Daniel Decker is a great resource when you’re ready to self-publish a book. I gained a lot of information from his post, “10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing … And 7 Ways to Overcome Them.”

Here are the link for the “Sweat the Details” portion of the presentation:

AuthorHouse: A traditional self-publishing house

Lulu: On-demand book printing

Register a DBA form for your publishing house at the Allen County Recorder’s office.

Buy your ISBNs at ISBN.org.

Create your bar codes at this Bookland page.

Establish a web presence using wordpress.org.

Be your own agent:

Make a Facebook page, instead of using a personal page.

Interested in doing presentations? I am always inspired by Presentation Zen.

Follow me on Twitter by clicking here.Possibly related posts:

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About 30 local authors will be participating in the fair, which will be Saturday, April 23, at the Allen County Public Library downtown.

My portion of this free fair will be a presentation called “Five Missteps That Can Kill Your Self-Published Book.” It will cover some common roadbumps that beginning authors must negotiate if they decide to self-publish their books. My experience editing and publishing the Allen County Photo Album books will definitely come into play.

The 20-minute presentation will begin at 1 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Allen County Public Library in downtown Fort Wayne.

This presentation is part of the free Author Fair sponsored by the ACPL.

If you’re on Facebook, you can tell me you’re attending on the FB event page.

Hope to see you there!Possibly related posts:

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My daughters Hannah and Sarita are budding authors, and this short essay by 13-year-old Sarita reflects what they wish to accomplish and how they intend to get there.

You Can Cook Another Omelet

a short essay sort of thingy about ideas

By Sarita Swerens

Just write down the idea.

When you detect that feeling, that inexplicable sense that you’re on the verge of becoming the author of a whole series of novels that no one has ever thought of, no one has ever read, no one has ever imagined in their deepest dreams, write it down.

When you feel the inspiration strike, wait for nothing and no one. Don’t post about your enthusiasm on Facebook or Tweet about your idea on Twitter. Don’t send a letter to your friend that you feel like writing; write. Don’t call all your friends on the telephone and shout that you’re about to get the most brilliant idea ever heard of on the face of the earth; write it down. If you have to dash out of the kitchen and let the toast burn or the roast combust or the egg-and-broccoli omelet smolder, then do it. If you have to tear through the house tipping over chairs and knocking your favorite purple coffee mug to the floor to hastily type down a fast-fading story idea from a dream about a song in a book you just heard about from a friend, then do it. You don’t have to use an online thesaurus, or dictionary, or rhyming dictionary, or rhyming thesaurus. You don’t have to spell pontification or serendipity or onomatopoeia or perspicacity correctly. Just write.

Don’t let the small things go. If a single sentence pops into your head that has a neat feel to it and makes you think, don’t leave it there. Don’t think, “Oh, I’ll write it down later, when I’m done with this English assignment,” because if you do, before you read two more paragraphs, the sentence will be a thing of the past; it will have faded away into the winding, cobwebby maze of ideas, stories, dreams, and fantasies that is your brain.

Even if it’s a single sentence, an entire story can be molded from it. A romance from an adjective. A villain from a noun. An ending from an adverb.

Even if it’s a single sentence, a tale of betrayal and faith and battle and love and hope against all odds can be woven into a rich, twisting story that is light and relief in this darkening world.

If it’s a dim, fading image from a dream that you just remembered you had a week ago, and it fills you with a desire to share your perception of the world with others, then write it down, even if it’s on a wrinkled piece of paper from an old history report that you just pulled out of the trash and scribbled on with a dull pencil from the junk drawer. Just write it down. Describe the feeling, the experience. Set your mind down on paper and trace it with ink. Scrawl down your scheme before it wanes and perishes and becomes an illusion of the idea you once had, the skeleton of a greater notion that can never be retrieved from the farthest reaches of you mind. Scribble down the inkling of better tales to come, before the passion dwindles and passes on into the inaccessible realm of lost stories. Just write it down.

Because if you write it down, it’ll be worth it later. If you write it down, then later you can correct your misspelled version of onomatopoeia. You can buy a new purple coffee mug. You can finish your English assignment. You can cook another omelet.

Because if you write down that idea and let it bloom, then later you can embellish it. A romance from an adjective. A villain from a noun. An ending from an adverb.Possibly related posts:

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And then who but Grover of Sesame Street delivers this pitch-perfect spoof:

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The BP Gulf oil spill is now anywhere from 19 million to 39 million gallons.

But that large of a number is hard for the human mind to grasp. To help, The Associated Press gives us this metaphor:

“In the worst case scenario, if 39 million gallons has spilled, the oil would fill enough jugs to stretch from the Louisiana marshes to Prince William Sound in Alaska. That’s where the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, spilling nearly 11 million gallons.”

OK, so that’s not really helpful at all. Now the distance is too large to imagine.

Also unhelpful was an earlier AP story, which said:

“Under the highest Gulf spill estimate, nearly 39 million gallons may have leaked, enough to fill 30 school gymnasiums.”

Honestly, are all school gymnasiums the same size?

So I searched for the capacities of several northeast Indiana bodies of water and discovered that my own sense of volume estimation is way, way off.

First was Lake James in Pokagon State Park. If you count all three basins that comprise the lake, Lake James contains 10.8 billion gallons of water. That’s billion, with a “b.”

Next, I thought maybe the Hurshtown Reservoir would be more help. But I was wrong again. That reservoir contains 1.8 billion gallons of water.

I need a lot less water. So I called Natalie Eggemann, the public information officer of the Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department. She called around the department and discovered that Reservoir Pond on South Clinton Street at Creighton Avenue contains 5.5 million gallons of water.

So the Gulf oil spill is at least four or maybe up to seven Reservoir Ponds.

Is that surprisingly small to you? Or maybe surprisingly large?

Above photo from August 1950 at Reservoir Park in Fort Wayne from News-Sentinel archives

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You can now reserve your spot at the May 23 presentation and book signing at Mitchell Books! Do one of the following:

• Stop in at Mitchell Books in Covington Plaza on Jefferson Boulevard and tell any staff person you’d like to reserve a spot.
• Call Mitchell Books at (260) 423-BOOK (2665) and talk to an actual human being — they can’t accept voice mail requests.

Seating is limited to 60 people, so contact Mitchell soon if you want to make sure you get in.

But do not fear: If demand is especially high, Mitchell said we can do a second book signing later in the summer.Possibly related posts:

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I’m excited to announce that I’ll be hosting a presentation and book signing here in Fort Wayne next month! Here are the details:

Want to hear stories about how we put together the Allen County Photo album book? And want a sneak peek at the next book due out this autumn?

Well, mark your calendars for 6 p.m. Saturday, May 23, when I will step into Studio M at Mitchell Books and give a visual presentation about:

• Some of our favorite photos from the book — and the stories behind them.
• Some photos that didn’t make the cut for some, um, interesting reasons.
• A sneak peek at some photos that will be in the next book.

Plus, I’ll have a fistful of black Sharpies if you’d like me to scrawl my signature across your book.

This will be a free but ticketed event because the venue holds only 60 people. If demand is high, Mitchell Books would be interested in having a second event.

Once I receive information from Mitchell about the ticketing procedure, I’ll post it here. (I’ll also run some ads in The News-Sentinel, in print and online.)

You can find more info on the new Allen County Photo Album blog.Possibly related posts:

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The headline in the Washington Post reads: House Offers $825 Billion Stimulus. That’s a lot of cash. But it’s such a large number that it’s difficult to wrap your mind around it.

Here are a couple of riddles I came up with to put that number in perspective.

Riddle #1

Let’s say you had an unlimited supply of $100 bills, wrapped in packs of 100. That’s $10,000 per pack.

If you began throwing the $10,000 packs into your fireplace at a rate of one pack every second, 24 hours a day, how long would it take until you had burned through $825 billion?

Answer below.

Riddle #2

Let’s say you have $825 billion in your checking account and it can be yours only if you spend it all in one calendar year. How much money would you have to spend every minute, 24 hours a day?

Answer below.

Answer to riddle #1:
2 years, 7 months and 11 days

Answer to riddle #2:
$1.6 million

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Click the image of the front page to see it larger, or you can download and view the PDF. (2.1 Mb)

The point of the design for today’s News-Sentinel was to play up not only the major news of the day, but also to make sure the reader could tell we had an exclusive interview with the family.

Did this page do the trick? Was it different enough from the front page of Brand X?Possibly related posts:

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