A: Technology has a dark side, like Jekyll and Hyde. The greater the
good, the greater the potential harm. Bill thinks computer vulnerabilities
are the new monster under the bed. This is a powerful tension driver that
should resonate, especially with people who are wary of computers.
Q: Do
readers have to be knowledgeable about computers or computer security?
A: Not at all. The book is for all ages and backgrounds, although
computer techies might enjoy seeing how Bill explains technical
concepts in ways that most great grandmothers can understand.
four generations
The book is for all ages
Q: Won’t the technical topic restrict readership?
A: The book is mainly being sold over the Internet, so that right away
limits sales to maybe only 700 million potential buyers. Bummer. Anyone
who can surf the web and read English can understand the book. Non-techies
will like the book because it’s a page-turning story about interesting
people. Techies will enjoy seeing how geek-speak is translated for general
readership.
Q: Who did the
book cover? What’s the story behind it?
A: The art is by Greg
Spalenka. The title and lettering are by Jeff Burne. Bill found
Greg over the Internet and believes Greg to be an artistic genius
and one of the top cover-artists of our time. One of the first questions
Greg asked about the cover was the mood to be evoked. Bill chose
two moods: menace and romance. The faces on the cover are not based
on photographs of models (as is often done for the covers of romance
novels) but were crafted by Greg based on Bill’s detailed
descriptions of the lead characters. The protagonist (Brent, in
mid-screen) is fully immersed in the computer and the energy shooting
up the top portion of the cover flows from his mind. The woman on
the right is Paige, FBI agent; the woman on the left is Shahla,
Iraqi expatriate. The energy flowing from Brent includes ones and
zeroes, and if you look closely you’ll find a few distorted
skeleton keys. The letters falling from the melting keyboard spell
Lexor, the name of Brent’s cyber-rebel band. To our knowledge,
Waldo is not hiding in the cover.
Q: Who
did the portrait photograph of Bill on the back cover and did they
stretch Bill’s face to make him appear slimmer?
A: The photo and digital touch-up were done by Dan Smith of Hill
Signature Portraits in Great Falls, Virginia. It took 33 photos
and lots of digital wizardry with Adobe PhotoShop, and this was
the best Bill could be made to look. You have to see the real Bill
to fully appreciate the extent of the photographer’s genius.
Improvements to the natural Bill include added hair, removal of
a few skin blotches and lines, removal of flashbulb glare, and the
addition of a twinkle to each eye. The photo did not have to be
stretched to make Bill appear thinner, as Bill has been known to
do with his own digital pictures. Instead, Bill lost twenty pounds
before being photographed, and has shed another twenty pounds since
the photo so that his face now is almost anorexic — worse
even than when he was porked out to full ripeness. Incidentally,
Bill’s weight loss did not involve a vomitorium but can be
traced directly to Suzanne Somers’ Eat, Cheat, And Melt The
Fat Away, published by Crown Publishers. Where did he cheat? Somersizing
does not allow wine.
Q: Could the computer security failures in the book
really happen?
A: Absolutely. Some already have. We’re the most technologically
advanced nation in the world, and the most vulnerable. We’re sitting
ducks. You read every day about amateur hackers, but not about the real
threat of professionals, against whom our society is about as safe as
beach cottages on a sand bar. See The
Cybersecurity Story.
Q: Is the threat from cyberterrorism overblown?
A: Oh, yes, certainly. Techies such as Bill look and see a house made
of straw. It’s hard for them to believe they shouldn’t worry
about matches.
Terrorists might look at our national cyber vulnerabilities and say, “What’s
the visual? Live computer, dead computer, they look alike. Boring. You
can’t have TV news without a picture.”
Bill thinks some terrorists are smarter than that. One of the benefits
of cyberterrorism is that you don’t have to blow yourself up. That
should count for something.
Q: Why did you decide to go print-on-demand?
Isn’t there a second-class stigma associated with such self-publishing?
A: The book includes conflict with Iraq. Bill had to get it out
while that story remained topical. Publication by a mainstream publisher
could not have happened before 2004. Bill didn’t have that
kind of time. Now that the Iraq war is ancient history, Bill is
marketing the book as being about a cyberterrorist attack on the
country.
Besides the above reason, Bill resented the idea of his fate as
a writer resting in the hands of self-assigned gatekeepers such
as literary agents. He thought, “Hey, this is my dream. I’m
in charge.” Going print-on-demand put him on the playing field,
able to let the readers decide what they want. Based on the brisk
sales of the book, many readers are pleased with Bill's choice.
Rose (Bill’s grandmother),
Bill, and Bob
Bill panders to his audience --
whatever it takes
Q: What are your marketing plans?
A: For starters, Bill's leveraged off his reputation as a top national
guy in cybersecurity to obtain solid media coverage and book a string
of keynote speeches. He's taken advantage of being an anomaly: a techie
who's written a novel that makes techie concerns accessible to the general
populace. He's also leveraged the U.S./Iraqi conflict. Beyond that, his
plans are utterly shameless. Bill’s sense is that, the greater the
marketing humiliation, the better the story for media coverage. Some of
his gimmicks are:
The first hundred books
printed are signed, dated, and numbered (1 to 100) and thus are
limited-edition collectibles that will be worth a fortune when Bill
becomes famous. Anyone who buys one of these babies has a vested
interest in Bill’s success. Although he’s selling most
of the limited-edition books at a discount, the first ten are going
for more, including $1,000 for book 1 of 100. If any far-sighted
investor buys that book, there's a news story. Bill is willing to
accept an even higher offer, should there be a shrewd investor who
sees the media possibilities.
Bill approached a local
hotel and asked whether they would buy a copy of his book for each
room if he featured them in the book.
To attract visitors to
his web site, he posts free music that he’s written -- Tom
Lehrer-style parodies.
Q: Where did you get your Business
Cards?
A: Jill used Adobe
PhotoShop Elements ($100) to create the front of the card which
consists of Bill's picture and his contact information. The back
of the card features the No Outward Sign
book cover. She sent both images to Printing
For Less and ordered 500 two-sided, laminated business cards
for $295 (about 59 cents for each card).
Business Cards
Q: Where did
you find your Postcards?
A: The front of the postcard features
an image of the No Outward Sign book
cover. Jill used Adobe
PhotoShop Elements ($100) to create the image for the back of
the postcard which includes:
The book cover's
watermark
Quotes from the
experts ("Entertaining", "captivating,"
"thought provoking," and "hard to put down")
A short book description
("No Outward Sign tells the "riveting" and
timely story of a man caught between two women and a nation
struggling to balance national lawfulness with national survival.")
A: Dan Smith of Hill
Signature Portraits in Great Falls, Virginia, used medium format
(2-1/4x2-3/4) negative film and took approximately a dozen photos
of Bill standing in front of a white backdrop. Bill and Jill selected
their favorite image and Dan sent the corresponding negative to
his lab for a high resolution scan. The art department at Hill Signature
Portraits used Adobe Photoshop to enhance the scanned digital image.
For example, they removed the glare from Bill's glasses, from the
metal buckles on his suspenders, and on the book jacket. They even
"ironed" Bill's trousers. Dan burned the final 76.4 MB
image onto a CD. Jill then emailed the image to Marcus Pierce at
Lifesize Greetings.
Marcus was impressed with the fantastic quality of the image and
commented that "It made our job very easy." To create
Bill's life-size cutout figure, Marcus and his colleague Bob cut
out and blew up Bill's photo in Photoshop, printed it on a wide
format printer, mounted it and laminated it onto a piece of plastic,
and then cut it out on a router.
Q: Where
did you buy your "Signed by Author" book stickers?
A. Jill bought Avery 8293 sticker labels ($16 for 400 1.5 inch
circles) and downloaded the Avery
8293 template for Microsoft Word. She used Adobe
PhotoShop Elements ($100) to create the images which she inserted
into the template and printed on the sticker labels.
Book Stickers
Q: Where
did you buy your TaleCatcher™ chocolate coins?
A. Jill bought the chocolate coins (without labels) from Ethel
M. She also bought Avery 8293 sticker labels ($16 for 400 1.5
inch circles) and downloaded the Avery
8293 template for Microsoft Word. She used Adobe
PhotoShop Elements ($100) to create the images which she inserted
into the template and printed on the sticker labels.
Chocolate Coin Stickers
Q: Where did you buy
your TaleCatcher™ chocolate cigars?
Chocolate Cigar Band
A: After taste-testing three candidates,
a chocolate cigar selection committee
picked Ethel M Celebration Cigars (3 for $9.50). Jill used Adobe
PhotoShop Elements ($100) to create the cigar band image. She
printed the image of the cigar band onto Avery
Sticker Project Paper, covered the paper with a laminating sheet,
cut the bands out, and wraped them around the chocolate cigars.
Q: Who is the webmaster and what tools were used?
A: Jill Neugent (Bill’s wife) is the webmaster. Her only prior
experience with web design was as a Technology Teacher in Crossfield Elementary
School (Herndon, VA), where she was also the school webmaster. At that
time, she used Adobe
GoLive for web development. For this site she uses Macromedia's Dreamweaver
MX ($350). For photos she uses Adobe
PhotoShop Elements ($100), For screen capture of images (e.g., TaleCatcher
Newsletter) she uses Any Capture
($25). Jill has an M.Ed. in Instructional Technology (George Mason University)
and twenty years of experience in the computer profession, so she’s
acquainted with technology.
Q: What was involved in adding the search engine?
A: Jill initially installed a free CGI script, but found its search engine
wasn't very powerful. After testing several other search engine tools,
Jill selected FreeFind (free with
ads, $5/month without ads) because it offers high speed, high availability,
advanced site search technology. There are several versions of FreeFind
(i.e., a free version that includes advertising with the search results
and a range of monthly subscription versions with no advertising). Jill
edited FreeFind's search panel HTML and added it to the TaleCatcher™
banner. She also used Dreamweaver MX to create a custom search results
page.
Q: Who did the moving tail in the TaleCatcher logo?
A: That is an interesting story. Bill used Elance to release a Request
For Proposal (RFP) for the animation. By the next morning, he had seven
bids, all at $300, which is the least Elance allows for that type of job
(this bid information is all publicly available on the Elance
web site). One proposal outshone the others, a bid from NetE
Solutions. These guys had actually done a quick mock-up of the animation
in both .gif and .swf (Shockwave Flash) format. That's for free, as part
of their proposal. Also, their animation portfolio (available at Elance.com)
was by far the best among the bidders. So within a day of releasing the
RFP, Bill had a draft product and an agreement with NetE for a final.
A few days later Bill received from NetE an improved version,
but the changes were not to his taste. He sent NetE a bunch of comments
and within a day had the final version you see on the home page
of this site.
He had a choice of using either a 103K .gif file or a 32K .swf file,
and chose the latter, due to its smaller size and the fact that he tried
a wide range of browsers and found them all compatible with the Flash
format. You hear so much about the high cost of web development. This
is a counter-example -- an entire acquisition in a couple of days for
a few hundred bucks. NetE walks on water.
By the way, the static logo was designed by Jill. Bill also used an Elance
acquisition to solicit logo ideas, but did not receive any ideas that
he fell in love with from any of the three winning bidders. Bill did not
fault the bidders for failing to guess what he wanted when he did not
know himself. Jill, however, being Bill’s wife, was able to either
read his mind and figure out what he wanted or convince him of what she
wanted. It is not allowed for husbands and wives to ponder on which of
these two cases might have occurred.
Q: How did you convert your workshop slides (“Self-Publishing
and Marketing Your Own Book in the Digital Age”) from PowerPoint
to a .pdf file?
A: Jill used Pdf995 which is a fast,
easy, and free way to save documents in the PDF file format. Once you
download and install it on your computer, you can create PDF files by
simply selecting the "print" command from any application. When
the Print dialog box displays, you select Pdf995 instead of your default
printer. You can view the resultant documents on any computer with an
Adobe Acrobat
Reader (free).
Q: What tools did you use to create your Sound
Bites?
A: Jill purchased an inexpensive Radio Shack PC microphone and recorded
music with the hardware (Sound Blaster Pro 16 sound chip) and software
(Sound Recorder) that came free with the IBM ThinkPad. Unfortunately,
the recorded sound quality was poor. Jill knew that one or more of the
recording components had to be replaced. She also realized that Bill needed
to record multiple tracks (e.g., separate tracks for vocal and guitar),
which can't be done with Sound Recorder software. After some research
at CompUSA and Circuit City, Jill purchased the Magix
Music Maker 2004 deLuxe ($65) software to record, edit, and publish
multi-track songs in several formats (e.g., mp3, wav, and ra). She also
bought a Plantronics
.Audio 60 PC Headset ($30) so Bill could listen to one track while
recording another track. Although Music Maker improved recording capabilities,
it didn't improve the sound quality, so Jill tried a few other microphones,
including a unidirectional Karaoke mike and a multidirectional speaker
mike. The results didn't improve. After further research on the Internet,
Jill purchased an External
SoundBlaster Extigy ($155) sound card, a Shure
Vocal Microphone SM58 ($135), and a 20' microphone cord. Voila! Bill
and Jill were in the Sound Bite business. :-)
Q: What has been visitor reaction to the site?
A: Excellent question. Since you asked, below are some of the unsolicited
comments received.
“I just spent the
past 30 minutes roaming through your home page. I love the beginnings
with the tail in neugent ... I am very impressed.” Sheila
Brand, Information Assurance Directorate, National Security
Agency; Sheila lives in “a long and low manse” in Pikesville,
MD.
“Just checked out your web site.
I laughed - I cried. Jill is a genius! This is absolutely wonderful
... Can't wait to read the book.” Linda Cross,
Cross Concepts -- A Writing Service for Leaders, Reston, VA.
“I've looked at your site, and
all I can say is ...‘WOW!’" Alvin
M. Hattal, Business Writer, Columnist, Nonfiction Author,
Editorial Consultant, http://www.biz2bizwriter.com,
Kirkland, WA.
“I checked out your website
(which is terrific, by the way), and your family background and
photos brought some memories to mind ... I even read your eulogy
for your mother, which I enjoyed very much.” Pauline
Hovey, freelance writer/technical editor, living in “beautiful”
Barboursville, VA.
"REALLY nice tail wag, and truly
wonderful web site!" Teresa Johnson,
Stuttgart, Germany.
“Wow Bill, if you write as
well as you write websites, the book has got to be funny, clever,
intelligent, and iconoclastic. Got to get it.” Janet
Lowenbach, Washington Reporter, FDA Webview, freelance writer/editor,
Washington D.C.
“Terrific job you did ... I
am impressed!” Barbara Mosgrave, Medical
Writer, Fairfax County, VA.
“Wow, Bill -- awesome web site!
And the shameless gimmickry is brilliant! Great ideas, and we can
sense the energy.” John N. Oglesby,
Manager, Strategic Technology Planning, International Paper; also
the brilliant author of "Steps" in Pronto!
Writings From Rome, and the as-yet unpublished work, May I Please
Speak with Rebecca Charlotte?, Memphis, TN.
“...the website...is great.
I just finished Bill's eulogy for his mother. Here I am on Sunday
morn with laughter and tears in my eyes for a woman I never met.
Now that's a great eulogy!!!!” Blair Reid,
Librarian/Media Specialist, Oklahoma Middle School, Eldersburg,
MD.
