Make Your Blog Posts Show Up On your Facebook Page… it’s a good idea!

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September 24, 2012
Self Publishing Advice Tulip Field

In an endless field of cool things to do with my website, how do I choose just one? And which tulip is the right tulip for me?

The wonderful thing about the internet is that there are so many things you can do!
The terrible thing about the internet is that there are so many things you can do.

Which things are worth my time?

Learning how all of this is going to help me sell my self published book is a massive time-sink, so I have to be very sure that doing something is worth it.

Based on my research, my observations, my workshop attendances, my groups, my mentors, my website classes, and my habit of listening in on Starbucks conversations – having your posts show up on your Facebook page is worth it.

Posting regularly to my blog – (which is the same as my website)… is worth it. And making sure those posts show up on my Facebook page (page, not profile – tho I could do both) is worth it, because I can make the Facebook page updates happen automatically. I can include automatic tweets with the same process, so that’s worth it too.

You can set up your Facebook page to have your blog posts flow automatically each time you post fresh material using the Networked Blogs app, done through Facebook. The same app will push the posts to your Twitter account.

I first set up HootSuite to do this, one of many free services that will do it automatically. But HootSuite would not let thumbnails of my post images show on my Facebook page and that was a deal breaker for me. I think people are more likely to click through if the picture shows, so I switched to Networked Blogs. I’d gone with HootSuite first because I’d read that Networked Blogs would count my click traffic as their own… but in the end, the thumbnails issue was more urgent.

Any specific details on how these services function goes out of date super fast, because everything is so dynamic on the web. Most of the tutorials I viewed about how to set up Networked Blogs were using the old Facebook interface – although they all still worked. The screenshots were out of date. So the info in the paragraph above may no longer be an issue by the time you are reading this post… but regardless, pick one and move forward so that your posts flow to both your Facebook page and your Twitter account.

Google “How to setup Networked Blogs” or “How to post blogs to my Facebook page” and follow through. Then keep posting regularly, because the heart of all the “How to use a website for Self Publishing” advice is to keep posting regularly, and then make those posts work for you.

If I’m wrong about Hootsuite, let me know!  (And if it would take a massive HTML hack to make it show thumbnails… that doesn’t count.)

 

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Famous People Who Met My Grandfather, Col. C. J. Tippett…. Ann Sothern

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September 21, 2012
Ann Sothern met Col. C. J. Tippett in 1931

Ann Sothern met my grandfather, Cloyce Joseph Tippett, in 1931 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. This picture is from the movie “Cry Havoc” released in 1943. She was blond when my grandfather met her.

In the continuing series about Famous People Who Met My Grandfather, I’d like to introduce Ann Sothern.

Ann was a stand-out beauty in 1931 when Tip brought her a room service tray at the Fort Wayne Hotel, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Tip reported that she was reading a script when she opened the door, dressed in a dressing gown, and that she was performing at the Fort Wayne Theater. Tip and his roommate, Bob, saw the play twice.

Ann Sothern was 22 years old, and Tip was 18. He was working at the Fort Wayne Hotel to support his studies at the Midwestern Aeronautical College, and he didn’t usually deliver room service trays. The hotel was shorthanded that night, and so Tip pitched in and scored this cherished celebrity sighting.

Tip did not fall in love with Ann Sothern, nor did he graduate from Midwestern. He was flying his Curtiss Jenny JN4 in open fields, recovering from boxing matches, and trying to find his way to aviation in the depths of the Great Depression. In a couple more years, he would join the Army. But on that one night in 1931, he brought Ann Sothern a room service tray.

This excellent personal service from my grandfather did not, to my knowledge, feature prominently in Ann Sothern’s life. She had started acting at age 18, and was destined for movies and television, but had started out in theater. She was already appearing on Broadway at the time Tip knocked on her door, but one of her Broadway producers had business ties in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and so the show went on there.

Looking at Ann Sothern’s career in comparison to modern celebrity standards, I can see that she was a hard-working professional. She had no reputation for extravagant living, serial marriages, or extraordinary behavior. She married at a reasonable time in her life and had one daughter. She went from theater to film, and kept working in an amazing number of films until she had a break-out success with the “Masie” films, and then a TV series in her own name.

Many of the famous people who met my grandfather were far more involved in his life than Ann Sothern was. She increased his pocket money by tipping generously for the room service tray, but other than that, she was just a fun story for cocktail hour. I include her in my series because she represents, to me, a person who achieved her goal in a methodical, professional, patient, hard-working, and diligent way. I am surrounded by stories of people who make it to the top of their profession by lightning strikes of luck or coincidence, but what I need instead are stories of people who got there the hard way, by working for it.

Ann Sothern, who was born Harriet Arlene Lake, died of natural causes in Ketchum, Idaho in 2001 at age 92. Ernest Hemingway, who also met my grandfather, also died in Ketchum, Idaho. This seems like a highly suspicious coincidence to me, (well, not really, but as I’ve said before… I don’t get out much.)  What is going on in Ketchum, Idaho?  If I was a famous person, I’d probably take up residence somewhere else. Like, Malibu or the Bahamas. Or Corfu.

 

 

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The Ultimate In Urban Homesteading… Biosphere 2!

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September 19, 2012
Biosphere2 Is the Ultimate In Urban Homesteading

The ultimate in attempting self-sustainable farming away from farmland!

Despite being born and raised in the city, many cities, I have been fascinated with farming.

I tried my hand at dry-land farming. That’s the basis of my book “Just A Couple Of Chickens”, which is funny because it didn’t really go well. But it also didn’t cure me of the farming itch. I’m back in the city again, having flunked farming 101, and now I’m starting to look to urban homesteading. That’s farming my urban habitat, no matter what it may be, using ingenuity and science and techniques the neighbors probably don’t want to know about.

Recently, I realized that my twenty-year-long fascination with Biosphere2 was because it is the Ultimate in Urban Homesteading.

Biosphere2 was an attempt to test what is required to have a self-sustaining enviroment isolated from the planet earth. While the facility is certainly on our earth, it could be completely sealed away from the ground, air, and water.  Sunlight pours in through glass, but sunlight would pour on to anything out in space as well, so that’s part of the plan.

In the 1990s, two teams of people were sealed inside on a mission to see how well it would go to be totally self-sustained. Like, including air and water and all food. They had chickens and goats and crops and five biomes of wild plants and animals. The general media likes to call the mission a failure, but it wasn’t. An experiment is a test, and if it doesn’t make the goal, that’s still good information. The biosphereians were not able to grow and produce enough food to sustain themselves comfortably, as well as suffering other problems, but they learned a lot. They learned not to bring monkeys next time, for instance.

I claim the Biosphere2 crowd as members of my distinguished crowd of failed farmers, which includes the Laura Ingalls Wilder clan.

As I begin my sequel to my first book… which will probably be titled “Just A Couple More”, I’m turning my thoughts to urban homesteading more and more. I’m in the perfect city to do it. Portland, Oregon has a fan base of sustainable agriculture in the city.

Biosphere2 is in Tucson, Arizona and well worth a visit. I think it’s very much like what I would do with urban homesteading if I had 250 million dollars to spare, and about 50 additional million dollars a year for upkeep. My farming plans are smaller in scope, but not in impact.

 

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Self Publishing Book Design – What To Consider

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September 17, 2012
More Than Twenty Tips for Self Publishing A Book

Book design is where we authors put all of our eggs in one basket… for a classy and cohesive presentation.

Book design is an important step in self publishing a book. It is the setting that showcases the polished jewel of your story. Designing your book is where you figure out what you want to do with each of the pages, headers, chapter breaks, and more.

Book design can be a great opportunity to express the message of your story in unique ways, or reinforce your message. So far, I don’t get too weird with my book design because I’m aiming for a polished and professional look… but I can literally do anything I want within the page margins of the book size I’ve selected and the content guidelines of the service I’m working with. But, what do I want to do? Where do I start?

I had no idea how to design my first book, and my friend Sue Waterman was a tremendous help. She did a lovely book design for “Just a Couple of Chickens”, and that was a huge boost. With her fundamental design in hand, I went to the library and checked out ten books, one each from my favorite authors. I lined them up and studied how they designed each of their pages. Then I decided how I would approach it. I also considered the fact that some of my favorite authors have fancy full-time book designers on staff, so their books look pretty swish. I opted for simplicity.

I found a wide variety of left page, right page, headers. Many books had the author’s name on the left and the book title on the right, with page numbers left and right with the header at the top. But some books had the book title on the left and then each applicable chapter title on the right. That takes either a lot of careful design or some fancy programming. It’s super helpful from a reader’s point of view, becasue I can tell right away what chapter I’m in, but it’s more than I want to take on right now from a designer’s point of view. I discovered that I prefer a page number on every page, although most books omit the page number from the first page of each chapter. Books that only listed the right hand page number were not popular with me. I don’t want to go looking for a page number. And I love book dedications, especially the creative ones. I discovered that many of the things I love as a reader, I don’t love as a publisher… like an index, for instance. Lotta work!

I’ll be posting in more depth on individutal book design elements over the next several weeks, and my soon-to-be available book series on How To Self Publish will have even more info, but in the meantime, using other books as a guideline is a great place to start.

Not every page is applicable to every book project, for instance, a fiction novel probably won’t have a bibliography. I feel that book design should always favor readability over fine art, but otherwise, it can be a powerful asset to the book when done well.

This, however, is an enormous amount of work… just when we thought we had “finished” our book!

 

 

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Famous People Who Met My Grandfather, Col. C. J. Tippett…. Ernest Hemingway

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September 14, 2012
Ernest Hemingway coached C. J. Tippett in 1931

Ernest Hemingway coached Cloyce Tippett in Golden Gloves Boxing in 1931. Yale University has an archive of letters from Hemingway to Ezra Pound and posted this picture at their Beinecke Library website.

In my continuing series about famous people who met my grandfather in the course of his aviation pioneering adventures, I am happy to introduce…

Ernest Hemingway!

Actually, Cloyce Tippett would meet Ernest Hemingway twice, and this story is about the first time.

Cloyce Joseph Tippett, known to everyone as Tip, had won a series of Golden Gloves boxing matches held at the YMCA in Port Clinton, Ohio, in 1931. He qualified for the state finals in Chicago and traveled there on a motorcycle with a sidecar, and his friend, Bob.

Ernest Hemingway was in Kansas City, Missouri with his wife, Pauline, waiting for the birth of his son, Gregory. He decided to go over to the boxing match and coach the out-of-town boxers at the finals match in Chicago.

Tip found Hemingway in his corner, seconding the match. Hemingway coached Tip with all of his extensive boxing expertise. Initally, Tip won his matches and was ready to compete for the Golden Gloves Welterweight Championship. Hemingway observed Tip’s opponent and strongly advised Tip to stay out of his way. But Tip was convinced he could win, and he let fly with a right-hand punch that failed to impress anyone, much less his opponent.

When Tip regained consciousness, he went several rounds with a furious Ernest Hemingway, who lectured him for ten minutes about disregarding coaching instructions.

When Tip met Ernest Hemingway again, much later in life, they both remembered their encounter at the Golden Gloves match in Chicago… and how did that second meeting go?  Check back to find out, or sign up to be notified when the book about Tip’s adventures in life, black marlin fishing, and aviation comes out!

 

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One Of The Fabulous Benefits Of The Urban Chicken Movement

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September 12, 2012
Modern Game Bantam Chicken by Tom Anderson

Fairy Chickens! The Modern Game Bantam Club of America has fabulous pictures of these fabulous chickens.

My first chickens were standard, durable, off-the-shelf, “normal” (meaning non-heritage, though shouldn’t normal really mean heritage?)… chickens. They were Buff Orpingtons, which are a hardy, robust, egg-laying meat chicken with beautiful strawberry-blond feathers.

At the time, I didn’t know anything about chickens, and these were a great breed to start with since I was learning-by-doing-it-the-hard-way, which was one of the possible taglines for the book I wrote about my chicken adventures, “Just A Couple Of Chickens”.

My second chickens were a mix of “hatchery choice” and therefore had some rare-ish breeds, most of which were still pretty hardy, like the Blue Andalusian.

But then I reluctantly left my rural adventure and moved to the city. I joined the Urban Chicken Movement (although without any chickens at first). I started to attend regional chicken shows here in the Pacific Northwest and I finally realized that I hadn’t even scratched the comb on the top of the weirdest and most wonderful chicken breeds that exist.

Since city chickens are kept in smaller flocks than most rural chickens, and city chicken keepers tend to have more money to spend on their chickens than rural farmers, the results are “specialty” chickens scratching around elegant coops in urban professional’s back yards. And that means chicken awesomeness for anyone who digs weird chickens, like me.

I’m starting my list for my next chicken adventure. A small flock of three hens in my backyard. Landlord permission, check. Coop prepared, no go. Budget set and saved up for, not at all… so it’s going to be a while. But it will provide the happy ending I am planning for my soon-to-be-available sequel to my first chicken book,  soon-to-be-titled “Just A Couple More”, and if you are interested in being on the release announcement list, please drop me a note on my contact form.

Top of my list are what my friend, Michelle Koppe, calls “Fairy Chickens“, otherwise known as Modern Game Bantams. Also top of my list are Seramas, which are mini-chickens, proud and stunning and fabulous. And expensive.

This is a faboulous benefit of city chickens… the variety and elegance and exciting connections possible. I miss my chicken adventure very much, but I shall console myself with fairy chickens one day very soon.

 

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The Chicago Manual Of Style, a book I love to hate…

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September 10, 2012

(this post is a re-write re-post from 2011…)

As I near the end of writing my manuscript, I realize that the time has come to polish up the grammer, usage, punctuation,
and so I pull out my mammothly heavy copy of The Chicago Manual of Style.
Perhaps, you are thinking, I should have that book out all the time – before I near the end of my manuscript.
Well, I am going to ignore that kind of thinking and move forward.

I can’t pretend that I like The Chicago Manual of Style. I’ve spent too many hours trying to follow all the freakin’ rules and regulations.

Rules like how percentage has to be spelled out if it refers to human beings, but can be a symbol if it refers to anything else unless it is at the beginning of a sentence and depending how big of a number it is referring to.
This is the kind of rule that seems to love itself too much.

The T-Rex of Self Publishing, Chicago Manual of Style

This is how I feel about the Chicago Manual of Style, but I use it… and use it… and use it some more.

To be a rule simply to exist as a rule and not to help mankind in general.
Stop signs, good rule.
Percent rule,  not so much.

The manualfesto is produced by the University of Chicago Press – who is actually a publisher.
They have a section of their website with manuscript preparation guidelines that are a handy basic starting point for formatting a manuscript, even if it isn’t going to be submitted to them.

And I wondered why the University of Chicago got to determine the final word on usage of the English Language… wikilore says it is because they did it first, and they did it most, and they’ve continued to do it.

It started in 1906 with the first edition and is now in a 16th edition and is considered a guide for the proper use of everything in American English.

If I sound a little negative, it’s only because I don’t write right and I have to spend many many hours creeping through the Chicago Manual of Style to put out a decent manuscript.
Their rules of English usage are not obvious to me despite my fluency in the language.

It is also because I decided not to sign up online because if I bought the durn book, then I’d have it and not have to pay again every year. How often would they put out a new edition?  I’d be set for decades.
The very next year, they put out the new edition. All newest editions are automatically accessible in the online subscription, which is also, naturally, searchable online.

If I had the online version, I could be searching the proper usage of the word “Dammit” right now.

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