No, I’m not going to teach you how to make fried brains with this blog post. (Wherever would I get a supply of brains?) Instead, the post title is letting you know that my brain is fried. So fried that this is the best I can do for a blog post, even though I woke this morning with a great idea for a post and I jotted down pages of notes on it. That will come later.
For now, you get me explaining why my brain is fried.
I’ve decided to close my CafePress store, which is where I first uploaded my Greenville books for sale. At the time I chose CafePress for self-publishing, it was the only service I could find that allowed me to design my books and upload them for free. The problem with CafePress is that my cost on the books is set so high that I have to put a high retail price on them, which doesn’t feel right to me.
About a year after setting up my CafePress store and uploading my books, I discovered Amazon’s CreateSpace, which allows me to design and upload my books for free, but also has a lower cost per book for me, which means I can lower the retail price.
I uploaded the Keeping Edition of Greenville a while ago. While I was deciding whether to close my CafePress, I also had to decide whether to upload the Sharing and Unfinished Editions to Amazon, or just let them die. In the end, I chose to let them live, but I knew it would take time to layout the covers again. CafePress and CreateSpace have different methods for uploading covers. CafePress wants the front cover, back cover, and spine all laid out and uploaded separately, whereas CreateSpace wants them all together in one layout document.
Which brings me to why my brain is fried. I just spent the past several hours redoing the cover layout on the Sharing and Unfinished Editions and uploading the whole schmear to CreateSpace. When I’m doing page layout, I’m so intense that I forget to move until I come to a natural stopping point. Did I bother to stop after laying out the first cover? Oh, no! My project was two books long and I wasn’t stopping until I was done with both. Result: Fried Brain. That’ll learn me.
(Actually, no it won’t.)
Once CreateSpace reviews and approves what I’ve uploaded, I’ll have to order proof copies and approve those. Then all of my books will be available through Amazon and the CafePress store will go bye-bye. I’ll also be mucking about at my website, woowooteacup.com, because I’ve got links there to the store. Perhaps I’ll condense it to a single home page with book covers and links to Amazon. That, however, will take more thinking than I’ve got in me right now.
The fried brain effect is part of that internet generation of occupying the mind: the screen staring, the mouse clicking, the places where each click goes, the mistakes, the code, the starting all over again when something goes wrong, the neck pain that starts to hurt, it’s tedious!
I still have to gain all these skills you mentioned here because I was hoping to have had them by now, but everything takes so much time, so I went and got a degree first.
To which, btw, thank you for noticing! I think I met you when I first started the process, so you saw the whole thing; it really took a lot out of me towards the end.
Thank you for all that support you gave me.
And l’m digging the new screen name Mz. Woo.
: P
Hi, LK – My brain seems to have recovered from the frying.
I got my new screen name from a friend, who calls me Ms. Woo because of The Woo Woo Teacup Journal. I changed the “s” to a “z” in Mz. because my daughter didn’t like the look of the “s.”
I’m messing with a new blog concept, Mz. Woo’s Guide to Life, and wanted my screen name to show up as “Mz. Woo” there, rather than “woowooteacup,” hence the name change here. WordPress won’t let you have more than one screen name if you’re operating several blogs on the same account.