Allyson Johnson

Pieces of my Mind

Archive for the month “May, 2026”

26 May 2026

The Publishing Journey: Step 10 – Chapter Breaks

My final draft of The Three Lives of Mary Sutton has been proofread. (Yes, “Mellie” and “Melly” are the same person, as are “Micky” and “Mickey”. Standardize on “Mellie” and “Mickey.” No, the family did not move from 16th Street to 6th Street; that’s a typo. Yes, I know this speech by Mame is not grammatically correct, but that’s how she would have talked in 1877.)

Now comes the layout stage. How is the book going to look? I confess, I haven’t thought beyond the cover, but my project manager is full of questions.

PM: Do you have thoughts on how to divide the book?

AJ: It should be divided into three sections corresponding to the three lives.

PM: Where should the part markers appear? Before which chapters?

AJ: I had thought that there should be four page-breaks – the first introduction to Mary Sutton and then for each of the three lives there would be the start of a new page. If the designer thinks we need a separate page with just the  name and year to mark each section, that’s ok, though the first section is very short.

PM: I didn’t realize that you only include those section headers—there’s no chapter breaks at all. We can definitely keep it this way if you’d like; however, I wanted to note that the reading experience will be better for a reader if we have chapters. Let me know what you think.

[to myself: Chapters! It’s a story, it goes along. I indicated breaks in the story line by the standard Chicago Book of Style – no indentation for a paragraph that starts a new section. What more do I need? But if “the experience will be better for a reader” I’ll have to go for it.]

AJ: How would you suggest I break up the sections into chapters?  I did indicate breaks by extra spaces and lack of indentation – would each of these breaks be a new chapter?  Do chapters require numeration? Heading?  Would appreciate your guidance here.

PM: For the chapter numbers we’d just do “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” etc. That said, I think that you have scene breaks too often for every single one to be a chapter break (it’d be like 90 chapters).

AJ: Please send me the cleaned up manuscript and I will submit chapter breaks.

PM: Here is the clean manuscript. Please do not make any changes to this document besides the chapter markers—and please do them in Track Changes as well.

AJ: Do I need to come up with chapter titles as well as numbers?

PM: No, just numbers is good, and I recommend that with historical fiction anyway.

[to myself: Whew! I had enough trouble coming up with a title for the book, and the PM didn’t care for it. No chapter titles!]

AJ: About how long should chapters be? In my first try at segmenting they are running from 3-8 pages.

PM: It’s up to you—I would say that chapter length can vary between 5–15 pages, but there are outliers, of course. I’d recommend pulling a few books off your shelf to see what others have done, but ultimately, it’s up to you.

[Some days pass. Trying to cut my book into smaller digestible pieces is like cutting your little girl’s hair for the first time. A snip here, a snip there…]

AJ: I wrestled it down to 29 chapters with an average length of nine pages and none less than five.  Hope this works.

PM: I’ll be in touch in the next couple weeks with your designed pages for your review. Safe travels!

[to myself: Done for now! I’m off!]

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Dear Reader: I’ll be out of the country for a bit, so there will be a hiatus in my posts. Hang on for the next step in the Publishing Journey!

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19 May 2026

What I’ve Been Reading: The Friend

A close friend dies through suicide, and the custody of his harlequin great Dane is forced upon the narrator. Like her late friend and mentor, she is a writer. Sylvia Nunez’s brief volume touches on many topics – what do animals experience? What does one owe to a dead friend? How does one deal with death? With grief? What is the role of a writer in presenting a world? Is writing worth the trouble?

Recently lost a close friend who was in the last stages of metastasized pancreatic cancer chose to take his own life (through Oregon’s “Death with Dignity” process). He planned his death well in advance and let his friends and family know. Now whenever I see an obit saying “he died peacefully at home surrounded by the love of family and friends” I’ll wonder if it was an assisted suicide.

I miss my friend, though we didn’t see each other often. He was a polymath, a gifted artist, a meticulous woodworker, a creative thinker and writer, a fascinating talker and persuader. It doesn’t seem at all sensible that the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime should just go poof!

I liked the role the dog played, as a silent companion in mourning. What does an animal know of death? We have the stories of Greyfriars Bobby who reportedly spent fourteen years guarding his master’s grave, and of Hachiko, who went daily to meet his master at the Shibuya train station for ten years after the master’s death. Is this behavior a testament to loyalty, an example of undying hope, or merely the force of habit? We can can only funble in the dark, imagining what happens in another creature’s brain.

I am a writer, so the views of other writers on the process are always interesting to me. I’ve come to believe that there are two types of writers. Type one is exemplified by Nunez’s narrator and her mentor/friend and maybe Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf: writing is painful, torturous, words dragged out of you one by one, agonizing over every phrase. Each word must be true; the whole must beautiful. Writers block is a constant hazard; rejected drafts fill the wastebasket and litter the floor.  

Type two is exemplified by me, and maybe Neil Gaiman, Lee Child, and other writers of popular fiction. Writing is a pleasure, if there is a story I want to tell.  Gloria Steinem said “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel like I should be doing something else.”  I agree with that. Though I often procrastinate, basically I want to tell the story. Yes, the tale should be shapely, it should have real characters, and if possible an arc of conflict and resolution. The story might not have a happy ending but the process of writing it doesn’t hurt.

In the last chapter of The Friend, Nunez shatters the wall of belief by imagining (or reporting?) an actual conversation with an actual friend who had an actual dog and was a failed suicide;  I think this shift breaks faith with the reader, who has gone along with the world Nunez has created, and then is told that it was all a trick. The device is a clever ploy quite suitable for a National Book Award winner though; those awards seem often to be given to authors who do tricks with time and space and the role of the narrator. I don’t care for those tricks; I find them confusing. I just want to tell the story.

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12 May 2026

The Publishing Journey – Step 9: Set up Author Pages on Amazon and Goodreads

In the group of writers I meet with monthly, all channels of publicizing one’s name and books are discussed. This week the Author’s Pages on Amazon and Goodreads were mentioned, and there was enough interest (and angst) to get the topic put on the agenda for the next meeting.

I had occasionally checked out Author pages on Amazon, so I knew what this was about. And setting up the Author page was pretty easy. I searched for my novel, The Three Lives of Mary Sutton, clicked on my name, arrived at a blank author page where I was invited to verify my identity, add a short bio, and select the language I wanted my page to appear in (a crucial step before the page was activated). The only oddity: the page clearly had a space where the author could upload a photograph, but a notice at the side said “Author’s Pages are no longer allowed to upload photos or videos.” Hmm – seems with all the money Jeff Bezos has he could afford to update the form for the Author’s Page to remove the tell-tale icon for uploading a photo.

The whole process took maybe ten minutes. (Check it out HERE!)

Encouraged, I continued to Goodreads. Again I selected my novel (available to pre-order only at this point) and entered my name, expecting to be routed to a form. Aagh! Instead I was routed to a page listing the audio books recorded by Allyson Johnson (who knew there was such a person?) and there was my precious book listed at the bottom!

Goodreads support, I must say, is outstanding. I posed about “two authors with the same name” at 7PM on Wednesday, had a response by 11AM on Thursday asking for more info, and by 3AM on Friday the Goodreads Team had set me up with a separate page, explained the source of the problem and the fix they had arranged. Now I was free to address the process of signing up for a Goodreads Author’s Page.

Whoa! This is a formal form indeed! To complete it I will need

An official author email address (which must be the same as my Goodreads account email address). Hmm. My author website does not include a “Contact Me” section; I expect folks to leave a comment if they want a conversation. I’m reluctant to use my personal email, or the alternate email I use for the little side business I’m involved with. I guess another gmail account is in my future.

And what is a Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) email address? I guess this is something I will get when the Kindle version of my book appears – or maybe I should have it already since the book can be pre-ordered.

“Below is a list of books associated with this author. Please indicate which of the following works are yours.” For some reason my book is listed three times with three different item numbers. I suspect that this refers to different formats – Kindle, Hardcover, and maybe Barnes and Noble? Need to explore.

But wait! the wonderful Goodreads Support Team set me up with a page already! It’s pretty bare bones, and I’ll have to figure out how to add some pizazz, but you can check it out HERE!

I’m officially an Author!

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06 May 2026

The Publishing Journey – Step 8 – Hire a Publicist?

In the Good Old Days, once a publisher had agreed to bring out a book, the author was taken in hand by the publisher and a schedule was created wherein the author would appear at bookstore signings, on radio and TV talk shows, and whereby reviews of the book would be appearing in trade journals, newspapers, and magazines.

No more, even with the Big Five of publishing. An author is now expected to come equipped with a Platform (which may include a website, a podcast, a regular column in a national newspaper, and /or an account on Facebook, X, or Instagram with hundreds of followers.

Or you can hire a publicist.

The publicist will contact book stores, trade journals, podcasters, and reviewers to set up the reviews, book store appearances, and media exposure – for a fee. You have say $5000 to spend; the publicist will undertake to reach out to sixty media outlets on your behalf. (Whew – that’s $83 per phone call!) But wait – there’s a catch – there is no guarantee that any of these sixty outreach efforts will actually result in any interviews, podcast appearances, bookstore signings, or reviews. Absolutely none.

It’s a leap in the dark – a leap of faith.

But you probably don’t know sixty people who do reviews, podcasts, etc. And you don’t like the prospect of cold-calling media opportunities. So it makes some sense to hire someone who does know people and doesn’t mind hitting them up.

But how do you know that a particular publicist actually knows sixty of the appropriate people? How do you know he/she will actually make those calls?

You could find sixty appropriate people if you put your mind to it. You could do a web search. You could make a list. When you were at work you cold-called people all the time.

But all that research takes time. You quit your job in sales and marketing so you could write, not so you could become a marketer on your own behalf.

So you close your eyes, hold your nose, and leap – hoping there’s a trampoline down there.

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