Catching Fog

If you want something done, find a busy person. Why? Because a busy person is someone who can get stuff done—otherwise he or she wouldn’t be so busy. Unfortunately, I’m a busy person. When I finished writing A Year With God, something I accomplished from start to final rewrite in three months–I was tired. But having finished the book, and with it being accepted by the publisher, that meant I finally got paid the final third of my promised payment. And having a pay day meant that my wife’s plan for our master bathroom could finally be set in motion.

If I were a bestselling author on the order of a J.K. Rowling who wrote the Harry Potter books, then I would simply have found some contractors, collected bids, and then spent the next couple of weeks in a hotel while they tore my bathroom apart and put it back together. Or maybe I’d just buy a new house. Unfortunately, my books are not quite as popular as Harry Potter, so a remodel plan meant the contractor was me. Another job on top of all the other stuff I was doing. Like trying to work on my next book, with its deadlines fast approaching. How fast? At the time, I had barely two months left before I had to have that book finished, including the final rewrites and edits. All three hundred eighty-four pages of it (A Year With Jesus).

But my wife had been waiting a long time for her new bathroom. And over the previous two years I had somehow remodeled my daughters’ bathroom, remodeled my kitchen, and remodeled my living room. The master bathroom was simply the last piece in the grand plan that my wife had for our house.

This remodel began as all remodels begin: with a trip to the local hardware store so my wife could show me what she had in mind. The centerpiece of her plans was the replacement of the then current shower stall with a Jacuzzi-style bathtub. Given that the dimensions of the shower stall were the same as those of the tub she wanted, how hard could it be?

The next step, therefore, was to take out the old, to make way for the new. For this, I needed a sledge hammer. Probably the idea of taking a sledgehammer and hitting a bunch of stuff with it sounds appealing, perhaps a way to get out all your aggressions. That theoretical dream fails to take into consideration the physical reality of swinging a sledge hammer. Sledge hammers are heavy. So the fun of smashing stuff lasts, oh, maybe two or three swings. After that, it is just hard work.

On top of that I have severe allergies and asthma. And I was doing all this during the time of year pollen levels were at their highest. Thankfully, I have and had good prescription medication, so I barely notice my allergies.

Unless I’m pounding on a wall of tile with a sledge hammer. Oddly, that created quite a bit of dust. Which led to sneezing. And a mild asthma attack. But I avoided a hospital visit.

After working for about eight hours on Saturday, the bathroom was at last stripped of tile and the old shower was gone. The old shower stall had a drain in the exact center. I had hoped, when I took up the shower floor, I would discover the drain pipe running from the wall to that center. Unfortunately, I simply found concrete, except for a two square foot spot in the center where the drain pipe was. Given that the new tub has a drain pipe on the far right side, as most tubs do, I had a bit of a problem.

My first thought was to drill holes through the concrete slab—but given that it took me about a half hour to drill one ¾ inch hole through five inches of concrete, I decided that was not a practical solution. My next thought was that I would rent a jackhammer to smash through the concrete.

By then it was late, so I went to bed. Easter Sunday, I awoke with a headache that lasted most of the day. We spent that morning with my brother-in-law and his family at his church, an hour’s drive from my house, where his youngest son and daughter were getting baptized by my father-in-law (who was a retired pastor). Feeling tired and grumpy, all I had wanted to do was sit. But the pastor of this distant church knew me, because he’d attended several of the conferences where I’ve spoken. So he asked me to assist him that morning in serving communion.

After enjoying Easter dinner with my in-laws, I finally got home late in the afternoon and promptly took a nap for about three hours. Thankfully, my headache left me. I also came up with a solution to the plumbing for my new tub that wouldn’t require the jackhammer: I would simply build a four inch platform for the new tub and then run the pipe across the top of the concrete and down into the old drain. This worked splendidly, and the raised tub actually looks nice.

Of course, just because my wife’s plans for my house were nearly done, didn’t mean I didn’t have more remodeling to do. My wife has parents. And their house needed a bathroom remodel, their kitchen sink needed to be replaced, and they wanted me to put ceramic tiles in their dining room and kitchen.

Maybe someday I’ll have a best seller and then I can just hire someone to do all that stuff for me. Or maybe someday I’ll learn how not to be a busy person.

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English is currently the primary or secondary language in many countries, and in fact it is the most widely taught and understood language in the world. Although Modern Standard Chinese has more native speakers, English is used by more people as a second or foreign language. Over 400 million people speak English as their first language. Estimates about second language speakers of English put their number at around 1.5 billion. English is the dominant international language in communications, science, business, aviation, entertainment, diplomacy and the Internet. It has been one of the official languages of the United Nations since its founding in 1945 and is considered by many to be the universal language.

Those who fear that the language of some new immigrant group to the United States is going to somehow displace English are worrying about something that simply won’t happen. Their fear flies in the face of both the overwhelming dominance of the English language, and the history of all previous immigrant groups in the United States. In the nineteenth century, for instance, new immigrants from Europe gathered in linguistic enclaves, established newspapers in their old European languages, established businesses and put up bi-lingual signs. Within three generations, all those old European languages were forgotten, the newspapers had gone out of business or transformed themselves into English dailies. Yet, far fewer people spoke English in the ninteenth century than now.

Far from being threatened, English is more likely to kill off several other living tongues over the next few generations, since the numbers and percentages of English speakers is increasing every year.

English, of course, does not sound the same everywhere it is spoken. Though one can easily converse with someone from England or Austrailia, every so often words or phrases pop up that make everyone scratch their heads. Despite all the contact between Australia and the United States, for instance, most Americans hearing the lyrics to the song Waltzing Matilda believe that it has something to do with dancing. Instead, “Matilda” refers to a knapsack worn by a hobo, and so the song is actually describing the life of a vagabond.

Although my books, The Bible’s Most Fascinating People and The Bible: A Reader’s Guide were published in the U.S., my primary publisher is actually Quarto, a British publisher in London. As a consequence, my editors were in London, and all my correspondence and phone calls were to people with London accents who would sound at home on the BBC. And, although for the most part I’ve never had any difficulty understanding them, there are occasional, momentary puzzles.

Once, while my family and I were in Disneyland, I got an email and later a voicemail from my London editor informing me that my contract (I forget for which book) was ready and that she’d “courier” it to me. My first thought was that some little guy on a bicycle would be carrying the contract to me. However, I quickly dismissed that as improbable since last I checked there were no bike lanes across the Atlantic. So my second thought was that she meant what an American would mean if she had said she’d “overnight” it—or more commonly, “Fed-ex” it.

My second thought was the right one, of course. The contract arrived in a sealed plastic envelope, with the name of the British company emblazoned on the outside: “Inter Continent Couriers Ltd.” Perhaps that’s as common as Federal Express is for us in the U.S. Once it had reached our shores, it was DHL that picked it up and actually delivered it to my door.

So I signed the contract and faxed it back to her. My friends and family whom I’ve showed the emails I’ve gotten from London comment on how “British” they sound. Even written languages have an “accent.” Despite the fact that the British and Americans speak the same language, it only takes a handful of sentences for us to realize that we’re not reading something written by a guy in Kansas, or vice-versa, someone from South Kensington.

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During my senior year of high school I lived in Homestead Florida, a town that described itself as the “gateway to the Everglades.” My dad was in the Air Force and he was stationed there. What that meant in practical terms was that it was humid and we were surrounded by a swamp. Mosquitoes were common and large, though to say that they carried off small house pets would be an exaggeration.

When I am under deadline for a book, I will often work many days in a row without a break. While I was working on A Year With God, I worked a whole a month with no days off, a consequence of laboring to finish the second third of it to meet a deadline. I had about 36 days to do the first third and I had about 36 to do the last third, but I’d only been given 29 days to do the second third. It was tiring, but I managed it. So when I finished that second third, I finally took a weekend off and relaxed. Recalling that time–and even now, without any pressing deadlines–I have been reflecting on how busy I tend to be.

Which got me to thinking about my swampy senior year of high school. I don’t recall feeling so overwhelmingly busy back then, and I’m not entirely sure why, since I was really very busy. Admittedly, children usually do not have jobs, but they are still in school all day, five days a week. My senior year I had to arise before the sun came up and I took a long bus ride to school. I had homework when I got home—a lot of it, since I had honors classes and still managed to graduate with all As. Despite that, I recall endless hours spent on a model railroad or on my stamp or coin collection and listening to classical music on the radio. Admittedly, I was an odd teenager. Somehow, in all of that, I also found time to write novels (I wrote my first when I was 16 and from then til now, for the most part, I do at least 10 pages of writing per day). I also read voraciously, and watched television not infrequently.

But I don’t recall any sense of being overworked or over tired. How did I do it?

What is my problem now, that I feel like I have no time for myself? Does it somehow relate to the sad reality of being middle-aged? Is it just that I’m simply not as spry as I used to be? Possible, I suppose, but I know some younger people that have trouble keeping up with me. In fact, my children are constantly complaining about how fast I walk and they don’t like how I pick parking spots as far from the stores as possible. Walking is good for your health, I tell them, but they don’t believe me.

So I’m wondering if my problem with feeling overworked is simply an attitudinal issue. If so, I’m going to have to work on altering it and recovering my high school mindset. Perhaps I need to discover again the art of leaving my work at work rather than carrying it with me in my head all the time. When I was in high school, I was able to keep my school life and my non-school life separated. Maybe I need to do that with my work.

In a world filled with cell phones and the internet, it can be hard to go completely off the clock. There’s nearly no place to go to get away from our labor. People can call us, text us, and email us no matter where we happen to be. Day or night. When I was working on A Year With God (a bit of a misnomer since I only spent three months writing it, including all rewrites and revisions) I regularly got requests from my editor at 11:30 PM–and she was back east, while I’m on the west coast! I’m not sure that woman ever slept.

Since I work from an office in my home, getting away from work is even harder. When do I begin work? When do I end work? And how can I tell? In the old days, I physically left my job. When I was in graduate school at UCLA, there was actually a time clock that I punched when I arrived at my job and when I left. But not anymore. Now I commute from my bedroom to my office and I find that I hardly ever leave my office until I’m back in my bedroom to sleep.

So what am I going to do? Something all of us need to do. Turn off our connections to work at the end of the day. We need to shut off the office in our heads and find something else to think about and do. Eight or so hours a day is long enough to work, and we need to work only five days a week. It is good to work hard, but we can work harder and better if we know when to quit. “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy,” so goes the old cliché. The dullness is not so much in the sense of making him boring and uninteresting to be around, as it is that it renders him dull of mind, and dull of energy. If we don’t take time off we might be able to impress our peers by telling them how many hours we’ve put in and how tired we are. But in the end, in cold reality, we will actually just make ourselves dull: accomplishing less and doing it less competently.

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When a new year begins, it is not uncommon for people to make resolutions: they find themselves dissatisfied with some aspect of themselves or their lives, and so they promise themselves that they will make a change or two. It is in January that the fitness centers are filled with people exercising, the Weight Watchers centers are filled with people who want to lose weight, and Christians begin the process of trying to read through the Bible in the next twelve months.

What did I want for this year? I wanted to make some more money from my writing. A purely mercenary resolution.

So I’ve undertaken the process of “indie publishing” where I take stuff I’ve written and haven’t gotten published yet and convert it into a format that works with the Amazon Kindle and other e-book readers. In order to do this, I essentially transform myself from being just a writer, to being a publisher: which means I had to do my own editing, copy editing, proofreading, and cover designs.

And then there’s the little question of how to let people know I’ve got books that they can purchase? There are over a million e-books for sale on Amazon; how do I stand out in such a crowd?

Of course, the situation with Amazon.com is not much different than my books in any bookstore, anywhere. Walk into a Barnes and Noble, or even your local used book store. How is it that you know to find the sort of book that you want to purchase? When I go to purchase physical books, I wander into the sections that contain the sorts of books I enjoy reading, such as the science fiction or history. When I’m searching online for a physical book or an e-book, I do much the same thing. Occasionally, I’ll look for a specific book that I’ve read or heard about in a review or from a friend’s recommendation.

I cannot think of a single book I purchased because I read an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper, or because I saw an ad for it on TV.

My best selling traditionally published book thus far is The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, originally published by Reader’s Digest Books in 2008 and reissued in February, 2012 by Chartwell. The book has not been advertised anywhere. The only reviews of it that I’ve seen have been the reviews readers have posted on Amazon.com—and there are only seven of those. And despite the dearth of advertising, for the past six months, according to the data from BookScan (think Nielsen Ratings, but for books) the book has been selling at an average rate of ten copies per day. That does not seem like a lot, of course. In a month, that means only about 300 copies.

But from the publisher’s point of view, that level of sales is actually quite good for an average mid-list book. And if you’re going to do indie publishing, you need to think about book sales from the publisher’s point of view. After all, a publisher is not selling just one book. They’re selling a bunch. So let’s say the publisher is offering one hundred different titles. Ten sales per title per day means a thousand books multiplied by thirty days. If they make five dollars profit on each book, that’s 150,000 dollars per month—and 1.8 million dollars per year. Not a bad business, really. Large publishers like Random House make considerably more than this, of course.

So as an author doing indie publishing, if you want to succeed, you need to be selling more than just one book. So, I’ve made 17 of my books available as eBooks on Amazon. The list price for each is $7.99—the average cost of a trade paperback. I get a 70 percent royalty rate on each book—which works out to $5.59 per book for me, minus the 9 cents that Amazon charges as a “delivery fee.” So, on each book sold, I stand to make $5.50 (much better than the 79 cents I would make from traditional publishing with a ten percent royalty rate.)

In the first two weeks of the experiment, I averaged a sales rate of a little over one book a day; that’s not a lot of money, but it’s money that I otherwise would not be getting. Obviously, if I can get my indie sales on each of the 17 titles to the levels of The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, I’d see substantial income. It hasn’t happened yet, after three months.

So how do I let people know the books are there for the buying? Do I simply hope that people will randomly come upon them? Mostly. Just like the big publishers mostly do. I have this blog (www.nettelhorst.com) and whenever I publish a book I announce it to my friends on Facebook and Twitter. And every so often I remind people.

And, periodically, for a limited time, I give books away for free. Sometimes I lower prices on select books.

So, over Christmas, I gave away the first book in a six book series, The Chronicles of Tableland. Within a day and a half more than a hundred people had “purchased” that free book, pushing it up into the top one hundred books in the category “science fiction—adventure.” This made it stand out to people looking for that sort of book—which then increased its sales all the more. My hope of course is that the readers of that free book will then fork over the cash for the remaining five books in the series. And I’m hoping that they’ll tell their friends about it. And post reviews on Amazon (assuming they actually liked the book; if they hated it, I’d prefer that they keep that to themselves. Heh.)

So, my New Year’s project, at least thus far, seems to be generating some money. More money than the books were generating just taking up space on my computer’s hard drive. It’s certainly not making me rich, however. But maybe I’ll be able to afford a coffee at Starbucks once in awhile.

So what books of mine can you buy now? As I said, I have 15 science fiction eBooks available on Amazon.com for the Kindle. If you don’t own a Kindle, you can still read these books. Amazon offers an app for Windows based computers, and for the Mac. There are also free apps for all tablet computers, whether Android, Windows 8, or iPAD. And there’s an app for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows 8 phones.

1. Inheritance
2. Somewhere Obscurely
3. Antediluvian
4. The Wrong Side of Morning
5. John of the Apocalypse
6. Chronicles of Tableland 1: All His Crooked Ways
7. Chronicles of Tableland 2: Twister
8. Chronicles of Tableland 3: Dark Waters
9. Chronicles of Tableland 4: Sail My Darling Lovely
10. Chronicles of Tableland 5: Behind the Wall
11. Chronicles of Tableland 6: Day Come
12. With a Rod of Iron
13. Darkness Warping
14. Clash Point
15. Narrow Gate

Click on any of the book titles above or below. That will take you to Amazon, where you can see a brief description of each book and even read the first few pages for free.

I also have 2 non-fiction eBooks for the Kindle or Kindle apps:

1. The Complaint of Jacob
2. What Would Satan Do? The Devil’s Theology

And then there are my traditionally published books available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Two are hardbacks and two are paperbacks.

1. The Bible’s Most Fascinating People
2. The Bible: A Reader’s Guide
3. A Year with God
4. A Year with Jesus

Thus, a total of 21 books written by me are available to be purchased by anyone so inclined. Let all your friends know.

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