I had just resigned myself to accepting that my books would not get translated by the people at Babelcube.com

It is a great site for authors to get their books translated into foreign languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, etc). My difficulty is that I don't (yet) have the track record of the established authors with hundreds of reviews on Amazon. I was more concerned about writing my books and felt that the marketing would take care of itself in due course.

I'm here to reiterate what anyone in the industry knows: marketing does not take care of itself. Something like 700,000 books are published in the US alone EACH YEAR (roughly 50-50 between traditional paper publishing and ebooks). I have read something in the region of two million books are published globally each year. This is daunting. But, focus on your genre and eliminate the fact that 99% of the authors think like me (or, like I thought) and are more concerned about their writing than their selling. Because, let's face it, you don't go into writing to make money. It is something I love and I do for myself as much as others. But, by the same token, we live in a world of mortgages, rents and taxes of various sorts. It is tougher than ever before to be a proper starving artist. Welfare helps for some but even that is under attack!

So... the good news is that a translator said yes! I will, assuming all the stars and planets align, have The Art of Wealth translated into Spanish by the first week in October. I just received the offer today. I accepted, uploaded my manuscript and that's it!

And... a colleague of mine sent out my YouTube blogs (ie. these blogs) and got 91 likes. It may not seem like much for those who have 100k of website traffic or generate 2,000 new emails per month from promotions, but this is a major step for me.

The lesson I learned is this: one step in front of the other down the right path will eventually get you to your destination. There are people who have walked those steps before me and there will be those who walk those steps after me. The key thing to remember is that there are steps. Just add perseverance.

I struggle with the world of information technology (IT) if only because it is so pervasive. Each time we click on a button, millions of things are happening behind the scenes. Apart from information gathering (our personal details and our interconnections with others and how to monetize that knowledge), there are things that occur that have no explanation. For example, my website. To the entire world, my website was working but I was unable to view it in my computer. I called the help desk at my hosting company and they said it was my internet service provider (ISP). This didn't make sense but it was the same conclusion everyone said--the difficulty being that everything else on my computer worked just fine. This morning, I tried to view my web page and it worked! It was a miracle. Most likely, it was a reboot or clearing of the cache of the provider of wifi I have been using these last few days. Whatever the reason, I am pleased.

But it reminds me of how much we do is limited to how people receive and process it. We can do everything correctly and still fail. We can get the best education, get the best job and make all the applications to further our dreams. But if those applications fall on deaf ears or, worse, malicious ears, our trajectory or levels of success will be seriously hindered. I touch on this in my book The Art of Wealth.

We have generations of people who go to school, learn what they are told to learn but are never able to break through the glass ceiling impossibly imposed on them by society. We are becoming increasingly immobile as a society and I fear that this lack of social mobility will dampen the entrepreneurial spirit necessary to take chances. When we take chances, we fail; it is part of the process of success. If we feel doomed to fail regardless of our efforts, we will cease to take chances. In that scenario, everyone loses.

Not to equate my IT issues with social mobility issues, but my thoughts were that we must constantly be aware of forces beyond our control or understanding. For many of us, we don't even know the questions to ask with the result that there are never any answers.

The good news is that I have launched my website. Yay!!! Everyone around the world can now see my site, navigate my books and peek inside (or listen, as it becomes available, to a sample). They can also enjoy this blog and any other tidbits of information I glean from life from time to time.

The bad news is that I am the only one who can't see the live version of my website. I contacted the service provider with no joy. I contacted the host of my domain, no luck. As everyone else can see my website, it is not their problem... I deleted all my caches, cookies and whatnot in my history and even tried loading on Chrome, Explorer and Firefox. No luck. I took my firewall down, changed the settings and tried. No luck. (I then put the firewall back...)

So, enjoy my site. I'm flying blind for now but I'll keep blogging my ups and downs along my journey toward social networking competency. 

By the way, as I wrote "toward" in the paragraph above, my thoughts drift to my earlier blog where I talk about my conversion to American spelling and grammar. In the past, I have always written "towards" (similarly, backwards instead of backward), but American spelling convention dictates that I write it without the "s". (sigh) Yes, it is a brave new world...

I have always followed the British spelling standard. My Word document and all of my Office Suite programs are formatted for British spelling. I am from Canada so this shouldn't be a problem. But I lived in London, UK (and now Jersey) so British has been my reality for the last two decades. So it was with a heavy heart that I changed my settings in Word and on my computer to American spelling. The other unintended consequence of this is that it changed the characters that popped up when typing (my computer thinks my keyboard has become American--but I'm still on the same British keyboard). The most noticeable was the quotation mark and the @ sign. On my British keyboard, the @ sign is next to the shift key, sharing the same key as the ' sign. Now, it has switched and shares the same key as the number 2. This will confuse my fingers for a bit until they learn.

The learning curve never ends.

This evolution is compliments of my proofreader who just handed back my most recent novel "Slaves of Circumstance" and part of my "Man on the Run" series (Volume V). Until now, I was satisfied with a content edit. A content edit is AMAZING and should be enough. It is a line-by-line edit and feedback of your entire novel. Expensive but worth it. The proofreader is there to catch anything that isn't caught by the previous sieve. Hence, my transition to American spelling. To me, colour seems less so as color; utilise isn't as effective as utilize but that is the way things are. Tough beans, my friends!

I was relieved to learn that I was not the only person who thought Indie (movies, music, books, etc) meant something from India. When a very good friend of mine admitted to this misconception, I thought I'd share it with you. I was only corrected a couple of weeks ago.

Hubris precedes the fall. It wasn't so dramatic for me, but the frustration is there. All I wanted to do was take a short video and post it on YouTube/my blog. I found the webcam feature on my computer and loaded it up. It had some great features and I played around with them, sending emails to my family with talking dogs, me on billboards and other such niceties. What I failed to understand was that I didn't need to email myself the files. They were already on the computer. As each file is large, it took time to email them to myself before emailing them to my family--or uploading them to YouTube. I decided to try using my phone as I see advertisements demonstrating beautiful videos and I figured that must be the answer. A short blog (less than one minute) ate up 75 MB and I got bored waiting for it to upload. I changed screens on the mobile phone and I thought I had accidentally deleted it. Hence, my video blog of this morning. When I uploaded this morning's blog, I saw last night's blog (the third one from yesterday). I then made a subsequent blog.

There is an expression that only a fool learns from his own mistakes (ie. the wise learn from others). I am trying to learn from others but am doomed to make these types of mistakes. The good news is that I am learning.

Hopefully, this is the last you (or I) need to hear about webcams and the logistics of video uploading. I include the blogs below.

I went into the meeting with high expectations of finalising my web page, dealing with my Twitter account and laying the foundation for world peace (actually, the last point we didn't get around to). Instead of congratulating me on my choice of names for my domain--ie. badbooks.co--I was told that if I wanted to be a serious writer, I should put my name out there and stand by it. Besides, initials aside, people would most likely look at the website name as gimmicky or something that sold poor quality books. AND, the .co would confuse most people into thinking I forgot the 'm' off .com   hmmm.....

I'm going to sleep on it but it looks like my brilliant plan is not being received as I thought. My initials spell BAD. I also thought that people wouldn't like or want to learn how to spell Deschauer. Even my spell check puts a red line under it. Note to self: have a word with the spell check robot running my computer...
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I appreciate that this can be done by 12 year olds. I currently consider myself at the age of 12 when it comes to technology. Hopefully I will improve. In the interim, enjoy a quote from Albert Einstein...

This is the day that I enter into the world of the blogs. My website isn't done and I am struggling with the technology. Follow me as I progress (hopefully) from neophyte to a competent blogger setting out relevant material for readers and authors.