NaNoWriMo and my Seasonal Affective Disorder
Unless you’ve been under a rock for years, you may know that November is National Novel Writing Month. November is also when my (and most people’s) Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) kicks in. The shorter days, combined with the fact that my parents are dead make for what they call “situational depression”. After 55 years of dealing with it, I have developed my own coping mechanism — I usually start a project that will occupy my mind all winter. At least twice that project was writing, but I’ve never participated in a meaningful way in NaNoWriMo.
I was all set to participate this year when a huge problem came to my attention. Allegedly, minors participating in NaNoWriMo were being directed to a fetish website being run by the only moderator in charge of children involved with NaNoWriMo. While I am pretty supportive of most fetishes (gonna be straight, I punch Nazi uniform fetishists), this report worried me as more came out about it. While I know it’s all heresay, the reports weirded me out enough that I decided to leave my mention of NaNoWriMo to my first two paragraphs in this piece. I leave it to the reader to follow the links and make their own decision about promoting NaNoWriMo. I personally am not going to give them my information or push their hashtags now.
Some years my project is my company — traditionally, I get a LOT of coding done over the holidays. My company actually needs a lot of work on it as well — but there are things going on that are making me hold off on company goals this year. I can’t talk about them here either, so you’ll all just have to wait on that one. Likewise, this year there are no consulting gigs to take my mind off the SAD. In the year before the vaccine, 2020, my project was self-publishing a novel. It turned out to be a lot more work than I expected.
If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you know of my love for Emperor Norton, the original San Francisco eccentric. There are others that people don’t acknowledge who were actually first — James Lick was an absolute madman who collected dead animals and dressed in rags despite being the richest guy in town for a while. But I found out about Joshua Norton almost at the same time I learned to read when I read about the character of the King in Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
My teacher dropped a hint that this was based on a real person and I kept it filed in my head until the 90s, when I found him again thanks to Neil Gaiman and issue #31 of The Sandman. A visit to San Francisco that year led to me discussing Emperor Norton with a random person at Murio’s Trophy Room on Haight Street who turned out to be a drummer for Chris Isaak’s band. He and his girlfriend insisted on dragging me to their apartment full of exotic birds on Russian Hill while he talked my ear off telling me random things about Emperor Norton. Wish I’d kept in touch with him but I was actually so impaired by alcohol I don’t even remember his name — just that he was really, really into Emperor Norton and it rubbed off on me.
Writing about Emperor Norton was not a new idea in 2020 for me. As far back as 2000 people were pushing me to write screenplays for movies about him. I actually did write a screenplay in 2003. It no longer exists, because what it made me realize is that a movie is too small to capture the whole story. The idea has percolated in my head for close to twenty years at this point, and in 2020 I started to get it out of my head. Over those twenty years, I’ve realized that there’s a lot more to the story than the bullet points we’ve gotten. Twain seemed to think it was impossible to actually write directly about Emperor Norton. For some reason, this hasn’t discouraged me.
In 2020 I developed a formula to write this novel that I feel worked really well. I ended up writing the first third of the novel in 2020. I’ve let enough percolate in my head for the past three years that it’s time to write the next third — that’s my SAD project this year. I could talk about the methods and madness that goes into writing a novel all day, but right now I want to discuss the business side of publishing a novel because I set this up three years ago as well. Trust me, if you want to self-publish then you will find this interesting. I hope I can make it interesting for the rest of you as well.
I did a lot of things that most first timers would not do and I would not recommend if you want to be widely read or distributed. The monopoly in self-publishing these days is all about Amazon. To publish a book, you have to have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number). These numbers are for sale from a central agency, and Amazon has a deal where they control the ISBN and are on record as the publisher of your book if you use their services to obtain your ISBN. This has several advantages and disadvantages. The biggest is that Amazon will throw their machine and algorithm behind your book if you go through them. The disadvantage is that people cannot buy your book in normal bookstores and libraries will typically not stock your book.
This was a dealbreaker for me — I wanted this book in the San Francisco Public Library. Luckily for me, there is an alternative to Amazon that they support. The first book is available at the San Francisco Library — and in figuring out how to do that, I ended up having to set up the next two books of the entire story.
The service that most small publishers use is called Bowker (https://www.myidentifiers.com/). I needed two ISBNs, because I was publishing a paperback and an eBook. If you refer to their website, you’ll see that individually they sell ISBNs at $125 per number. You will also see that they sell ten ISBNs for $295. You can probably see where I am going here. I bought ten of them.
Once you purchase your ISBN, you can set up your self-published book with Amazon — but be aware that they will do absolutely nothing for you and you will always end up at the bottom of the pile on their algorithm. You can’t even find my book by searching normally for it — half the time it won’t show up even when you put the exact title in. You can see it all over the internet in every small bookstore catalog though and also Barnes and Noble, etc. Plus it’s at my local library.
So now I have used two ISBNs and have eight of them left. If I use two ISBNs for the next book and two for the final book, I will have four left. I’ll probably wait six months after I am done with the last book and publish a large collection of all three in one volume after taking the other books out of print — I’m still trying to figure out the end game on all of this, but so far that’s the plan. I also have two more ISBNs left over, so maybe I’ll write another book when I’m done. If you are self-publishing and just starting out with no money, don’t do what I did. Use Amazon’s service.
If you aren’t interested in the nuances of self-publishing, you may be asking yourself why I’m sharing this with you. If you’ve stuck with me this far, I am hoping that you at least find me an entertaining writer. I am fighting an uphill battle of my own making with this project, and I need all the help I can get. Good news! There are several ways you can help me!
First, if you haven’t already bought the first book in my story, you should do that! Either buy it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or your favorite small bookstore (ISBN: 978–1–7371997–0–0 for paperback). I much prefer that people buy it from small bookstores. Clerks at small bookstores talk about books a lot if they like them. I’m also at a disadvantage when it comes to advertising and marketing so if you know anyone who might appreciate it as a holiday gift go ahead and stuff those stockings too! Anything to get the word out.
Second, ask for it at your local library. Again, the ISBN is 978–1–7371997–0–0. It’s already in the San Francisco Library so you don’t have to ask them. I love libraries — it was a huge factor in my decision not to use Amazon’s ISBN service. I feel like it is worth doing in the long run.
Third, help me get the word out about this book on your socials and review it. I’m making posts for all my socials so it could be as easy as reposting what I do, but if you feel like writing a review I need all I can get. It’s been the hardest part about this whole experience, getting reviews!
Finally, if you have read the first book and want to read along as I write the second book then I highly recommend you join my Patreon Page. The first three chapters of the next book are online there, and my goal is to publish at least one chapter a week until the next 33 chapters are in the can. At that point, I’ll use two more ISBNs and publish the next book. I already have the cover designed and I’ve collected blurbs for the back cover. The first half of November was spent with plotting and outlining so I could keep the story straight. From the very beginning, I intended this to be the story of San Francisco and several characters of old San Francisco with Emperor Norton as a connecting thread. New chapters go up on Fridays!
Thank you!
