How I Came to Write
By Kathy Pratt
My interest in books began early in my life. I was read to by my parents and grandparents, and we didn’t have a television until I was around ten years old, so I listened to stories on the radio until I was able to read. I still don’t watch television, preferring instead to curl up on the sofa with a good book while everyone else is tuned into the TV.
I grew up in Indianola, Iowa, and got my first library card in the second grade. The library in our town was a red brick Carnegie library. As a little girl, the ceilings looked so tall to me that they seemed to stretch up to the sky. The first book I checked out was Tom Sawyer, followed in a few days by Huckleberry Finn. I’d tried to check them both out at the same time, but the librarian wouldn’t let me, thinking it would take me weeks to read them. I quickly became a voracious reader and would read everything I could find written by authors I discovered. I was in the fifth grade when I read every book the library had by Edna Ferber.
I spent my last Iowa summer curled up in an old wing back chair reading Gone With the Wind over and over again. We moved to California when I was fourteen and I started high school that year. One of my first classes was American literature, and I discovered John Steinbeck. I’ve read every book and short story he wrote at least once, some of them several times. My uncle lived in Northern California and we’d make the drive up the San Joaquin Valley several times a year. I’d pass the miles by staring out the car window and making up stories about the people and places we passed along the way. Many of those stories were inspired by something I’d read in a John Steinbeck novel.
My interest in writing started in junior high school when I began to be assigned creative writing lessons. Those classes were some of my favorites all through school. In college, my instructors encouraged me to write but I didn’t begin to seriously pursue writing as a possible career until the last five years. Prior to that time I’d written articles for nursing journals, travel logs for the newspaper, and short stories. Initially I made all the mistakes a writer can make. I figured all you had to do to write a novel was...write it. So, that’s what I did. I wrote the novel of my heart, and once it was completed, I promptly sent it out to a couple of houses and was just as promptly rejected. Thoroughly discouraged, I found an agency that charged ME to read my book and consider whether to represent me. Three hundred dollars later I received another rejection letter with a small paragraph of suggestions on how to edit it. Discouraged, I put that manuscript away and gave up on becoming a writer. Instead, I returned to college with the goal of getting a degree in English Literature.
I am a Registered Nurse and have worked more years than I care to admit to, in just about every area of nursing from rehabilitation to drug detoxification, to ICU/CCU, and now hospice.
This has provided me with a wealth of first-hand knowledge on human behavior under extreme circumstances. I draw from these experiences when I am creating my characters and situations in my works. In planning for the second half of my life, I returned to school to become a teacher. A couple of years into my post-graduate studies I decided that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I really wanted to be a writer--I just didn’t know how to go about it. That’s when I discovered extension programs in colleges, writer’s conferences, writer’s organizations, and critique groups. I’ve taken writing courses at UC Irvine and California State University Fullerton, and am a member of Romance Writer’s of America. I’m also an active member of the Orange County Chapter of RWA. I find my Monday evening critique group meetings invaluable.
My brothers and my mother are also writers. Mom has been published in retirement magazines and Chicken Soup for the Soul books. My two brothers are newspaper columnists, following in the footsteps of my uncle, who was also a newspaper columnist.
I prefer writing women’s fiction. Medicinal Remedies is a medical thriller with romantic elements. The protagonist, Kristy, is a Registered Nurse.
Kathy Pratt is a registered nurse who holds a BSN degree and PHN (Public Health Nursing) certificate. She spent fourteen years working the night shift in an Intensive Care/Coronary Unit in a Southern California hospital, where MEDICINAL REMEDIES was born. She returned for post-graduate studies in English Literature and transitioned into studying fiction writing at both Cal State University, Fullerton and UC Irvine. Pratt is the co-author of CONVERSATIONAL ENGLISH (published by Gummerus Publishing in Finland) and has been published in The American Journal of Nurses, the Sacramento Valley Mirror, and in the Whittier Daily News. Married with two adult children, Pratt currently resides in Fullerton, CA where she works part-time as a hospice nurse and pursues her writing career during the rest of her waking hours.
Medicinal Remedies by Kathy Pratt is available for purchase at the DPPstore (www.dppstore.com)
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
You Are Your Own Best Marketing Rep!
EXPOSURE
Get out there and kick some book -- yours!
Exposure, is exposure, is exposure. I just channeled my inner Gertrude Stein and I’d like to encourage you to channel yours. In all the previous newsletters from this past winter, every marketing tip has centered around exposure in one way or another. Albert Sterner said, “There is art – and there is advertising.” And that’s true…to an extent. But unless you’re writing in a vacuum (see Newsletter from December 2, 2005), art and advertising must share the same path.
Advertising, public relations, marketing – words that make most writers cringe are vital to an author’s success, at least in terms of getting their book(s) sold and read.
The best way to get exposure is to expose yourself – any way you can!
Make a commitment (again, the Newsletter from December 2, 2005) to taking one small step a week towards marketing your book (see Newsletter from December 12, 2005). Keep on taking steps thereafter (Newsletter, December 19, 2005). Network, network, network (Newsletter, November 28, 2005) – anyway, anywhere, anytime, with anyone you can. Jump into action and start locally (Newsletter, January 18, 2006). No matter where you market your book, you are getting your book and your name out there!
DPP author, A.J. Alise, has been a super action wiz when it’s come to getting the word out about her book – and she’s done it very simply. Below is a short email she sent out to all her email contacts *(this is printed with the author’s permission). Nothing fancy, but a great pitch for her book, for eBooks, and inviting people to visit the DPPstore (she also included a hyperlink in her email to the DPPstore):
Get into the world of ebooks today. It's the computer age, so I hear and If you've never downloaded an ebook why not start with my novel CRIMSON ICE. It's very easy reading and please give me feedback, if you've ordered it or read it. Thanks for your support
Alise has also gone the local action route, getting herself interviewed in local newspapers and on radio stations. She has also sent her book out for review. The payoff? People have visited the DPPstore and bought her book.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, when Gwendolyn says to Cecily, “I never travel without my diary. One must always have something sensational to read on the train.” This is a great reminder to me – and hopefully to you, dear author – to travel with your book (on an eReading Device), or business cards or postcards of your book. They make for great conversation starters, and you never know who you’ll run into who will be interested in you and your book!
Exposure doesn’t have to come in the form of a grand campaign. It can unfold little by little, step by step, and relatively simply…with a little effort and ingenuity we can all be our own best marketing reps.
Get out there and kick some book -- yours!
Exposure, is exposure, is exposure. I just channeled my inner Gertrude Stein and I’d like to encourage you to channel yours. In all the previous newsletters from this past winter, every marketing tip has centered around exposure in one way or another. Albert Sterner said, “There is art – and there is advertising.” And that’s true…to an extent. But unless you’re writing in a vacuum (see Newsletter from December 2, 2005), art and advertising must share the same path.
Advertising, public relations, marketing – words that make most writers cringe are vital to an author’s success, at least in terms of getting their book(s) sold and read.
The best way to get exposure is to expose yourself – any way you can!
Make a commitment (again, the Newsletter from December 2, 2005) to taking one small step a week towards marketing your book (see Newsletter from December 12, 2005). Keep on taking steps thereafter (Newsletter, December 19, 2005). Network, network, network (Newsletter, November 28, 2005) – anyway, anywhere, anytime, with anyone you can. Jump into action and start locally (Newsletter, January 18, 2006). No matter where you market your book, you are getting your book and your name out there!
DPP author, A.J. Alise, has been a super action wiz when it’s come to getting the word out about her book – and she’s done it very simply. Below is a short email she sent out to all her email contacts *(this is printed with the author’s permission). Nothing fancy, but a great pitch for her book, for eBooks, and inviting people to visit the DPPstore (she also included a hyperlink in her email to the DPPstore):
Get into the world of ebooks today. It's the computer age, so I hear and If you've never downloaded an ebook why not start with my novel CRIMSON ICE. It's very easy reading and please give me feedback, if you've ordered it or read it. Thanks for your support
Alise has also gone the local action route, getting herself interviewed in local newspapers and on radio stations. She has also sent her book out for review. The payoff? People have visited the DPPstore and bought her book.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, when Gwendolyn says to Cecily, “I never travel without my diary. One must always have something sensational to read on the train.” This is a great reminder to me – and hopefully to you, dear author – to travel with your book (on an eReading Device), or business cards or postcards of your book. They make for great conversation starters, and you never know who you’ll run into who will be interested in you and your book!
Exposure doesn’t have to come in the form of a grand campaign. It can unfold little by little, step by step, and relatively simply…with a little effort and ingenuity we can all be our own best marketing reps.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
The Advantages of eBooks, by Michael Hart
The Advantages of eBooks
By, Michael Hart, founder of The Gutenberg Project
The Advantages of eBooks:
1. Readability
2. Searchability
3. Quotability
4. Error Correction
5. Ease of Storage
6. Permanence
1. Readability
The more readable, the better.
For the general reader the greatest advantage of eBooks is most likely to be simply readability, the advantages of being able to have the words appear in the fonts and font size most suitable to the reader, not to mention a similar ability to adjust margination and pagination to also make the books' general appearance of what readers prefer as possible.
The less these abilities are present in your eBooks the less they possess the qualities that make them eBooks.
2. Searchability
The more searchable, the better.
Most readers regard the ability to find certain chapter or page indicators of great value, hence the whole idea of "bookmarks" that has been with us pretty much all of the history of books. One of the great advantages from the changeover to bound books rather than scrolls is an ability to jump directly from one place in the books to any other place, as long as it isn't on the other sides of the pages being read at the moment.
eBooks have extended the usual "ability to find certain chapter or page indicators" to the ability to find your specific word or phrase, not just an approximate place, but the exactly spot you are looking for.
The less these abilities are present in your eBooks the less they possess the qualities that make them eBooks.
3. Quotability
The entire idea of books is to communicate.
Most books become famous because people talk about them with their friends, which usually involves quotation as an element of the conversation.
With the original eBooks you could simply cut and paste the quotations you wanted in an effortless manner.
The harder it is to quote from a book, the less value a book has to anyone who wants to pass on information.
4. Error Correction
Perhaps the greatest utility of eBooks as compared to a similar paper source is the ability to correct errors.
Trying to correct an error in a paper book is usually a losing proposition, whether you are simply trying to do a correction in your own edition, or trying to get some publisher to correct an error in future editions.
eBook publishers can fix errors literally overnight, as people send them in.
Paper publishers often leave the same errors in edition after edition for decades, even centuries, instead of a new edition actually containing a newly proofed edition of the original text.
To the extent that any eBook is not correctable, it may be considered to have less "eBookness."
5. Ease of Storage
The standard DVD can contain nearly every word that you can find in the books of the average public library and the multi-level DVDs can obviously hold twice as much-- four times as much if double-sided and double-layered.
*
The standard DVD holds ~4.3 usable gigabytes per layer.
*
The Blu-Ray DVD starts with ~25 gigabytes, and had some added potential via a layer of 8.5 G, totaling 33.5G.
Thus 30 of these would hold 1 Terabyte. 15, if they release a 2-sided version.
*
The next generation DVD has already been designed, with about 1 Terabyte of total storage, so just a few should be able to hold every word in the Library of Congress-- a few more for the British Library.
*
Think of the savings in the cost of the shelving if not the simply the cost of the books. . . .
Not to mention the time and energy savings when using a book from such a collection.
*
Many eBook producers use formats that are not so easily storable on your own media.
To the extent that these eBooks are not storable or not compressible, they lose their quality of eBookness.
6. Permanence
We have all heard the headlines published by olde media that information stored on computers is impermanent and is lost to future generations when the olde computer is no longer available.
This is only the case when the information was kept via out of general circulation via some secret encryption.
Plain text eBooks don't cause those kinds of problems.
The paper publishers tout their medium as permanent yet every year we hear that thousands of library books were disposed of because they were simply falling apart.
When new paper books are published, it takes only about five years for them to become so scarce that when local libraries have one lost, damaged, or stolen, that it is not replaceable.
Of all the things published in 1971, most are lost, and pretty much not retrievable except to the experts in an assortment of interconnected archives around the world, but not so with the first eBook as published by Project Gutenberg in the earliest days the Internet started its journey from laboratory experiments to reach out to the rest of the world.
Once an eBook is published in this manner in either the plain text or plain markup modes, the odds are it could survive indefinitely.
To the extent that an eBook does not have this quality, it is just that much less an eBook, as it has that much less a chance of survival.
Just as the more non-standard an email is the less will read it, the more non-standard eBooks will be less read by the general population.
Of course, that is the purpose of many of the formating decisions by various eBook publishers today, to keep an eBook out of the hands of the general population.
The entire idea of keeping people from being able to do all the things listed above is the general result of an astonishing philosophy that the most important aspect a successful eBook must have is that it can't be accessed in the usual manners, as that would allow copying.
Of course, this presupposes several things:
1. That enough people would only want to have illegal copy access that this would threaten the eBooks' success.
2. That it would be possible in the first place to make up some kind of protection that could not be cracked by an enterprising young hacker in its first few weeks.
3. These protection modes have not been intentionally made crackable by government enforcement agencies. [Such as the widely touted Lucifer, DES Data Encryption Standard that was intentionally weakened by some U.S. Government agencies so they could be sure to break into anything a person or corporation might ever store on a computer.]
***
The Advantages of eBooks are:
1. Readability
2. Searchability
3. Quotability
4. Error Correction
5. Ease of Storage
6. Permanence
The greater extent that an eBook eliminates the ability on the part of the potential reader to accomplish these the less the eBook has of the general qualities we have come to know as "eBookness."
By, Michael Hart, founder of The Gutenberg Project
The Advantages of eBooks:
1. Readability
2. Searchability
3. Quotability
4. Error Correction
5. Ease of Storage
6. Permanence
1. Readability
The more readable, the better.
For the general reader the greatest advantage of eBooks is most likely to be simply readability, the advantages of being able to have the words appear in the fonts and font size most suitable to the reader, not to mention a similar ability to adjust margination and pagination to also make the books' general appearance of what readers prefer as possible.
The less these abilities are present in your eBooks the less they possess the qualities that make them eBooks.
2. Searchability
The more searchable, the better.
Most readers regard the ability to find certain chapter or page indicators of great value, hence the whole idea of "bookmarks" that has been with us pretty much all of the history of books. One of the great advantages from the changeover to bound books rather than scrolls is an ability to jump directly from one place in the books to any other place, as long as it isn't on the other sides of the pages being read at the moment.
eBooks have extended the usual "ability to find certain chapter or page indicators" to the ability to find your specific word or phrase, not just an approximate place, but the exactly spot you are looking for.
The less these abilities are present in your eBooks the less they possess the qualities that make them eBooks.
3. Quotability
The entire idea of books is to communicate.
Most books become famous because people talk about them with their friends, which usually involves quotation as an element of the conversation.
With the original eBooks you could simply cut and paste the quotations you wanted in an effortless manner.
The harder it is to quote from a book, the less value a book has to anyone who wants to pass on information.
4. Error Correction
Perhaps the greatest utility of eBooks as compared to a similar paper source is the ability to correct errors.
Trying to correct an error in a paper book is usually a losing proposition, whether you are simply trying to do a correction in your own edition, or trying to get some publisher to correct an error in future editions.
eBook publishers can fix errors literally overnight, as people send them in.
Paper publishers often leave the same errors in edition after edition for decades, even centuries, instead of a new edition actually containing a newly proofed edition of the original text.
To the extent that any eBook is not correctable, it may be considered to have less "eBookness."
5. Ease of Storage
The standard DVD can contain nearly every word that you can find in the books of the average public library and the multi-level DVDs can obviously hold twice as much-- four times as much if double-sided and double-layered.
*
The standard DVD holds ~4.3 usable gigabytes per layer.
*
The Blu-Ray DVD starts with ~25 gigabytes, and had some added potential via a layer of 8.5 G, totaling 33.5G.
Thus 30 of these would hold 1 Terabyte. 15, if they release a 2-sided version.
*
The next generation DVD has already been designed, with about 1 Terabyte of total storage, so just a few should be able to hold every word in the Library of Congress-- a few more for the British Library.
*
Think of the savings in the cost of the shelving if not the simply the cost of the books. . . .
Not to mention the time and energy savings when using a book from such a collection.
*
Many eBook producers use formats that are not so easily storable on your own media.
To the extent that these eBooks are not storable or not compressible, they lose their quality of eBookness.
6. Permanence
We have all heard the headlines published by olde media that information stored on computers is impermanent and is lost to future generations when the olde computer is no longer available.
This is only the case when the information was kept via out of general circulation via some secret encryption.
Plain text eBooks don't cause those kinds of problems.
The paper publishers tout their medium as permanent yet every year we hear that thousands of library books were disposed of because they were simply falling apart.
When new paper books are published, it takes only about five years for them to become so scarce that when local libraries have one lost, damaged, or stolen, that it is not replaceable.
Of all the things published in 1971, most are lost, and pretty much not retrievable except to the experts in an assortment of interconnected archives around the world, but not so with the first eBook as published by Project Gutenberg in the earliest days the Internet started its journey from laboratory experiments to reach out to the rest of the world.
Once an eBook is published in this manner in either the plain text or plain markup modes, the odds are it could survive indefinitely.
To the extent that an eBook does not have this quality, it is just that much less an eBook, as it has that much less a chance of survival.
Just as the more non-standard an email is the less will read it, the more non-standard eBooks will be less read by the general population.
Of course, that is the purpose of many of the formating decisions by various eBook publishers today, to keep an eBook out of the hands of the general population.
The entire idea of keeping people from being able to do all the things listed above is the general result of an astonishing philosophy that the most important aspect a successful eBook must have is that it can't be accessed in the usual manners, as that would allow copying.
Of course, this presupposes several things:
1. That enough people would only want to have illegal copy access that this would threaten the eBooks' success.
2. That it would be possible in the first place to make up some kind of protection that could not be cracked by an enterprising young hacker in its first few weeks.
3. These protection modes have not been intentionally made crackable by government enforcement agencies. [Such as the widely touted Lucifer, DES Data Encryption Standard that was intentionally weakened by some U.S. Government agencies so they could be sure to break into anything a person or corporation might ever store on a computer.]
***
The Advantages of eBooks are:
1. Readability
2. Searchability
3. Quotability
4. Error Correction
5. Ease of Storage
6. Permanence
The greater extent that an eBook eliminates the ability on the part of the potential reader to accomplish these the less the eBook has of the general qualities we have come to know as "eBookness."
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