Direct Publishing for Kindle

Apparently Kindle sales make up over half of Amazon’s sales now. I read a blog about the benefits of Amazon’s Direct Publishing for Kindle, so I had a look at it. Apparently some already successful authors are going that route rather than through traditional publishing.

It costs essentially nothing to get published. They take part of the sales price. You get either 35 per cent or 70 per cent of the list price. If you go for the 70 per cent option, you have to pay a distribution charge before you get your royalty. It is only a few cents though.

One problem is that they deduct withholding for U.S. taxes. I looked into that once before when I was on Associated Content. It would cost me to get that back and it was more than what I’d get back. However, that was for a very small payment. If I got some decent sales, then it would be worthwhile.

Their website explains how to create your own e-book.

I tried out two of the programs they recommend: The Mobipocket Creator and the Kindle Previewer.

The Mobipocket Creator wasn’t too hard to use, although I can’t get it to create a table of contents. I’m not very happy with the quality of the result though. I played around a little and got it to look better, but I’m still not satisfied. I think that with a little more practice I can get an e-book that looks good. I need to study some other Kindle books and see what they look like.

I’d like to publish my book Walk in the Snow on Kindle. I have it for sale on Lulu as a hard copy and a PDF file now, but I think I may get better sales if it is on Amazon. I’ll wait until I get the hang of the e-book creation first.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Tell, Don’t Show?

“Show don’t tell” is one of the most common bits of advice I come across when I read about writing. I’ve always thought of it as good advice, although I do find it hard to do

Recently I started to wonder if it is the way to go in a film script. Could it be better to “tell, don’t show” in a script?

In the past, when I wrote the action descriptions I tried, not always successfully, to describe what the character does and not how he feels. That is: “show, don’t tell.”

For example, this is a bit of action from my detective script.

Robert eyes widen as he looks at the image on his video camera. He looks up at the image of John Smith on the TV. As he glances at the squalor he lives in, his face breaks out in a sly grin.

I have described what he does and leave it to the reader to interpret how the character feels and what he thinks. This is what I used to think of as the right way.

Robert is surprised as he recognizes that the man on his video recording is the same person as the John Smith on TV. He is happy as realizes that he can get rich from blackmail and escape the poverty he lives in.

This would be considered bad writing, well worse writing than what I originally wrote.

Who is the audience for a script? In my article How to Write a Feature Movie Script Part 1: What is a movie script anyway? I suggested that a script is the plan for the movie. The director and the actors will take it as a suggestion as they create the movie. You might say that a character smiles, but they may choose a different way to express the character’s emotions and thoughts.

The “show, don’t tell” style provides details that the director and actors don’t need and forces them to guess at what the character feels and thinks. The “tell, don’t show” style tells them what the character feels and thinks and allows the director and actors to choose how to “show” those emotions and thoughts in the movie.

Another audience for a script is the script readers who review scripts for producers. Since they can make the difference between a rejection and a sale, you want them to like your script. I suspect that they are more likely to be turned off by a “tell, don’t show” style of writing.

I guess the right answer would be “it depends.”

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Transportation Planning Movies and Stories

When I started to work on my ideas for a story featuring transportation planners, I didn’t think that it had been done before. I thought I should check before I go too far. So far I haven’t found anything quite like what I have in mind. I have found some movies and a novel that do mention transportation planning.

In the movie Mission Impossible III there is a scene where Tom Cruise pretends to be a transportation engineer. This isn’t really about transportation planning though. His character is really a spy and the transportation planning reference has no relevance to the story.

A transportation planner appears as a character in an episode of Law & Order. I think it was Pride, the final episode of season five, but I’m not 100 per cent sure. The story has nothing to do with transportation planning and the character could have been any other city worker.

I’ve read that a character in the movie Singles is a transportation engineer or planner. I haven’t seen the film myself, so I don’t know for certain. From the descriptions I’ve read, transportation planning is not an element in the story.

John Paizs’ 1985 film Crime Wave has a minor character who is a traffic counter and there is a brief scene where he counts some traffic. When I met John Paizs, I asked him where he got the idea. It turned out that he had worked as a traffic counter for a number of years.

The movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit has a transportation planning issue as a major element of the plot. The bad guys in the movie want to shut down the street car system and replace it with freeways. None of the characters is a transportation planner and bulk of the plot is the murder mystery.

The movie Chinatown was intended to be the first of a three part story. The second movie, The Two Jakes, but the third film was not made. The description I read of it sounded a lot like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and also features the Great American Streetcar Scandal. Since the movie was never made, we can’t know how much it would have gotten into transportation planning.

In the movie Quick Change Bill Murray plays an urban planner who robs a bank. He isn’t a transportation planner, and in any event, that has nothing to do with the plot.

Frank Osgood’s novel Region Aroused is a fictionalized version of his experiences when he was involved with the Southern California Association of Governments. I have only read a review of this book by Wendell Davis. This book comes as close to what I have in mind as anything else I’ve found. Although, it seems to me that the author’s objective is to use a fictional account to make it easier for non-planners to understand urban planning. The book is also available in a Kindle edition.

I am sure that these are not the only times that transportation planning has been depicted in fiction.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Transportation: Planners versus Modellers

I just published a new article: Transportation: Planners Versus Modellers. In it I talk about some of the conflicts that develop in transportation planning.

I wrote this article because I want to make a movie set in the world of the transportation planner. They say to write what you know, and that was my life for 30 years.

The article is part of a series I want to do about transportation planning. I want to identify and explore issues that I can incorporate into my stories. I published one article on forecasting earlier: A Review of "Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail - and Why We Believe Them Anyway" .

I also plan to write some short “transportation planning adventure stories” to practice writing stories about transportation planners. So far I have published one story: The Glencoe Project and I have started on a second. I have several other ideas for stories.

It would be a big help to me if people tell me what they think about my articles and stories, so I hope you will read them and write some comments. Thank you.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

The Perils of On-line Publishing

The Canadian election led some people to my articles How Would Proportional Representation Change Canadian Politics? and Should Canadian Taxpayer’s Finance Political Parties? I chose those topics because I thought that would happen.

When you search for “How Would Proportional Representation Change Canadian Politics?” on Google the first item is my article. The big disappointment for me is that it is the copy on the site that pays the least. My higher paying sites are further down the list.

I hadn’t thought of that as a problem before. I felt that the various sites would draw different groups of people, so the more sites I had, the more readers, and money, I would get. Now I see that they can compete.

I wanted to remove the article from the low paying site, so it wouldn’t steal readers from my other sites. It turns out that they don’t allow you to delete your articles. All the other sites where I published my articles allow you to delete your articles, so I never thought to ask.

I ran into video sites that don’t allow you to delete your videos after you’ve uploaded them. The terms of service do say they get a perpetual right to show the videos on their site, so there is no way to get out of it.

I have thought for sometime that it makes a lot of sense to have your own website to publish on. You do have more control over your work, although you do give up a lot of exposure that you would get on larger sites. On the other hand, I notice that it is the smaller sites that are more likely to want perpetual rights. I expect that isn’t just a co-incidence. That would drive away the more savvy video makers, who also draw the most viewers.

I experimented with publishing my stories on my site (see: http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/writing.php) and more recently I tried a video (see: http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/extra_special_care.php). So far I haven’t got a huge number of visits, and they’ve dropped off in the last few weeks, but my site does better than some of the other sites I post on.

Last year when I thought of ways to promote my website, I came up with an idea for A Co-operative Video Website. If I can find other people who also want to set up their own sites, then we could come up with a way to link the sites, which would expand our audience.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

New Film Posted: “Extra Special Care”

Well, actually, it is an old film, but I never posted it on-line before.

Extra Special Care  1990 (16mm) 4 minutes

A crack team of scientists and technicians collaborate on a very important project.

I made this as a member of a filmmaking class at The Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. Walter Sheppard urged me to post some of my earlier films, so I started with this one.

I did a little editing of the film. I cut some shots shorter and put in some dissolves. The original film was silent, so I decided to add sound effects.

I am posting this film only on my website and not YouTube or similar sites. If it works out, I may do that with all my films.

I no longer have the names of the other people who worked on the film. If you recognize anyone, please let me know.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

A New Approach for my Blog

Monday last week, Stacy Parks of Film Specific put a post on her blog about blogging for filmmakers.

I made a comment about some of the challenges of writing a blog and she suggested that if your film has a particular target audience, that posts about their interests would be a good idea. As I commented back, I should have thought of that myself.

However, when I started to look at the projects I have underway, I realized that it isn’t always easy to follow that advice. In part, I find it difficult to articulate who my audience is, and what kind of posts would attract them.

I started to think over how I could approach this with some of my projects.

The Doorman’s Sacrifice

A man’s fascination in a series of books leads him to the dangerous cult like following that has grown up around them.

There many books, TV programs and movies that develop a cult following. Many of these people could be interested in a story like this. I haven’t been involved with this sort of thing myself, so I would need to learn more about it.

My Detective Story

A troubled police detective is targeted by a nasty villain.

This would be a problematic story to target. Not so much that there are not a lot of people who are interested in detective stories, but because there are so many other detective stories around for them to watch. I think I do have a unique perspective, but it is only revealed at the end. The initial premise isn’t distinguishable from a lot of other detective stories.

Bright Freedom

A young lawyer seeks justice for abused women, but then has to face a past she thought she left behind.

I see potential to explore aspects of the story in a series of blogs. Certainly I know that I need to know more about these issues if I want to create a good story. It would be too easy to go badly astray.

Then the Phone Rang

A politician threatened with blackmail struggles to save his relationship with his wife.

I don’t see anything that sets this story apart from many others of the same ilk. The story needs something more. I could develop the project to be more about how the private lives of politician affect their political careers.

The Crying Woman

A chance meeting between two people leads one of them to confide in the other.

I want this story to be about building trust and learning to listen. I am fascinated by the idea of putting one’s own interests aside and devote time to listen, and there by help, someone else. I’m sure that there are others who would find it interesting too.

I only have a preliminary outline for this story. I don’t think I am quite ready to write it. I did cannibalize parts of it for Then the Phone Rang, so I need to either scrap one of the two stories or come up with new elements of the story to replace the ones I used.

Transportation Planning Story

I spent a long career as a transportation planner, so if I “write what I know” that would be the subject. I wrote one short story, The Glencoe Project, about transportation planners. So far as I know, this is the only story about transportation planners ever written.

Most people I met over the years had strong opinions on transportation plans and planners. So I think that discussions of these issues and how I incorporate them into a story could attract a lot of interest.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog