I Need Some Help Spending Money

I discovered some money left in a research grant from the Lock, Stock, and Barrel project, and I am encouraged to exhaust that grant.  Ideally, I would do promotion of the book through radio and TV talk shows, but I do not have the connections (and apparently not the skills: local conservative radio here is profoundly uninterested).  I had contacted a book PR firm, but they were not interested because my website www.claytoncramer.com was not modern and professional (using the standard templates to make it look like all the others).

So: two possible ways to spend $1000 or so:

1. A web designer out there who would bring my website out of the HTML Dark Ages.

2. Someone with PR experience willing to flog my book.

Lock, Stock, and Barrel Now Available for Pre-order

on Amazon.

Proofreaders?

The proofs of Lock, Stock, and Barrel are in my inbox.  I need several people to look it over for typos. Interested?  It is about three hundred pages.  I still need to go through and update page references and index it, but I need fresh eyes to look for typos, and only typos.  Bad sentences or structural problems are too late to fix.  Perhaps just a few chapters to spread the load?  And yes, you will get a copy when it prints.

All Done With Copy Edit Phase

It was a long and somewhat stressful phase,  but I believe I am done with it.   In some cases,  I needed titles of newspaper articles for the bibliography,  which meant digging through the footnotes for the newspaper and date,  then trying to find those articles online.  Fortunately, 1830s and 1840s newspapers are easy to find online now.  Also a nice second verification step for those footnotes.

In a few weeks I will have the galleys to check for typos.  Unlike the old days,  where these were on paper,  the galleys will be PDFs.  Then I have to update all the page number cross-reference (why we cannot use the builtin facility in Word eludes me ), then I get to index it--the least fun part.

Wondering About the Quiet

I am at the copy edit phase of Lock, Stock, and Barrel, where the publisher makes whatever changes are required to fit their usual style.  It isn't painful; mostly laborious to check every change.  It keeps me busy, however.

Copy Editing Stage

I have reached the point in Lock, Stock,  and Barrel where the publisher is having me verify text edits.   They have added a lot of typesetting codes as well.  One surprise was that periods ending sentences have only one following space.  I thought this was a Microsoft originated change to the standard of two spaces,  or maybe book publishers do this because justification makes the difference invisible anyway.

Once we complete this task,  the next stage is gallery proofs, done in PDF, not on paper.  Book should be available in February.

Coming Soon

Lock, Stock, and Barrel: How American Gun Culture and Manufacturing Created the Modern World.  Pre-orders starting in the next few weeks.  Shipping in February.  Retail: $48. 

If that seems steep: Greenwood mostly sells to university libraries so paper and bindings are 300 year projected lifetimes.  Buy it, read it, make a charitable contribution to your local library where it will influence people for generations.  (Okay, that's my ego speaking.)

Book 10

I received an NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund grant to research and write a book tentatively titled Mass Murder: Who, Where,  Why?   That is my next major task.  While I do not have a commitment from my publisher yet,  they have expressed interest.

Amazon Reviews

Does anyone know how much influence reviews on Amazon have on purchases?  My book 

Historical Evidence Concerning Climate Change: Archaeological and Historical Evidence That Man Is Not the Cause has a low average rating because at least two reviewers downrated it for what sound like warmist reasons:

Not very coherent. Book does not flow from chapter to chapter.

The book was poorly written. Lots of typos. Thoughts were not well-developed. Author made scientific conclusions using history and archaeology without regard to science. Graphs were not properly described and labeled. The majority of the book was comprised of page after page of quotes from other sources. This seemed more like an undergraduate research project than a professionally published work.

What constitutes poor writing is a matter of opinion, but the graphs are clearly described and labelled. I would love to see some more honest reviews.  The Kindle edition is $2.99.

Lock, Stock, and Barrel Nearing Completion

I am fast approaching completion. Dave Golden is powering through it, catching many stupid mistakes and improving some clumsy sentences.

Frustrations About Book Reviews on Amazon

My book about global warming is getting downvoted pretty clearly by global warming worshippers.  I would love for some of you to buy the $2.99 Kindle version and post some honest reviews.

Speaking of Bizarre...

I pitched this idea to my wife and she thought it would sell to computer geeks:

Migrant Software Worker: A Technical Memoir of the Beginning of the PC Era

The primary focus would be my career as a software engineer, which was somewhat unusual.  I was writing telemetry software for the Voyager mission at Jet Propulsion Labs when I was 18, and I worked for several startups in the 1980s and 1990s.

Being a technical memoir also avoids the danger of too much self-revealing.  I am reminded of P.J. O'Rourke's remark that if you accuse a Hollywood celebrity of being a drunken, drug-addicted pervert, his response would be, "Thank you for reading my autobiography."

Of course, to make it interesting requires explaining technologies that are largely hidden from modern developers, such as a problem at one small company where we were installing one of the first of the plug-compatible memory cards for Interdata minicomputers.  With the memory card installed, the operating system would not boot.  I had an assembly language listing of a slightly older version of the operating system.  My only debugging tool was inserting a JSR * (jump relative to self) instruction through the front console into various memory addresses and seeing if I got that far.  I keep inserting this further and further back.  I finally demonstrated that the failure was when the OC (Output Command) instruction started the DMA operation that loaded data from the hard disk into RAM.  After that executed, bit 13 of every word in the first 32 KB (yes, that's KB) was turned off. The next instruction after the OC was now an illegal instruction.  The processor therefore performed an Illegal Instruction interrupt.  The first instruction of the Illegal Instruction interrupt service routine (ISR) was  DI (disable interrupts) but with bit 13 off, it was an illegal instruction, and so the the Illegal Instruction interrupt happens again, and the ISR again throws the exception.

After much analysis with an oscilloscope by our hardware engineer, it turned out the memory card was fine.  Interdata's hard disk controller was not conformant to their own specifications.  It was missing a data line on the data bus; hence the DMA turned off bit 13.

The guy that ran this company also could not figure out how to write an assembly language subroutine to unpack binary to decimal.  He had persuaded the customer to use hexadecimal part numbers; he hired me because he couldn't use this approach for prices.

Soon

I am going to need one or two people to read through my new book, Lock, Stock, and Barrel:

How American Gun Culture & Manufacturing Created the Modern World,  looking for typos, and sentences that need to be taken behind the barn and shot.  My wife is going to be working it over on our vacation in Alaska, so probably early May, I will want to send a PDF.

Thanks, I now have enough.

Harriet Tubman With Rifle Picture

I am looking for a public domain copy for my book, and not having much luck finding one that is clearly in the public domain.

Book Contract Arrived for Lock, Stock, and Barrel: The Origins of American Gun Culture

Signed, going out in today's mail.

I Have a Publisher!

I won't identify them until I have signed the contract, but I have a reasonably prestigious publisher for my book about gun culture, gun making, and the myth of creating a gun market.  There will be a bit less blogging for a while as I write two new chapters.  Passers-by will likely hear the rat-a-tat-tat of my keyboard.  Before the stroke, it sounded like weapons fire from a tiny machine gun.  Now, more like carefully aimed fire from a .05 caliber semi-auto.

Thanks to all for research assistance, title suggestions, and your enthusiasm.

Need a Book Title

I finally have a publisher for the book on early gunsmithing.  They want it recast as a history of American gun culture; then and now.  No problem.

I need a catchy title for what will be a popularly targeted book.  The book explores the evidence of America's gun culture through thew Mexican War; evidence of early gunsmithing and gun making and how the industry changed the world.

Suggestions for titles that would force you to buy?

What Have I Been Doing?

You may wonder why I have been blogging less.  In addition to machining, I have been finishing work on an upcoming Southern Illinois University Law Journal article.  If you have never been through this process: let me explain.

Law reviews expect every point or quote in an article to have what is called a pinpoint citation to a specific page.  And at least the better ones check every pinpoint cite for accuracy of claim and quote. If the sources you cite are not readily available to the law school students who do the editing, you must provide photocopies.  Fortunately, after finishing publication of Armed America, I scanned in nearly all my non-book sources before destroying the paper.  This was good; how else could I find an 1821 Cleveland newspaper?

In my experience, some lesser law reviews do not do this pinpoint citation checking, especially when the article is antigun.  Yes I am thinking of an article by Nathan Kozuskanich that failed this test but was published in University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law anyway.  Dave Kopel and I checked his more outrageous claims and found widespread Bellesilism.

Also, I am on the verge of finding a prestige publisher for my book on gunsmithing and gun marketing.  We are at the "We have some requests for changes" stage.

Not Much Blogging Today

Busy sending query letters to publishers for the early gunsmithing & manufacturing book.

You could have knocked me over with a feather

I'm beginning to approach university presses about my new book on early American gunsmithing and gun Manufacturing. One of the university presses that I approached said "No," which I rather expected, but the editor indicated that she was familiar with my work, and suggested an editor and press to try.