THE PLATFORM

Let's take a look at blogs. What are they up to, what are they good for, why do folks have them?

There are people out there who are compulsive communicators. They have to say things to other people. Sometimes it may not even matter what they're saying. They just want to be heard. Their blogs are more like personal diaries they've decided to share with the world.

Others have axes to grind. Or maybe lots of axes, a veritable hardware store of edged implements. They need to make points, to educate, to enlighten. They have Important Stuff to say.

And yes, their points can be ground to a sharpness resembling the tip of a needle. With barbs: When the point is made, the needle goes in, and stays.

The point may be concerned with the intimate and personal or with humanity on a global scale. Keeping in mind all politics are local. Is this how the world's mind gets changed? The guy is saying: Let's find out.

Moving away from the ideological, we approach the commercial end of the spectrum. Some blogs exist to sell widgets and services that repair or tweak widgets.

Other commercial blogs are meant to be platforms where a personality can present itself to the world—with a commercial end in mind. There's money involved, somehow, down the line. Maybe a very long way down the line.

This blog is supposed to be such a platform. It's not a very good one, let's face it. (Though I'm pretty sure I could make it worse.)

I put up the occasional post, and that's nice (read: minimal), but there's a bunch of other stuff I should be doing. At the very least I should be posting more often, maybe even welding those posts to a reliable schedule.

I should be more engaging, soliciting comments and questions and so forth. I should be running contests and tossing prizes around. I should be promoting the blog by offering to guest on other, actually successful blogs. (You could ask: What's in it for them? A day off, that's what.)

There's lots I could (should) be doing. So why aren't I? The short answer: I'm busy. I've got a lot of crap to write.

The slightly longer answer: I'm pretty much an idiot.

(Being an idiot may impact other areas of my life as well. It's hard to tell [being an idiot and all].)

One of the things platform-savvy folks do is offer some token in exchange for collecting email addresses. Then they mass-mail to those addresses when they have "exciting" news to disseminate.

I have to say, that sounds like a lot of work. Also, what I consider "exciting" (i.e.: I could end up making some money) might not seem so exciting to the folks on the list.

Which brings us to one of the nastiest parts of being an indie pubbing author. You don't just have to write the damned books, you have to try to sell them to people. And to sell them, you have to help those potential buyers find your stuff.

Visibility is key.

It can be a lot easier if you turn indie with a huge trad-pub following, especially if you've got one or two successful series going. Make the first volume perma-free and announce the coming of MONKEY MAN number eight (or whatever). Let the inertia of your established career scrape a furrow across the belly of the World Wide Web.

If you're being trad pubbed right now, get your platform up right away, while existing books can promote it. (Your publisher will thank you, for now.) Then go indie and take your following with you.

Someone once said the establishment of the platform should precede the first book by two years. Any of you guys ready to plan that far ahead?

TO SAVE OR NOT TO SAVE

Did this ever happen to you? You're working in MS Word, putting the final touches on some manuscript. You save your changes, check the word count real quick, then close the document.

A window pops up: Do you want to save the changes you made to "Excellent Book"?

And you're thinking, "What changes?"

Now you get all paranoid. What happened? Was there some sort of glitch? Did the power flicker or something? Did I lean on the keyboard, introducing spurious characters someplace in the depths of my manuscript? Where's that damn cursor right now?

So, what do you do? If you save changes, and you DID lean on the keyboard or something, you could be messing up your perfect book. If you don't save changes, you could be losing those perfect last-minute adjustments you just made. Are you absolutely sure you saved your changes before trying to close the document?

This is serious! You were all over that book today, tweaking this and that and getting it just the way you wanted it. If you had to start the day over again, would you be able to find all those places and make all those changes again? Almost impossible!

Okay, you might try this: Click "Cancel" on that warning window and go back into editing mode. Click File and Save As and create a new title for the work. This copy should have those changes Word was talking about, whether they be spurious or essential.

If you saved changes in the original version (as you're convinced you did), then it's fine under the old name. When you have time, you can open one version and use Track Changes to see if the other version has differences you want to keep. (It almost certainly won't.)

At lot of trouble, right?

Or you could do this: Trust that you saved changes in the first place.

And remember this glitch in Word: Checking the word count triggers a request for saving changes. Nothing actually happened. There ARE no changes in the text of your manuscript. Say Yes or say No, it makes no difference.

Just to be sure (sort of), train yourself to check the word count BEFORE you save current changes. There'll be no warning on exit.

On the other hand, can you really be sure you DIDN'T lean on the keyboard or something? Are you willing to run this version through KindleGen directly to the "shelves" of Amazon, where all the world can view your perplexing display of gibberish?

"What's this?" a reader might exclaim. "Is the author having a stroke? Is the character supposed to be having a stroke? Am I having a stroke?"

Personally, I don't set KindleGen loose on a Word doc. I create a text file, run it through MobiPocket Creator, and open the HTML in Notepad++. Once there I view the book numerous times in my browser, along with several other times in Kindle Previewer. There still maybe things wrong with it, but at least I can be sure there are no bouts of "keyboard-leaning" gibberish anywhere in there.

Unless my Oldtimers' Disease kicked in, then all bets are off.

Isn't paranoia a lovely way to spend your hours?

DEATH TO DASHES

When you're stuck in an ebook universe of right-margin justification without benefit of hyphenation (Kindle World, as imposed by Amazon), one of the more annoying bits of punctuation is the dash.

For various reasons, I've concluded the type of dash that works best is the en dash. The short one.

Unfortunately, in the corrosive environment of the ebook, the spacing around en dashes can get messed up. There is a particular problem when using a pair of dashes to set off a bit of information inside a sentence. If the dashes are far enough apart to appear on different lines of text, there is an excellent chance the spacing around them will differ—sometimes strikingly.

Never a pretty sight.

Even the use of a single dash inside a paragraph opens the door for noticeably loose spacing, compared to other forms of punctuation. The dash just seems to draw unwanted attention to itself.

Toward the end of the edit of my last book I went through the manuscript (in the HTML version) with a bloody axe, taking out dashes. Later edits restored some of those dashes. (They are a hard habit to kick.) With just hours to go, I went through again (search set for "ndash") and reduced dashes from 86 to 20. (In 95k words.)

Here are some of the techniques I used.

Substitution: swap in a colon.

Colons and dashes are meant to appear in reverse order.

    This statement leads to a list: item, item, item, and item.
Or the dash version:

    Item, item, item, and item – all coming from the same situation.

You may object to simply subbing in a colon for the dash in the previous sentence. It's a question of eye and ear. But often it's a fast change you can get away with.

If you have more time, you could rewrite the sentence, putting the statement first and the list last, with a colon betwixt 'em. Mainly you give up a bit of drama, which is why you're more likely to see the colon in formal writing, where drama is exchanged for clarity and organization.

Another simple substitution: the comma.

Often, little or no revision is needed to use a comma in place of a dash:

    He wanted to know the truth – so I told him.

Becomes:

    He wanted to know the truth, so I told him.

In the first example, the dash is all about the drama. The second sentence is more low key. In an already dramatic situation, the information that the first character ("he") is at last handed the truth is probably enough drama. And a lot of that is created inside the reader's mind, those good folks doing your job for you.

The reader "jumps the gap" in knowledge so quickly it hardly matters how the text puts it, so long as the information is clearly given. The loss in drama switching from dash to comma is negligible—if the situation is setup with the right amount of juice to begin with.

(Blog writing is generally a bit hyper, which is why I can get away with a dash in the previous sentence. Plus, the text is not justified, so there's no visual penalty.)

If drama is still sought from punctuation, go for the full stop:

    He wanted to know the truth. So I told him.

There, an extra dollop of drama, and no dash.

Even more drama:

    He wanted to know the truth.
   So I told him.
Now the drama extends to a new paragraph. This technique also fluffs up the white space on your page, making the scene read just a little faster. Your eye and ear should tell you when you've used this technique too many times in one book.

These examples show how you can kill a dash with the least bit of rewriting. Save all that extra writing for your next book.

(And this time, try to think outside the dash box, so you don't have to keep cleaning up the mess.)

Fixing the paired dash situation can also be done quite simply, though there are consequences.

One solution is again to swap in commas:

    He ran around all day – from one end of this stinking, crowd-addled island to the other – before arriving home in time to watch Game of Thrones.
Becomes:

    He ran around all day, from one end of this stinking, crowd-addled island to the other, before arriving home in time to watch Game of Thrones.

Separating a chunk of text that includes at least one comma is often the main reason for USING a pair of dashes. Taking them out again by throwing in even more commas puts some demands on the reader. It slows the reading a bit, true, but makes it look more grownup, somehow. More serious. More literary.

Now, going another way:

    He ran around all day (from one end of the this stinking, crowd-addled island to the other) before arriving home in time to watch Game of Thrones.
Using parentheses is a risk, and in this case I think the result is slightly off-putting. If I couldn't have dashes, I would prefer the commas.

Other times, however, a parenthetical remark is perfectly acceptable. It tends to lighten the mood, though, releasing some tension. And it's right on the edge of being mistaken for an intrusion from the author.

Here's another example:

    Bob Randall – no question, the stupidest man in the known universe – ran for office in December, a month after the elections were held.

Becomes:

    Bob Randall (no question, the stupidest man in the known universe) ran for office in December, a month after the elections were held.

With commas:

    Bob Randall, no question, the stupidest man in the known universe, ran for office in December, a month after the elections were held.
If the sentence is to forgo dashes, it appears to work better with a parenthetical remark, the comma version coming off positively comma-clotted. If using parentheses is not always a perfect solution, it is a solution that gets the job done.

There is, as I mentioned, a risk using parentheses you don't face with dashes. In a style-heavy third-person chunk of text it needs to be clear all the attitude is coming from the viewpoint character, and none from the author.

Remember, overuse of parentheses leads to a gushy, diary-like effect, and should probably be avoided—unless that's exactly what you're writing. BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY, for example, is packed with parenthetical remarks, but they seem at home there.

Of course, when you're writing in the first-person, everything belongs to the character, even if the character is mistaken for the author:

    Bob Randall (no question, the stupidest man I ever met) ran for office in December, a month after the elections were held.

Now, I don't mean to leave you with the impression all dashes need to be removed. They work to great effect in short bits of interrupted dialogue:

    "What the – "

As long as the text is too short to reach the right-side margin in the largest reasonable font, the spacing around the dash will be equal and normal looking. Just remember to use the same sort of spacing on both sides of the dash. Don't mix regular with non-breaking spaces (" " in HTML).

If you ONLY use dashes this way (interrupted dialogue), you might want to experiment with the big guys—one em dashes. Up to you.

But I've found embedding those guys inside sentences leads to problems their smaller brothers don't have to worry about. The dash may stick to the back of the first word, while opening a space in front of the next. Or worse, join up in a three-part unit with large spaces front and back.

And I would not recommend using both en and em dashes in the same book.

Personally, I stick with en dashes, keeping them out of the interior of paragraphs whenever possible. Increasingly, I find it possible to do just that.