Mt. Sneffels Press, a Colorado Micropress

Catalog Updates

dave — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 03:52:57 +0000

I’ve renamed the catalogs. Formerly, I had one catalog (“our catalog”) for books actually published by Mt. Sneffels Press, and another catalog (“extended catalog”) for books I don’t publish but for which I do web fulfillment. With the addition of the OCHS book, there are enough history-oriented books to re-divide the catalog, and history is proving popular. Now there are three catalogs: the History Catalog, the Fantasy Catalog (fantasy novels, including the Flying Broomstick series), and the Medley Catalog, which includes humor, poetry, essays, a children’s book, and short stories. Those books that aren’t published by Mt. Sneffels Press are so indicated. Enjoy!

Ouray County Historical Society Journal publishes 4th volume

dave — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 03:39:12 +0000

The OCHS has published Vol 4 in their Journal series, filled with well-researched, entertaining stories about life in Ouray County back in the "good old days." Click on the image to order.

Mt. Sneffels Press is proud to announce that we’ve published the Ouray County (Colorado) Historical Society’s Journal Volume 4, new for 2010. The book has 11 well-researched history articles all illustrated with multiple black and white photographs. You’ll enjoy stories such as the mining history of Ouray County, memories of Ouray’s San Juan Miners Hospital, the Sneffels Stagecoach holdup, the Marlow brothers’ Texas ordeal and their life in Ouray County. This book joins our History Catalog, bringing to you life as it was in Southwestern Colorado. You can go to our History Catalog here to see other books about life in our area as it once was.

To learn more about OCHS, click here, where you’ll find directions to the museum in Ouray. The site has many more details about the museum.

Cool and widely-read review of Railroad book

dave — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:25:00 +0000

This review resulted in many sales!

This review of our own Narrow Gauge Railroading in the San Juan Triangle in the Summer, 2010, issue of Classic Trains on page 84, generated lots of sales. The contact information got a bit muddled—the address given is for Mt. Sneffels Press, not the Ridgway Railroad Museum. Although the web URL is provided, I received many letters with checks, some made out to Mt. Sneffels Press, some made out to the Railroad Museum, and some even made out to both! No problem—the books were all shipped promptly.

Sacrifices! What we do for art! More archery research

dave — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:15:01 +0000

I figured if I'm going to write about longbows I ought to shoot one. Well, there's a right way and a wrong way.

They say (whoever ‘they’ are) that one should write about what one knows about. Okay, fair enough. My new fantasy novel, The Unexpected Traveler, involves longbows. I’d never shot a longbow. As can be seen in another post (here) I borrowed a modern compound bow and shot it off a few times. But a compound bow is a precision machine. The parts being flexed are made of modern materials. There’s a front sight and a rear sight to help with repeatability. The draw weight is precise.

In other words, a compound bow is nothing like a traditional longbow.

PSE Legacy Bow, click image to go to PSE site

It was good to shoot the compound bow as it gave me a feel for a few things like aiming, draw weight, arrows, etc. But a longbow is essentially a stick with a string. No sights. No fancy arrow holders. No controlled draw weight.

I was in Denver this past week and grabbed the chance to stop at Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, a huge affair in the Northfield shopping area just north of I-70 at the Quebec off ramp. The folks in the archery department listened to my story and were quite inquisitive about my fantasy novels and the research I was doing. They handed me a PSE Archery Products Heritage Series Legacy Bow—not an inexpensive item! The Legacy features real wood (although they do throw in some fiberglass) and looks and feels how I thought longbows ought to look and feel. Longbows are just that: long bows. The thing stands from the floor to my nose.

They have an indoor range and soon I was shooting it. There’s no sight, so it’s by-guess and by-golly—experience counts. Further, unlike a compound bow, the more you draw a longbow the harder it is to pull. There’s no pulling and holding—one pulls and shoots.

I did hit the target a couple times, much to my delight. After awhile my shots started going wild. They told me that’s the time to quit, otherwise I’d develop bad habits.

The longbow is not actually held straight up and down, but rather canted to the right (presuming a right-handed bow) so gravity holds the arrow in place. And one cannot sight down the arrow because the hand is in the way. Unlike a compound bow, which is shot with a trigger mechanism, I had to use my fingers on the bowstring—one above the nock and two below.

There’s a reason you see all those actors in Robin Hood movies wearing leather forearm protection. Unless the bow is held out just so, the bowstring will scrape the left inside forearm. The bruise you see is from just one such hit—that’s all it took! Ouch! It was operator error of course, but next time I will wear arm protection.

I suppose that’s the whole point of writing about what you know about—or else do research—because it’s the little things (like bruised forearms) that make the story believable.

Sneffles or Sneffels?

dave — Sun, 09 May 2010 03:19:46 +0000

Mt. Sneffels, not Mt. Sneffles!

Well, actually, the correct spelling is Sneffels. That’s f-e-l-s. But apparently people are having trouble finding the website because Sneffels just has to be spelled Sneffles! So, I bit the bullet today. www.mtsnefflespress.com now redirects to www.mtsneffelspress.com. Hopefully that helps!

E-Books Workshop April 24, 2010

dave — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 23:57:37 +0000

I gave a workshop on August 24, 2010 on e-book publishing. Click on the image to see the charts (takes you away from mtsneffelspress.com)

I had a great time at a workshop hosted by the Montrose Library and Carole London of London Publishing. I was asked to speak on e-books. Those wishing to see the slides I presented at the ebook workshop can find them here.

To prepare for the conference, I put my first broom book up on Smashwords. That’s a feeder site for Barnes and Noble, Sony, and the new Apple bookstore. You can see the details in the charts.

UPDATE: Here are two questions posed by Cheryl:

Question: Hi Dave,
I enjoyed your workshop at the library yesterday. I have questions! When preparing my book as an e-book, do the various ‘stores’ have a preference for number of pages in the book. In an 81/2×11, single-space format, my book has about 108 pages, including the cover. In 5.5×8.5, single-space pocketbook format, it has 218 pages. Does length of book matter? Does page size matter? Also, I’m still looking for a POD company. Do you offer that service? Thanks, Cheryl

Answer: No, there is no preference for size. In fact, the size of the paper is not a consideration. An e-book is simply a file that an e-book reader, such as Kindle, formats for display. The reader determines how big the text will be (see the samples on this chart). So the concept of page numbers is meaningless. And, no, the length of the book does not matter. That’s entirely up to you. And, re POD, no, I don’t offer that service. There are any number of outfits online who will do that. I personally have a rather low opinion of such companies, many of whom charge large ‘setup’ fees that I don’t think are necessary. But I can point you toward a printer I like. See the Technology Page. In all fairness, I should point out that Amazon has a POD service and so does Smashwords. But you will have to provide finished files for them—just as you would for a printer.

Question: Okay, Dave – more questions. When I’m taking out ‘white space’ in my document, do I take out the space between one chapter and the next? Also, this book was started years ago on a different computer with an ancient version of Word. Now, I don’t know how to take out page breaks, or page numbers. It is in both Word 2000 and Word 2007 now, plus PDF. My head is spinning…Thanks, Cheryl

Answer: Your submitted text should be pretty much continuous. The Smashwords Style Guide and Smashword’s sample manuscript give examples. You end your chapter, hit return a couple times, put in your chapter title or number, hit return, and continue with your text. Smashwords offers an interesting idea: after carefully making a backup of your original manuscript, save your document as pure text, then import it back into your word processor. (I use Open Office Writer instead of Word—it’s free and better-behaved.) Doing so completely eliminates the formatting. You may want to go back in and bold your chapter headings or do other minor formatting. At the same time, take out all the white space (long strings of carriage returns without any text). Both Amazon (Kindle) and Smashwords (Nook, etc.) do not like .pdf. I tried it once—it came out really weird. They do like Microsoft Word .doc files. (Open Office Writer can create these too.) But if you have strange formatting in your .doc file, and it sounds like you do, very carefully save a backup copy and name it something else, and then experiment with the various ways to export your manuscript as text (Word has two or three ways to do this) and experiment with importing them back into Word until you get what you want.

Archery Research for The Unexpected Traveler

dave — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 02:29:37 +0000

It’s hard to write about something I’ve never tried. The Unexpected Traveler, my new fantasy, uses archery and swordplay as primary weapons of war. Not having fired a bow before, I borrowed this one and got 30 minutes of instruction. Randy Cassingham, of This is True fame, handled the camera.

Yes, this is the one shot that hit the target! We managed to break the nocks off three arrows, and given this is borrowed equipment, we thought we ought to stop while we were ahead!

The American Flying Broomstick Web Pages Moved

dave — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:23:38 +0000

The AmericanFlyingBroomstick.com Web Pages Consolidated into MSP

As part of an ongoing “look and feel” consolidation, the web pages for www.americanflyingbroomstick.com have been placed onto the Mt. Sneffels Press server. All the information is intact, including the videos. You can go to the AFB pages directly or you can navigate by using the menu bar at the top of the page. Hover the mouse over “Projects” and you can click on “Flying Broomstick,” which has all the links. As usual, you can order any of the three books in the series via our catalog page.

The “Technology” page has been bumped up a notch to be its own “Project” page. I get questions all the time about doing this and that. You’ll find the answers on the Technology page.

And the “Weather Station” is also its own project. It took several hours of work to get the weather station info to upload properly, but I finally persuaded WordPress to do an “include,” which means the page always contains the latest data. That meant a plug-in to permit “including” some php code. If that sounds technical, it is!

In the past I had a couple earlier pre-broomstick books online and took them down to reduce expenses. Now that I’m consolidating on this site, I will re-post them. The two books are in the “About” series: About Dan and About Phillip. Watch for them!

If you find any problems (stray links or other disconnects), please alert me via a comment to this post. Thanks!

Cool Little Utility: Wordle

dave — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:52:46 +0000

Cool utility called Wordle. You feed it text, it makes the map.

Here’s a fun one for you to play with. It’s a little utility called Wordle, and it’s available at www.wordle.net. You feed it text and it spits back these cool maps, much like tag clouds. The most common words get the biggest font; it goes down from there. Options abound, including fonts, color scheme, and shape. The main photo is what happened when I pointed Wordle at this site. I find it rather interesting that I can tell a lot about the site simply by looking at the map.

Well, of course, there’s more. I couldn’t help myself, in fact. Next comes a Wordle word cloud from a section of the first Broom book, The Story of the Great American Flying Broomstick Book 1: Genesis. Here it is:

I'm at it again! Here's a word cloud from Broom 1.

And the fun goes on. I’m working on a new fantasy called The Unexpected Traveler. I thought it would be fun to do a word cloud for the most recent chapter, one I wrote just last night. It’s the bottom image. Note that Rainier is the main character. Looks like it shows!

Here's a word cloud developed from the fantasy book I'm drafting now

Wordle was created by a guy at IBM Research on his own time, though he freely credits other IBM Research personnel. I think it’s cool. Give it a try!

Experiment: New Broom Intro Video

dave — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:12:18 +0000

This is an experiment. Randy Cassingham made a very nice video introduction for me to put on the www.americanflyingbroomstick.com home page. And he did a great job! But I did it on a day that my bipolar illness had taken me way, way down. So, I thought I’d try something a little different:

The production values stink, but I would like some feedback on the concept. The video is much shorter and hopefully more entertaining. So, compare it with the old one here: (Be careful–the volume on this second video is much louder.)

Remember, the production values are much better for the second, so think about content, length, humor, etc. Tell me what you think by commenting using the box below.

The old video has been viewed literally hundreds of times, but has not resulted in hundreds of sales. Help me define a video that turns the merely curious into bona fide broomsters!