bit skeptical at first, but what the heck – the price was right ($0). Besides, Reedsy had gotten their vig from my transaction with the editor, so I figured it was the least they could do.

Color me impressed, friends! After a few minor initial hiccups (i.e. user errors), I was able to upload my Word file and the Reedsy Book Editor cranked out a typeset version in about five minutes. Super-duper-cool! Now I have to read through the bastard one more time and make sure there are no proofreading errors. Fun ahoy!

Cover of Jackrabbit, new John Dillinger novel — Buy on Amazon

Into the Belly of the Beast

Published by Crawford on June 22, 2019

I took the plunge and signed up for my Amazon KDP account in order to start the process of publishing Jackrabbit. Big sigh. I jumped on the Amazon bandwagon back in the early 90’s because I’m a book nerd, and they were a cool online book store. Now they’re a behemoth that prys into way too many aspects of our lives. Yet I swallow my reservations and sign on, since it’s pretty much the only way to go for self-published authors. I hadda give them my damn bank account information! If I had more than eight bucks in it right now, I’d be worried.

Social Media? We Doan Need No Steenkin’ Social Media!

Published by Crawford on June 22, 2019

Okay, I created a Twitter page and a Facebook page for this endeavor. somewhat to my chagrin. No fan of social media, I. Hell, I bailed entirely on the whole concept last year when this whole Cambridge Analytica mess came out. However, I know it’s a requirement, if for no other reason not to look like some sort of prehistoric troglodyte.

So you can check out @S_W_Words on Twitter or @SweetWeaselWords on Facebook (ain’t doin’ Instrgram or anything else if I can avoid it – and I can). You’re not going to see anything there that you won’t see hear. Or perhaps anything at all if I can’t figure out how to automaticaly link the content from this website to those two social media platforms.

Grumble, grouse, piss, moan…

I’d Rather Be Writing

Published by Crawford on June 21, 2019

Instead, however, I’m working on this bloodydamn website. Oh well. it’s gotta happen if I want this book to see the light of day, so to speak. Blew my budget on getting the MS edited by someone who knows what they’re doing, so I can’t afford to pay someone to put this site together. Oh well, that’s rock ‘n’ roll, baby.

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