I've met a lot of people online, getting my book out there, trading reads, trying to keep my ratings up. You run up against some interesting authors, some of whom might even merit a profile here, but all of whom have at least got it together to put something on the table. Several things have happened to my own self-image as an indie author as a result.

One is that I'm no longer happy with about half the stuff I have out there for sale. I could put better pop-art covers on them and clean them up, which I'm inclined to do since I value them, but in some cases I might want to just sweep the deck and put them in the Amazon dustbin. A couple of them lost their ratings this week as Amazon decided that any rating over about 15 million is probably hurting the author instead of helping him - and a 15 million rating means you haven't sold a book in about eight years anyway.

I have seen a wide range of tolerance for typos - lots of authors have way more than I do - but have become less tolerant of my own. When I go back through and republish my books, one at a time, I'm going to make sure that kind of thing is a little cleaner. Last time I went through them I caught a few and, because it's such a hassle republishing, I'm not even sure I got them all. And there are two venues to get them in - the kindle and the paperback. One has to be systematic about this.

Technically, for example, the kindle version doesn't need a table of contents, though if you put one in there they will link it up. So you have to decide to what degree you really need such a thing. One of my author friends said it was way more professional - for example, I have this issue with my autobiography, which has 100 chapters spread through - and I have to decide whether it's worth it to me to update them all and do it right or what.

Authors, of course, are more critical of these things and always notice. One has actually said that the template-made cover is the kiss of death. Well if that's true eight or nine of my stories need work and I don't know if I'm fully prepared to redo them all. As it is they give a kind of history of my writing, and of my life, so I find it hard to change or delete anything. But one author said the other day, and it kind of stuck with me, this is your product, this is your shelf - you have to keep everything up to date, everything good, everything the best you can do. These weren't his exact words. But they represented a kind of business approach moved over into writing/marketing. If you have something out there for sale and it's really not up to your present standards, even if it's only because you've upgraded those standards a little bit, what's up with that? We writers have to turn around sometimes and be business people, and upgrade everything, all the time.

By the way this blog is unusual because it has a lot of my writing on it, and therefore I turned off the "search engine" option so it wouldn't draw in everyone in a commercial sense. Noweadays I am using it for my free thinking about being a writer, but still I'm somewhat glad that it's not just totally commercial and totally drawing everyone in. I'm thinking of changing the way it is, though. The stories that are on it, and have always been on it, are still a major draw in the ESL world where I developed them and where my former students and their friends have always appreciated an interesting collection of readable short stories, usable for ESL, not too hard. They managed to find their way in here and use them, and still do, and this has given me kind of a name in the ESL world. So I want to keep the site, to some degree, as cool as it's always been. But I might open it up to the search engines, and make this part of it, the top, a writer's thoughts about writing. And I might start a "best of indie" blog just so I can keep cranking stuff out that I'm interested in, stuff I've read, other people's product, what people have on the line.

It's an interesting world.