• Home
  • My Bookshelf
  • Blog Posts
    • This Writers’s Life
    • Breakfast Flights
      • I, amputee
  • Here’s Doug
  • Horst Wessel and U-853 Gallery
  • Photo Gallery

dscooperbooks

~ author D. S. Cooper

dscooperbooks

Tag Archives: Kindle

Sixty Page Novels

30 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

eBooks, Fiction Writing, Flight From Katama, Kindle, Novels, Self Publishing, Whom Fortune Favors, Writer's solitude, Writing, Writing projects

I once read that many neophyte authors get sixty pages into their novel before they find themselves lost in the labyrinths of storytelling and get discouraged. Sixty pages may be anecdotal, but it sounds about right to me, and I ought to know, because I’ve spent decades discarding stillborn books. Lord knows how many pages I’ve tossed into the recycle bin, but the bundles usually did seem to average sixty to one hundred pages.

After my accident I had plenty of time to write, so I rolled my wheelchair up to the dining room table and started writing scenes and dialogues for a novel, in no particular order, whenever inspiration struck. When I pulled it all together, the result was 1,760 typewritten pages! That technique got me past the sixty-page barrier, but the result was awful. I could have spent years polishing that manuscript as a no-name unpublished author, but instead I started writing shorter “quick-reads” to see what self-publishing was all about. My first book was only 15,000 words and used characters based on some of the kids I knew when I was living and flying on Cape Cod, decades earlier, to play off the Chappaquiddick Incident. Flight From Katama taught me how to finish stories and publish them on Kindle and Createspace. I’m not getting rich or famous, but I am enjoying the writing immensely.

So would you think that my days of not finishing a story are over? Hardly! Sometimes you just need to decide that a project isn’t working and move on to something else. The beauty of writing in the electronic age is that you can easily use some of those gems later, in another setting.

The key point, for me, is to keep writing something, every day.

When I was a teenager I’d get so enthused about books that I would write to the author. Every one of them wrote back, but only one offered to meet me. Dick Bach was a Flying Magazine editor and author of Stranger To The Ground, an aviation classic and a book that really moved me when I was sixteen years old. Dick lived in Iowa but he just happed to be in New York working on a new book about JFK Airport when we met for lunch. It was going to be an in-depth study of a major metropolitan airport, although he lamented that the Arthur Hailey novel Airport had just been made into a blockbuster movie, so he would probably put his project aside and work on something else. Then we spent a few hours talking not about airplanes and flying, but about metaphysical matters; self-levitation, suspended animation, walking through walls, and so forth. As far as I know, Dick never wrote the book about an airport.

Of course, Dick Bach was Richard Bach, and his next book was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which shocked the publishing world and launched millions of people on voyages of self-discovery.

So we should all have the courage to put our pet projects on the shelf and launch onto something new.  We can’t go wrong if we just keep writing, writing, and writing.

 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

Write of Passage

22 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

eBooks, Kindle, Self Publishing, Writing

Everybody likes free stuff, unless it is their stuff being given away by other folks. So when I Googled my pen name and “free” I was a bit miffed to see my books being offered for free as a “Kindle [pdf]” at various places on the internet.

You may know about these online bulletin boards, where college kids seek free copies of the textbooks and other published works which–in their minds–they are entitled to.  For €99 a subscriber can download thousands of “pirated” books which have been posted there. So, two things: If you self-publish your books online you might want to check to see if your projects are available (supposedly) elsewhere. And (2), if someone is offering your book for “free,” relax. It is probably a scam which will only burn the subscriber.

Take Usenet.nl, for example. The front for this bogus company is located at Via XXV Marzo, 4 Domangano, San Marino Italy, which I discovered when I saw that they were offering several of my books free of charge, with a subscription to their service. However, the RIPOFF REPORT website shows that this is a scam which never delivers a product and does not allow users to unsubscribe after they provide their credit card information for a “free” 14 day trial. In fact, Usenet.nl is basically a collection agency which wears subscribers down until they cancel their credit cards.

How about Motoauthority.com? This is another slick scam, piggybacking on the legitimate websites of Motorauthority.com (with an r) and Moto-authority.com (with a -), which are very reputable on-line providers of aftermarket motorsport products. The crooked website with the slightly different name would have you believe that they have converted your eBook to a pdf for redistribution, but in my case, that was nonsense. What they DID do was to skim the information about my book from my author website, which is why I don’t post sample passages any longer.

So, relax. This happens to every author as a “write” of passage once we publish on the internet. The crooks probably don’t actually have that novel you poured your heart and soul into and their shenanigans will not effect your sales in the least.

I, for one, just laughed it off. Hey, I’m so famous now that people all over the world are clamoring for copies of my books! Sure. Right …  if only THAT was true.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

How We Write

07 Saturday May 2016

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Amazon Kindle, e-books, Kindle, Self Publishing, Writing

writespace

My dining room table was my first writing station, mainly because I was confined to the first floor of my house at the time and that table was the only flat surface which could accommodate my wheelchair, once we raised it 2 inches with blocks under the legs.

Five years later, I’m out of the wheelchair and getting up and down the stairs quite nicely on an artificial leg, but I’ll still sit down there nearly every morning for the views out the windows and the easy access to the coffee pot. These days I’m rewriting my first complete manuscript, which I first wrote there after the flying accident which sent me into early retirement and thus started my e-book writing career, Moons of the Sierra Maestra.

Moons was never meant to be an e-book. Rather, it was a naïve attempt to publish a novel the ‘conventional’ way, which never quite got off the ground. As soon as I finished the first draft, I promptly sent all 975 pages out to my first readers. Big mistake! But much to their credit, three of my friends actually read the bloated tome and provided positive feedback, even though by then I knew, as well as them, that it was awful.

It was my late friend and mentor since high school, the prolific (72 titles in print!) author Roy F. Chandler, who recommended that I forgo agents and publishers and concentrate my efforts on e-books. I have no regrets in taking that advice to heart. I’ve learned a lot and derived a great deal of satisfaction from writing and self-publishing five little books, rather than spending lonely years grooming one massive manuscript for multiple submissions to agents and major publishing houses. How many potentially marvelous novels have languished as rehashed manuscripts until abandoned or taken to their graves by frustrated authors?

So this is how we write today. We do our best work and publish it ourselves.  We learn to control our alliteration and our similes and we allow the dialog to carry the narrative. We try to write simply and truthfully about things that matter. We read voraciously. We jump through the same hoops as the fortunate few who learn the craft by writing for newspapers and magazines before tackling their novels, and although we may never realize the same profits or fame, we are published authors.

That is why on the very same day that my rewrite of Moons of the Sierra Maestra is finally completed, I’ll publish it on Kindle and move on to the next project.

 

 

 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

Phantoms I Have Known

04 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Carson Long Military Academy, Cult, Ghosts, Kidnapping, Kindle, Phantom Pain, Self Publishing, Writing

Old Cadet Cover

Like my character Kevin O’Connor, I have known phantoms.

They often come in the night, bringing tingling sensations to my right leg, which was amputated above the knee three years ago. These visits by a limb which no longer exists in the physical world are not always unpleasant. Sometimes the illusion that my leg has returned is so convincing that I must reach down and touch the end of my stump to prove to my senses that there is nothing there. On occasion, there is searing pain, like a prolonged electric shock, which causes muscles that are no longer alive to brutally convulse. And while these most severe bouts of phantom pain are infrequent, I have learned that resistance is futile. I just get up and read and watch TV and listen to music through the night. By morning, the phantoms will have left me.

Civil War physician and writer Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) gave a nod to the ghostly nature of the phenomena when he coined the term phantom limb, writing that “thousands of spirit limbs were haunting as many good soldiers, every now and then tormenting them.”

So when I decided to put a supernatural twist on my novel about the kidnapping of a boy from a military prep school in Pennsylvania, at least one of the characters — Kevin O’Connor — had to know the same phantoms which I have known.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

Billy Coates

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

1969, Amazon Kindle, Chappaquiddick Incident, Falmouth Airpark, Flying, Katama Airpark, Kindle, Self Publishing

Billy Coates

“Are you for the war,” was the question in 1969, “or against it?”

“I’m not for the war or against it,” Billy Coates would say. “I was in it.”

Now, Billy Coates is a fictional character, and not based on any one person. But I knew from the onset that the protagonist of Flight From Katama, which plays off pivotal events in 1969, would have to be a Vietnam veteran. The reason why has a lot to do with where I was living in the Seventies; Narragansett, Falmouth, Plymouth and Newport. Small seaside towns with a purpose, be it fishing or tourism or sailing. Towns where people were working hard. So the veterans therein (who were all older than myself) had simply come home and gone back to their labors. Perhaps in other places they might have donned their old fatigues and smoked pot and flashed peace signs to air the pain of blood spilled in vain, but the men that I knew had no time for all that.

So in Falmouth we have ex-door gunner Billy Coates, who used his GI Bill benefits to learn to fly, and who then found a wealthy sponsor for his charter flying business. He literally rubs elbows with the rich and famous when he flies them around Cape Cod and the Islands in his airplane, but he is not one of them. His best friend Ned Rogers is a cook in a seafood restaurant and Benedita Lopes, the high school girl whom he never quite connected with, is keeping the Cranberry Flying Service’s books for his silent partner.

When a seemingly small midnight favor — the flight from Katama — evolves into a momentous event, Billy finds himself standing at the confluence of wealth and politics. If he allows himself to be dawn into the media storm, his fifteen minutes of fame might lead to sudden riches. But at what cost to the course which he has charted for his own life?

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

None To A Million

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Amazon Kindle, eBooks, Kindle, Kindle Direct Publishing, Self Publishing, Solitude, Writing

cropped-eastrivertrust-cover-e14172283338142.jpg

Writers are each a solitary actor with an audience of none to a million.

That’s my theory; writing is a non-simultaneous performance art. We act out our stories as we write — we perform them in our minds, just as surely as if we were on stage — without knowing how many people will be in the audience when the house lights come up. The writer must feel all the emotion as she writes; the reader gets it later. And who knows how many readers there will be?

Some can hold their game face as they write, hardly betraying the highs and lows of their feelings as they put words on the page. Others mumble their dialogs or speak the words aloud. Some pace at their writing station and pantomime the action. No wonder so many writers prefer to work alone!

I’ve read that JK Rowling was waiting on a train platform without a pen when she had the idea for a scrawny bespectacled boy who did not know that he was a wizard. Imagine if she had entered into a conversation with a fellow traveler, and that thought had been lost? Later, she penned her Harry Potter novels in the public room of a pub overlooking Edinburgh Castle. Could anyone watching her face then have sensed the brilliance of the words which she was putting on paper?

Alas, few of us have imaginations so powerful and so impervious to distraction as JK Rowling. So we retreat to quiet places. We train our family and friends to respect our diurnal periods of self imposed solitude. In the end, we put it out there. We publish electronically.

Will anyone read our words?

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

Flight From Katama

25 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Above The Knee Writer, Amazon Kindle, Chappaquiddick Incident, eBooks, Falmouth Airpark, Flight From Katama, Flying, Katama Airpark, Kindle, Kindle Direct Publishing, Old Cape Cod, Sea and Sky, Self Publishing, The Sixties, Writing

Set in 1969, this novella plays off the ‘Chappaquiddick Incident,’ with young charter pilot Billy Coates and his friends from Cape Cod tossed into the world of presidential politics by a fictional twist. It was fun to write, because I lived in Falmouth in the Seventies and I first learned to fly there. The characters came easily, since I  had known a few young locals like Billy in that seaside resort town, with his stalwart pal Ned Rogers and love interest Benedita Lopes.

Flight From Katama was my first self-published project, appearing on Amazon eight months ago. I intended it to be a short ‘Two Hour Quick Read’ which I could initially offer as a free promotion to introduce me and my writing. But readers have really responded well to the characters, so I’m planning to bring them back in a ‘Billy Coates Series’ of eBooks.

The biggest mistake I made on this project was the title. Pilots from all over the country might recognize ‘Katama’ as the popular grass airstrip at Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, but most readers wouldn’t know that. So given the way that Amazon suggests books by interests and keywords, ‘Flight From Chappaquiddick’ might have sold many more copies.

Live and learn.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

My First Disaster

23 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Above The Knee Writer, Amazon Kindle, East River Trust, eBooks, Flight From Katama, Kindle, Kindle Direct Publishing, Royals All The Way!, Sea and Sky, Self Publishing, The Old Cadet, Writing

Recyclable1

Much of my writing ends up in the recycling bin, and I know that I’m not alone in that regard. If you are reading this blog, you may be a writer, and this might all sound very familiar.

I started to write my first novel at least a dozen times over the years, but I could never charge further than about 70 pages into the story before work or travel broke my stride. A few of these attempts dating back 20 years or more are stashed away in my filing cabinet or somewhere in my basement, growing mold. No one has ever read them.

After my forced retirement, I took the advice of many writers and got up 5 a.m. each morning, made a pot of coffee, and sat down with my computer. I turned off my cell phone and tapped the keys until 9 or 10 o’clock, and then printed the pages and added them to the stack. Ten months later, I had 1245 pages of Moons of the Sierra Maestra, which I rushed off to friends and family for reading.

It was awful.

So, I did what we all do: I began editing and re-writing, preparing a final manuscript to mail off to some agents or publishers. I suppose that I might have spent the rest of my life perfecting that masterpiece if I had not decided to put it aside “just for a few weeks” to write a little novella. I had been toying with the idea for Flight From Katama for years, so why not try a small project as an eBook, just to see what this self-publishing thing is all about?

I still have a lot to learn as a writer, but pushing that one little project through to completion for Amazon Kindle was the best move I ever made.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • March 2021
  • September 2020
  • July 2020
  • October 2019
  • May 2019
  • February 2018
  • December 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • November 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015

Categories

  • A Writer's Life
  • Breakfast Flights
  • D. S. Cooper Books
    • New Books
  • I, amputee
  • Self Publishing
  • Self-publishing
  • This Writer's Life
  • Uncategorized
  • Writing

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • dscooperbooks
    • Join 49 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • dscooperbooks
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: