How to spell "Oops," ("Ouch," "Oh Cr-p," "Zapped again!")

This is an adventure in misadventure. That much I can tell you with some real accuracy.

 

Most of my friends here on HubPages have been watching as I, first, composed all of those "Dumb Poems" and stuck them onto these pages for either your enjoyment or your ridicule. Always, that was a great deal of fun. Whenever someone pointed out an error or a stupidity in my writing, I could easily come back in here and do a bit of correctional editing – respelling words, sticking a missing punctuation mark, or so forth. If I came across an additional photograph that fit the page, it was dumped onto the piece like more cream gravy atop a redneck chicken-fried steak (or perhaps some extra butter onto a bowl of grits).

Along came the thought that it would also be lots of fun to put most of those "Dumb Poems" into an eBook – one on CD for folks to mess around with until they found one of the pages in the eBook that might provide a laugh or two.

Back to work I went. Not content to leave well enough alone, I figured that "more" was indeed really "MORE." When that is a newfound goal, it is something that must be achieved within the limits of both writer’s endurance and producer’s budget.

Text and illustrations for each page had already been settled and ready for new use as pages on an eBook. All that needed doing was to do them. So, what else would be good? How about a voice recording of each "Dumb Poem," one MP3 audio per page? Piece of cake, right?

Off to the Internet I went, searching for a freebie and downloadable computer program with which to make those MP3 recordings. The one I found was "Audacity," and it was available at no cost from "Sourceforge.net." It turned out to be a very "pro" program, most forgiving of my lack of knowledge and experience with MP3-recordings. Said I, "Hot doggies – now I really have it made with this project. It did not take long (just a cure for an ailing voice...) for 101 MP3 recordings to be completed and stored on my computer disk. It was amusing during those recording sessions to be yapping away with one "Dumb Poem" after another and, suddenly, to have a teenager with a super-loud car radio go by my window right in the middle of one of my soulful recitations. Redo! Actually many of them. Because I really do enjoy laughing at myself (and at everyone else, too) I listened to the earlier of my voice recordings, the ones that featured my ailing and stuffy voice, and decided that each of those should stay. Yes. It takes real gall to foist lousy poem readings on folks, particularly people considered to be your friends.

 

Anyway, the next big deal was to consider distribution. Should I sell this new eBook? Should I put it on Amazon or on eBay where folks can get their hands on a copy? What to do about spreading the thing around...

I decided that the best thing to do would be to give the eBook away for free. True, I had a respectable dollar investment in the project by this time, even with that free "Audacity" MP3 prepping program and the good offices of our HubPages people, but there were some dollars spent for Web host space rent, artwork, Internet access, and more. I was certainly not going broke because of these things, but a certain amount of fame was beginning to hit at my limited fortune. For example, by this time I was working with a growing bunch of fellow Korean War veterans in their prepping and distributing some of our many "war stories." Whatever this eBook project was to do for me, personally, it would have to also do for the bunch of us. That is, there were eBooks ahead for the group, too.

In order to not go completely broke paying for ALL of that by myself, or asking my aging buddies to dip into their small savings to do so, it seemed appropriate to ask those receiving copies of this and other forthcoming eBooks to donate a little bit to the project.

So, with all of that considered, the eBook project hopped along into its final phases.

 

A first "oops" showed up. The PDF ("Adobe Reader" format) version of the new eBook works well with just about every PC available – one that works with Microsoft "Windows," "Unix," "Linux," and "You-name-it." However, you need to have eBooks in special formats (like ePub, Mobi, and others) to work with all of the different, hand-held eBook readers, like the "Kindle," "Nook," "Sony’s" gadget, "iPad," and the many portable telephones that can also display eBooks – not well, but really-truly.

Back to the drawing board with this striving, but ignorant, redneck.

Lucky me. I found several more free programs available for free downloading over the Internet that promised to translate my PDF-style eBook into other formats needed by the hand-held readers. If you "Google" their names you will find them at their sources. They are "Calibre" and "MobiPocketReader." The first one also has the feature of helping you to organize your eBook library so, even if you do not want to do any format translating, it is a good piece of software to have around. Anyway, now I could make the new "Dumb Poems" eBook available to just about anyone who had a computer or eBook reader to display its pages.

 

Left to be done was to prepare the "advertising" material for publicizing the eBook’s availability. At first I set up a page on one of my websites to do that job. The donation part was a little tricky. Because I have membership in "PayPal," I used their donation facility to place a "Donate" button onto the advertising page. That page also enabled one-click downloading of the eBook.

But it hit me that folks would be most reluctant to donate to a project without having first seen what that project produced – like some worthwhile eBooks. Also, it came to me that anyone who downloaded the free eBook would remain totally unknown to me. That, of course, made it impossible to let them know when the next free eBook became available. Needed was a list of people who had downloaded the first and subsequent eBooks. Because those who wanted one of the eBooks had to do "something" to get one, it seemed that asking those who wanted a free eBook to send me an eMail asking for one was no more difficult than asking them to go to a Web page and key in the several commands needed for downloading the book to their computer.

All of this stuff went onto the advertising Web page and onto the front page of the new eBook, the page before the "cover page." People would get their free eBooks as attachments to the eMail replies I would send, and I would get their eMail addresses so that they could be notified of future offerings.

 

Now for the "oops."

I spotted a small glitch on one page of the new "Dumb Poems" eBook. The error was easily corrected. Then my left-hand pinkie finger hit a "wrong" key. The completed eBook went away – off into the world of uninhabited electrons, positrons, and doggoneds.

Lucky for me, I had some backups on CD that had been created earlier. Some of the new stuff needed to be re-done, but pretty much everything else was on hand and, once again, ready for finalizing.

This experience has provided a much-needed lesson. If a writer does not want to experience those "oops" things, it would be a really great idea to back up everything you write or do almost as soon as you write or do them. Had I done that, I would not now have to backtrack and redo a lot of what I had already completed.

Lesson learned!

And I am still not sure how to spell "oops."

For those who want to know how we plan to helppay for this grand "Free ebooks" project...

There are thus far seven of us involved in writing the eBooks in the project, all of us also writing here on HubPages. We have been paying for whatever needs paying for since the beginning. Most of us are in our late 70's and early 80's, and thus, our "wealth" is more in memories than in money. So we decided to request voluntary donations from anyone who feels like helping.

With that in mind, we set up a Web page on our Sampsonafb.com website to talk about our new free eBooks and how people can get their hands on copies. We have set up and have at the ready eMails to use as replies to all who ask for an eBook. The eBook is attached to the reply. The requestor gets a good, new and free eBook, and we get his or her eMail address with which they can be notified of the next free eBook. We shall see if this is an efficiently useful way to go about giving eBooks away and possibly getting some small contributions to the project.