Harvardinates

John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard (1708-1724), used Harvardinates (sons of Harvard), instead of Sons of the Prophets, to refer to Harvard alumni. That was his way of saying, we educate all men, not just divinity students (yes it was boys only at that time). This is the story of opening up Harvard, and all higher education in North America, to a wider audience - which is still a trend in progress.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CND89PZS

Hooray!

Nov. 14 is an auspicious day - I just finished, and uploade, a new book. It's called Harvardinates. You will see it exploding on social media, etc., tomorrow. You're hearing about it first, here.

My wife said, get me a proof copy, and I'll proofread, fast, I can do it really quickly. She can, though she doesn't like my style, and will give me a hard time about such things as commas. I will get her a book, but I won't hold my breath. Same with my brother. He's really one of my best careful third eyes. I value his advice.

But, the problem is this. You spend a few months on it, you do tedious research, you get all finished, toward the end there's a big rush of all-consuming days as you finished, and it's all like a dam. You have a thousand gallons of water waiting, dying to get through. On the other side it's dry - nothing produced in a long time. No reads. No sales. No nothing. You've been neglecting all that so you could finish writing. Well, the balance is too tipped. I can't wait another minute. I have to have it out there.

Now fortunately one can still change a book after one publishes it. I am counting on that. This time, I have this one pretty good, I think. I've got most of the proofing errors, although I know of two already in the paperback copy. They're small. If they were a problem I'd just change them on the spot. One of them you have to read all the way to the last page, and read the notes (which are actually a very interesting part of the book).

It's partly because I've gotten a little discouraged in proofreading my own books. I find it virtually impossible. So why not let my wife do it? Simply because I can't wait. And she won't want to do it, once she knows it's published. To her, that's the last step. You have to proof before you publish. If you don't it's like dealing with rotten fish.

One last reason is that I'm dealing with a truly ancient computer on the Word end of it. Here I have a pretty good one - on the blogs, on the graphics, on the promo - but when I write, it's ancient. It blanks out a lot. The space bar has become unreliable. I have to use incredible patience and grit to get through anything. In the end, if I have a misspelling or something, I don't want to go through the whole process of uploading, changing, etc. I'll let it wait until the last minute or just forget about it.

Ah but I'm done. If you buy the paperback, watch out for the sachem and the archaeologist. I misspelled them both. But it'll be fixed soon - as soon as I find a few more. It's only a matter of time.

Knee-deep in reading, having started a read-marketing site (yes, consider joining us if you are an author), now, I'm a little burnt out on reading and unable to enjoy concentrating on the usual. It's partly because I'm not a huge horror fan, and got a little too many horror ones in the spirit of the season, and just got tired of them. But it's also because my home life is a kind of a horror, so that just piles up horror on top of horror.

So, I delved back into the Puritan colony of late seventeen-hundreds Massachusetts, and that helped me get through it. I actually made progress organizing my book and getting it on the ground. It's a long, difficult book, and it flies through the witch trials because they only indirectly affect what happens at Harvard and the relationship between the people that run Harvard and the Mathers, Increase and Cotton. Interesting that, out in Salem, nineteen people are being executed, while at Harvard, one of my relatives is cranking out logic books in Latin and keeping mum. He dislikes Cotton Mather; he probably isn't big on spectral evidence; but you don't want to speak out against the big honcho especially when, at the time, he was directly employed by Increase.

Engrossed in my own little Puritan world, I care even lesss for the stuff I'm reading, although some of it is well-written. My read-only site has generated a little action but keeps threatening to stall. I don't quite know what to do about it, and, oddly enough, the other Read-Only site disappeared almost immediately after I opened mine. It's like that admin, who had done quite a good job, was just so sick of it, she was grateful to be out of there. She had kind of half-heartedly said, "maybe after the new year," and I found that to be unacceptable (waiting), which led me to start mine. But she apparently was very glad to just slip completely out of sight. Why? It's a mystery to me.

So far I don't find running the site to be that bad. I'm not one for disciplining people: telling them to do this or do that, or your book is too long, or inappropriate, or whatever. I will have to, of course. I might as well gear myself up to do what I have to do.

We all pick up an hour either tonight or tomorrow, sometime. I'll use mine doing the witch trials maybe.

Authors' Read-Only Trains - no reviews

The best read-only site closed for the holidays, November and December both, saying if they get enough members they'll open up again. I was a little disappointed and decided I couldn't wait until the new year to market my books.

So I started my own site, Authors' Read-Only Trains which you can see. Please join me. I need active members and I need other people to be on there besides me. Right now I have five books on five trains.

Read-only trains keep you insulated from the hassle of reviews, and also the against-the-rules nature of review site activity. It's only against Amazon rules if two people review each other's, or if you review your friend's, or if you're a writer. Unfortunately all of these are true for all of these sites, it seems. And I'd rather just avoid the whole mess. Let the reviews come when they come.

Because Amazon's algorithms now know who is your friend and who is not, they are becoming more aggressive about flagging and removing reviews done by friends for friends. This is a problem since a lot of my friends are writers, and generally I like my friends' work. That's why they're my friends. It puts me in a pickle with Amazon.

But I'd rather not even think about it, and I feel like there's nothing wrong with letting the reviews gather as they gather. There's nothing especially wrong with a book that has no reviews, or has only a few. So what? It doesn't take away from what the book is, what it does, what's good about it. In the end I'm willing to wait for reviews.

But reads, that's a different story. Anytime I can get anybody to read anything of mine, that's good.

Local Author Fair

This is one of those days when things aren't going so well and I'm complaining about the whole racket. I sit and watch my "dashboard" and nothing comes in. They don't want to read or buy my work? What's the problem?

One problem is that I'm checking it too much. Another is that I'm not actively creating something, which sometimes can take my eyes off of it for a few hours at a time. Finally, I'm full up on things to read so can't actually go out and create new reads myself by reading more, and if they aren't just coming out of nowhere to read my stuff then there just isn't going to be anything up there happening.

All of that is a little depressing. A Monday of reading a wide range of things, whatever I can handle, and trying to attend to other business, and coming back to find it all very slow on my own board. But I am making progress, albeit slow; I'm doing better this year than I was doing at this time last year; I can feel the progress and on some level it gives me encouragement to keep on going.

One thing that's discouraging is when the reading I am doing is difficult. Sometimes it's difficult because it's written in a literary way, with long sentences that require work to figure out. Sometimes it's difficult because it's just a little too shallow, or silly, or unbelievable. I have a vampire one right now that qualifies; I don't mind believing in vampires in the course of a book, but if their conversation is banal what's the benefit of living forever? I have one book that I would call modernist. I have trouble making sense of it. And I don't really like that; if I'm working to figure out what's going on, how am I supposed to enjoy the action? You can't do both at once.
br> Why not put it down and do my own writing? Well, I have John the Younger being born in Boston in 1662; somehow I'm stuck on that, right around the time of his birth (it's a matter of organization). Then there are the Disney stories; I have to read a bit to get the hang of Disney, but it's worth it. And I have half a dozen other projects, half-done. I should be able to do something. But I'm not.

A few other things hang over my head. I'm typing a son's novel. I'm making Quaker pamphlets and having printer problems. I'm getting the house ready for winter, I hope.

Mostly not. I've just had a bit of an earache and was in just enough pain to not even enjoy indie writing.

The day my rating went over a cliff

I checked one day on my crime book, A Dozen Crime Stories from a well-known, big box, discount, retail chain, and it had gone over a cliff: from about five million to eleven million, overnight. I panicked! What's up with this? It took me a while but I figured it out.

That's one of my older books; early, inspired, relatively short. Once I took it and sold it on consignment at a LUbbock bookstore, and someone stole it; I never got my money. What could one do? Stop selling books on consignment. It complicated my life too much.

But the answer to my question was this: it was an old book, maybe ten years old, and had just gone over that mark. A lot of its sales had happened immediately after I produced it, and I myself bought quite a few of them. So all those sales went over a line where they weren't counted anymore, after ten years. If your book doesn't have enough sales in the last ten years, it has a rating like eleven million.

The thing is, as an author, you live in fear that some demon in the heart of Amazon is just there to punish you, and tack six million onto your rating just because you have the audacity to keep cranking out books like that. Nobody at Amazon has reached out to give me punishing threats or anything like that. I've been lucky. They consider themselves lucky to have me exclusively, too. It's odd, but the chances they've had to punish me or come after me, or suspend my account, they haven't. I'm grateful and try not to break their rules.

A cliff is just a cliff. All you can do is sell a few more books, and, if necessary, to yourself.