Just Can't Help Writing

I’m back to recount my various publishing trials as I encounter them, and right now they involve battles with website creation. The hair-tearing-out, hate-every-form-of-tech-but-especially-upgrades, you-call-this-support? kind.

This will be a grumpy post, so be forewarned.

I won’t detail every frustration. I actually need to write now and then. But I am curious as to the degree to which I am merely displaying my incompetence, or, alternatively, expressing widespread angst.

Basically, a group that I have recently joined as a volunteer has a website of the thrown-together sort at Squarespace. Thrown-together because in volunteer groups, people do what they can. I had had good luck with WordPress in the past, so I thought a) Squarespace is not easy for beginners in a hurry; b) it’s more expensive than a WordPress premium account; and c) maybe I can recreate the Squarespace site on WordPress and we can switch.

Fail.

When I first discovered WordPress, say around 2015, it was a joy. I built multiple sites, including this one. You picked a simple theme, made your changes, set your static home page, and went to town.

No more. When I began trying to build a simple page in a new site, I found myself in thrown into a train wreck of incomprehensible “blocks” that often didn’t let me enter text or images, that didn’t show me what I thought I had entered, and often didn’t let me make even the most basic changes even though I was able to find a “settings” panel that claimed I could. As for those panels, if you didn’t know exactly how many panels deep to look for a particular setting or on which side of the screen to look—well, happy hunting. Support consisted of screen shots of the documentation I had already found unhelpful. At least I had the sense I was talking to real people—who often gave contradictory advice or advice at odds with the onscreen instruction.

E.g., the mysterious “Post content block” that monopolized every screen. I was told, first, what I’d already read, which told me nothing about how to enter my text and media; then, that I could type into/over the text in the PCB, (not so); and finally that I could simply remove it (HIGHLY forbidden if you try).

Now, three books, several websites, and multiple YT videos into fighting back, I think I have realized that to return to the WYSIWYG technology I revered in the past, I need a third-party program that will show me what I’m actually doing, and that in successfully revising my website, virginiasanderson.com, I was unknowingly using one.

Suffice it to say that my group has renewed its Squarespace site for the time being; this site is actually simpler than WP, so for now we’ll play with what it can do. I warn WP, though: I will win. I will reclaim the WP I once loved.

Spoiler for a future post: DO NOT TRY TO PUBLISH A WEBSITE IN CANVA. Main reason: No human beings work at Canva. None.

Any advice out there for the WP lovelorn? Share.

For those interested in my experiences this time around in my self-publishing career, here’s a report on some options for reasonably priced covers. I submit this after having spent $600 for a cover I really didn’t like. I played around with designing my own cover for Three Strides Out, my new horse mystery, but was told by (possibly) qualified critics that my efforts didn’t “look professional.” Sigh.

I clicked on a coupon offer from WPBeginner for half off at 100Covers and submitted my book details. The basic price for an ebook cover is $100. For $200, you get both ebook and paperback cover.

The final 100Covers design met my needs; that the book is picking up more orders than my older titles may be due to the “new” factor, but it could also be that the cover is inviting. It definitely got WOW responses from friends and colleagues I tested it on.

I would give 100Covers 3.75 stars. The one-quarter star deduction reflects the number of tries to get the designer (whom I could not contact directly) to understand what seemed to me a pretty basic request: more horse, less woman. However, I suspect that any interaction with a designer requires multiple explanations of just what kind of focus the cover should have.

The other star reflects the fact that I wouldn’t recommend the site for anyone with a looming deadline. First contact from a “project manager” was prompt, and the first drafts arrived within two weeks, a reasonable amount of time. The cover proposals were pretty far from what I’d hoped to see, so I sent what I thought was a specific request for a refocus. I waited three weeks for the next drafts. This did seem to me to be an unusual amount of time for a project which felt as if it should have migrated to the top of the pile. The second set of drafts, oddly, did not respond at all to my feedback despite my having sent some iStock images that illustrated more of what I was hoping for. A firm re-emphasis on “more horse, less woman” led, I must say, to a very prompt third draft, which, with tweaks, is now my much-liked cover.

I have submitted my request for the paperback files; I will report on that process when it’s done.

Writing this, I now provisionally revise my rating to 4 out of 5 stars, with the delay in the middle of negotiations accounting for 0.75% of the star. Bottom line: I am thinking of asking for proposals for 100Covers revisions of my current covers for my other books. I’m on no deadline; I’d be curious to see if new covers perked up sales on those titles, and my experience was positive enough to go back for more.

In the meantime, a Facebook friend recommended MIBLART and GetCovers, both of which are also extremely reasonable, especially GetCovers. MIBLART looks as if its focus is fantasy/sci-fi/paranormal, but my friend assures me the site can produce in a number of genres. I’m wondering if anyone reading this has experience with either of these, or has other recommendations. (I am not particularly interested in “ready-made” covers, though I know they work well for many writers.)

So please share!

About my last title. Fact is, almost all the tech sites I’ve been “battling” with in one way or another respond promptly and thoroughly and patiently to cries for help. Draft2Digital came back within just a few hours with a fix for my main problem. I’ve had excellent support from MailerLite as well, and generous help from both Amazon and Smashwords. My “battle” was mainly with the template’s determination to do things its way, and I now know that about templates (similar experience with Amazon’s paperback-interior templates—finally went with the blank to get the right margins and less interference but still found simpler is better).

The only thing I can say about the support structure is that the online FAQs and databases almost never answer my specific questions, leading to my need to find the email screen where I can ask for the fixes I need.

So don’t hold my mistakes against any of the platforms I discuss. The learning curves are real, but the help is excellent so far.

It’s hard to believe that it has been only two years since my last visit to this blog. Seems like eons since I abandoned Just Can’t Help Writing to do what I couldn’t help: write a new book and get it out into the world. I’m returning with some news about my latest learning curve–not how to publish an ebook (I already knew how to do that), but my experiences with editing as an indie and my struggles to learn how to market out in the wide book world.

I am not an expert. Not one of those wonderful gurus who can tell you how they have sold hundreds of books a day and YOU CAN TOO! I’m not mocking those gurus. I have learned a terrific amount from them already and will share their names with you. Rather, posts here will recount what’s happening to me as I experiment the way I suspect many indie writers do, and, I hope, collect responses and advice from writers who see how badly I’m messing up and know how they can help.

First task, as I guess anyone can see, is to UPDATE. Some books in new covers, some unpublished, and of course news of my latest, THREE STRIDES OUT: A HORSE SHOW NOVEL OF SUSPENSE (at Amazon and Smashwords) and my newly resituated author website, virginiasanderson.com. In addition, I hope to post some account of my adventures once a week and re-establish some old connections.

Let me hear how you are doing if you happen by.