How Not to Write an Article

Before you start writing,  decide the purpose of your article or your thoughts may be scattered!

What is your purpose in writing the article?

Is it to review the literature, post an opinion, document original research, or to advertise a service or product? Do not try to hide your purpose, it will show up in the product!

Have a few targets in mind, but understand the difference between a blog (max at 700 words, but the most popular  blog posts are under 600 words) and an article in a peer-reviewed journal, which may not allow citations to secondary sources, opinions, blogs, etc. If you are writing a blog, check the length of the most successful blogs posts. If you are writing an article, try to stick to the word count, going over has impacts beyond ones you might think of in our online world and interfere with sponsorship.

Check out the complete "Instructions for Authors" before you start writing, including any footnotes or hyperlinks now as it will save you much time in redoing later! Collect the appropriate data from the onset, or you will be doing it on the back-end, and taking a ton of time to reinvent your wheel! Double check your links as you go, as unless you have much experience as a webmaster, it may be difficult to trace intended links.

The more you read your text, the more you may read over typos, but do not forget about the
hidden information included with any file, like a file's attributes or what I think is a much broader concept, the file's metadata.

Be aware of the hidden data elements of a file. I had completely forgotten about attributes of files until I worked on an article with my mentor of 40+ years and noticed a third name in our two-author article! Our names were not included but another name was. No matter what I tried, this third name would come up and I could not help but wonder, Why? I am still not positive per the "why?"

File attributes have been around since the days of DOS, but metadata is a broader and more recent term.  A file has data connected with it, to describe the file. This data is called "metadata" and includes the author's name. I used to change "attributes" on a file by adding  terms like Read-Only, Write, etc, and had forgotten about metadata, etc., and hidden information tagged on to file. The file information may be hidden, but most journals want the author field blank in regard to metadata, and for sure one would not want one author's name on the hidden file and another set of authors on the visible file!

If you are submitting an article as "anonymous," you are defeating your purpose if a name appears in the metadata. Some of the hidden data can be changed, some can not.

For example, in Windows, if one right clicks on a file, the attributes of the file appear, usually in a box. In both Microsoft Word and Open Office (open source), the metadata appears in each file, again on right clicking and then selecting "properties" of that file, then clicking on the various tabs including the "security" tab.

I am noticing that it is very easy to make changes in a document in Word, but Open Office is my choice for making the best PDF Files. Since I have been moving the text from Word to Open Office and back again, I have much extra code on my manuscript which needs to be as my mentor states,
"sanitized."

He copies and pastes the text into another Word file, I would write my document in simple HTML, look at it in a web browser, and copy and paste into my target word processing application as it is easier for me to write code in very simple HTML using notebook and hand coding, than to edit in any word processing program, especially features like tables!

I right clicked on a file called Blank 39 (below) and the dialog box opened with the last option as "properties." Click on "properties" and then tab over to "security," and check out the information.

Walk Forward - Updating Book

I love Amazon Kindle's Report module, but not too happy about the steps I need to take to revise a duplicate content word entry and an extra space in a hyphenated word in them text of my book, Walk Forward.

Problem is that to fix the errors in the free part of the book, I can not go up to Amazon.com and just fix, as I did with the "Book Description", I have to redo in Open Office, convert to .mobi again, and send it through the Amazon grinder again. The steps seem to be overkill as all I need to do is fix a hyphenated word that has an extra space and delete a duplicate word!

I continue to Walk Forward m to uncover the secrets of ebook publishing! I love the picture of my Mom on the book's cover, hope you do to?

Walk Forward - Housekeeping

I felt courageous and clicked on the "look inside" my 3-day-old book, Walk Forward, and noticed two conversion errors in the first 10% of the book. One word was repeated, and a hyphenated word did not convert correctly. I had read about the second error type, but not the first. I wish I did not have any errors in my first few chapters and am perplexed as to how the errors happened. Fixing them is simple, if one likes to format and convert files, but I have no plans to format in the near future,  am seeing code in my sleep, and continue to search for any secrets to the process of ebook publishing!

When some of my paragraphs failed to indent, I could verify that code was missing, I saw the missing symbols, but no matter what I tried, I could not add the needed code. I finally had to alter my content to fit the formatting -- luckily, I am the author of the book and can add or delete content!


Many of you are formatting, please share any and all secret fixes, so that we might all save time!
Seems like a  list of common errors observed after formatting or sending a file to be ground up, would be well received, certainly by this author!

Starting with plain HTML is my secret and  made the process easier than those I read about. I had little manual labor to do, did not have to go through pages correcting code. I had no extraneous code in my manuscript. Using Open Office has some advantages and Word has others, but since I am not comfortable with the new Word program on my computer, I used Open Office and recommend it.

Breathing on a manuscript seems to propagate extraneous code, and holding one's breath, as I did, apparently makes some needed code mysteriously disappear!

There is much housekeeping to do the first days after publication for a single platform. I have not found
a "to do" list anywhere, but am  finding out by the helpful hints of those reading Walk Forward.

One reader emailed that she loved the book, would like to "like" my tags, but I have none!
Another told me she could not find me in "author central" -- maybe an issue per my maiden name?

Amazon prompted me for an RSS feed to my blogs, and I have no clue how to do, but will be reading about it in the wee hours of the morning!

I want to respond to the email and telephone calls I am receiving about the book. I am being asked "Rosa, where did you get all of those details?" -- the answer is that I was lucky that my mother kept a journal which I found after she died last year. Adding details to the stories I remembered was easy, as she wrote them down. This was long before I was serious about writing a book. It remains a very emotional process, because I miss her very much.

Summary, one can not do a half decent job if attacking all platforms at once. The housekeeping tasks are keeping me busy 24/7. I am glad that I am only on Amazon!

My book keeps moving from #6 to #4  and  back again, in several of its categories, and I can not help scrolling back and forth between Amazon's incredible report module and my book's web page.

I highly recommend checking Amazon's incredible report module which includes statistics on my book in real time!

Clarification of ISBNs and Ebook continued

I called Bowker, the company from whom I will buy my ISBNs.  Bowker told me today that my ten ISBNs will wait for me. I do not have to pay an annual fee. For publishers who buy a multitude of ISBNs there is an option of accessing a spreadsheet including all their ISBNs. There is an annual fee for this spreadsheet.  For ten ISBNs no spreadsheet is needed. Since I know I will need two ISBNs, I decided to buy ten as two are the same price as ten.

My book is in final review. I hope to format my book in some generic file so that I can prepare a version for each of the ebook platforms. I wrote my book in HTML, inserted it into Open Office and saved it in the format preferred by each of my reviewers.

Because I wanted to write at the most generic level and hate to do any kind of formatting,  I rather insert style via  codes in my word processor than have to delete extraneous code from my document.

Fixing extraneous code is labor intensive!

I wrote my book in the most simple, generic HTML. I limited myself to the opening and closing tags, no font tags included. Formatting codes will be added to my simple document in Open Office.