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My Immortals Series Re-Cover Did Not Go Smoothly

Saturday, October 21st, 2023

New Covers!

As previously mentioned, after some market research, I decided the books in the My Immortals series needed new covers. Getting new covers took longer than I liked, but I was extremely budget conscious this time and can’t really complain that each cover was handled as separate project. It got done, and I am very happy with the result. The new covers fit in with the current paranormal romance market.

And Then There Was Amazon

I started uploading at the various vendors, starting with Amazon. I do two print versions through Amazon. One is for Libraries and bookshops. That version is priced very high in order to accommodate the discounting needed and it uses an Amazon supplied ISBN. I do another version using my own ISBN which I price as low as possible so that print readers have the most affordable option. These two versions are identical as to content and cover.

Some additional context: For all of my books, I use a logo for my imprint, cJewel Books, which is registered to me at Bowker and therefore connected to my ISBNS. I commissioned the logo in 2015 and use it on all my books. For print books, the logo appears on the back cover. For EVERY SINGLE BOOK. Here’s the full color logo:

Image that looks like a combination of book pages and a gem. The text cJewel Books appears underneath

The Logo

I love the logo, by the way and I like the continuity it gives. I have been using this logo since 2015. Some more context here. Some of the new covers use the same model as the original cover. Some used new images. All the covers have the same background. I did update some back matter in the eBooks so that the flow was more efficient and more conducive to readers having an easy opportunity to get the next book. There were no changes to the print interiors. The only change was the cover.

For all but two of the books, the uploading went just fine, eBook and print. But for some reason Amazon had a hissy fit about one of the print covers for My Demon Warlord. They started by asking me to prove I had the publishing rights. Even though nothing had changed but the cover and even though the updates were coming from the same account that originally published the book. Amazon “helpfully” has a list of acceptable proof. Unfortunately for self-publishers, none of the acceptable proof applies. My Demon Warlord was never traditionally published. I wrote it my own self for my own publishing career. Amazon explicitly states that it’s not enough to say, but I wrote it! Copyright registration is also not proof they will accept.

At first, I replied that they should be able to tell that the same account was involved in the update and that the only change was the cover. I provided all the ISBNs and pointed out they were registered to me or CreateSpace. This was not sufficient. Then I sent images from my Author Central account showing that both print versions had been verified by Amazon–meaning they agreed that all versions of the book were mine. They cleared the book. Yay, right?

NOPE

I got another notice asking for the same proof, which I sent. Again. One of the print versions was cleared. Yay! Right?

NOPE Again

I got another notice for the OTHER print version asking for the same proof which I sent again. This was disallowed. WTAF? So I sent the information AGAIN and pointed out the history on this and tried to stay polite. Then I got a notice saying they had cleared the book. Yay! Right?

NOPE AGAIN

Yes, they agreed I had the right to publish the book but now they believed I did not have the right to all the images in the cover and to please send proof that the images were properly licensed. Recall that all these books have the same exact background and the they’d cleared an identical version earlier in the day. My Demon Warlord, originally published in 2016, is one of the books where I was using the same model as my original cover. You’d figure this means the problem had to be in the background images  (shared by ALL the covers). Yet all the other books were successfully updated with the new covers. I asked the cover designer to send me the licenses for all the images in that book. I also attached the invoice for my logo, because honestly, I am pretty certain they were having a fit over that. Fortunately, the 2015 invoice was readily available to me because taxes and business expenses.

Meanwhile . . .

Amazon sent me another notice asking me to prove my right to publish My Immortal Assassin. ::Sigh::: All because I updated the cover. Fortunately/Ironically? My Immortal Assassin was traditionally published and I have my reversion letter. I keep all my reversion letters readily available because I have other books where I have been asked 3-4 times to prove my right to publish the book. For some books, I have sent my reversion letter 3-4 times. Anyway, I pointed out the only change was a new cover, same account, blah blah blah, but here is the reversion letter AGAIN. They accepted this proof since a reversion letter is on Amazon’s acceptable proof list.

Finally?

Anyway, Amazon has finally cleared My Demon Warlord. But is this over? Who knows.

Some Thoughts

I suspect this entire process never once involved a human on Amazon’s side. I suspect I could have sent an image of my cat as proof of my right to publish and their automated system would have said, hey, proof is attached! You’re good. I suspect that once a book is flagged they double down and match book images to images on stock sites and that since my logo is not a stock image, they decided I was stealing.

Several things are obvious to me. Amazon has an unintelligent algorithm that misses some pretty obvious rules. Such as, if they have previously vetted an account’s publishing rights to a book, they do not need to confirm those rights ever again. When the same account updates a previously cleared book, they don’t need to clear it again.

This process is everything that is wrong with Amazon and more. All I did was update covers for books Amazon has already agreed I have the right to publish. How hard it it, really, for them to check that, and what does it say about how bad their backend system is that they don’t/can’t do this?

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Posted in Books, Computers and Technology, Publishing, Rant Alert | 3 Comments »

Getting Organized Has Unexpected Benefits

Sunday, July 24th, 2022

As you may know from an earlier post, in late June of this year, my website host disappeared from the web. I was able to recover everything on my main site thank goodness. The site I use to maintain evergreen links wasn’t quite so easy to recover, which I admit was totally my fault. But I was able to get the service up (YOURLS) and running and now I have a local database-driven system for keeping track of all manner of information about my books. Being forced to get organized has both expected and unexpected benefits. I am totally thrilled!

If you are an author and want some help with something like this, especially YOURLS, let me know. I’m happy to help.

Screenshot of a portion of a MySQL GUI. No, I'm not showing anyone the actual name of the database. Doh.

MySQL GUI screenshot

Benefits!

Now I have a book database that will generate all the links I need for a new book which is super handy. While I was at it, I added in tables for all my ISBNs and various required info when books get uploaded to the various vendors, and now all this stuff is essentially automated and is going to save me so much time I’m practically giddy. I hadn’t realized what a mental burden the inefficiencies were.

Don’t worry! All this was, at most and in total, maybe a day and a half of work. I do database work for a living so I know now to build and populate a database.

Technical Details for Nerds

Once I had the link service database up and running, the next challenge was to recreate the short links and load them into the database. Trying to rebuild them manually would have been an utter nightmare and likely months of work. Instead, I built a local database designed to generate the flat files needed for a mass-upload plugin available for the service. My internal system for naming the short links meant I already knew the vast majority of the short links I needed to make and only needed to get the vendor URLS, which I already had in a spreadsheet. Once that was done, it only took a second (literally) to generate the csv files required for the plugin. It took way longer to upload the files via the plugin than it did to generate a file of hundreds of links. After that, all I needed to do was manually enter a handful of short links I’d made that didn’t conform to the standard.

This work uncovered a situation with two books where a vendor URL had inexplicably changed at the vendor and/or disappeared from the vendor site. I was able to fix both those, in one case with the assistance of the vendor’s tech support.

This weekend I installed MySQL locally, restored a backup of my short links database, and started building and testing the queries to do some direct backend updates related to cleaning up a test upload and doing future updates. SQL Server syntax is just different enough from MySQL syntax that I had to keep googling for the MySQL syntax but this morning I issued two of my backend updates.

Now I have the pieces in place to test my planned batch update process, and I’m actually pretty excited about having that capability since YOURLS isn’t set up to deal with the kind of short link system an author is likely to need; the ability to batch update a vendor URL from the pre on-sale URL to the on-sale URL, for example, across multiple short urls. I did have a plugin that was supposed to do this, but it was clunkier than I liked, and this is going to be way faster and less prone to error because I can test everything locally first.

And, of course, always backup the database first!

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Posted in Computers and Technology, Writing | 4 Comments »

Fall Greetings!

Saturday, September 18th, 2021

I suppose technically it’s not Fall yet, but let’s not quibble. As we move into what will hopefully be cooler, wetter weather, the writing is going well. I switched up my schedule and now write in the mornings before my “commute” into the living room for the day job. I’ve also made some progress with getting more sleep, and that makes a tremendous difference in how I feel. Go figure.

Bound in Smoke is going reallly well. I continue to have breakthroughs that make me excited about the story and the world. I’m not sure when I’ll have an updated Chapter 1 to post, though I think it will be sometime in the next couple of months. It’s such a relief to have the creativity continuing to come back to me and have the words on the page feel rich and real.

A while back, I started writing using a program called Ulysses rather than WordPerfect and so far it’s been a great transition. Ulysses has a really neat feature that lets me quickly insert editorial notes as I’m writing that don’t disturb the flow of the story text. Oddly, this has been emotionally helpful because recently my inner critic has been so loud and detrimental. Now, I can insert a note or reminder about the text and just move on instead of feeling like the whole story is a failure. Plus, I also got my printer working again after the MacOS upgrade to Big Sur disabled my ability to print.

I hope everyone is staying safe and doing well. Let me know in the comments.

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What Was I Going to Say?

Thursday, November 1st, 2018

I can’t recall because I came to my blog and there were more updates and one of them hung and then I had to disable one, and do some manual updates, and sometimes the internet here is so s. . . . l. . . o. . . w that I give up after a while. Good grief.

Anyway I was going to say whatever it was. I’m sure it would have been AMAZING. So instead, I’ll say, I hope everyone who observes Halloween had a wonderful time. Oh, and I’m going for broke on the covers for the Street Witch series. The photographer/cover person did the shoot last week with all three models, and I have been through all 750+ photos and selected my top several for each.

The next step is to take a look at the processed favorites and start talking with them about which ones to go with. I will be an awful tease and say that the images are beyond awesome. All three models nailed what I was going for and, of course, so did the photographer.

I am very excited!

The first book is close to being ready to send for editing so I’m hopeful the book will be out in early 2019.

Maybe later I’ll remember what I was going to write about.

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Writer’s Toolbox

Sunday, October 21st, 2018

The Search for the Perfect Writing Tools

Writers need the right tools for their work, and boy do I have opinions on this. With respect to software, my opinion is that the people developing these tools spoke to anywhere from zero to one actual writer. In fact, I think they developed whatever their programming environment made possible and then justified that result to writers. Which means the tools in general lack the flexibility required when actual people use those tools.

Until about a year ago, I wrote in WordPerfect. I run a Windows virtual machine on my desktop and laptop so I can continue to use a tool that actually IS pretty darn flexible and doesn’t impose the Microsoft “YOU WILL WRITE THIS WAY BECAUSE” paradigm. Oh, and formatting. The formatting is so awful. Anyway I have been increasingly annoyed and irritated by the VM I use. (Parallels).

Parallels mostly works but when something goes wrong or when you need to contact the company for any reason the experience is dreadful and I have been searching for a WordPerfect alternative because in my perfect world, I never have to give the Parallels company another dime of my money. If anyone from Parallels reads this; I hate your company and I hate your broken, opaque website and I hate that you hate your customers.

For years I have  been looking for a tool that would allow me to write in MacOS. Because I’m telling you Word ain’t it. I have to have MS Office in order to be compatible with the rest of the world, but I really really really hate Word. That said . . . The MS office suite tools that allow you to open and edit documents on any iOS device are wonderful. Editors, copy-editors, and proofreaders tend to work in Word, so this ability is a must have for me, and in this case, MS nailed it.

This tool works. So, for every purpose except writing fiction, thumbs up to Office 365 and its MacOS/iOS tools.

I did try Scrivener. I really did but its not a tool that works for the way I write. I envy all the people who love this tool and haven’t had to fight their natural writing process to use it. I just can’t

I tried a bunch of other tools; Open Office and Pages were total fails. I tried several apps that proclaimed they were great for writers and none of them were, and most did not mean “great for people writing fiction of 100,000 words.”

Ulysses is the only tool I’ve found where I started a writing project and was able to complete it in that tool instead of moving it to WordPerfect.  I wasn’t wasting hours trying to do simple things like work with individual chapters sometimes or with the entire document other times, oh, and being able to assemble and reorder chapters. I didn’t have to fight to have an environment that was pleasing to my eyes and it exports to a docx format (and several others) without forcing me to spend much or any time reformatting. It’s good enough to send to editors etc.

I wrote an entire novella in the tool and it was fairly seamless. I’ve written Bound in Smoke in Ulysses, and that book is just about done. I haven’t used WordPerfect in ages. I have a few things I wish it would do but nothing that keeps me from writing and getting the output I need.

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Customer Service – A Rant

Sunday, August 26th, 2018

If you’re reading this, congratulations to us all because it means my move to a new webhost was successful.  I’d been with my previous webhost for over ten years and they were really stellar. If there was a problem it got fixed quickly and courteously. I feel it’s not unrelated, given the story I’m about to tell you, that the person who handled most of the issues I had was a woman who recently left that company.

I was surprised when the security certificate on my site didn’t/couldn’t renew. I contacted my host about why it hadn’t renewed and the response was “You don’t need a cert because you don’t sell anything on your website.”

Notice that this does not respond in any way to my request. Note as well that the customer service rep is wrong. Deeply wrong, in fact.

For the last two years at least Google has been downranking websites that don’t run on SSL (That is, has a security certificate and is https:// rather than http://) and by now users are seeing warnings when they land on a site that isn’t running on SSL. Not to mention an expired cert will cause all kinds of problems for a website.

This is an experience women have all the time. They get worse customer service and more roadblocks in the way of that service. I opened a ticket about why an existing cert hadn’t renewed and the answer to me, someone with an obviously female name, was to question my need for a service I was using. At every step, in fact, my issues were not taken seriously.

On top of this add that these tech support people did not understand certs and how their backend requires they be set up for the customer, and the problem is even worse.

What’s in a Name? Customer Service

The short version of this tale is that I spent from the 14th to 20th explaining over and over what they needed to do and telling them that their changes actually made things worse and had ended up breaking my email. There  was a string of responses over those days that were all basically, we fixed this, please reply to the cert email we are sending you, an email  I was not getting (if they were actually sending it which I doubt because they were doing it wrong) because they broke my email. And if was wasn’t that, it was, please send us the error messages and tell us exactly what the problem is and I kept saying, OK, but look at in the thread of this ticket where I already did that, but here it is AGAIN.

Carolyn Not Charles

It was worse than that, way worse. And I’m just going to say that if my name was Charles Jewel my cert would have been renewed on the first day and I would still be their customer.


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Writing and Technology

Saturday, May 19th, 2018

Writing and Technology Carolyn Style

I recently bought an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil, since some writers I know had switched entirely and my MacBook Pro is aging a bit. In addition, I have at last found a Mac app that I can write in without being incredibly frustrated and annoyed. My novella, The Viscount’s First Kiss, was written entirely using the Ulysses app.  Ulysses exports to Word, PDF, and HTML, among other formats. It syncs seamlessly between all my devices. I’m fifty thousand words into a novel with Ulysses.

I have some nitpicks, but  in the main I like it. In case you’re wondering, for essentially my entire writing career I’ve been using WordPerfect. When I switched to Mac OS, I installed a Windows virtual machine so I could continue using WordPerfect. There’s a lot about WordPerfect I miss, but Ulysses is the first acceptable replacement I’ve found that works for me.  Yes, I tried Scrivener but it just doesn’t work for me. I know it does for others and more power to you. I keep hoping that Scrivener will address its controlling propensities and stop interfering in the way I want to write. With Ulysses, I started writing and just kept going. I didn’t have to fight with the interface, and it took me about thirty seconds to read about how to make things look the way I want them to.

Anyway,  a while back, my MacBook Pro underwent some kind of glitch that required a complete reformat and restore from backup. To be honest I haven’t bothered to fix the Windows virtual machine on it since I bought the iPad Pro.

What I love About The iPad Pro For Writing

It’s a lot lighter than my MacBook Pro, but about the same dimensions other than thickness.  I bought the Apple keyboard cover, which is pretty sweet. That keyboard is about the same size as the keyboard for the MacBook Pro. When I’m writing on it, I love that it’s a touch screen, too.  I am able to rest the iPad Pro on the exercise bike do-hickey for holding devices, and have been able to dictate while I exercise.  This gives me an additional hour of writing time, which is nice.  I’ve used the Apple pencil a little less than I thought.  I find the documentation for my notebook apps to be pretty bad, and I hate spending more than a few minutes trying to figure out how to do something. However, I have used it for some note booking, for example, and that has been absolutely awesome. Writing longhand is a different experience and a different way of unlocking the writing brain.

What I Don’t Like About Writing on The iPad Pro

iOS is simply not quite as functional as Mac OS there are a couple of things I cannot do on the iPad Pro that I can do on Mac OS, predominantly having to do with one or two apps that I like. The reasons this is a con for writing, is that I want to travel with the iPad Pro and not have to bring the MacBook Pro.

Slight Segue Into Dictation

A couple of years ago I started using dictation because I wanted to make sure I preserved the functionality of my fingers and wrists and because once you settle into the dictation it can be a lot faster than  typing by hand. I had a disaster once that I resolved by dictating a massive number of edits that had been lost. If I hadn’t done that I would not have been able to finish my book on time. For my emergency, I used the built-in Apple dictation. It was not perfect but it worked and well enough I that I bought Dragon dictation both for Mac OS and Windows. Unfortunately, neither was seamless or effortless. Yuck.

What I don’t understand is why Apple insists on using straight quotes in apps where curly quotes are available and enabled. Word corrects this  annoyance, but the Ulysses app does not. Straight quotes are an abomination in fiction. Dragon, however, fixes those straight quotes, so I’m stuck using Dragon When I am writing on the iMac. Speech recognition in Dragon for Mac is pretty awful. Considering how expensive the program is, Nuance should be ashamed. In iOS, I have to use Apple dictation and for some reason that is completely beyond me, when the keyboard cover is attached to the iPad Pro you cannot dictate. WTF, Apple? When I’m on the bike, I remove the cover so I can dictate.

That said, I have watched Apple dictation perfectly transcribe my words and then change them to near gibberish as they are processed. Why? Why? Why is there no setting that allows me to tell it that I am dictating fiction and to stop changing everything to present tense or using pronouns that aren’t the pronouns I used. In addition, there are several  punctuation conventions for fiction that Apple and Dragon completely blow over. It drives me batty. For dialogue, a comma, followed by a close quote should not be followed by a capital letter unless that word actually requires a capital letter: “More coffee,” Mrs. Smith said. But: “More coffee,” she said with a desperate smile. NOT “More coffee,” She said.

It’s annoying as hell. Oh and also for some reason on my computers, both Dragon and Apple dictation randomly capitalize words. Really?

 All in All

Nevertheless, I have not used the MacBook Pro in quite some time. The combination of the iPad Pro, Ulysses app, and the Apple Pencil overlap with several functionalities: a MacBook Pro, a paper notebook, printed MSS, and pens and ink. There was a day when I forgot to bring the iPad Pro with me but I had my regular iPad. I was able to work exactly where I left off. If I had to, I could write on my iPhone.

That said, the RWA National Conference is coming up and I haven’t decided if I’m also going to bring the MacBook Pro. If I don’t, there is an app I use daily that I will have to skip. It wouldn’t be a big deal, though. So I think probably not. My board service means that I fly several times a year and that means I have learned to hate flying, checked luggage, and heavy purses.

Overall, I really like the Ulysses app and hope that they work on the needs of fiction authors. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the portability and lightness of the iPad Pro, and the ability to do longhand writing with it. This combination does most of what I need. It’s just short of perfect.

I find it ironic that so many apps, including Microsoft Word, talk about how great they are for professional writing when in fact they fall down in crucial ways that professional fiction writers need. I would pay a lot of money for WordPerfect as a native Mac App.

 

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Writing Stuff I’ve been Doing Lately

Friday, November 24th, 2017

I’ve been wanting to sell books directly for quite some time. I was able to sell print books from my site, but I removed the links to doing so because it was a PITA mostly because of the combination of PayPal functionality and people who just won’t look in their spam folders. . . .

The publishing environment being what it is, and given that most of the major platforms that let you sell books directly have addressed their issues with payment processing and tax collection and remittance, I really wanted to try this again.

Herewith my Tale

The important thing to understand here is that I have a low tolerance for bad instructions and almost no time to fuss with stuff. This is key to understanding why I ended up where I am. (Happily so!)

I started looking once again at all the systems that profess to allow you to sell books directly to consumers: Selz, eJunkies, Shopify, SquareSpace, and several open source systems that are free to install via my website host.

I had tried to set up Selz before and couldn’t bridge the last mile then or now. The whole interface was confusing to me, and they charge a monthly fee PLUS a percentage. And of course the cheapest plans offer so little that they are useless as options. I would have to sell a lot of books per month just to recoup the monthly fee, and I don’t even know if I will sell any. Selz was a no.

eJunkies doesn’t have a monthly fee, and they have a processing fee, which I was okay with, but then, its interface was confusing and the documentation was terrible and not specific enough. But I wanted to use BookFunnel to deliver my files and then I just got annoyed that it, too, isn’t really set up for what I wanted to do. I mean, you sell a book, and you need to deliver the buyer the format they want. Not ALL the formats. Anyway, I couldn’t confirm that I could do what I wanted so I moved on.

Shopify also did not have clear information about what they offer and JFC it’s expensive so NO.

I tried SquareSpace but, I’m sorry, the documentation is horrible and unclear, and I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to make the theme for digital products do anything appropriate for books. Abandoned.

I looked at all the shopping carts available via my website cPanel and decided to try Abante because it sounded like it would work. The instructions/documentation were written by someone who does not speak English as a first language well enough to provide clear documentation. I have some facility with interpreting the sentence structure of the country of origin, but this was frustratingly unclear. Abante even comes with a category for books so you’d think the product would be set up to actually sell digital books. I did the install, and spent way too much time setting everything up only to be unable to make the product allow me to let users select which digital version they want to have. They also don’t integrate with BookFunnel. Fast forward through a lot of frustrating googling and I realized that this product in fact cannot do this, and they apparently have no interest in addressing the issue.

Frustration is Frustrating

Yeah, I was getting pretty damn frustrated. I mean, LOTS of people want purchasers to be able to select which of a variety of digital files they actually want. People who sell photographs, for example.

So, then I looked at WooCommerce, and lo-and-behold, their documentation was clear enough, though not completely clear, and googling yielded a lot of great videos and other step-by-step explanations of how to do exactly what I wanted to do. WooCommerce is free, but you pay for certain additional functionality. I’ll skip ahead a bit and say that you could sell books without ponying up for anything, but there are a couple of useful extensions. And it happens, they were all on sale when I was getting this set up.

I installed WooCommerce on the domain I wanted to use, since it was already a WordPress site, and literally, within 15 minutes I was setting up books with the ability for customers to select ePub, Mobi, or print. BookFunnel integrates with them. When I ran into a question, the WooCommerce documentation had the answer about 60% of the time and the rest of the time google landed me on an excellent video step-by-step.

Trying to Cross the Last Mile

There were three stumbling blocks: The first is one that WordPress and WooCommerce need to address because it’s completely stupid; which is the ability to easily allow WordPress to upload additional file types. I get why they wouldn’t with regular WordPress, but WooCommerce is set up to sell digital files. The product needs to easily enable additional file types.

This is NOT easy and not documented. However, I found two plugins that offered the ability to add file extensions. Add WP Mime Types is what worked, but at first I thought it didn’t. I had to Google what exactly to enter to enable ePub and Mobi,but HERE IT IS so you don’t have to suffer:

epub = application/epub+zip
mobi = application/x-mobipocket-ebook

Just enter those two lines in the WP Mime Types plugin, and boom. Done, with one gotcha. I was expecting that when I went to select files in the WordPress media uploader, files with the extension ePub or mobi would no longer be grayed out. They remained grayed out and I was about to start cursing. Then I dragged the files to the window and then after I was done dealing with my intense frustration I looked up, and the files were there, listed in the media gallery.

WOO-Fricking-Hoo!!!

After that, it was easy to connect the ePub file to the ePub option and the mobi file to the mobi option, and set up the print option to not be a digital download, and I was essentially over the last blocker.

The next issue was how to make WooCommerce connect Book series, and that did require an extension to do this seamlessly, but in hindsight, I think it could be done, less elegantly, without the extension. I did not realize (and there was nothing in the documentation about this) that Categories of products do not actually connect to a product in the database until the product is published. I wish that weren’t the case, because you can’t easily sandbox efforts to see if you’ve made a sensible series of categories and sub-categories.

They have a sub-theme for books, which I went ahead and bought. But that is also not entirely necessary. It also took me a while to realize that you have to create a thumbnail image for each category. If you don’t, you end up with big ugly blank image markers on the shop home page. The intention is that users see an image that represents, say, All Books and others for Historical Romance, Paranormal Romance, each series, etc. Which they click on to see the various categories and subcategories, with, for me, series names being a subcategory of the series genre.

I am not a graphics person, but I managed to kludge together some images that solve the issue OK-enough. But this is something I’ll have to address as an improvement.

Payments

The last issue was payment. It was easy to set up Stripe, and I already have PayPal Standard. WooCommerce made this really really simple. No real surprise, Apple Pay isn’t working. Stripe integrates with Apple but the final hurdle is over at Apple and their instructions are unclear. So I’ll disable that for now, and work that out in the near future.

So, technically, I had everything set up in a day, and I THINK I’m ready. But a bit nervous about pulling the trigger and re-enabling my website’s shop menu tab and sending everyone to my WooCommerce set up. I need to fuss with a few more things.

Updated to add: I did figure out the ApplePay issue. I had to ftp a specific file to a specific directory and then wait for Apple to agree the file was there. So, ApplePay appears to be working.

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Mind The Gap

Friday, November 24th, 2017

There is a happy ending to my story so I’m able to tell you about the nightmare of the past 12 hours. Being the geek that I am, I have an iPhone X. In fact, it arrived just this Tuesday, so on Thursday, my phone (which I LOVE so far) still had that new phone smell. Folks, the iPhone X is a religious experience for me. I really, really, really like this phone.

Thursday evening I was getting in the car for a short but necessary drive, and I put my phone down in the center console near the middle of the seat. Only the phone slipped into the gap between the seat and the side of the console and then slid completely out of sight. Completely. It was NOT underneath the seat. After 45 minutes of me, my son, and my sister trying to even see where it was and get it out, we failed. I resigned myself to having to go to my mechanic to have the front seat removed in order to retrieve the phone from the innards of the driver’s seat.

Important note: my son insisted that the phone was underneath the center console. To which I replied, “No, it can’t be. I saw it slide underneath the seat.” In the opposite direction.

My phone and I were forced to spend the night apart for the first time in our nascent relationship. The horror. Also, the horror of realizing that I would not be able to easily access any of the sites where I have enabled 2-Factor Authentication and ACK HOW DOES ANYONE FUNCTION WITHOUT A PHONE?????

This morning, I had to call ON A LAND LINE— what even is that? —to tell my mechanic that I had a car emergency and to be prepared for my immanent arrival. I then drove immediately there. Two people tried to find my phone. We were about to set about removing the front seat when a third person said he’d try, and after calling my phone several times he too said the phone was under the center console. He fetched a thingamajig and two minutes later he handed me my phone. They didn’t even charge me.

I HAVE MY LIFE BACK!!!

When I got home, I stuffed some cloth in the gap so if this happens again, me being somewhat klutzy, the phone will not slip down like that.

When my son gets up, I will tell him that he was right, and I was wrong, and I don’t even care because I have my phone back, and besides, you have to admit when you’re wrong like that.

 

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Posted in Carolyn's Writing, Computers and Technology, Rant Alert | 2 Comments »

When Worlds Collide! Kapow! Writing and Database Design

Sunday, February 14th, 2016

I continue to marvel at the intersection of my writing life and my tech life. One of my job functions is to architect databases that will hold the information that runs websites or pays bills or, report on the information in the database. It’s remarkably easy to get wrong. Because I’m a data architect and not a software developer, my approach is always, how would I set this up so we meet the users needs and protect the data?

Every software dev is now slapping her/his forehead and groaning.

Dude. We’ll negotiate the joins later, OK?

But no. We’re not doing it your way because your way is fast on the app side and 30 days later we can’t report on the data. Or it’s not actually what the user needs.

So. Authors who write series, often more than one, need a way to show readers the order of the books in the series. Sounds simple, right? Let the author number the books from 1 through a bazillion.

(And now all the authors are now groaning, going, wait! What about prequels, novels and novellas? where I didn’t write them in chronological order or where readers want Novel order interspersed with Novellas … without having to number Book 7 in the series 9th in the order because there are intervening novellas or short stories.)

Readers are doing much the same.

I know, I know. And I’m so sorry.

surprise/not surprised

I’m surprise/not surprised that ALL the book vendors have gotten the design of this wrong. It SOUNDS easy, but it’s not. We all see the huge disconnect between all the vendors who went “Let them number the books IN WHOLE NUBMERS!” and what authors and readers actually need.

A structured database, like SQL Server or Oracle could do this of course. So could a NoSQL db, but either way you still have to understand this isn’t just a numbering problem. NoSQL probably makes this easier to achieve.

But is OBVIOUS no one at the vendors actually talked to enough authors or even publishers about this. If they had, they’d know they were about to design it wrong.

Painful Lessons of Bad Data Architecture

One of the early lessons for any database person is that when the structure doesn’t provide users a way to do what is needed in real life, they will find workarounds that fuck up your data.

Like when there’s no field to hold (easy example) a middle name and someone goes by their middle name. Users will enter the middle name in the first name field OR the last name field, or a field for Company name. And then you are fucked because you have no way easy way to know that Roberta Ellen Smith is in your database as

firstname: Roberta Ellen
LastName: Smith
CompanyName: Acme Widgets

AND/Or
firstname: Roberta
LastName: Ellen Smith
CompanyName: Acme Widgets

AND/OR
firstname: Roberta
LastName: Ellen
CompanyName: Smith/Acme Widgets

Now get me a list of all the people whose last name is Smith.
Oops.

I’m not making this up, except the names. I’ve seen databases like this.

Real World Reading and Writing

In the real world of reading and authoring books, a series can have:
Novels
Novellas
Short stories
Something else we didn’t think of yet.

And the order might go like this:

Book 1
Book 2
Novella 1
Book 3
Short Story 1
Book 4
Novella 2

AND it’s possible the author wrote these stories in this order

Short Story 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 4
Book 1
Novella 2
Novella 1

So that by the time they’ve written novella 1, which in the chronology of events in the SERIES places Novella 1 chronologically before Book 3, they will need to reorder their books.

How do I know this is possible? Because I’m a data architect and I’ve seen stuff like this before but also because here’s the story series order of my Sinclair Series books:

Books in chronological order according to the World
Mary’s story
Anne’s Story
Lucy’s Story
Emily’s Story

Here’s the order I have written or will write them in:

Anne’s Story
Lucy’s Story
Emily’s Story
Mary story

Why? Because PUBLISHING doesn’t commit to series and sometimes neither do authors. A book that was intended as a stand alone turns out to have characters in it readers are dying to read about, and some of those characters’ stories would be BEFORE the time setting of the book that was published first.

Authors commonly want to number books like this:

Prequel (Book 0)
Book 1
Novella 1.5
Book 2
Book 3
Novella 3.5

Which is a fairly obvious solution from their point of view, but with clear issues on the backend if you only allow the number field to accept whole numbers which everyone except All Romance eBooks does.

That’s the problem with the simplistic notion that Books are ordered 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . . N

Authors and Readers – in the same leaky Boat

Readers might want to read the books, regardless of length or nomenclature (novel, novella etc.) in the order they were written. Or chronologically according to events in the series. Or in some order the author has provided for the series.

So, on the backend, book order is actually considerably more fluid than any vendor currently provides to authors who would like to number their books so readers can figure out which stories they want to read first.

So vendors end up giving us this, which is completely inadequate for authors and readers alike.
Book 1 = Book 1
Book 2 = Book 2
Book 3 = Novella 1
Book 4 = Book 3
Book 5 = Short Story 1
Book 6 = Book 4
Book 7 = Novella 2
Book 8 = Book 5

Because to get the books listed in reading order authors have to say Book 5 is Book 8 when it isn’t book 8.

Obviously, you should allow the author to provide a reading order that does not link reading order to nomenclature.

1 = Book 1
2 = Book 2
3 = Novella 1
4 = Book 3
5 = Short Story 1
6 = Book 4
7 = Novella 2
8 = Book 5

So, you show the end user this:

Vampire Flowers Series – Reading Order

Flowers in My Garden, prequel
Flowers in my Sock drawer, Book 1
The Gnome Attack, Novella 1
Flowers in my mailbox, Book 2
Gnome Attack!!, A short story
Bees Knees, Novella 2

Reading Order, as a numbering concept unrelated to any other order, would also permit a reader to get a list of just the novels, in reading order.

But nobody asked me.

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Posted in Computers and Technology, Publishing | 3 Comments »

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