Newsletter #63 — The Wisdom Within
August 1, 2023
Newsletter #63 — The Wisdom Within
The Wisdom Within — For several years I've been encouraging and helping a friend to proceed with a book he had in mind: a definitive collection of the sayings of Charlie Chan. It's important to note that these are the sayings in the novels, not in the movies. Lou and I have shared questions and answers and helped each other along the way. And now, at last, Lou Armagno's book, The Wisdom Within Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chan: The Original Aphorisms Within the Charlie Chan Canon, will be published (August 26 for the ebook, September 4 for the paperback).
If you enjoy both wit and wisdom, and in addition would like to learn more about Charlie Chan's sayings in the six Chan novels, you will find this book very appealing. One of the many things I enjoyed about it was that the author looks at the sayings in several different ways, including putting them into categories.
Tightening a Book — Authors almost always have to tighten their manuscripts before submitting them. With She's on First I had to tighten by reducing a 400-page manuscript to 300 pages. Ouch! The approach suggested to me at the time was, "Get rid of the deadwood."
Because I'm considering self-publication for Exit Velocity, I wanted to reduce the roughly 105,000 words to under 100,000 words. This was for cost reasons. I don't think there was much deadwood in Exit Velocity (hopefully writers get better as they write more books!). In order to reduce the word count I used an approach I just happened to stumble across at the right time — delete the weakest sentence in each paragraph. Doing so, I was able to reduce the manuscript to approximately 98,000 words. Not bad! I'll soon be writing a blog with more details about this method
Exit Velocity Decisions — Anticipating that I will most likely end up self-publishing Exit Velocity, I've set aside thirty to sixty minutes a day to study up on all the decisions I'll have to make. Because I have a lot of time before a May 2024 publication date, I'm investigating things in a willy-nilly [I've always wanted to use that word!] fashion: i.e., without direction or planning.
Yesterday I watched a video on and read a few articles about whether or not it would benefit me to offer Exit Velocity as pre-order. That is, people could start buying it ninety days before its official publication date. They would not receive the book or ebook until pub day, however. This may seem like a no-brainer decision, an easy Yes answer, but according to some recent sources, pre-order might not be the right decision. According to such sources, selling books the first week of pre-order, and then not selling many from then to pub date, is detrimental to sales. I won't go into all the reasons here, but it is something I'm still pondering.
EReaders— Perhaps I'm a Luddite, but it wasn't until this year that I began to use an eReader. I write about this in my August 1 blog.