by Lynne | Sep 25, 2012 | Uncategorized
How Book Research Makes You (and Your Reader) Smarter
When I started researching the Triangle Factory fire, I knew there were a lot of stories hidden in the rubble of the fire. In earlier blogs I discussed the social conditions of the garment workers, the tragedy of the fire itself and the forensics of fire. There are many stories of the survivors and the victims that I might get to eventually, but in this blog I wanted to talk about a real-life hero. Samuel Jesse Battle.
Cormac Mead, my fictional NYPD cop, befriends another cop in the story – in reality, the first black NYPD cop in history. In a bar scene, at McSorley’s Old Ale House (a real pub that still exists) Cormac takes offense when the bartender refuses to serve Battle a drink. Cormac defends Battle and considers him a “brother.” All cops are brothers.
In THE TRIANGLE MURDERS, Battle helps Fiona escape the harassment of Mike Sweeney, the lecherous oaf who does many dirty deeds. After the fire and Fiona is killed, Battle goes on to help Cormac collect forensic evidence.
In actuality, however, Samuel Battle didn’t become a member of the NYPD until three months after the fire. But I couldn’t resist him as a character. Ahh, the power of fiction.
In 1911, NYC’s population was about 2% black. Today, it’s 23%. They also make up 18% of the police population. A hundred years makes a big difference.
Battle went on to become the first black sergeant in 1926, the first black lieutenant in 1935 and the city’s first black parole commissioner in 1941.
Another interesting side note. Fiorello LaGuardia also appears in THE TRIANGLE MURDERS. In the book he is a young interpreter at Ellis Island, which, indeed he was. In 1943, however, during a race riot triggered by the shooting of an African-American suspect by a white police officer, LaGuardia requested Samuel Battle to quell the Harlem area where the riot erupted.
Battle shakes hands with LaGuardia Photo appeared in article in Your Black World by Ayvaunn Penn, June 2011.
Those of you writers familiar with doing research know how often these coincidences occur. What’s difficult is picking and choosing the real-life incidents and characters to enhance your story.
by Lynne | Sep 18, 2012 | Uncategorized
Way to go, Frances!
If you read my last two blogs, you’ll know I digressed from my book research to my book “publishing.” Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to return to THE TRIANGLE MURDERS.
As mentioned in earlier blogs, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was the worst disaster in NYC before the World Trade Center. Another woman besides Clara Lemlich would get involved and eventually help change the plight of workers. Her name was Frances Perkins and she would eventually become the 4th Secretary of Labor of the United States and the first woman to be appointed to U.S. Cabinet.
On Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, Frances was having tea with Mrs. Gordon Norris at the Norris home, a townhouse near Washington Square. They were interrupted by the wail of sirens and bells of fire engines. As the clamor continued, the two women rushed to the front steps to see what was going on. Crowds of people hurried eastward. They followed and saw smoke rising from behind the NYU law school. Waverly Place was blocked with fire engines. Then they heard the screams.
“People had just begun to jump as we got there,” Perkins would remember years later. “They had been holding on until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer.” Voices around her screamed, “Don’t jump. Help is coming.”
But Frances knew that wasn’t true. She knew the fire ladders were too short, the nets useless. She knew there weren’t enough exits for the workers to get out in time. As executive secretary for the Consumers’ League, an organization dedicated to the improving working conditions, Frances knew about fire safety. And she knew that New York factories were extremely vulnerable.
At the time of the Triangle fire, Frances Perkins was only thirty years old, but this tragedy would change her life forever. More than twenty years later, as a loyal supporter of her friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Frances helped join the labor movement and the New Deal coalition. With the Social Security Act, she established unemployment benefits, pensions for many uncovered elderly Americans, and welfare for the poorest Americans. Through the Fair Labor Standards Act, she established the first minimum wage and overtime laws for American workers and defined the standard forty-hour work week. Frances was also largely responsible for federal laws regulating child labor.
An interesting side note. Although Frances died in 1965, she was the target of political opposition as recently as 2012. In her parents’ native state of Maine, she is depicted in a mural displayed in the Maine Department of Labor headquarters. On March 23, 2011, Maine’s Republican governor, Paul LePage, ordered removal of the mural, saying they received complaints about the mural from state business officials that it was reminiscent of “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.” LePage also ordered that the names of seven conference rooms in the state department of labor be changed, including one named after Perkins.
On April 1, 2011, a federal lawsuit had been filed in U.S. District Court seeking “to confirm the mural’s current location, ensure that the artwork is adequately preserved, and ultimately to restore it to the Department of Labor’s lobby in Augusta.” However, according to the article below, a federal judge, ruled in favor of the governor. Appeals will be filed.
See the mural in question on this site:
http://bangordailynews.com/2012/03/23/politics/federal-judge-rules-for-lepage-in-lawsuit-over-mural-removal/
by Lynne | Sep 11, 2012 | Uncategorized
Creating Your Own Print and POD Books
From my last blog you no doubt got the feeling I’m not enamored with self-publishing. Well, let me say, self-publishing e-books is a breeze compared to print versions. Here’s my saga.
My first book, THE TRIANGLE MURDERS, was now on Kindle and Nook (and KOBO, SONY, etc.) I was ready to tackle print. My first stop was BookBaby again. They are happy to print your book. However, they would like to get paid (quite a bit) to format it. Hmm. I, however, in my infinite wisdom, thought to myself: why can’t I do the formatting? How hard can it be? So I sent BookBaby the Word doc. then I selected the paper, font style, and cover finish. Easy? Nuh uh. Let me tell you all the ways I went wrong.
First, the cover for an e-book is not the same as the cover for a print book. One is for light, one is for ink. Also, a print book, unlike an e-book, has to have a back cover (which means copy, photos, whatever you want) and a spine. Duh. So I had the gentleman who did my website help me out here. He designed the back cover and spine, matching the front cover very nicely. He also recreated the front cover for ink. I learned a few more things about cover design. A barcode is placed on the back cover, and if my designer didn’t catch it, some of the new copy I wrote for the back would have been covered by the printed barcode.
All right. I now have the interior document and a lovely exterior front cover, back and spine. (By the way, a formula must be followed to make sure the spine is the correct width. This depends on the paper you select and the number of pages. You knew that, right?)
So, I went ahead and ordered copies from BookBaby (about $8 each with tax and shipping.) When they arrived a few weeks later, I was devastated. Let me count the ways the book went wrong.
First, I chose white paper. Wrong. For novels, cream is better. White made it look like a self-help manual.
Second, there were no headers or page numbers. Of course not. For e-books, you’re asked to remove all headers and page numbers. For print, however, I should have re-inserted. Why didn’t I know this? (More about headers later.)
Third, the margins and gutters were all wrong. Way too big. There were hardly any words on the page, for heaven’s sake.
Fourth, no one mentioned justifying the margins to me, so my right margins were ragged and ridiculuous.
Fifth, the type font was way too light and hard to read.
The only really good thing about the book was the cover. Nice artwork with a lovely matte finish. Still, I was terribly bummed out.
What next? BookBaby wasn’t the way to go, if I still insisted on doing it myself. So I decided to try Create Space. This company has a great system for designing your own interior and exterior and you can actually look at an online copy of the book, page by page. I gathered all my knowledge: picked the cream paper, used correct margins and gutters, justified left and right, picked the right font. And, with much difficulty, added headers (author name on even number pages and book title on odd number pages) plus page numbers. Creating headers is not easy to do with Microsoft Word. Even the trainers at the Microsoft Store at the Mall couldn’t do it. Finally, however, between about five of us, we figured it out. Very cumbersome and not fun.
So now, I’m ready to upload the manuscript to Create Space and see what it actually looks like. After a few “issues” were resolved, it looked good. So I ordered a print proof for a few dollars. POD is truly amazing. How is it possible to print one book at a time and still be cost-effective? But it’s done.
My proof arrived and still had some issues. But now, all I had to do was upload a new copy to Create Space, go through the process again and order a new proof. It took four proofs before I was satisfied with the product. Now it’s available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Hurrah.
One last misstep, before I end, however. My Nook book was on B&N about four weeks before the POD paperback arrived at their site. Suddenly the Nook book disappeared and only the paperback remained. I have since learned that there was much confusion about ISBN numbers. Now maybe you know this but I didn’t. The e-book ISBN should not be the same as the paperback ISBN. I needed a new ISBN when the book became a print book. It’s not resolved at this writing and the Nook book is still not available on B&N.
Maybe I’m just a whiner and got what I deserved. I thought self-publishing was a simple process. The problem was there really isn’t anyone to tell you to watch out for the mistakes I mentioned above. Unless you have a friend who’s gone through this.
Now you have a friend. Me. I’d be happy to advise if you need help. Good luck!
by Lynne | Sep 4, 2012 | Uncategorized
Wanted: Sense of Humor
I digress this week from my normal Tuesday blog. Rather than focus on my book and the research that went into it (the fun stuff!), I’d like to approach a topic that writers may have some experience with: self-publishing. Until about six months ago, I had still hoped to obtain an agent and a publisher and go the traditional publishing route. Well, it was not to be. So I decided to publish myself. Here’s my story.
I started with a company called BookBaby at the recommendation of another author. It seems BookBaby will convert your Word doc to an e-version and send it out to nine different vendors. Never mind that hardly any books sell outside of Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
So that’s where I went. I signed up to get three books (two coming in the near future) distributed in online versions to the nine vendors. The cost was about $545 for all three. For an additional fee, BookBaby will also design a cover for you. Here, I must admit, they did a great job. The cheaper cover design was $150 for each book (more expensive is $279). Okay, not too bad.
BookBaby also assigned an ISBN number (for $19) and steered me towards a certain pricing structure. I actually just guessed at this, based on other e-books.
The process was fairly easy since BookBaby converted the Word files, sent them back in an e-version for me to proof on my Nook. When I gave the okay, voilá, up it went. BookBaby also lets you know when the vendors will get it online. And, after about 60 days will track your sales on a BookBaby dashboard on your account.
Amazon is the quickest to bring it online– about 3 days. Other vendors range from two weeks to twelve weeks. Great, so in a few days, I’m on Amazon! However, there’s something missing: my bio. Evidently, the vendors don’t take the bios from BookBaby. Why? Who knows? So, I do some research and find out that Amazon has a site called Author Central (how are you supposed to know this?) where you can upload bios. They were quick to add it to my book page. Author Central is also the place where you sign up to get paid for the books that sell. Oh right. You get paid! I forgot. So I signed up and now I can check my Author Central dashboard to see how many books are sold. Then wait for the money to pour in.
Now, Barnes and Noble. Another story entirely. B&N still has a bricks and mortar mentality and they don’t hire the best tech people. Trust me. First I had to find the equivalent of Author Central, something called PubIt, not even close to being as easy as Author Central. But here I signed up to receive payment and submit my bio.
My e-book went up online at B&N for about two weeks. Then it disappeared. That was three weeks ago. Since they don’t have people to talk to like Amazon does (24/7) all I could do was email the address they listed on their site. When I finally got a response they told me to talk to BookBaby. BookBaby told me B&N was working on some format issue and should it have back up Friday. . . and Friday. . . and Friday. Still not there as of this writing.
Wait. There’s more. . .
What author doesn’t want to hold a print version of their book? If you think the B&N e-book has been a struggle, wait until you hear about the POD version!
My next self-publishing experience relates to print and POD and my experiences with both BookB aby and Amazon’s company, Create Space. This will be the focus of my next blog. Tune in next Tuesday and weep.
