Writing / Publishing

My favorite story by H. P. Lovecraft so far, and we are up to story twelve in his writings. This is not a story about ancient castles or about muddy plains with octopus monoliths. It’s a story about feeling as if life is no longer worth living. It’s about escaping into dreams – and then beyond.

We begin with a man who feels life has run its course. We get the impression that he’s in his seventies, he’s alone in a farmhouse somewhere, and life has no meaning. It’s not that he’s in pain or suffering through cancer treatments or anything else. Life is just gray. Monotonous. There is nothing left there for him.

He tries to escape into his dream worlds. Yes, there are beautiful oceans and serene rivers, but even their beauty fails to stir him after a while. He’s drawn to the grotesque twisting trees of a forest. But even there, after a while, it just becomes boring and dull. He wants to go through the gate. Surely something beyond there will hold interest to him.

To me this resembles the story The White Ship where the main character moves from location to location, and each is interesting, but even so the main character is never quite satisfied. He wants to get to that place beyond the realm where nobody has ever returned from.

Finally the main character learns of a drug which will help him get to that unattainable realm. He takes it, and sure enough, the gate opens. He’s able to step through.

Beyond it, there is complete peace. No people. No scenery. Just white light and a dissolving of self. No memories. No burdens to shoulder.

In his real life, Lovecraft had wanted to enlist in WWI and was actively blocked by his mother. His mother told everyone he was too weak and feeble to fight. This was the world Lovecraft had to deal with. And then his mother died. He was wholly cast adrift. One could see how Lovecraft would just want everything to ‘go away’. To not deal with thoughts or memories any more.

I found this piece extremely powerful.

Read Ex Oblivione for yourself:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/eo.aspx

I get into more details in my video on this topic.

New Twist in my stalled-for-10-years Low Carb project!

Lulu, where I originally had published my paperbacks, has just SHUT DOWN all my low carb paperback books from global distribution. Suspicious.

Now I have to race even faster to get them all loaded into Amazon, which I’d been handling at a reasonable, steady pace.

I can only load 3 a day because Amazon now has anti-AI blockades in place preventing more uploads per day. My books are NOT AI written – they are all hand-written by me – but Amazon’s blockades apply to everyone as a safety measure.

Everything has gone haywire :).

These are my 3 updates for today! Yes they are still 2021. My focus right now is ONLY to get the Amazon side to match the Lulu side so everything moves exactly where it belongs.

Once everything is on Amazon, I can start updating again.

One of the downsides of being a reasonably well-known author is that scammers love to take advantage of your built-in name recognition to sell their own works. Over the years I have had ALL sorts of problems with scammers putting out books on my exact topic, using MY NAME, and in some cases using covers nearly identical to mine, all to get their hands on ‘quick easy money’.

And here we have yet another example.

Since about 2000 I’ve published 13 Low Carb Diet books and run a popular Low Carb website. I have hundreds of reviews on my books. People looking for diet advice often find me and write to me. Around 2020 I got very interested in the low FODMAP eating plan, which is similar to low carb. I put low-FODMAP on my list of things to write about.

I did not write my book quickly enough.

In 2021, a person decided to publish “The Easiest Low-FODMAP Diet Cookbook 2021” under the name of Lisa Shea.

How do I know this person isn’t a “real” Lisa Shea nutritionist who just happens to have the exact same name as me?

Well, for one, the author NEVER mentions the name Lisa Shea ANYWHERE in the entire book. Not even on the copyright page or title page. There’s no biography. No publisher listed. It says in the intro that the author is a nutritionist. An author who is a nutritionist would ABSOLUTELY have a biography page where they played that credential up. It would be a big part of their sell for the book. Instead, the book itself is wholly generic.

Next, when I run sections of the book through AI checkers, I get warnings that the content is too AI-like:

“You should edit your text until there’s less detectable AI content”.

And we’ll note that 2021 was just when AI was starting. So the author was probably using some sort of rudimentary AI crutch to write this.

The vast majority of this book is made up of low-FODMAP recipes. Some quick google searches had me finding the EXACT SAME RECIPE on the web, same ingredient order, everything, published pre-2021 by random other people. And we are talking about some extremely specific combinations of ingredients for non-standard recipes. So that is always a warning sign.

The book is also full of formatting and typo issues. Look right on the cover:

They let “for” and “IBS” run together to say FORIBS. That’s a fairly obvious issue that SOMEONE would catch if this was an actual serious author. The same typo is on the title page.

How about Chapter 1?

That’s it. That’s the end of the page. “This chapter will cover the” – and that’s it. The next page starts a new section.

Who would have not even checked Chapter One’s first page?

There’s all sorts of formatting and typo issues throughout this book. I’ll just mention a few more. We’ll begin right in the introduction! There’s a random indent half-way through the paragraph. There are phrases like “… the regular stomach upset that I experienced since childhood can be reverse by knowing …” – that “reverse” should be “reversed”.

This is right at the start of the book. And it keeps on having issues like this.

There’s many strange hiccups. Every single recipe has the formatting issue of turning “you’ll” into “you-space-apostrophe-space-ll” and calling your pantry a “store cupboard”. Degree signs aren’t actual degree signs (which are circles) but a super-scripted number zero.

And yes more typos. This one was extra odd because they spelled “filling” wrong (as “filing”) on step 5 but then spelled it properly on step 6.

There’s a four-page table of contents without page numbers. That’s fine because the pages themselves don’t have numbers on them! So the table of contents is fairly useless.

Researching the ISBN for this book – ISBN: 9781008938557 – it is owned by the Lulu self-publishing company. This book isn’t actually available ON Lulu though. So it looks like someone used Lulu to self-publish their book, created X number of copies, and then listed those copies on Amazon in paperback and hardcover format. They listed the publisher simply as “Lisa Shea”. So the actual person / company behind this is wholly hidden.

Fortunately, when I bought my hardcover copy to research this situation, I bought the very last one available for sale. There are now NO new paperback nor hardcover copies of the “Lisa Shea” FODMAP book on the market. The only ones on the used market have now ratcheted up to astronomical prices due to the way the automated pricing mechanisms work. So the chance of someone accidentally buying one and thinking it’s by me is slim to none.

People often ask me, when someone infringes on your identity as an author, can’t you just write Amazon to complain? The challenge is this.

In the cases like with my chair yoga book, where someone was specifically duplicating MY EXACT BOOK topic, title, and author name, I can challenge it, because it is a clear attempt to steal customers from my existing book.

However, there are legitimately other human beings out there with the name Lisa Shea. I can’t prevent them from publishing books. And I hadn’t yet written my low FODMAP book. So this author wasn’t trying to “steal” my low FODMAP content or traffic, because I didn’t have my book out yet. They were just taking advantage of my reputation in this area.

So I just kept putting this issue off in 2021 … 2022 … 2023 … but finally in 2024 a block of time opened up for me to be able to work on a solution. So my solution entails:

1) Get their low FODMAP book off the market somehow. Luckily, this was easy! I only had to buy the last hardcover copy to effectively do that.

2) Write my own low FODMAP book like I’d always wanted to do. Tie it into my Low Carb series so it 100% was clearly labelled and marketed as by being the established Lisa Shea who has written about low carb books for nearly 25 years. That will make it clear to my readers that it’s an authentic book by me.

Maybe it’s just as well that I waited until 2024 to tackle this, so that the “other Lisa Shea” low FODMAP book would ‘take itself off the market’ naturally. And now I can move forward with my writing plans for low FODMAP content.

Ask with any questions! Hopefully you never find yourself in a similar situation with an author trying to in essence ‘ride on your coattails’!

If you publish paperback books and ebooks, you’ll want to consider all the most popular and effective options for both formats. Here’s a view into how this works.

I first started publishing my 13 low carb books back around 2000, when I began writing online about my experiences with the low carb diet system. At the time Lulu was a big part of the self-publishing market, so I published the physical paperbacks through Lulu. Those paperbacks then distributed to Amazon and the other markets.

On the ebook side, I posted the ebooks directly on every system available, including GooglePlay, Lulu, Kobo, and of course Amazon. I also used the distributor systems of Draft2Digital and Smashwords to reach other markets like Barnes & Noble and Apple iTunes.

Over the years, Amazon has become dominant, and being optimized for the Amazon market has become a key to high sales. It’s critical to have the key words, categories, and everything just right with Amazon’s options. A third-party vendor won’t necessarily have all of those fields updated or even available. Third-party vendors reduce to the ‘lowest common denominator’ across all publishers they work with.

In addition, Lulu now has a policy that you have to PAY for a proof copy EVERY TIME you make any change at all to your paperback book. Since I have 13 low carb books, and tweak them multiple times a year, this quickly becomes unreasonable. For that reason my updates have stalled, which isn’t great for my marketing and sales.

So I’m at the point of preparing to move my paperback books out of Lulu and into Amazon as their primary source location. This became a massive project to organize where all of my low carb paperback books and ebooks were even available. Because it turns out:

* SmashWords was no longer a live ebook publishing system. SmashWords auto-migrated all my books into Draft2Digital, into a separate account from my regular Draft2Digital one. I now had two sets of all my low carb ebooks feeding out from two Draft2Digital accounts into 12 different vendors’ systems.

* Lulu was supposed to be distributing my Lulu ebooks out to Apple and to Barnes & Noble. It turns out that at some point Barnes & Noble stopped displaying Lulu ebooks. So those Barnes & Noble ebooks were simply not visible.

* Kobo was hanging in there. Still, did I really want to deal with updating 13 ebooks regularly in Kobo when I could just do that updating in Draft2Digital and have the ebooks auto-distribute to Kobo along with the 12 other vendors?

So my plan of action going forward with my low carb paperback books is:

* Migrate, one at a time, each paperback book from Lulu to Amazon. This is a process that needs to be done DELIBERATELY SLOWLY in order to maintain the books’ reviews and connections to existing locations on Amazon. Each book needs to be added as-is (no changes) to Amazon so it can “take the place” in the Amazon listing of the original Lulu book. It needs to get tied to the matching ebook. I would then LEAVE the Lulu listing alone. That Lulu page’s existence in search engines and links still provides value to me. If people see the old date on its cover, they might think ‘I wonder if there’s an updated version somewhere’ and find the Amazon one. Try to avoid ever deleting pages or links that promote your products.

* Once Amazon is fully populated with my paperback books, I will edit each one and bring it up to a 2024 version.

My plan of action for my low carb ebooks is:

* Shut down all the Kobo entries for my low carb ebooks. In Draft2Digital, turn on the Kobo distribution option. Once the ebooks are distributing into the Kobo system, I can write Kobo and they will move the reviews I had earned for those ebooks onto the new entries. I’m shutting down the Kobo direct entries simply because it is a lot of hassle to maintain book descriptions / contents / covers in so many systems manually.

* Shut down all the low carb ebooks in my SECONDARY Draft2Digital account that was auto-created by the migration from SmashWords. This SmashWords-to-Draft2Digital account migration became a gigantic mess. It turns out the secondary account had my ‘cocktails’ ebook and my main account didn’t. I asked Draft2Digital if they could move my cocktails ebook over to my main account. Draft2Digital said nope, it is stuck in the migrated account. So I will delete that cocktails ebook wholly from the migrated account and create it fresh in my regular Draft2Digital account. It’s the only way to have everything in one main Draft2Digital account.

* Shut down any distribution options in the Lulu ebook area. Apparently those distributions are having issues anyway. Only have the Lulu ebooks on Lulu itself. Those ebooks, at least, I can update without needing to pay for it.

* Whittle this down so the only places I have to maintain the ebooks are: Amazon, GooglePlay, Lulu, and Draft2Digital. Draft2Digital then broadcasts out to about 12 other sites. Note that I *could* have Draft2Digital broadcast out to Amazon, but for reasons explained earlier, I only ever want to work on Amazon books from within the Amazon system itself. Draft2Digital does not distribute to Lulu nor to GooglePlay.

I know this is a lot of information about a variety of different systems. I hope this will help people who are planning out their paperback or ebook distribution plan. The details should also help people who have been with a publisher and are looking to move their content to be in a different or additional publisher.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

In October 2024 I’m running a FREE writing and marketing seminar series in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. You can attend just one session if you wish, or as many as appeal to you. I cover all stages of writing, editing, marketing, publicity, social networking, and much, much more.

Contact me with any questions!

Thank you to the Uxbridge Cultural Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council for supporting this seminar series!

I often talk about how critical it is to optimize your book covers to shine in modern sales situations. Your covers must grab attention – in a sea of competitors – even at a small cellphone-browsing size. Otherwise the reader won’t even see the book to learn more about it.

Here are two recent examples.

First, one of my own books. I’d designed this cover for my middle-school-aimed fairy tale short story. I loved the font and the feel of it.

However, the more I saw it at a small browser-on-phone size, the more I realized that title became illegible. Not only that, but many middle-school students are challenged by cursive letters. A title MUST be crystal-clear to its target audience. I was sad, but I updated my cover to this new version.

That is MUCH easier to decipher at a small browsing size. It’s also much more legible. It still has that ‘fantasy’ feel to it.

Cordelia on Amazon

Here’s another recent example. My friend Curtis Corey was working on a mock-up for his latest children’s chapter book involving a friendly bigfoot character.

His personally-drawn cover image fits wonderfully with his hand-crafted theme. However, the title doesn’t stand out well against the blue background. Similarly, the lower white text has trouble being read against the background which ranges from dark to light. The bigfoot is almost ‘lost’ behind the words.

Here’s the update I made, to help this cover become more legible.

The letters now stand out more strongly against the background. The bigfoot character is much more visible. The title “BOULDER” and the word “BIGFOOT” are much more visible. The dark shadow behind the author name helps it stand out against both a lighter background and a darker background.

Boulder on Amazon

Just to further show the evolution, here was Curtis’s first version of the Boulder cover, when he had it on Kindle Vella.

In the original version, the colors were all muted and ‘middle value’ so the bigfoot character blended in too much with the background. You always want your main focal point to stand out against its background.

These kinds of tweaks can make an important difference in helping your book covers be seen and the reader taking a next step to learn more. A cover should never be ‘static’. It should be ever evolving and improving, optimizing toward drawing in the target audience for your book.

Ask with any questions!