Jeff McArthur Author Page: February 2014

Sunday, February 23, 2014

My Move

I’ve been away for a couple weeks. I know that’s the wrong thing for a blog to do; we’re supposed to put up something once a week, and I tried to stay true to that, but recently I have been moving to a new apartment. This is my first move in nearly 20 years.

I moved into apartment M in September, 1995. I had come to LA trying to make it in the film industry. Originally, I had planned to work in New York, or maybe some other town that was starting to build an independent film scene, like Austin or Wilmington. But I had a few promises of work here, so I maxed out my credit cards and went into deep debt so I could get out here and work my way up the ladder.

I had a choice between this one and another on the opposite side of town. The other apartment building had a pool and was across the street from a park. This one had no pool, but the building looked nicer, and a beautiful woman who was an occasional actress on Bay Watch lived next door, and was the manager. Of course, I picked the latter. To my credit, it was also down the street from Warner Brothers and Universal Studios, and Disney was just a few blocks down another street. I was also at the intersection of two of the main streets in town. So I stayed. I always wondered how different my life would have been if I had chosen the other apartment; the people I would have met, the connections that would have changed had I been a little earlier or a little later arriving somewhere, or coming home. Would it have made a difference on my life?

My apartment was a studio; one main room with a bathroom and a kitchen. There were quirks about it, such as points on the floor that would creek when I stepped on them. But that didn’t matter. I’d only be in there for a little while. Once I made my money back and had the large income I was expecting, I’d be in a much nicer apartment, and probably in a house.

But the promised jobs didn’t come, and I wound up wandering from temp job to temp job always barely getting by. I kept living very temporary, never making my place into a real home, but always ready to move when I got that big break. Year after year I was on the brink of something big; a job I was great for, a script I had written, a directing job I was being considered for, a movie that was on the brink of getting its financing.

But nothing worked, and I just kept living year after year in a temporary place.

I had a girlfriend who went off to Santa Barbara for college. I spent every weekend there, and when she was off for breaks, she stayed at my place. She wound up there for the first summer, then the second, and finally when she graduated she moved in temporarily until she could find her own place. She got comfortable, and just stayed. Looking back, it was a rather odd situation as not only did we have two people crammed into a studio apartment, but both of us were living temporarily. My things were put away, but despite having lived there for five years, I had never really arranged things in a specific order. Why do that when you’re going to move out? I just kept putting things where they fit in preparation for moving out. My girlfriend just fit her stuff wherever there was room. We both planned on getting a one or two bedroom together once she was making money.

But she had been even more unrealistic than I had been. She had majored in piano performance, but was afraid to play for anyone, so she just jumped from one temp job to the next. She was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, so she had to pay for a lot of medications, and both the disease and the side effects got in the way of getting work. There was also the fact that she couldn’t drive a car.

She wound up blaming me for her life not going anywhere, and broke up with me, but she didn’t leave. Instead, she just slept on the floor and I had to kick her out. Since I was back in the dating world, I organized the apartment to look nice, but the place was still more or less not organized as a regular home. After several bad dates led me to missing the women with whom I had lived, I finally decided it was time to wipe her visually out of my life. I completely re-organized the apartment. I repainted the walls, redid the furniture, replaced most of the pictures hanging on the walls, took everything out of their closets, and repacked them into place. It was the first time I actually decorated the apartment to be a home more than a hotel room. I arranged all the parts of my life into specific areas, categorized by their purposes. My various film projects had their places, the information I had on various connections were in their proper spots, my games were tucked away in one closet while my books were aligned on the shelves organized by genre rather than tossed wherever was convenient. I managed to make more out of the room in that tiny apartment than most people make out of a whole house. The walls were decorated with my photography and other things regarding my life for which I was proud. There was only one spot I did not fill, the area at the front, above the TV; to spot most visible, the place you saw when you first entered. This needed to be the centerpiece of my home.

I decided to let that decision be made while out on a date with another woman of whom I was very fond. She and I were supposed to go to Venice Beach and I decided that while we were there, I would choose something with her, and that would become the centerpiece of that wall. Before we did, this woman suddenly told me she had no interest in being with me anymore. I was blown apart, especially as she had been telling me not a week earlier that we were extremely close kindred spirits.

I felt more alone than I ever had before or ever had since. El Nino was going on at that time, so it was raining all the time. My job had to temporarily lay me off as they didn’t have enough work, and two films I had been developing which were supposed to be funded were both knocked down. I had a nervous breakdown, and never left my apartment for close to three weeks. I tore down many of the things I had put up, trashing the home I had created. I got out of bed only to lie in the bathtub where I laid in it so long the water dissolved out. Sometimes I didn’t make it back to my bed, I just lay on the ground naked and cried.

For a long time I didn’t re-organize my apartment. Everything felt hopeless. But after several more weeks I began putting things back together. As I did, I found a couple games I had borrowed from a friend years before. I had borrowed them for the girlfriend who lived with me. She had put it with her stuff she left behind when she moved out, and I was embarrassed that I still had it. I took it to a friend, who told me the place he worked was hiring, and I got a great job making training videos. Life slowly came back together, and I put together a feature film. The group who made the film came together much like a family, and it was one of the most pivotal times of my life. We used the apartment as four different places, redecorating it for each location. Though it was one room, it was made to look like several, and helped the film look like it had a much higher budget than it really did. When the movie was done, I had a poster printed out and put that at the head, just above the television, which itself was given to me by the lead actress. It was a reminder of how my life was put back together.

I was later laid off by the job, and I used the severance money to build a photography studio in the apartment. I kept half of it for my sleeping quarters, and used the other half as an area to hang backdrops, place up set pieces, position props, models, etc. I sometimes turned it around and used the sleeping area as a backdrop when it was appropriate. Large sections of the shelves were used for photography, and a section was opened up to something else I was doing more recently, writing. Research went in one area, completed pages went into another, and books I was reading took up a shelf that had previously been used for DVDs. I was still trying to succeed in the film industry, but it had let me down so many times, I was starting to turn to other areas.

One such area was games. I had also invented a few games, and I had a couple of the larger cabinets filled with boxes of pieces that I occasionally used to create those. I had another large closet filled with my ever-growing collection of board games.

Most of the time I didn’t notice how the place looked. I’m so lost in my head when I write that I lose track of the world around me. But I began to notice a bit more when Jamie came into my life. She lived miles away, far into the valley, but when she came over, she noticed the way the place looked, so I tried to keep it orderly for her. She then got a job right next to Warner Brothers, so she “temporarily” moved in with me until she could find another place nearby. We just enjoyed living together, and found it to be a waste to spend more money on another apartment, so a couple week’s stay turned into a couple years.

Jamie was used to living in small spaces. Ever since she moved to LA, she had rented rooms from people rather than having an apartment of her own. So she didn’t have a problem squeezing her things into areas where I didn’t already have my stuff, and keeping them out of the way of the photography “studio.” She organized the place so it both looked better and operated more efficiently. She got a new bed to put in the place, and some new decorations to make it feel like our place. But it really wasn’t. No matter what we did, it had been my place that she squeezed into. She was still more like a long-term guest than a person who lived there. It was probably partially because of this that she kept looking for other places to live, especially when she got other jobs further in LA.

But none of the places were quite right for her, either because of financial or other considerations. But when a one bedroom opened up down the hall in our same building, we knew we had to take it. It’s been a struggle getting the money together for the initial move, but we’re making it happen. There’s far more room and we can live much more like normal people. We can even have people come and stay on our couch without it being strange that they’re sleeping right next to us. We can have parties and host them in the living room without them seeing our entire lives or sitting on our bed; it’s amazing!

Since she had moved into my place before, as we planned this new place, she was in charge of organization. She plotted out each room and moved her things in first so it was our place rather than mine with her as a guest. She arranged a corner of the living room to be my office where I have DVDs and movie supplies on one side of me, and books and research on the other to support my growing writing career. And best of all, I can write late at night without keeping her up.

When I went to the utilities department to change our address, they told me someone would be by this week to turn off the power. I couldn’t help but think that it was this act that began my living there. Someone in 1995 came and turned the power off. And now, this week, someone will be coming by to turn it off.

I won’t lie; this new place is far better than the old place. There’s even more light that comes in. But I have to admit, I feel very sentimental to the place. This transitional home turned into my safe haven for nearly two decades, and now it’s been left behind. Whenever I think of it, I’ll always remember the saying from a poster I hung up at the head of the bed during my photography phase. It said, “Not all who wander are lost.” Living in such a small, low cost place gave me the ability to wander in life and seek out my interests. I have finally found it in writing books and designing games. I felt lost many times, but as long as I had apartment M to call home, I was only wandering.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

My method for writing nonfiction

I was having drinks with a friend when she asked me how I put a nonfiction book together. I thought it was an odd question because, like often happens when people ask us about things we do all the time, I thought everyone knew. I took my knowledge for granted. In my mind it was just a simple process of getting the information and putting it down in a narrative way.

But the more I got to telling her what I do, the more I realized how complicated it is, so I decided to put down, albeit a bit briefly, what my process is for writing nonfiction.

Obviously, the first step is getting the information. The very first things I need to do is get the bare basics of the story; the one page pitch, as it were, to figure out what the overall story is, why it’s worth telling, and how I would describe it briefly to someone. This often winds up being the majority of the back cover description. I take the time here to find out if there’s enough information to cover a full length book. Sometimes a topic is fascinating, but you can’t make a full book out of it without making things up.

The next thing I do is dive into the information. I will read everything and watch ever documentary I can. I take sources of information I already knew existed, including experts on the topic, and I also look at the sources of the books, documentaries, etc. to add to the list. For instance, I’ll look in the bibliographies of books to get names, places, etc. Of course, I’ll also Google information as well, though I don’t simply take the information I see on the internet. Again, I look at the sources and I go to look at them.

I don’t write for a long time. I’ll spend weeks diving through all of this information. The difference between writing fiction and nonfiction is in fiction you lay back and think; in nonfiction you sit up and read.

When I finally feel I understand the topic well enough, I still don’t start writing. I make a very basic outline of how I intend to approach the topic. I then take that outline and break it down into chapters. This is the most important organizational tool I can use. Though these chapters do usually wind up being the actual chapter breaks in the book, they don’t have to be.

The reason for my breaking the book into chapters at this point is simply to categorize where all the information will go. It’s too much to tackle all the information at once, so I need to have a category for each chapter. I actually create a separate folder in my computer for each chapter, and I’ll drop the information for that chapter only into that bin. Sometimes I’ll have physical folders for each chapter for the physical information I have as well.

For example, in the book I’m currently writing, Two Gun Hart, I have a folder in my computer with the title of the book and the word “Chapters”. Inside of this folder are 13 folders, each with a title number and name. The book is being organized by dates, so I put those dates on the folder names. This makes it MUCH easier for me to know where new information goes. If I find something that happened in 1933, it goes in the chapter titled “1932-1939”.

I can then bite off smaller chunks at a time. So when I write chapter 1, I’m thinking only of the information in that chapter. Everything is made much easier. The one problem with this is that it causes me to repeat myself in various chapters, or mention something in one chapter, then not follow it up in a next.

This fixed in the next step. Once all the information has been placed in the appropriate chapters, and each chapter is “written” on its own, I then go through the whole book, reading through every chapter, and making corrections as I go along. This is when I connect thoughts from one chapter to the next, take out places where I repeat myself, etc. When this is done, I have a first draft.

The next step is basically going through the book and making corrections the way you would with any story; correcting grammar and making the flow of the story work, making everything clear, improving the way characters are developed, etc. I call this step smoothing out.

So far, I’ve had two basic types of narrative in my historical books, one I like to call linear, the other I like to call character pieces.

Pro Bono – The 18-Year Defense of Caril Ann Fugate was a linear book. The story began with the murders that started the whole incident, then went through the investigation, the preparation of the defense, the first trial, between the trials, the second trial, and on to the appeals. I broke up the chapters into these parts of the story, putting in everything I knew about the media and the public during the murder spree in one folder, everything I could find about the investigation in the next, the trial transcripts into their respective trials, etc.

The Great Heist was a character piece. Though there is a linear story, it’s told through describing each character and telling about their part in the story. I bookended it with the first chapter being the bank robbery, and the last chapter being how it was solved and the wrap up. I then had a folder with each main character’s name and I put in all the information about that person in that folder. Since these characters each took part in one aspect of the story, I was also able to divide up the story elements into their names. For instance, Gus Winkeler was responsible for getting the money back to authorities in Lincoln, Nebraska, so the information about the return of the money went into his folder. Al Capone was dealing with the mobsters who robbed the bank, so information about the mob went into his folder, etc.

As you go through the book, you get to know the subject matter intimately, so you’ll just know what goes where, even when some things overlap, as they did in The Great Heist where sometimes a couple characters did the same thing. However you do it, organizing the information is the main part of creating the story. The next part, smoothing it out, is just as you would with any story, and is really the easy part, in my opinion.

Monday, February 10, 2014

Releasing to Multiple E-Readers

Today was spent releasing my book The Great Heist to all the e-readers (in addition to Kindle, in which it was already available.) I was intending for this pots to be the announcement that it's available on all these readers, but I had forgotten what a bureaucratic mess it all is, and how long it takes for the book to become available on the other sites.

First, I should explain the top places to release your e-book. They are:

Kindle

Smashwords

Google Play

Goodreads

Drivethru Fiction

Scribd

I have placed them in the order in which I do them based on a delicate balance of value for you vs. how much of a headache they are. Below I list each one and how I feel about them.

Kindle is the number one spot for independent writers/publishers. It just is. There are other places with a great independent spirit, like Smashwords, but the simple fact is that Kindle makes it easiest for independent writers/publishers, and they help promote them the most. By placing our books in Amazon alongside larger publishers' books, we get the same respect and potential sales as anyone else. Amazon also recommends our e-books when someone buys something similar. But most important to this particular blog post, the publishing process is easy. First of all, it's a very streamlined process. The amount you need to do to prepare your document is rather minimal, and when you upload it, their program will help fix little problems you may have, and you can check it right away, seeing how it looks on various readers immediately. And if there are any problems, you can call them and they'll actually talk to you! Many other distributors complain about Kindle having unfair competitive policies, but there's a reason they're ahead, and rather than complain about them, other e-readers and distribution channels should learn from Kindle and maybe do what they do. It's for these reasons that I typically start my books on the KDP Select exclusive deal with Kindle for the first 90 days before making it available on other readers. I'd love to open up to the other sites right away, but Kindle is just simply the most supportive and easiest to deal with.

Smashwords is the second place to go. And in some ways, one could go with just being on Kindle and Smashwords and be fine. When you publish something through Smashwords, it goes out to just about everyone except Kindle, so everyone you want to carry the book has it. It's run by Mark Coker, probably the largest supporter of independent books. It's because he's so supportive of independent artists that I want to go to Smashwords first, but in order to upload to them, a publisher has to go through a whole bureaucratic process that's extremely complicated and frustrating. The good news is that when you finally get it right, it's formatted for a whole bunch of different readers, so you only have to do it once. This is true, and it's nice to not have to do it multiple times, but by the time you prepare this one file, you'll feel like you've done it a bunch of times. Smashwords provides a guide to help you prepare your document... that's literally more than a hundred pages long. And if you get lost, there's no one to call; just a note that tells you that it's wrong after you upload it. You can't even preview it to see what it looks like and where the problem is exactly. The excuse for this is simply that it's publishing, and therefore complicated. I would accept that if it wasn't for the fact that Kindle is so easy to publish onto. I don't blame Coker or the team at Smashwords. I think they're doing their best to make it easy on us. I think it's the fault of the companies it gets distributed to, like Barnes & Noble, Sony, etc.; these companies that complain about Amazon having unfair business practices rather than learning from them and improving their services.

Google Play is fast becoming an important distribution platform, particularly because of the Android tablets they sell to. Also, the way Google is growing, it's got its fingers in many areas. Personally, I like the convenience. I know some people feel like it intrudes on their personal lives, but I really like the way I can connect all my various projects and jump between them with ease. I can have a book trailer on Youtube that connects to these blogs which connect to my calendar which connect to my email, etc. And now my books can be part of this mix. The biggest problem has been a very poorly organized site with which to upload the books. Every single time I used the system I had problems. Links were broken, instructions were incorrect, it was a mess. Worst of all, they had no phone number to call for help. I could email and maybe get a response sometime that week, but that's all. I often begged the people to give me some phone number because the issues were usually easily solvable in less than a minute over the phone, but they took more than a month by email. I write all this in past tense, however, as they seem to be solving their problems now. Let's hope it gets better... and that they start to have phone support!

Goodreads is of course the place where people generally go to talk about books, but they now have an option to purchase e-books directly on their site. This is a great thing, as the majority of people on there are book fans. If they can instantly purchase books they've been recommended, so much the better. The problem with this is that these services are just being implemented, and it needs vast improvement to work properly. Like Google Play, there's no phone service, and issues that could be resolved in minutes take over a month.

Drivethru Fiction is a personal favorite of mine, but the number of people who know about it is limited. It's nice because it's connected to several other game and comic book sites, so it attracts a lot of fantasy and sci fi fans. What's wonderful for writers is that they have a great method of advertising. Every month you get a certain number of points you can use to advertise. You can get more points by doing various activities that help the community, such as reviewing other people's work. Also, don't let the name fool you. Just because it says "fiction" doesn't mean you can't sell non-fiction on it.

Scribd hardly needs mentioning if you do Smashwords. It's supposed to already be distributed there if you go through Smashwords. However, I haven't noticed many sales through Scribd when I went through Smashwords, but I have seen sales when I put things on directly, so I always upload here separately. Scribd is a great place to get noticed. Every time I upload I instantly get dozens of reads. I usually have 10 to 20 before I switch from the uploading screen to the reading screen. It seems to be the perfect place to get people to notice you so they then start purchasing. Plus, it's easy to upload! No bureaucratic nonsense! Google, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Goodreads, these guys could learn a few things from Scribd and Drivethru Fiction.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Social Media and Building a Platform

I'll be honest with you, I hate dealing with social media in regards to my business. I would far rather be writing, completing a book or beginning a new one. After all, it's the product I want people to see, not my online persona.

But alas, I must build my platform through an online presence in order for my books to have any chance to be noticed. Connecting through social media goes far further today than advertisements, especially in the book world. And so I set about having an online presence on several networks. At first it was chaotic and scattered. I did it when I could, but in doing this I would put it off, forget to do it, or do something that was half-assed. I often entered conversations and disappeared from them.

I had to make a plan that would be effective. The biggest obstacle for me is the way I work. I'm the sort of person who can sit down and concentrate on one project for hours and hours. If I stop, getting back into it takes a huge amount of time and makes the process very inefficient. So I finally settled on one day a week in which I would work on social media, Sunday. I created a list and go down it. The most important things are at the top, and the priority list drops the further you go down the list. It's too long a list for right now. Perhaps I'll put it up another day. But here's the gist of it:

Blogger: I write the blog. Today, it's this one. I do this first because it has to be kept up each week. I then put the link to the blog on the connected Google + page, the Twitter feed, and a Facebook group I created called Bandwagon Books. I also place it on my Goodreads blog, and occasionally try to put it on Reddit.

Scan social media networks: I then go through my various social media networks to see what everyone else is talking about, and I respond to them. It's important to not always be about yourself, so I go in and find things people are talking about and only talk about them, not about myself. If they're interested in me, they'll come check me out.

Update projects: I then go into each major project and upkeep the social media and websites for them. This includes blog posts, connections I've made, and groups I've joined.

Lately, I've discovered one major flaw. I've been doing this all under Bandwagon Books. The reason I did this was to keep my business separate from my personal life and other projects. I wanted to keep my own name free to post about various things. However, it's recently become clear that people are looking up authors when they like their work. They're not going to look up Bandwagon Books so much as they're going to look up Jeff McArthur.

Therefore, I'm going to have to post as myself. I don't want to drop this blog nor anything associated with Bandwagon Books because I think it's a good way to make a distinction that I'm writing about publishing. So what I'm going to do instead is do the same blog as myself and as Bandwagon Books. That way I'm posting in both places without overworking myself. (Spreading myself more thin is the last thing I need.) So if you see this blog post up twice, it's because I'm putting it in both places. Every now and then I'm sure I'll have separate things to post, but most of the time, it's up there both times so one can find me either as an independent publisher or as an author.

I'll probably be connecting with people more as myself, too, but I haven't figured that one out completely yet. Bandwagon Books sounds more like an authority figure, and you know what it's about just by its title. However, it's good to get my name out there. So that might wind up being double the work. I'll let you know how it goes.