Historical Mistakes

Sure, there’s been many, but without them we wouldn’t be where we are today. Yes, I speak tongue in cheek. Indeed, one person’s mistake is another’s success (or boon or just good fortune depending where the individual stood on the “mistake” at the time). But that’s not what I’m referring to. I make reference here to my content—specifically historical errors in my books. Some I caught in time, some I didn’t. They can be fixed, of course, with a small effort and a little money since all my books are now at Lightning Source, Smashwords, and Amazon (Kindle). For the former I need only $40.00 to re-upload and the last two platforms require only an expenditure of time.

Research in conjunction with the upcoming sequel to my latest novel Camellia Creek has uncovered several errors in previous works I now feel compelled to correct. Students of history will be quicker to pick up on them than the general reader (no one has pointed anything out to me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean folks haven’t noted them). The mistakes are painful to me because I know I was wrong in my assumptions and that resulted in my documenting an incorrect “fact.” The errors appear primarily in the Historical Notes to my novels, but one in Camellia Creek proper has caused me to make an alteration to its sequel, Honor’s Banner. That error is something I can work around, but things would have been a little simpler had I checked rather than assume the obvious was correct. Remember the old adage? “To assume makes an “ass” out of “u” and an “ass” out of “me.” [My marine-corps husband told me that one a lifetime ago. Personally, I don’t believe the navy—that would be an oblique reference to myself—has to take much of an individual effort to make an ass out of a marine since he is so capable on his own.] But, alas, I am talking about me here, am I not? And I messed up.

Except for my misspelling of the name of the freshwater fish bream, a Southern-staple, as brim in The Devil’s Bastard, all my (known) errors deal with the era of the War of Northern Aggression and the tyrannical period that followed, euphemistically called Reconstruction. And, hey, in my defense, that misspelling is not really a “historical” error, and I wrote the name of the darn fish just like it sounds—“brim.” Of course, one might think that in fifty plus years of eating the thing I’d have seen the word in print, which I did after printing up 2,000 copies with an offset printer. That was long ago. The upload to LSI is correct and as disgusted as I was with myself at the time—I’m a Southerner, I really should have known how to spell the name of the fish—I’ve learned to take such embarrassments in stride.

I recently discovered another particularly egregious error in Camellia Creek. In Chapter Twenty-nine my hero, teasing his young wife regarding her belief in ghosts, makes reference to Irwin Russell, who linked the old darkies’ ability to commune with the dead as a gift given the ignorant and childlike.

Born in Mississippi in 1853, Irwin Russell became a renowned author in postbellum days, but though he was alive and kicking at the time of Eli Calhoon’s 1865 reference to him, he would have been only twelve and the work containing Russell’s observation, Christmas in the Quarter, yet to be written. Like the misspelled brim (and believe me, I searched for an alternate spelling) there was no getting around the screw-up short of a revision. Fixed it is, but that doesn’t change the fact there’s probably a hundred copies of Camellia Creek in circulation with that anachronism.

Ah, now space grows short, and I’ve other “mess-ups” to confess. Those I plan to address in upcoming posts. Not only does that afford me the opportunity to acknowledge my mistakes, it will allow me to introduce readers to my work without shoving the books down their throats—part of my non-obtrusive marketing strategy—see my two preceding posts below. It is hoped that, if nothing else, readers will enjoy my take on the history.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be discussing John Lusk Alcorn and his role in secession (“Historical Note,” Wolf Dawson); President Andrew Johnson (“Historical Note,” Camellia Creek); and Kentucky’s economy prior to and during the War (Camellia Creek proper). I’ll also throw in one or two near misses that I did have the good sense to check before I went to print.

Thanks for reading.

Charlsie

The Republicans, the Taxpayer, Suffrage, and History

I’ve recently pulled out my fifth novel set in Mississippi, a historical mystery/suspense set during Presidential Reconstruction (1865-1866) in Claiborne County. I completed the first draft and a series of tweaks to Camellia Creek before Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast back in 2005, and I hadn’t looked at it since. In the interim, I established Loblolly Writer’s House and published my first four novels in all formats. I continue my struggle for effective marketing. This blog is a recent aberration of the latter; another is Twitter, which I hope will direct interested readers to my blog and my novels.

Regarding Twitter (the blog looms before you), I’m growing followers. Mostly I attract and am attracted to “Twitterers of a like mind.” Just the other day, one such follower mentioned we should be following the opposition if we want to start a dialogue. I think she made a good point, and I’m for enlightening discussion (140 characters a quip, however, does require some innovation), but I don’t think I want to give up people of like minds either.

My work is decidedly pro-South and therefore politically incorrect. I believe the South was right for all the right reasons, and to point out those reasons, I don’t have to look farther than the Constitution, the soul of this Federal Republic. The South’s losing the War Between the States proved a devastating blow, not only to the region, but to the Republic itself.

This brings me to the provocation that sparked this blog post. I’ve noted, and replied to, more than one of my fellow Tea Party followers regarding their 140-character tweets meant to, I think, malign the Democratic Party and its “racist history” while praising the Republicans for championing equality—hence, vote Republican against Obama in November. I can come up with lots of reasons to vote against Obama, and the Republicans are my only real alternative; I don’t need naïve and/or revisionist history to sway me.

The Tea Party champions the rights of the taxpayer within the framework of the Constitution; at least that’s how this Tea Party supporter interprets its purpose. References supportive of the Republicans of Lincoln’s day (and the administrations immediately following his death) while blatantly maligning the Democrats of that same time period miss the point, not to mention those tidbits of history tossed out in tweets are usually taken out of context or confused with later history, and when challenged, the tweeter can offer no valid reference. Okay, maybe he can cite what he’s seen on contemporary television or read on Wikipedia. Not one offered me even those.

I take issue with offenses cited between 1865 and 1876. This period is the setting for more than one of my books, and it’s one about which I have a good layman’s knowledge. I won’t try to mislead you; I look at that most disgraceful period in our nation’s history from the Southern taxpayer’s point of view. That was a time when the defeated Southerner across the war-ravaged South, couldn’t fight his way through mobs of non-taxpayers to the polling booth, assuming there was a candidate worthy of his vote even allowed on the ballot. That was true even if he had sworn allegiance to the United States and regained his vote (the ex post facto deprivation of which was unconstitutional to begin with). For years—over a decade in some states and Mississippi was one—the downtrodden taxpayer was not represented in his legislature or in Washington, and puppet governments squandered the revenues critical to the South’s recovery.

For those who delve back in time, and Tea Partiers do, look at Reconstruction not necessarily from a Southerner’s point of view, but as an American through the prism of the Constitution, because that’s the period when States touting loyalty to the Union abrogated their responsibility to not only the Constitution but also themselves by ceding unprecedented power to a Federal government flush with victory, drunk on power, and poisoned by the hate-filled greed of the Radical Republicans. Power never recovered by the States, freedom forever lost. For Tea Partiers to tacitly extol the virtues of the Republicans by maligning the Democrats of that period is oxymoronic.

Personally, if the objective is to represent the contemporary Republican Party as supportive of the taxpayer and the Tea Party, it would be prudent, in my opinion, to leave the Republicans’ dubious rise to power one-hundred and fifty years ago out of the justification.

From Early Marketing to Online Presence

It’s late, I’m tired, but I really need to get this post done. Several weeks will have passed before you read it. I leave for Israel the end of the week (I have a pregnant daughter there), but I want to maintain my weekly blogging schedule. That means scheduling my post for publication at a future date--something I haven’t done before. Neat.

I’m new to the blogosphere--well, not real, real, new. I think this will be my twelfth post. Despite that, I’m still learning Blogger. Just yesterday I had to pull out my Blogging for Dummies by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley to recall how to update my template (I wanted to add links to the resources I used in building my first Kindle book.). Blogging is my latest attempt at marketing.

Last week, I broke down and threw away two full boxes of the “advanced reading copy” (ARC) of my first published novel, The Devil’s Bastard. The book bears a copyright of 2007, but it hit the streets in September 2006--and my brain-child, the 100+ copies of a plain, white-covered ARC--was even earlier than that. One of those boxes had never been opened, but I needed space, and that brain-child had proven a non-starter.

That large inventory of The Devil’s Bastard was an idea I had back when I first started self-publishing, a delusional attempt to market my books across the states that once made up the Old South. I was going to send ARCs to every independent bookstore I could google from Virginia to Texas and north to Kentucky and Missouri.

The idea fizzled in my home state of Mississippi. Truth is small independent bookstores don’t have the manpower (or the interest) to review a distant stranger’s self-published book--particularly one with an ugly white cover.

I was a classic “newbie.”

Additionally I did not have the time or logistics to drive and promote all over Dixie, then follow up with those stores on a “routine” basis--assuming they agreed to take a few copies of the “finished” book to begin with. Odds are very good--I know this now, I didn’t then--that if you leave a few books with a store, and those books eventually sell, that store owner isn’t gonna call you up and ask you to send more. He might take more if you ask him, but unless those suckers flew off the shelves--and beginners are unknown so they probably didn’t--you more than likely won’t be receiving a call. The author has to drive the sell, first to the bookstore owner. Once the book is in the store, she has to get the buyer in there, too, to buy the book. The latter is another story and I’m not going there today.

I did purchase plain, white-covered copies of my second book, Wolf Dawson, but wiser for those boxes of white-covered copies of The Devil’s Bastard still sitting on my shelves, I bought only 25 (the minimum from a digital printer), and those I used in the true spirit of an ARC. That was to request prepublication reviews from the standard biggies: Kirkus, USA Today, ForeWord, etc. Never got one, but I’d already learned from my attempts with The Devil’s Bastard that I probably wouldn’t. More practically, I passed out a number of those ARCs to writer/reader buddies to check for typos/usage prior to my offset print run.

With my third book, Epico Bayou, I did a full-color cover with an “ARC flag” across the top. I didn’t request one prepublication review that time around. I’d learned that lesson. But my writer/reader buddies still helped out with the proofing. If I hadn’t done the ARC, I’d have gone straight to offset and that’s too late to proof.

This fall, when I published my most recent novel, River’s Bend, I printed with Lightning Source (LSI) and forwent the ARC altogether. LSI is a digital printer and though the cost per copy for digital printing is more expensive than offset, I can order as few as one book. Once again, I sent copies of my initial short run to my writer/reader buddies for proofing. Errors fixed (most of them anyway, I hope), I uploaded the corrected .pdf to LSI and purchased a larger run--but not too large.

So far, I love dealing with LSI. No huge inventory sitting around and no hefty charge on the credit card to pay off. And by hefty, I mean several thousand dollars. Now I pay as I go.

I know much of this sounds discouraging to prospective self-publishers (and familiar to others), but things are not as bad as they sound. I’ve gotten four five-star post-publication reviews from Midwest Book Review, and I’ve found my niche in Mississippi selling primarily at craft fairs. I do have my books in independent book stores within the state (and as time passes, and my readership grows, the rest of the Old South is still on my list). LSI (owned by Ingram) provides access to the big chains across the nation. Barnes and Noble now carries the print copy of River’s Bend in its online store, whereas before Amazon was my only out-of-state retailer for print books. That new connection with Barnes and Noble would not have happened without LSI. Right now I only have one book at LSI, but one of 2012’s goals is to get all four of them there. Smashwords and Kindle have made my work available to all the major ereaders and gotten them with the major online digital-book stores.

Oh, a little brag if I could: Along with that surprise appearance of the print copy of River's Bend on sale at the Barnes and Noble online store, there was a five-star review. No, I do not know who posted it, but if he/she is reading this, thank you and I'm glad you enjoyed the story.

But whether it be a digital store or the local brick and mortar store downtown, my challenge remains to get the reader to the store to purchase my book. Loading my car, setting up a booth, only to tear it down hours later, through summer heat and winter cold is getting, like me, old. That brings me back to where I started this post, my blog and its purpose. Online marketing is a new initiative for me, and that’s the subject of my next post--next week.

I’m doing it in advance, too.

Thanks for visiting,

Charlsie