What’s Up?

Hi. It’s me. I’m still around, although with the close of school looming on the horizon (eight days, including the weekend!) it’s pretty much all I can do to hang on and crawl through the week.

Plus there was the editing, and the acceptance of the manuscript, and taking the cat to the vet because a half Siamese in heat is about as much fun as…what? The manuscript? It was accepted? Well, yes. Yes it was.

After a lot of thought and noodling over the independent vs. traditional publishing houses, I decided on going the independent publisher route. My ego kept begging me to try the traditional houses first, just to see if any of them would bite, then I remembered: when they buy your manuscript, they own it. All of it, all of those words you so painstakingly put together and edited and polished and loved and titled…and since they own it, they can change whatever the fuck they want.

I? Do not want that.

So, I shopped around. I researched lots of options, settled on a free ebook site, then looked again, because my mother couldn’t read it without a computer and she wouldn’t be happy about that. I looked at P.O.D. publishers and, well, wow. But there was one out there that just called to me. Unfortunately, they are picky about who they accept. Unlike some of the other P.O.D. presses out there, they won’t put their name on anything that they don’t think will sell. The other guys know they’ll sell some of your books, because the author has to buy about a thousand dollars worth of books.

Um, I’m pretty much fresh out of wealth at the moment, and I’m not sure when my shipment of barrels full of money will arrive. Last time, they got the order wrong and I ended up with barrels full of monkeys. You cannot buy groceries with monkeys; it makes the store clerks mad.

Anyway, I decided to try that one publisher. I sent it in and waited. After a couple days, I received the acceptance email and the REAL fun began.

The contract (I read it) and now the reformatting. Unfortunately, I chose a slightly smaller size book and now I’m looking at something HUGE because the page numbers are climbing (thanks to bizarre margins). I’m a little concerned what the price will be for said tome once I’m done fiddling around with it. Will anyone be able to afford a copy?

I may have to do some adjustments on paper quality etc, providing that’s still an option. If not, anyone need a slightly entertaining door stop?