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Technology Risk and the Independent Author

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Two years ago I looked at hundreds of WordPress themes in anticipation of putting up this site. I’d never paid for a theme before, but time and again I kept coming back to the themes at StudioPress.com. Their designs were clean, their support seemed solid, and after a while I decided to pull the trigger on their Streamline theme, which is the theme you see on this site.

For a year and a half I was perfectly satisfied. The support was excellent, the theme performed as expected, and I was able to get on with the business of blogging.

About six months ago, however — give or take — StudioPress became a subsidiary of CopyBlogger, the underlying software for the themes was radically altered, and the support on the site became spottier and more contentious. I never faulted the moderators for putting limits on the amount of customization they offered, but the tone and frequency of such reprimands seemed to signal an intent to drive additional fee-for-service revenue from the basic themes being sold.

Because I knew upgrading my current theme would break a number of modifications I’d made, I put off the upgrade as long as possible. At the same time I faced an ever-growing backlog of changes I wanted to make on my site, and at some point it became obvious that I should upgrade before making any additional changes to an older version I had every intention of migrating away from.  [ Read more ]

Site Notice: Server Issues

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It’s almost beyond belief to me that I’m continuing to have trouble with my site host, Network Solutions. I apologize to anyone who’s tried to visit this site or the small site I put up at the beginning of the week. The amount of data I’m trying to move is trivial, but for some reason the addition of one site to NetSol’s server capacity seems to have crippled its ability to send pages to your screen — if it allows those pages to be served at all.

I am once again in tech support hell, and have once again managed to escalate the issue to NetSol’s tech support by demonstrating that the problem is not on my end. I have tried several of the fixes they asked me to try, and if they didn’t make things worse they did nothing to resolve the problems at hand. My hope is that the issue will be resolved shortly.

— Mark Barrett

WordPress as a “Known Issue”

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I put up a small WordPress site over the weekend. It’s on my shared-hosting package, meaning the new site resides on the same sever share that this site sits on.

After pointing people to the new site today I received a message that it couldn’t be accessed. I checked and it worked for me, but when I checked again a few minutes later I got a ‘permission denied’ page, as if the site was unavailable or under construction. Over the next ten minutes or so I was able to replicate the problem on the other site, and even on this site.

My first tech support call to Network Solutions — my site host — went well enough. They showed me how to reset the permissions on my site, and things seemed better after that. Until a couple of hours later, when the same thing happened again.

My second tech support call was less reassuring. Not only was I told that the intermittent errors were a result of total server load, but WordPress was specifically described as a ‘known issue’ in taxing server bandwidth.

Uh…no. If you’re one of the largest hosting providers in the world, and you’re having trouble feeding my WordPress pages to a small handful of visitors, that’s not a WordPress problem, that’s a YouSuck problem.

I’m now being pointed to some helpful tips on speeding up WordPress installs, and have been advised to try using WPSuperCache (a plugin I have considered before), but having one of the most widely-used blogging apps described as a known issue by my site host is a fail.

After allowing malicious code injections into my site, failing to notify me of such in a timely manner, degrading the response time of this site to +30 seconds, and now this, I can’t recommend Network Solutions to anyone else. I’ll probably play out the end of my contract, but between now and then I’ll be looking for reliable hosting without excuses.

The good news is that while I was on hold a robo-message informed me that J.D. Powers might call to ask about my tech-support experience. Please do.

— Mark Barrett

The Storytelling Life

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If you are interested in telling stories I want you to do something for me. I want you to protect that desire from your friends, your family, your peers, your online acquaintances, the literati, the critics, the publishing world and, most importantly, you.

If you decide at some point that storytelling no longer interests you that’s fine. What’s not fine is to think there’s some metric by which you must measure success. And the last possible metric you should measure success by is money.

I’ve been paid for my storytelling skills more than once. I have been and am a professional writer. But the storytelling I’ve done that has made money is only part of my storytelling life. The epicenter of that life, the core of my storytelling drive, is the mystery and promise of the blank page. It has been that way since I was a child, and I have protected that core from every assault waged against it.

I have not, however, always put storytelling first. For much of my adult life I put relationships ahead of my desire to tell stories, and I have no regrets about that. To do anything else would have been unthinkable to me. If life is short, and it is, then it’s for damn sure too short to be spent satisfying an itch while the people you love go wanting.

There were of course times when I was frustrated. And there were times when I could have written but I wasn’t supported in doing so. But even during the worst of it I didn’t feel as if I had to make a final decision one way or the other. I didn’t have to choose precisely because I never intended to let storytelling go. What I want you know is that you don’t have to choose either.  [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Print-On-Demand Roadmap

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As regular readers know, I put a collection of short stories on Smashwords four months ago, where it can be sampled, purchased and downloaded in various e-book formats. I now want to make a print-on-demand (POD) version of that content available, so people can order a physical copy of the book. (This post rejoins a conversation I had with myself — and many helpful commenters — shortly after making the e-book available. More here and here.)

Paranoid Overview
There are a lot of companies offering print-on-demand publishing to independent authors. I also know there are a lot of disreputable companies — known variously as vanity or subsidy publishers — whose business model is predicated on charging abusive up-front fees for middling or nonexistent services. Industry propaganda against fee-for-service publishing says that money should flow to the author, not from the author, but as I noted late last year that propaganda has always been a self-serving fraud. Authors can be ripped off by anyone.

For any independent author, controlling costs and maximizing each dollar spent is critical. Philosophically I don’t care whether costs are up-front, fee-for-service charges or back-end participation. What matters is getting the most service or product for my money. As a practical matter, however, minimizing out-of-pocket costs is important because it preserves operating capital. The longer I can keep my head above water the longer I can write, and the longer I can write the more chance I have of seeing a profit.  [ Read more ]

Ditchwalk at One Year

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I started this blog with a focused set of objectives. I wanted to learn about the state of the publishing industry. I wanted to re-establish myself on the web. I wanted to meet people who are interested in storytelling and dialogue with them about related issues.

Check, check, check.

So what’s next?

I have a lot of things I want to write. Novels. Stage plays. Screenplays. Nonfiction.

I have the time and freedom to write these things, but the opportunity is not open-ended. I need to take advantage of this moment, even if it means making a lot of compromises in my life and giving up on other things I’d hoped and planned for.

All I know is that if I don’t do this I’ll regret it, and I work very hard to make sure I don’t have regrets.

There are no guarantees, of course. I could complete all of the drafts I hope to write in the next nine months and have nothing salable — either because the market isn’t there, or because what I’ve written is not very good. But if the choice right now is between relying on myself and counting on others, that’s not a hard choice to make.

I’ll still keep blogging. I’ll still keep an eye on the industry. But in general I think I’m up to speed on the big issues, and that most of what’s happening in publishing will sort itself out without my involvement.

The good news, and it’s very good news from my point of view, is that even as the market value of writing heads toward zero, the opportunities to reach readers directly keep growing. To the extent that a viable business model may not currently exist, worrying about business models before I have content to sell seems a bit misplaced.

The only useful convergence I’ve been able to identify seems to be spending time writing while the market continues to sort itself out. So I intend to write. A lot.

— Mark Barrett

Getting Back Up

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One of the things you learn when you find yourself lying flat on your back with metaphorical blood running out of your mouth is that the ceiling always looks different from that perspective. You see the cracks in the plaster, the peeling paint, and the old stains that were never properly sealed. It’s a lesson in point of view, as well as a reminder that you can adopt different points of view voluntarily, instead of waiting for life to knock you on your ass.

As anyone who has spent time on the web knows, internet time is a literal warping of the time-space continuum. My previous post here was a little less than two weeks ago, but it feels like ten years. In the interim I’ve watched the sun move across the walls each day, and felt the warmth as it slid across the floor and washed over me. I’ve had time to think and to rest, and with the tail of my shirt I’ve been able to stanch the flow of blood.

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Taking A Punch

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I’ve taken a few punches over the past year. Some of them were economic, some were emotional, but they’ve all taken a toll.

For the time being I’m going to have to step away from this site. I hope to be back soon.

— Mark Barrett

The Facebook Backlash

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A little over two weeks ago I decided I’d had enough of Facebook playing me for a punk. I deleted my small Facebook account and Ditchwalk page, and as noted earlier I felt (and still feel) no loss in doing so.

This was a personal decision. It was not a business decision. Then again one of my failings as a businessman is that I don’t have one set of morals for my customers and clients*, and another set for the people I have emotional relationships with. For that reason, if I think you’re a liar or a cheat, I’m not doing business with you even if that (potentially) hurts me more than it hurts you.

What’s been interesting to me in the aftermath of that decision is that Facebook has clearly lost control of its image. In previous instances where Facebook reneged on promises or otherwise sold out its own users, everyone (included the abused users) was eager to help Facebook recover its cachet. Now, however, I don’t see anyone coming to Facebook’s defense. In fact, there seems to be a growing trend toward stating the obvious:

Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially “out,” as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are – simply put – not trustworthy.

That’s a fairly calm paragraph from a rant by Jason Calcanis, which may be part of a growing pop-culture reassessment of Facebook as a company and as a phenomenon. When you’re at the top, there’s often nowhere to go but down — and plenty of people who would like to see you head that way.  [ Read more ]

The Information-Age Myth

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I went into a large, nationally-known chain store last night to buy a few things. When I what I wanted I went to the check-out lines. Because the store had too few employees handling too many customers I elected to take my five items to the twelve-items-or-less line, on the assumption that fewer items would mean a faster checkout.

Confirming the wisdom of my choice, the customer two places ahead of me breezed through checkout. Because the three women ahead of me were only buying two items as a group, I felt confident that I would be on my way in short order. (In the fable business, this is known as counting your chickens before they hatch.)  [ Read more ]