Tag Archives: ebook

So here’s the deal…

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I took every spare minute I could scrounge up over the last six months and wrote a book. Thanks to the generosity of a few friends, What You Didn’t Learn in College: A Field Guide to Surviving the Cubicle Wars is now working its way through the editing and “beta” process. In a couple of weeks, the plan is to have this little gem available as an ebook through three primary retail channels: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. Eventually, Smashwords will spread that distribution out to other retail outlets like the Apple iBooks, Kobo, Sony, and others smaller venues. I’m still looking into ways to bring the book to market in print that don’t require a) dealing with a publisher or b) cost a small fortune and result in boxes of inventory sitting in my basement.

Rest assured, as soon as the editing is finished and the retail side is up and running, you’ll be among the first to know. In the meantime, there are a few things you can do to support the cause:

1. Follow me on Twitter – @jdtharp

2. Like my new “official” fan page on Facebook and share it with your friends

See how easy that was? No fuss, no muss – Just a few clicks and your good deed for the day is done. Now all you have to do is sit back, relax, and stay tuned.

The hardest part…

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With much respect for Tom Petty, I have to tell you that I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion that the waiting is the hardest part. As far as I can tell from personal experience, it’s the writing that regularly threatens to knock your teeth down your throat and beat you into a bloody pulp of submission… But hey, maybe that’s just my perspective.

PressDoing a day’s work with your brain is exhausting. It’s naturally a different kind of exhausting than baling hay or digging a ditch, but it’s still an activity that will leave you mentally spent at the end of the day. Normally, I’d recommend making sure to take the time to mentally recharge, rest, recreate, and relax, but when you’re in sight of the end, the only thing your exhausted brain wants to do is keep pushing ahead. Even with your eyes glazed over, your brain wants to drag you across the finish line. Or at least across the first of several finish lines you need to get past.

I realize the last two paragraphs probably read like gibberish. In this one instance, I’m going to be OK with that. You see, I’m two chapters away from being able to call what I’ve been madly typing away at for months a First Draft instead of just another Work in Progress. Trust me, that’s an important distinction if only to the guy behind the keyboard. It means that in maybe a week or two the first draft will get its first full length read through, polishing will start, and then it will make its way to several people who have graciously agreed to read a first draft that’s sure to be full of grammar, punctuation, usage, style, and myriad other problems. Then it’s more polishing, revision, cover design, formatting for e-publication, polishing, developing sales descriptions, publication, figuring out how to leverage jeffreytharp.com to sell ebooks on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and trying to wrap my head around whether it’s worth putting a book of snarky observations into a dead tree edition.

Two thousand or so words now stand between me and where I want to be. This isn’t the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end… but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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What Annoys Jeff this Week?

It hasn’t been an awful week. Tomorrow is Friday and I’m looking forward to an outstanding three day weekend and even better company. So there’s your silver cloud, now it’s time for the lead lining:

1. Command Decisions. Maybe I shouldn’t complain about the sheet of ice that covered the parking lots and roads at work this morning. The nuckleheads who piled up or ran down into a ravine trying to get to the gate are the ones who have a real gripe. Since all I did was twist the hell out of my back trying to keep my footing when I got out of the truck, I guess I got off easy. Since I didn’t have any trouble on the county roads getting to work, this might just be a case of the better part of valor being the powers that be saying “yeah, we didn’t get a head start on this one, go ahead and delay arrival by an hour.” By then that fine coating of ice would have been melted and a whole lot of property damage and more than a few personal injuries could have been avoided. Seems like it would have been a no brainer.

2. Books. Now that every DVD and CD I own are safely stored and backed up to disk, I’m starting to eye the one last bastion of physical media in the house… The bookshelves that take up an entire wall of my home office. They’re stacked to overflowing with dead tree editions of every book I’ve read over the last 20-odd years. A handful of them, certainly under a hundred titles, have some significant meaning to me and I’d keep the paper copy regardless. For the rest, though, it would be awfully nice to file them away as an ebook to have on hand “just in case” I ever need some factoids about the 1890s oyster harvest in New York Harbor for instance. Sadly, there is apparently no easy or cost effective way to get from paper to electrons in any kind of large volume without taking inordinate amounts of time. As long as it’s cheaper to buy everything over again as a new ebook than it is to copy what I’ve got already, the paper products won’t be flying off the shelves around her.

I usually shoot for three, but like I said, it hasn’t been an awful week. Check back tomorrow, though, because it’s Friday and something is sure to fly off the hinges 30 minutes before quitting time

A look behind the curtain…

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As a fresh college graduate back in about 2001, I remember having a series of conversations with a few other newly minted professionals wondering why nothing we learned in college actually prepared us for working in a “real world” professional environment. As I recall, the group consensus was that some kind of handbook for new graduates would have been incredibly helpful in making from the transition from full time student to productive member of society. None of us took up the banner at the time. I think we lumped it into same category of conversations that ended up with us wanting to open a brew pub, build a working trebuchet, and buy a rental cottage on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Of our brilliant ideas, the only one that ever came close to seeing the light of day was building the treb – even though we never did manage to figure out how to attach the sling mechanism to the throwing arm, we managed to put together a respectable first effort at medieval siege weaponry.

Those first random conversations about the idea of a snarky little field guide for new grads has kept popping back into my head from time to time. After going to work for Uncle, there seemed to be a limitless supply of cautionary tales I wish someone would have told me before I showed up for my first day. I don’t know that it’s anything that would have changed my career trajectory, but it’s a stack of information that would have fit well into that “nice to know” category before needing to learn some of those life lessons the hard way. I have a few insights that might be useful for those coming up behind me and I like to think I give it enough misanthropic twist to keep the narrative interesting even if you’re not well on your way to a career as a office drone.

For the last few months, one of the projects I’ve been working on behind the curtain has been a first draft of what I suspect is becoming the handbook we first talked about more than a decade ago. I’ve said it here before, but it’s worth saying again: Serious writing is damned hard work, but it’s some of the most personally rewarding work I’ve ever done. That’s probably because it’s one of the few things I’ve ever written purely for my own purposes. Hard as it is to believe, spitting out well-crafted information papers and memos just doesn’t leave me with the same warm glow of self-satisfaction.

If I had to give it a SWAG, I’d say that at 13,000 words I’m probably halfway to having a very rough first draft. I’m shooting for a 25,000 word first draft with the vague hope of polishing that up to about 30,000 words in its final version. Maybe it’ll be ready by summer, maybe it won’t, but Summer 2013 is where I’m really hoping to land this thing as a well dressed ebook on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I’m feeling pretty good about hitting my “half draft” mark yesterday, so if there’s any interest, maybe I’ll post up a sample chapter so you can see how I’ve been misspending a big chunk of my evenings and weekends.

The best thing…

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The best thing about running your own blog is that when you don’t want to write, no one is standing over your shoulder forcing you to do it. Sure, there’s that nagging voice in the back of your head telling you what you “should” do, but listening to him is pretty much an optional exercise.

Since I’m basically vamping this whole post and have no idea why or what it’s going to be about, how long it will last, or what I really want to say, here are some fun facts for you to consider. Since September 2011, I’ve written and published somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 words for books that I’m secretly selling on Amazon under an assumed name (and that are doing respectably well since they’ve had basically no marketing at all, thank you very much). In the same 8 months, I’d estimate I’ve written another 40,000 words here for your reading pleasure. That 40,000 number assumes I post 20 times a month and each post is 250 words, so it’s a lowball to be sure. Add in the few other odds and ends I’ve written for other blogs, and the endless stream of memos that come off my desk at work, and I’d I’m somewhere well north of 300,000 written words in the last eight months.

You’re just going to have to take my word for it that 300,000 is a metric shit ton of words, ok? But you know what? For the last month I feel lucky when I can string a sentence or two together without drooling all over the front of my shirt. I love writing and the sheer power of the written word, but I feel like I’ve poured alot out of my brain and need to take some time and let the well refill. I don’t know if it’s possible to run out of words, but it feels like it is right now. So yeah, I’m officially in recovery mode from a great spurt of fantastically productive creativity. I like to imagine that I’m going to take a month and not do any more writing than is required to keep a fresh face on the blog, but really that’ll probably last all of three days before I have some other slightly warped idea that I can throw at unsuspecting consumers thanks to the wonder of electronic publishing.

Decimating whole forests…

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I can’t imagine how this process would work back in the olden days when books were written and published on paper. Every time I turn around, there something I want to change, an error that needs fixed, and a new draft version number going up on the big board. If I were trying to do this even ten years ago, I would have slaughtered entire forests single handedly… and that would have still been with the help of a good solid word processor. The thought of what it might be like using a typewriter is just too sad for me to contemplate.

I think I could do nothing but edit every day for a month and still find things that aren’t quite right. As it is, I’m hungry, my eyes are sore, and my fingers hurt. And in the back of my head I know there are still mistakes out there that I missed, but will be sure to find next time I read through a draft. It’s infuriating, really, but at the moment, I can barely focus on the screen so the chances of anything productive happening for the rest of the night are between slim and none. Clearly, Hemingway drank because his editorial staff was not nearly large enough to get the job done. What hope does someone way fewer editors and much, much, much much less talent have at getting it done right?

Shot in the arm…

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I’m starting to remember why I always think twice about getting the flu shot. Last year’s shot was perfect; a little soreness in the arm, but no troubles. The year before that, I was sick as a dog for three days afterwards. Today I’m not quite feeling like I got hit by a freight train, but I’m a damned far cry from feeling good. I think I spent more time in the can this morning than I did at my desk. I’m sure you all wanted to know that, right? Since I’ve gotten home, I’ve only been off the couch long enough to let the dogs out and make the still obligatory trips to the bathroom.

If nothing else, today solidified my love of ebooks. Leave a reader upstairs in the can, have the iPad on the couch, and an app on your phone when you’re forced outside with the dogs and everything is perfectly synced to where you left off on any of the other devices. It’s not exactly magic, but it beats the hell out of settling in somewhere and finding that the book you’re about to finish is somewhere across the house.

Kindle…

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I have a Kindle app on my iPad, I have a Kindle app on my iPhone, I even have a two month old Kindle sitting in the living room on the table beside my big comfy chair. Despite all logic to the contrary, I still find myself looking at the new and improved Kindles trying to convolute logic just enough to justify buying a new one. It’s obvious that I absolutely, positively don’t need one. It’s even more obvious when I admit that even though I have an actual Kindle, I use my iPad for 90% of the reading I do. So, yeah, I’m going to do my best to resist the temptation to run out and spend $150 on a new device that’s mostly just going to sit around. Especially since in another few weeks I’ll be hot on the trail of the latest and greatest iPhone.

Sigh. It’s sad that there’s so much tech and so little time. The new Kindles do look slick, though. If anyone is picking one up, let me know how it handles. Maybe you can give me the nudge I need to sell my lightly used current model at a deep discount. Come on. Be an enabler. You know you want to.