Lauren Wayne

I’ve been wanting an HTML signature in rich text for my Gmail account for when I send business emails, so I can promote my websites, Twitter account, and Facebook pages — but all in a streamlined and attractive manner.

Gmail doesn’t currently support rich text or html formatting in the sig box, which is on the Settings page.

Here was the best I could do in plain text:

~*~
Lauren Wayne

www.HoboMama.com
www.HoboMamaReviews.com
www.LaurenWayne.com

www.Twitter.com/Hobo_Mama
www.Facebook.com/HoboMama
www.facebook.com/pages/Hobo-Mama/322453825286

Unwieldy, isn’t it?

I don’t like how lengthy the Facebook URLs are, and I don’t like that the sig as a whole is a whopping 10 lines long. For Gmail to automatically parse the html, I had to keep at least the “www” part intact, which meant I had to use a plain URL rather than just, say, a blog name (www.HoboMama.com vs. Hobo Mama or HoboMama.com).

So, since I didn’t like that, what did I like? Well, here’s what I ended up with, using my super-cool and sneaky method:

•••
Lauren Wayne
Hobo Mama • Hobo Mama Reviews • LaurenWayne.com
Twitter • Facebook • Facebook Page

And here, my friends, is how I got there:

First of all, you need a place to edit your html. If you know how to hand-code html and preview it online, go to it. I found the easiest way in a WYSIWYG sort of way was to use a Blogger account. For my purposes, I used my standard Hobo Mama account.

1. In Blogger/Blogspot, create a new post. You can title it “gmail signature” or something else memorable in case you want to come back to it. You won’t be publishing it, just saving it as a draft, and you can always delete it after you’re done tweaking your signature if you want to keep your account clean.
2. Click on the Compose tab. Type in your signature as you want it to look. Use the Link function to add URLs to keywords. Change fonts and colors as you wish. You can add in special characters like bullets. You could even add images, such as a company logo. In fact, you could make your whole signature just one big image if you’d rather and know how to edit image files.
3. Copy the finished signature.

All right, now we head over to Gmail. As I said, you can’t use any html or rich-text formatting in the signature box, so we’ll skip that box. You could simply copy and paste your signature into each email individually, but that’s cumbersome. The method I came up with isn’t as easy as having a traditional signature, but it takes only a second or two each time you compose an email and it uses the Canned Responses feature in Gmail Labs.

1. Go to Settings in Gmail (top right corner).
2. Click Labs along the top tabs.
3. Scroll down or do a search for Canned Responses and select Enable next to it (yes, “email for the truly lazy”). At the top or bottom of the Labs page, click Save Changes.
4. Now click on Compose Mail. Make sure you’ve selected Rich Text as your messaging view. Paste your signature into the message box. It should paste exactly as you had it formatted in the Blogger box. You can change the font or layout further using Gmail’s rich-text editing.
5. As an optional extra, if your signature font is formatted in a way unlike the way you would like your message to be (for instance, my signature is in blue, but I prefer my message font to be in black), add in a simple line of text above your signature that you usually use to start a message. In my case, I added “Hi!” I formatted “Hi!” in my preferred black message font.
6. Now that you’ve enabled Canned Responses, there should be a line that says Canned Responses just above your message box. Click on Canned Responses and select Save –> New canned response… A box will pop up and ask you for a name to save it under; you can choose something like “business signature.”
7. Now you can Discard your draft message.
8. Next time you go to email someone, either through Compose or Reply, click on Canned Responses –> Insert [business signature or whatever you called it].
9. Voila! Your signature appears. You can tweak it in the message box if you’d like, or go back to Blogger to do major revamps. If you want to save a change, simply click on Canned Responses –> Save –> [business signature] again, and OK the warning that pops up that you’re saving over a saved canned response.

I know this method isn’t quite as convenient as having a signature automatically appear whenever you click Compose, but it’s the most streamlined way I could find for now!

The good news is this method lets you choose which messages you want to put a signature on. You could even have multiple signatures, such as a personal one and a business one, and choose which signature you want each recipient to see. You could put your address and contact info in emails you send to publishers, for instance, but your URLs alone for emails to colleagues, just saving each signature under a different name.

Hope this tutorial helped you! Let me know, or give me your own tips.

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Just as a follow-up to my last post on Search Inside This Book, I mentioned that you need a Seller Central account to sign up. I already had one, so I just switched my log-in email over to the one I’d given to Search Inside This Book.

Well, now I have a caution about using an existing Seller Central account for Search Inside This Book. I’m no longer using my Seller Central account for selling anything, but when I tried to log in to it to access previous information from when I previously used that account to sell DVDs through Amazon’s Marketplace, I couldn’t reach the typical Seller Central page anymore, no matter how I tried. It would only default to the Search Inside This Book page, which is a specialized author/publisher-specific interface.

Fortunately for me, this isn’t disastrous, since it was a defunct seller account anyway, and I didn’t badly need to get into those old files.

BUT…beware if you use your Seller Central account for serious selling that you might want to contact Amazon in advance and ask what’s best. I know that having two seller accounts is actually against Amazon rules and can lead to your being banned as a seller. But if Search Inside This Book really does make your Seller Central account inoperable as a seller account for selling on the Marketplace, then you would need a second one specifically for your publishing interests.

So, there you have it. No real advice from here, but a counsel to seek out Amazon’s take on the situation. Maybe there’s a secret link to access your Seller Central information from the publisher page, or maybe it’s something they’ll fix in the future.

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Now that I’m in the self-publishing world with my little personal book of poetry, I thought I’d share my experiences with Amazon.com’s “Search Inside This Book” feature.

Here’s the gist of the feature from a reader’s perspective, which is that it allows readers to search for keywords and — even more importantly, I think — view sample pages before deciding to purchase.

From an author or publisher’s perspective, that’s golden. You get to entice potential readers with a few tempting pages from your tome, and those buyers will feel more confident about springing for a book online when they’ve had a chance to virtually thumb through the pages.

If you want to try out the feature for yourself, go to any participating book on Amazon.com and click on any cover picture that reads “Click to LOOK INSIDE!”

That appealing little icon will appear in small search results, as well, so readers will be able to see at a glance that your title is searchable. If they want to make sure your book deals with a particular topic, they can do a keyword search, as easy as searching a PDF.

Here’s a sample participating title for you to play around with: Where the Wild Things Are.

If you click on the cover image, you can choose to look more closely at the front or back cover, flap, copyright page, or the first few pages. If you type in a keyword — “wild,” say — you will see a paginated list of every instance of that word in the book, in summary form with the search term in bold.

As an author, you might be concerned about security and who’s going to buy the cow if you give away the milk for free and all that. By logging into an unused Amazon account of mine, I discovered that if you haven’t bought something on Amazon they won’t let you see beyond a certain amount of pages. Even if you are a trusted buyer, if you do a lot of a keyword searches, they’ll let you see only a certain amount of pages per day. So the whole text of the book is scanned in and searchable (and an easily transferred candidate for Kindle), but readers do not have access to read or download the full book without paying for it.

So, now that I’ve convinced you of the appeal of the program for published authors, I’ll give you some hard infomation on how to sign up.

You send in a PDF of either your entire book or separate PDFs of your front cover, back cover, spine, and interior. You must send in at least the front cover and interior, and you can leave out any sections of the interior that you wish, for instance if you’re still concerned about security. However, that will mean that those portions of your book will not be keyword-searchable, which might affect reader interest in your book.

Amazon was very accommodating and speedy in uploading and formatting the files. It was functioning within two days in my case. They will also deal with low-resolution files, though they prefer high DPI, and they can help crop or splice files as necessary.

The sign-up is connected to your Seller Central account, so if you have a Seller Central account already, be sure to use your Seller Central email address to sign up for Search Inside This Book. If you don’t have a Seller Central account, this process will open one for you. Don’t worry too much about that; I mention it only because it was a little confusing and opaque to me. The interface for signing up is a series of email exchanges rather than a straightforward web format. That said, the time involved to get everything set up was not painful.

So go offer your books for searching! It takes a few extra steps, but it’s well worth it.

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Speaking of deadlines, one that’s coming up fast is the June 1 deadline for NaNoWriMo winners to get your free bound copy of a book from CreateSpace.

I mentioned before that I wasn’t keen on the idea of self-publishing my NaNoWriMo novel, because I plan to submit it for traditional publishing. But, for any writer, there is probably always some art form that was done more for personal pleasure than for publication glory, and a print-on-demand press is the ideal platform for preserving that art for future generations. Even if you’re not a NaNoWriMo winner, read on, for I have good news on that front!

In the interests of scrambling, I am compiling 20 years (golly, I’m old) of my poetry into a chapbook for the purpose. I’m laying it out in Microsoft Word, having my graphic design-adept husband craft a cover, and calling it a day.

Of course, first I had to dig out boxes from storage to find some older poems that weren’t still (or ever) digitally entered on my computer. I chose a little over 130 poems to be in the book (why not go whole hog, when I’m not sure I’ll do this again?), most of them recent, but a sampling from my teenage years. And then I had to figure out how to organize them all.

I threw out chronologically. Do I start with the early (read “bad”) poems, so that’s the first thing people see when they crack it open? Or do I go reverse chronologically and have the clunkiest poems be the last thing left in people’s minds?

No, no, I needed some other arrangement. I considered grouping themes (school, parenting, nature, etc.), or structures (formal vs. informal, or even subdivided such as, sonnets together, sestinas here, etc.). But it seemed like it would be too repetitious for the reader.

It finally came to me. A friend had recently crafted a beautiful self-published book of poetry and photography (see thumbnail to side). Because her photos are primarily macro nature shots, she wisely grouped her poems and pictures into a coherent seasonal progression.

I’m all about stealing what works, so I started making piles. Some poems were easy to sort: a poem with “July” in the title went in the summer stack, and a poem about the start of school went in autumn. Others were more metaphorical — poems of grief made it into winter, and hope for rebirth into spring. A few were more nebulous still. If the poem was mostly happy but not sentimental: That sounded summery to me. Did I sound pensive but not depressed? Fall, I think.

Eventually, I had four roughly equal stacks, and then it was time to make sure that the poems made a nice progression within each season, and leading from one season to the next. So, for instance, the autumn section would end with a poem suggesting colder days ahead. Again, some of this was bordering on esoteric, but it all seemed to work out.

For the week ahead, I’m editing and fine-tuning the layout. And then off my book goes to be printed! My very own proof copy of my very own poetry, on the page in black and white.

I chose to self-publish my poetry because I could submit it for publication, but I just don’t want to. I write it because it begs to be written, not for a specific audience, and certainly not a commercial one. Unlike with my fiction! My novels also beg to be written, but I love having an audience in mind, and I don’t at all mind revising my fiction to make it more sellable.

So, now for the good news — in perusing CreateSpace’s site to determine the nitty-gritty of cost, shipping and handling, and royalty setups, I was pleasantly surprised that the prices for self-published black-and-white books are really astonishingly reasonable. And, they get you an ISBN and listed on Amazon.com automatically. And, because it’s print-on-demand publishing, they print up a copy as soon as someone orders it, so there’s no need to order a big print run, then store all the inventory and try to sell them all off.

I had been intending just to take my proof copy and run, but it’s sorely tempting (and, yes, cleary that was CreateSpace’s clever intention!) to buy several copies of my cute little chapbook to hand out to family and friends this Christmas. (Nothing says “I love you” like a vanity press offering!)

I also realized I could offer my collected poetry for sale on my personal writing blog, in case other friends wanted to pony up the bucks necessary to purchase it. If they buy it through Amazon.com, they can even qualify for free Super Saver Shipping. And I can price my paperback reasonably low, while still making a little bit in royalties!

So, even if you’re not a NaNoWriMo winner, check out CreateSpace and see if it’s a good fit for any of your unpublished works. Getting your own proof copy requires you to pay only the base publishing price plus shipping and handling, and the same goes for any copies you buy for yourself.

So, think about the gems you have languishing in a drawer: a stack of short stories? A fabulous how-to on creating wool diaper covers? You can also self-publish (is that the right term here?) movies and music, so if you have a CD of children’s lullabies you’ve been dying to have professionally produced to give to your kids as a Christmas present (been there, done that), that’s also an option.

I’ll try to write once I receive my proof copy with an update on quality, turnaround time, and final bill. Happy self-publishing!

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Hey, fellow NaNoWriMo08 winners!

In case you didn’t get the memo, you can still get a free bound copy of your work courtesy of CreateSpace through NaNoWriMo.

The details are under “I Wrote a Novel, Now What?”:

CreateSpace, an Amazon.com Inc. owned company, is generously offering every NaNoWriMo 2008 winner a “free proof copy” of their 2008 manuscript. … They’ll even cover the costs of basic shipping to you.

To redeem the offer, you’ll need a special NaNoWriMo winner’s promo code.

… After you receive your proof copy, you can then choose if you want to make it available to the public at large—everything from showing up for sale on Amazon.com to complete invisibility.

More questions and answers are available on the NaNoWriMo forum.

The offer expires June 1, 2009.

If you’re anything like me, you relish the thought of getting a free, bound copy of a book by yourself, but … it’s not necessarily your NaNoWriMo book that you want to have self-published.

That’s ok, too. You can publish any old book of yours you want, as long as it doesn’t exceed 828 printed pages in your PDF proof.

One reason I don’t want to publish my novel-in-process is that I’m not sure that it will be publisher-ready by June 1 (though I sincerely hope so!). But the main reason is that I intend to submit it for real, live publication, and don’t want an ISBN attached to it as I shop it around.

So, instead, I’m considering printing up some of my poetry and essays, and some of my husband’s essays — things that we’ve “published” online but that we’ve never submitted for actual money anywhere. It would be fun to have them in print! Having a son now, I relish the thought of passing along some of our favorite writings in bound form.

What are you going to do with your free copy? Or, if you’re not eligible for one, what have you considered self-publishing?

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How many rejection letters have you amassed? Do you view them as a mark of shame, or a badge of honor? Do you rip them up and toss them in the recycling with the other shredded junk mail, do you let your gerbils poop and chew on them, do you hang them up to inspire you to keep going, or do you pass them around to other writers and loved ones to commiserate, laugh, and moan in community?

If it’s the last, here’s your chance to get one into book form so that even more people can read how much you suck!

Bill Shapiro, the editor of Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See is coming Other People’s Rejection Letters. He’s collecting submissions right now.

They don’t have to be writing related, but all writers have one or two or a gazillion tucked away, right? They could also be Dear John letters or disinheritances, credit denials or a critique of an audition. They can be sent or received by you, and anonymity is available. Considering the imaginative layout of the last book, I’d say creativity counts.

So if you have a rejection letter or two tucked back there in the closet (or if you’ve written any) that you’d be willing to share, now’s your chance to be part of the book.

You can send them to 1000rejectionletters@gmail.com.

If you’re looking for something more immediate, there are always online forums to let it all out. There, now, won’t that feel better?

Thank you to Brian at There Are No Rules for the heads up

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I came across this review in The Curator for a fantasy book, Cyndere’s Midnight. The book is by Jeffrey Overstreet, and the article is by Annie Young Frisbie, titled “On Fantasy Fiction; Or, You Should Read Cyndere’s Midnight.”

Frisbie (or can I call her Annie? she sounds personable) talks about her history as a closet fantasy fan, her coming out, and now her advocacy for non-fans of the genre to lay aside their snarkiness and give a really good book a try. She declares: “I’m tired of seeing fantasy ghettoized. Genre was made to be transcended.”

I’m one of those people who don’t…quite…get fantasy. It’s just not my thing. I love C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter books, and I hear true fantasy fans disparage them as bad examples of the genre, so…I guess I’m just not a fan, although this glowing review might inspire me to give it another chance. Truly, no offense intended; I think I just get tripped up by names I don’t know how to pronounce.

Because in any case, I totally understand feeling marginalized for enjoying commercial fiction that’s not considered prestigious, in my case romance and mystery novels, and in fact enjoying them so much that I write my own.

When Frisbie (and/or Annie) mocks people who read “to pad your Goodreads feed with Booker nominees in order to impress your Facebook friends,” I remember when I signed up for Goodreads at a friend’s request and then feeling twinges of…oh, no, was that embarrassment?…when I listed recent books I’d truly enjoyed but were nothing like what my other friends were sharing with the world.

I didn’t and don’t want to fill this blog with apologetics and justifications and rants about how I feel ashamed or victimized by my preferences. I know other people just like me are out there, in large numbers, and I choose not to dwell on the naysayers’ snootiness.

But I don’t mind bringing it up once in awhile, just to discuss the phenomenon of creating a divide between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. (Isn’t that a funny distinction all in itself? Literary meaning it’s like literature, and commercial meaning it sells — shouldn’t both strive to be both? Kind of reminds me of “Republican” and “Democrat” — shouldn’t all Americans embrace the basics of both those words?)

I’ve been skulking agent blogs and writer forums whenever I need a break from revising my WIP (work in progress to those who don’t skulk — I’ve discovered all new terminology from all this procrastinating), and I found this uplifting A from a Q & A by the Evil Editor:

Authors don’t get to declare what kind of prose they write. … That’s a job for critics, agents, and the people who make up the lies that go on the backs of books. Apparently you’re unhappy with calling your book literary fiction. Don’t be. Literary doesn’t mean it’s literature; it just means it’s boring. My advice: add some sharks and a wolfman, and call it commercial fiction.

That made me laugh. I love that we have professional advocates out there to override any sneering voices.

I’ll end with a great quote from Annie (I’m going for it — I just read her bio and she loves LLL and cloth diapers [just like me, swoon]. Seriously, read her article; it’s great, and here’s a similar blog post she wrote):

Don’t let signs at Barnes and Noble or tags on Amazon.com tell you what kind of books you like to read. You’ll miss out on countless worlds of beauty.

Enjoy novels that tell a story! Enjoy characters you’d want to be friends with! Enjoy an adventure you’d like to go on! Embrace your chosen genre, and be happy.

Image courtesy of Julia Freeman-Woolpert from stock.xchng

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I have officially finished one full novel and won NaNoWriMo08!

It’s only a first draft, but I’ve planned out my edits and will get to work revising. I know, for instance, that I need to add scenes and descriptions, red herrings and clues, to get my novel up to the ~70,000 words expected of a cozy.

I’ve already put books on querying agents on hold at the library and will let you know how the process goes. I’ve been reading agent blogs to dip my toe in the water, and for once I don’t feel like I’m just procrastinating from writing by doing that!

Right now I’m too excited to do much other than celebrate, but soon it will be time to work, work, work, and start writing the next in the series! For genre fiction like mysteries and romance, it’s common to think in terms of series, and I am definitely on that train.

I highly recommend that you try out NaNoWriMo next year if you haven’t done it already. Write 2,000 words a day, in little chunks if needed, and you’ll have a whole fricking novel by the end of the month! What could be better?

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I was writing an article for a friend’s magazine about parenting books I’ve found helpful, and I realized that I’d come to almost all of the books on my list through online resources. It reminded me of Jo Beverley’s plug of Google Book Search, and my note that current books are also wonderful to have in full or in excerpted form online.

I think sometimes authors try so hard to “protect” their work — their ideas and their copyright — that they forget that the point is to get their writing out there. For some, it might be selling more books; for others, the message might be paramount. Either way, it’s best to reach the widest audience possible.

I wouldn’t have read 95% (I’m guessing here) of the books on my list if I hadn’t been able to come to them in some way online first. Whether it was reading detailed reviews or blog entries, looking at excerpts online, downloading articles from the same author, discussing the ideas on forums, or whatever avenue, I needed frequent exposure to the book and author in question before I was intrigued enough to seek out and read the book for myself.

If you’re an author or self-publisher, what does this mean for us?

Here are some suggestsions for the online world of marketing:

• √ send out review copies whenever they’re requested
• √ start a blog to talk about and get readers interested in your work and ideas
• √ host contests and polls to generate excitement, such as a vote on cover art or a character’s name
• √ hold drawings to award copies of your books to lucky readers
• √ offer live chats with readers
• √ start a fan email list and send out occasional newsletters
• √ post short stories, articles, or sample chapters on your website
• √ allow and encourage others to link to your work
• √ visit other appropriate blogs and leave helpful comments with a link back to your site
• √ check out Google AdWords for targeted pay-per-click ads
• √ join and post on online message boards and create a tasteful signature that links back to your site

If anyone has other good online-marketing ideas, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

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I’m on a Jo Beverley kick and have just read A Lady’s Secret. In her notes at the end, Beverley points out a good resource for writers, particularly of historicals: Google Book Search.

I’d been using it unwittingly for my other blog — I found old-timey books on wet nursing such as A Treatise on Hygiene and Public Health.

You can also often search selections of current books to see if there are passages to interest you, such as The History of the European Family, which also gave me invaluable information on breastfeeding rates from days gone by.

Google Book Search is trying to scan in many copies of old and rare books to preserve and share them for free, and publishers and authors of newer books can offer a glimpse into their pages as a service to potential readers.

As a writer doing research or a publisher promoting a book, it’s worth looking into. As a reader scouting out good new reads, it’s also a treat!

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