My One Raised Eyebrow is Joined by Another

Remember this? The archaeologists are documenting evidence of looting in that spot.

More on Self-Publishing

I sent my manuscript to the typesetter. I am a little nervous, which is weird, since y’all have read and will read most of the contents of the book (I got rid of a story from last year that I didn’t like and wrote a new one). In regular publishing, a lot of stuff happens kind of all at once–the book gets typeset, you get a cover design, etc.

But when you’re guiding own project, things have to happen one at a time. Like, I had to decide which self-publisher I was going to use. I went with Amazon because they can make your books available to all bookstores. So, that allowed me to know for sure which specs I need for the interior, which I have to have before I have the exterior designed, because I need to know how many pages the book is going to be so I can tell the designer how thick to make the spine.

I have to make some decisions about how much marketing I want to do, if any. I’m doing the book for myself and for any of y’all who read last year’s stories and enjoyed them and thought you might want a collection of them. But, yeah, of course, if people who don’t read and would never read Tiny Cat Pants would enjoy the stories, I’d like them to find out about them.  But newspapers don’t publish reviews of books they consider not legitimate and still, no one considers self-published books legitimate. Of course, this is the same crowd that still complains about blogs not being real journalism. So… yeah. And it’s very difficult to get a collection of short stories published anyway, so I could sit around and be rejected over and over, because that’s the hoop I have to jump through if I want print media to pay attention to me.

Or I could not jump through that hoop, repeatedly, and not worry about it. Which, obviously, is what I’m doing.

Still, marketing. I don’t know. It’s kind of an open-ended question.