Two months ago I posted about my (still unpublished) novel, Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels.
Time for another update.
I still suck as a publishing agent. That’s your update. I’m flat out terrible at it. The book is still a draft. I still want to publish it. But I’m still naught but an “aspiring” author. How embarrassing!
Regardless, don’t give up on me. I’m diligently moving forward. I’m making actual progress. It’s just slow. Maybe I had unrealistic expectations about timing? Even if I’m moving like a sloth climbing Everest I’ll get there.
If you’re interested in “inside baseball” here’s what’s happening.
Since the last post I’ve created a marketing site (you can’t see it yet, it’s not ready for “primetime”). I also created a business bank account. They need each other like peanut butter needs jelly. I inadvertently let it turn into a chicken and egg thing.
But, I finally sorted it. I could never get the WooCommerce plugin to WordPress running here. In the other environment, it does work. I have a web shopping cart; finally!
I’m never sure what works and what doesn’t on my computers. I keep “looking at” a site and it finds cookies from somewhere and says “Hi boss, would you like to see the backend and have no idea what the customer sees”? I’m sure an IT pro would handle this well, but I don’t.
Don’t let AI blackpillers get to you, a great deal of the internet is cluelessly, densely, illogically, stupid. Skynet ain’t here yet.
I thought I might have to “air gap” a computer just for testing? Instead my wife bravely “volunteered” to be a crash test dummy. She used her hardware, went to the page, clicked on a link, made a “test purchase” through the “shopping cart”, fed it credit card info, and we prayed it wasn’t all going to explode.
To my delight, I got an e-mail. “Some customer named Mrs. Curmudgeon has ordered a thing. Ship to the (fake) address Mrs. Curmudgeon typed in. DO IT NOW!”
The bank transaction also worked. I’d just about given up hope I’d ever configure that properly. I almost died with joy when it functioned.
2026 is weird. We wound up taking ten bucks out of one bank (the “cost” of Mrs. Curmudgeon’s fake order) and being delighted (almost shocked) when it arrived (less fees) in another bank (A.C.’s business account). Of course, there were banking fees, because there are always fees. But at least it worked.
That it works is the good news. The bad news is it’s still ugly. It’s tied up in some sort of AI interface that is clearly designed by cyborg crackheads. I can’t figure out how to modify it effectively and the whole thing looks like ass. Actually, it’s not unbearably ugly, it’s just out of my control. It also looks exactly like every other e-commerce site out there. Have you ever wondered why everything looks like it’s selling yoga classes or scented soap? It’s because that’s what the AI / interface thing assumes.
All those online stores. Do they know an easier way? Am I missing something? This is what it’s like dealing with my e-commerce / WordPress / WooCommerce / AI / voodoo interface:
My next planned step was to put my sawhorse rigs and jigs up, just to have something live and know it’s working. I haven’t gotten it to fly yet. You can’t imagine how hard the interface is making it.
For one thing, I can’t figure out how to add shipping. Why is shipping hard? It would seem like shipping is a basic necessary step to selling any physical object on planet earth. But what do I know?
A whole different part of the process is the infrastructure behind e-book. I setup an Amazon KDP account. Amazon went berserk trying to get its fangs in our household Prime site. I was like “woah there, this is an author thing”. It was “All hail Prime. Bow before your Master!”
I tried reasoning and begging and clicking lots of buttons. Eventually I sorted it out. All it took was many additional passwords and logins and two party authorizations and ID checks and probably there are some things I still haven’t set correctly. Just when I’d decided to give up and live in a tree stump as a hermit, it figured out what I wanted. “Hi, I’m Clippy, would you like me to ask you tax questions until you jump off a cliff?”
It wasn’t really Clippy. It was worse.
That said, I think I got it figured out, unless I didn’t.
Beyond all this, there’s the ISBN. Amazon will provide an ISBN but then it’s Amazon’s. The POD (print on demand) people are similar but then it’s theirs.
I want my own. This either wisdom or me being paranoid. (¿Por qué no los dos?) This is a one time expense. As far as I know, once an ISBN is tied to a book it’s tied to it forever.
ISBN’s aren’t free but they’re not insanely expensive. But I’m afraid I’ll “buy it”, click some form wrong, and then it’ll be forever tied to a grocery list or something. Also, I ran out of scratch. This month has included a lot of bills; dentistry, a tragic veterinarian expense, and brakes for my truck. (I’m prefer trucks that stop when you press the pedal.) So there will be a brief pause while I “save up”.
I hope you enjoyed a glimpse of the bizarre interlocking circular firing squad of digital entities that must be configured before a single book is sold. Don’t give up on me. I’ll Don Quixote my way through this thing yet.
It will be on dead tree. It will be on e-book. (Assuming Amazon doesn’t freak out on me.)
It will happen. Just slowly.
Thanks for your patience.
A.C.
P.S. In retrospect, if I ever do something like this again, I might buy an entire new cell phone with it’s own phone number. Everything wants to run via cell phone. Everything interlocks with everything else so my pre-existing blog keeps turning into a complication. Since a phone turns into your identity, would a separate phone help? I’ve never heard of anyone doing it that way but a true IT person probably knows things that I just don’t. It’s a theory at least.
