I should have hired a copy editor (or "I can't believe how many typos there are in my book")

I asked the AI Blog Post Image Generator to give me something related to the prompt "book editor." On its own, the app apparently decided this fake editor must have fat fingers.

If there's a lesson in today's post, it's that when you're doing something that's important to you, be willing to put in the time and spend the resources (dollars included) needed to ensure it's done right.

I know this now. I wish I would have known it a year ago when I started working on my book.

"5 Kids, 1 Wife" is my little contribution to the publishing world. Yet again, I will mention that it's available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a variety of obscure online bookstores of which you and I have never heard.

It is likely the only book I will ever write, so you would think I would have done everything I could to make it perfect. Or as close to perfect as can be reasonably expected.

I did hire both an interior book designer and a separate designer to create the cover. No way I was going to try either of those things on my own.

My mistake was not hiring someone else to edit the actual text.

I have enough experience in editorial matters to know that no matter how many times you read your own copy, you're not going to catch all of the mistakes. You need a second (and sometimes a third) set of eyes to polish the sentences over which you have labored and agonized.

But what did I do? I read through the book myself a total of six times, figuring that would be sufficient and that surely there couldn't be any typos left.

This was an unwise decision.

I always assumed one or two boo-boos would get through in the finished book, but I've come to realize it's more than one or two.

As I type this sentence in early March, I'm a little more than halfway through recording the audio version of the book, and it seems like I'm discovering some painful little slip-up or another in every other post.

Missing words, double words, wrong usage, comma splices. You name it, I think I've found it.

I have no idea how I could have screwed up so many times.

And even less idea why I was so cheap that I didn't bite the bullet and allow a professional editor to correct my errors.

If you've not yet read the book, please don't let this deter you from purchasing a copy.

Please also understand that the author is a bit of a moron. A penny-pinching moron who is now paying the price for this own tight-fistedness.

Again, expend the resources to make your passion project as good as it can be, that's my advice to you.

She doesn't say it, but Alexa thinks she's better than me

We have, I think, five or six Amazon Echo/Dot devices scattered around our house. They can do a lot of different things, but I interact with them in only three ways:

• To turn the lights on and off in our bedroom
• To play background music when I'm engaged in a particularly tedious or time-consuming task
• To play the Question of the Day trivia game

These little "digital assistants" do a great job with the first two items. I particularly like the way they seamlessly integrate with your streaming music service, which in our case is Apple Music.

As for the Question of the Day, that usually goes off without a hitch, too. I play it most days and do fairly well, as I'm somewhat of a trivia guy. (Some might also say I'm somewhat of a "trivial" guy, but that's another discussion for another day.)

My only complaint is the passive-aggressive way Alexa – the default name of the disembodied Echo/Dot voice – sometimes treats me when I'm trying to answer that day's question.

For instance, almost invariably when I fire up the app, Alexa will try and get me to subscribe to the Question of the Day Trivia Club, which costs money.

My response to her offer is always "no."

I don't mind these commercial pitches, by the way. Question of the Day is free to play, and I feel the Amazon people are within their rights to try and upsell me if they so choose.

It's just that, when I tell her no, Alexa usually responds with a cheery "No worries!"

"No worries" implies that I've inconvenienced her and that Alexa herself is magnanimously forgiving me. Which isn't the case at all. I'm allowed to say no, Alexa. I've done nothing wrong.

Even worse is when I finish the game and then she tries to sell me on something. Again I'll say "no," but instead of an irritating "No worries!", Alexa will often simply say nothing. The game just ends without even a "Goodbye!"

I interpret this silence as disappointment or outright contempt. And again, I deserve neither. It is my right to turn down her offers of a subscription or an additional game without having to feel guilty about it.

At least that's what I tell myself. As the silence between us lingers and becomes increasingly awkward, I find myself inwardly defending the decision to say no to an electronic device. As if I need validation that I'm still a good person.

I appreciate Alexa's constant readiness to serve. But her smug superiority and utter disdain for me as a person cancel out anything she does right.

I will not let you shame me, Alexa.

Or maybe I will.

Either way, please stop it.

I'm prepping for my one and only gig as an audiobook narrator

This would be me recording an audio version of my book if I was younger. And better looking. And had more hair.

Over the years, I've listened to dozens and dozens of audiobooks. I discovered early on that just as important as the quality of the book itself is the quality of the narrator.

My favorite audiobook narrator is the late Frank Muller. I can't think of "The Great Gatsby" or "A Tale of Two Cities" without hearing his voice. He brought those works to life for me.

Which is why, when several people suggested I record an audio version of my book "5 Kids, 1 Wife," I initially balked.

Yes, I'm the guy who wrote it, and yes, having had some experience with a microphone, you would think I'm the ideal candidate to narrate it.

But good audiobook narration requires more than just a decent voice and a knowledge of the text. The best narrators are also actors. They understand inflection, dynamics and pace.

Especially pace. I'm a fast talker. You can't be overly fast when you narrate an audiobook. Then again, you don't want to be too slow, either. I'm afraid I'll be so self-conscious about the speed at which I'm talking that I'll forget everything else that goes into making an audiobook listenable.

Still, despite these misgivings, I'm going to give it a go. It turns out you can record, edit and distribute your own audiobook just as easily as you can self-publish a paperback these days. The folks at Amazon make it especially easy through their ACX audiobook platform.

You do need to know how to set your audio recording software to fit within certain ACX-prescribed parameters to make it sound good, but I think I'm just technically savvy enough to manage it.

My goal is to record the audiobook in January and have it edited and available for sale by the end of Q1 2024. It will go right onto the "5 Kids, 1 Wife" Amazon page, which already offers print and Kindle versions of the book.

All I'm saying is, don't expect perfection. And if I end up talking too fast, you can slow down the playback speed on your device.

With all of these caveats, it's starting to feel like any price point for this audiobook above, say, $2 will be a ripoff.

I have no idea how the book business works, so I can't explain why my book is being sold in these strange places

Does anyone here speak Danish??

As I've mentioned more than once (I apologize if it's getting annoying), I recently wrote a book. Like this blog it's called "5 Kids, 1 Wife," and it's a compilation of some of my favorite posts since 2011.

I published the book through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which means it is available for purchase through Amazon. Between that and any copies I sell directly to people I know, I figured that was the extent of my potential sales channels.

But then, within days of the book coming out, it mysteriously showed up on BarnesandNoble.com. I couldn't explain how that happened, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Then I found the book popping up online in a dozen or so other places, many of which I wasn't even aware existed.

That's when I remembered I had agreed to take part in KDP's Expanded Distribution program, which they promise will "make your book available to distributors so booksellers and libraries can find your book and order it."

Here's what a simple Google search turns up:

• My book is more expensive on "Thrift" Books ($18.06) than it is on Amazon ($16).
  
  
• On the other hand, it's significantly discounted ($12.88) at Alibris.com.
  
  
• While we're on the subject of pricing, please please PLEASE do not buy it from this eBay seller for $30.82. If you find yourself tempted to do this, call me and I will give you a copy in order to save you from yourself.
  
  
• On the fun side, while the book is only available in English, you can buy it on websites on which the primary language is Danish, Swedish and German.
  
  
• There's a classical guitarist named Scott Tennant of whom I've been aware for several years. Authorship of my book is credited to him in a few places, including this site.

A question worth asking – at least as far as I'm concerned – is whether and how I get paid if someone buys my book from any of these people. Other than the eBay merchant, I'm assuming the other sites have some sort of arrangement through which they buy the book from Amazon/KDP and I still get my standard royalty, which is an admittedly small but symbolically important $3.42 per book.

I have no way of tracking this or confirming it's truly how the whole thing works, but I'm going to trust Andy Jassy (the president and CEO of Amazon) and his team to treat us small-time authors fairly.

Of course, as I describe in the book, I also once trusted a local panhandler named Maurice to pay back $80 I gave him, so this could be another case in which my enduring faith in humanity proves to be foolish.

How to buy "5 Kids, 1 Wife" the paperback, the eBook, and the audiobook

If you are interested in obtaining a copy (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) of my book – which like this blog is titled "5 Kids, 1 Wife" – you have some options:

AMAZON: If you were to ask, I would say this is my preferred way for you to buy the book, as I can track sales and associated royalties most easily through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform. This is the book's Amazon page, which contains links to buy it in paperback, Kindle/eBook, and audiobook formats.

BARNES & NOBLE: On the other hand, I am certainly not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. If you want to get your copy from B&N, by all means, have at it. As of January 2025, however, they have apparently stopped selling the paperback version and only offer the eBook version for $4.99.

CLEVELAND PUBLIC LIBRARY: I was pleased to see my friends at the Wickliffe Public Library have five copies of the book in their collection. The call number is 248 TEN. If you are in the Northeast Ohio area and want to have the book delivered to your local CPL branch for borrowing, here's the online catalog link where you can do that.

CUYAHOGA COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY: Only one copy in circulation here, but it's usually available. Here's the catalog link.

OTHER WAYS TO GET THE AUDIOBOOK:

• Audible
• Apple Books (or use the Books app on your iPhone)

As always, thank you for reading/listening, and thank you for considering a book purchase to support this labor of love I call my blog.

Scott

I have published a book and would appreciate if you would consider ordering a copy

For years I thought about writing a book, but I figured I didn't have the time, didn't know how, wasn't sure what I would write about, etc. There was always a good reason not to do it.

Then I figured out two things:

(1) I had been blogging for nearly 12 years and probably had some quality material ready to go.

(2) While there's undoubtedly time and effort involved, the people at Amazon (and more accurately Kindle Direct Publishing) have made the whole thing a lot easier than it used to be.

I chose 51 of my favorite blog posts, found a way to organize them into four sections, consulted with the wonderful Brian Sooy on how one goes about self-publishing, and voila (French for "I don't know how well this turned out, but here it is.")

This is a link to the Amazon page where you can purchase a copy of the book, which I have uncreatively titled "5 Kids, 1 Wife." You can also just go to Amazon and search for "5 Kids, 1 Wife." Searching for "Scott Tennant" is another possibility, though I should mention you're more likely to come across a series of classical guitar instruction books by a very talented musician with whom I share a name than you are to find my book.

However you get there, I appreciate your consideration.

The book costs $16. My original goal was a price of $10, but I opted for Amazon's Expanded Distribution program, which makes your book available to booksellers and libraries so they might purchase copies.

As a first-time author, I have no idea whether this program will be helpful for me. But then I remember something my son Jack recently said, which was, "Did you ever think you would write a book that someone could check out of a library?"

No, no, I didn't, but it sounds awfully cool.

Opting for Expanded Distribution raised the book's minimum price to $15.50. I rounded up to an even $16 and called it a day. The Kindle edition, should you be interested, is $8.

I make $3.42 on every paperback sold, so I am clearly not in this for the money. Heck, at the outset, I was trying to find a way to publish and distribute it for free to a select group of family and friends. Now I figure it won't hurt if I recoup at least some of the cash I sank into this project.

There is a detailed Acknowledgments page in the book, and I want to mention a few of those individuals here. In addition to thanking Terry, the kids, my extended family and the aforementioned Mr. Sooy, I also acknowledge:

• Callie Bumba, who was marvelous in designing the book's front and back covers
• Catherine Williams, a UK-based professional who expertly designed the book's interior
• Ron Kotar, a talented photographer who gave me permission to use a photo he took of Jack in the epilogue
• Everyone who has read this blog over the years and stuck with me through multiple stops and starts

If you decide to part with 16 bucks (or 8 bucks for the Kindle format) and purchase a copy for yourself, I thank you, too. Truly, thank you. You didn't have to do that, and my gratitude is immense.

I'm writing a book and cannot stand to read my own words anymore

I don't know what prompted it, but a couple of months ago I decided I was going to publish a compilation of my best blog posts. If all goes well, it will be released sometime this fall.

Actually, the 50 posts in the book may not necessarily be my "best." They're more like my "favorites." As I combed through the 840 posts I've written over the past 12 years, I picked out the ones that either made me laugh the hardest or the ones of which I was most proud, for whatever reason.

The book won't be intended for mass-market distribution. It's more of a pet project for friends and family, though I will gladly accept sales to random people who happen to stumble across it on Amazon.

Creatively enough, it will be titled "5 Kids, 1 Wife." At first I wasn't sure what to call it, but my longtime professional acquaintance Brian Sooy (a published author and marketing guru) suggested appropriating the name of this blog as the title. It's concise and compelling, he told me, and it gives readers a quick taste of what they'll find should they choose to buy the book.

He was right, as usual.

There will be a section on parenting, a section on family and relationships, a catch-all section labeled "Other Things on My Mind," and yes, a small section on my short-lived game show career.

The good folks at Kindle Direct Publishing make it relatively simple to create your own book. As Amazon's publishing platform, they allow you to distribute your work widely and easily in both electronic and hard-copy format. Thus, my book will be available as a paperback or as an e-book, depending on your preference.

Still, self-publishing is not something you accomplish in an afternoon.

First there's the writing. In my case you would think this part was easy, since I was choosing from among hundreds of pre-written, already-published blog posts.

I thought that, too. Then I started working through them and found my initial list had something like 120 posts I might potentially include in the book. It took a good while to whittle the list down to the 50 posts I liked best, and that I thought told some semblance of a collective story.

Then I started re-reading them and realized I needed to do some heavy-duty editing. It's not that they were poorly written. It's just that my writing style has become more economical over time, and the early posts especially needed some trimming in terms of word selection and sentence construction.

I have done five complete edits of these posts, pruning them from a bloated 41,000 words to the sleeker current total of just over 38,000.

At first it was fun to read my old stuff. By the third edit, however, it was torture. None of it seemed remotely entertaining anymore. By the fourth time through, I was thoroughly sick of reading my own material.

Let's not even talk about the fifth and final edit, which I can only characterize as a slog.

Once I got through that, there was the matter of finding photos to go with some of the posts. These had to be photos of sufficient resolution for inclusion in a printed book and to which I owned the rights or had permission to use.

Given those narrow parameters, there may be 20 images in the book once it gets to final form. Maybe.

Then I remembered I'm not a graphic designer and that even the most text-heavy books need some design to make them attractive. Enter another professional from my past, the talented Jamie Feldman, who is going to create the front and back covers.

I've also engaged an interior book designer from the UK named Catherine to work with me on typeface selection, page layout, and creating an engaging look and feel on each page.

I really should have hired someone to copy edit the book for me, as well, but I've already spent enough money on what is supposed to be an informal personal project, so I did that part myself.

I know people like Stephen King have staffers who handle most of this process for them, but now I wonder how many times he read through, say, "The Shining" before vowing never to open one of his own books again.

Believe me, brother, I can empathize.

The Amazon van makes frequent stops at our house

I registered for my Amazon.com account in 1999, the same year I also logged on to eBay for the first time.

If back then you would have asked me which of the two would have the biggest long-term impact on American shopping habits, I would have said eBay, hands down.

Amazon was, after all, primarily a place where you could get books and/or CDs. Or at least that's what my first several purchases were limited to.

eBay, on the other hand, offered everything. I would have assumed that, rather than brick-and-mortar retail stores, product manufacturers would just start putting their wares on eBay and selling through that model.

And many do, of course. This isn't to denigrate eBay at all. I still make a purchase or two per year there, particularly if it's a hard-to-find item.

But it's no Amazon. Nothing is Amazon except Amazon itself.

In many ways, Amazon has become Walmart, but in a much better way than Walmart was ever Walmart.

We have a huge Amazon distribution center near our house. There are times when I will order something and it gets here in far less than 24 hours, almost certainly because it was in stock at that facility in Euclid.

This is stunning to me, a person who grew up in the 70s and 80s when, if you ordered something by mail and were told it would arrive in 4 to 6 weeks, by gosh, they meant 4 to 6 weeks.

That perspective alone makes me appreciate the speed of Amazon transactions all the more.

I do understand there are legitimate concerns with Amazon, not the least of which is the threat it poses to local mom-and-pop businesses. And I really do try to patronize those businesses when they have what I need.

But the reality is that, thanks to its convenience and wide selection, Amazon has a devoted customer base within my house.

Like many people, we serve as a regular stop on the Amazon person's delivery route. We have a stockpile of Amazon boxes and envelopes.

It won't be long before Amazon will start delivering stuff before we even realize we need it. Then we'll know we're really in trouble.

Alexa, what's the Question of the Day?

If, like me, you own an Amazon smart speaker like an Echo or a Dot, you may have, at one time or another, played "Question of the Day."

Actually, you probably haven't. It seems like one of the more obscure little trivia games buried within the Alexa virtual assistant software.

I happen to play it almost every day, usually in the morning when I'm emptying the dishwasher.

Unlike the headline to this post, though, I never call it the Question of the Day. I always say, "Alexa, what's my Question of the Day," as if the people at Amazon spend countless hours coming up with trivia questions to ask me specifically.

I choose to believe this is true.

Anyway, as you might imagine, the Question of the Day can pertain to just about anything, from Disney movies to obscure African countries. The questions range in difficulty based on the number of points they're worth, from 1 to 8.

If you get the initial Question of the Day right, Alexa congratulates you and tells you you've earned a bonus question. Very politely, she asks, "Would you like to answer it now?"

I cannot imagine a scenario where the answer is "no, I'm good." Of course I want to answer the bonus question now, Alexa. And I also want to know how many days in a row I've played the game, and how many points I've accumulated all time (she will tell you both).

Whether or not you earn a bonus question, you're then treated to a little two-minute Question of the Day podcast in which hosts Murray Horowitz and Tamika Smith give you more detail around that day's main question. It's always interesting, and their corny jokes and awkwardly forced banter make it even better.

Why do I bring this all up? Well, for one thing, when you're blogging every day, you're liable to touch on just about anything about which you may know a little something. But it's also to point out that I take an illogical amount of pride in answering these little questions.

Because I do answer most of them correctly. And when I get one wrong, I don't even want to hear Murray and Tamika's podcast. "Alexa, stop!" I'm snap at her when I answer incorrectly and grumpily finish the task of putting silverware back into the drawer.

I hate, hate, hate getting the Question of the Day wrong.

This is dumb, I know, but it is my personality. I am competitive, and the person with whom I am most competitive is myself.

I can't stand losing to me.

All of which suggests that maybe the Question of the Day is not the healthiest activity for me. But I will continue playing, and I will continue taking unwarranted joy when I nail an answer.

It's the little things in life, folks.