So, it's obvious my old methods of earning a living are completely broken

[james_davis_nicoll]

But I am so stressed out I can't feel my fingertips and I can't see a way out of the corner I am boxed into:

A: Work has dramatically slowed down in the last year.

B: For reasons I am going assume for the moment are not due to deliberate choice on the part of the companies I freelance for, none of checks I've expected this month have materialized (if I am not stress-confused, I think at this point the most recent invoice that has been paid is about 2 months old); when companies were actually issuing checks they were irregular and unpredictable. This isn't specific to one company: nobody is paying me. Nobody. And even if all the money I am owed showed up today, I'd just be treading water.

UPDATE IN MID POST: in fact I just got email assuring me at least one check will definitely not be showing up for at least a week thanks to the new system (another company told me privately my checks might be cut in a week and then sent out a public email telling freelancers to expect the delay to be a month). I'd walk away from book reviewing at this point if there was anywhere to walk to.

Actually, the above is not quite true: while Romantic Times pays very, very little they have never promised to pay any more than that and they do pay on time. So kudos to them; they are the one bright spot.

[I spend a lot of my time telling myself that this is not a repeat of what Guardians of Order did to me, even though a lot of the same notes are in this tune]

C: There are bills I have been deferring for as long as I can and expenses I have cut to the bone as far as I can but I'm pretty sure all the plates I have in the air are about to come crashing down.

D: Can't afford to create the Millennium Reviews book and frankly I don't understand a lot of what people are telling me how to create it.

(That said, editing all the reviews and adding new commentary for all 35 essays would take me two weeks to a month)

E: Review site ditto: I know how to create content for it but I can't see how to create it and the advice I am seeing doesn't mean anything to me.

Open to suggestions here.

Comments

[annathepiper]

A few thoughts.

1) If you're not feeling up to the technical challenge of creating your own ebook of your reviews, a possible alternative might be for you to deploy to Smashwords. At minimum all you need for that is a Word document. You fling that through Smashwords' own system, and it spits out a gazillion different formats. They aren't pretty, but they're functional. I've used their system for deploying Faerie Blood; if you're interested in seeing the output of Smashwords' system, you can see samples here.

Smashwords does provide a free guide to walk you through how to format your Word doc in order to make the output of their system suck as little as possible. It's tedious to chug through that guide, but at least in that case, the only technical skill you need is to know your way around Word.

2) Re: making your own website for reviews, my best suggestion there is to consider an account on Wordpress.com--which is easier than rolling your own Wordpress installation. Wordpress.com would basically take care of the heavy lifting involved in making a site, leaving you free to create posts and pages for it, and only having to worry about stuff like what plugins and themes you'd like to play with. A lot of the authors I know have their sites hosted on Wordpress.com.

(solarbird and I host our own Wordpress installs but we have the luxury of our own webserver and the technical chops to know how to install Wordpress and the requisite webserver and database server for it to sit on. I do not recommend this approach for people without their own webservers.)

2b) Blogspot is also a consideration--the Carina Press group blog I'm on, Here Be Magic, lives on blogspot. But I'm not as familiar with its UI as I am Wordpress so can't speak to the ease of creating static pages on it as well as blog posts.

3) I would donate to a crowdfunding effort if you chose to launch one. ^_^

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

NB: MCA Hogarth has just announced that she is walking away from Smashwords because of the poor quality of the interface and its persnicketiness about Word formatting and the even worse customer service provided as backup.

[annathepiper]

Yes. Smashwords does have its issues worth being wary of. Still, it's an option that needs to be considered.

Other services I'm aware of that will take your Word doc and make an ebook out of it will require money, though. (E.g., BookBaby.) And given that the whole problem James needs to solve here is shortage of money, well. Best options I can think of here are either a) James goes to Smashwords or b) James recruits volunteers from his readership who have the skills to build ebooks.

Option b) is also worth considering.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

An example of GOOD customer service from Smashwords to its authors: a reader had posted a review of a book, giving it four out of five stars. The author wanted the reader to change it to five stars, but the reader had not made his e-mail public. The author contacted the Smashwords customer service team. The reader was e-mailed the author's request for a five-star rating.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

The problem with publishing a book of reviews is it won't generate any immediate revenue. Smashwords pays one month after the end of the fiscal quarter, IIRC, so it'd be October before James received royalties from them; Amazon is monthly, but they don't make payments until two months after the end of the sales period (i.e., sales in July won't pay out until the end of September, and August until October). And that's even assuming a book of reviews would attract readers beyond people who read this blog.

[annathepiper]

It's true, Smashwords doesn't pay often. But on the other hand, of the various options available for self-publishing material, it does have a fairly low bar to entry, at least from a technical perspective; as I mentioned, all it really requires, technically speaking, is ability to do stuff in Word.

That said, Amazon KDP does also now take Word docs for upload--they didn't used to. So that's something Smashwords no longer has exclusive claim to.

From what I'm seeing in the KDP Help, Amazon converts the file you give them anyway out to something Kindles can read. I handed them a MOBI because I could, but apparently I also would have had the option of giving them other things, including a Word doc.

But yeah, neither of these really addresses the bigger question of whether James wishes to put a book out there. Which is his call to make! I'm just addressing what I know about it from a technical perspective and what options exist to make it less onerous for those who don't have the skillset to build their own ebooks.

[michal wojcik (from livejournal.com)]

If you download LibreOffice (which is free), there is an extension called Writer2Epub that lets you create an EPUB file with a minimum of hassle. I found this tool works even better: http://soft.alkinea.net/

You can do most of the formatting in Word, open it up in LibreOffice and save as ODT. The only concern is defining your styles so your Table of Contents will work, but it's not hard to grasp and there's plenty of documentation out there to help.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I have a self-hosted Wordpress site through the webhosting company A Small Orange. I found that no more difficult to set up than the Wordpress.com site it replaced. And I am so not techy...