Tiny Cat Pants

So, the second proof came. I looked at it only long enough to verify that it contained the right innards and then I ordered my review copies. They have to go out next week or the beginning of the week after at the latest. So, mistakes. There may be some. But it’s too late to fret about that crap.

So, yes, hypothetically, you could order the book right now if you wanted to. You’ll probably soon see it up at Amazon, for instance. But I’m hoping you wait until next week, when I’ll give you a link to order it directly from the printer and a coupon code to get 15% off. If, for some reason, Amazon wants to give you a better discount than that, you should go for it. But I don’t know if they will. Probably not.

We’ll also be getting the Kindle version up in the next little bit. I’ll let you know when that happens.

But things are slowly trickling out in preparation for the October launch. So, yes, we’ll still have a story a night here in October. They’ll be rough drafts of the stories in the book (or half of them. The other half were first published here last year.) But please, feel free to buy the book as early as it’s available (which should be next week).

I just have three requests.

1. If you like it, tell someone. I don’t have any marketing money, so I’m depending on your word of mouth.

2. If you don’t like it, please, give your copy to someone, even if it’s only so that the two of you can complain together about how terrible it is. Loudly, and in public. Please, if you hate it, complain loudly in public about it and call it evil. That’s all I’m asking. You don’t have to like it, but if you hate it, please publicly call it evil. Say that it glorifies Satan or something.

3. My goal is to sell 333 copies. If you are a church group looking to burn my book because it is evil and glorifies Satan, if you are willing to hold up my book in front of television cameras and denounce it, I will give you a 50% discount on bulk purchases of my book to burn. It’s worth it to me to meet my sales goal.

Okay, that’s everything. Whew, this is really happening. I’m making time this weekend to address envelopes for press releases.

Ha, you know, when I first started doing this, I thought that people who didn’t call it “self-publishing” but called it “independent publishing” were just being wankers, for lack of a better term, about not wanting to be seen as self-published.

But I have to tell you, I do, at this point, feel like calling what I’m doing “self-publishing” gives the wrong impression–like I could have somehow made this whole product myself and had it turn out just like it has. That is an enormous falsity. I am, in fact, independently publishing this. I am doing my part–creating content, project managing, and marketing–and that’s a big chunk.

But I really depended on the skills of other folks to pull this together.

And I think that’s important to stress. It may be that you are the kind of person who has mad skills in every area. Maybe you like the book cover templates they provide just fine and you can copy edit yourself and typeset passably well and market yourself. In that case, I think you can truly self-publish.

But I am not that person. So, I had to be able to pull together a team of folks who could do that stuff. In that regard, living in Nashville has been a tremendous asset, because we have such a large creative community that leans geeky who are excited about the creative stuff people in town are up to and willing to help. I can’t speak for other places, but damn, I feel like that’s a crucial component to my success.

Let’s just take this Kindle nonsense. Last week, I tried to upload the PDF to Kindle and it came out looking… well… bad. Bad is too mild a word, but bad. And it was the kind of bad that scared me not just in this realm, but had reverberations into my professional life (which we will not talk about, except to say that, whoa, are a lot of places relying on magic to fix this or what?).

I was, of course, relying on magic. “Upload PDF”—magic–”Something Kindle readers can use without turning to their significant others and saying ‘Honey, I think a pirate has hacked my Kindle and is trying to send me a very lengthy ransom note. Something about ghosts. And Nashville. Do you know anyone in Nashville?’”

This is really the difference between ceremonial magicians and kitchen witches. A ceremonial magician would have been all “Draw an elaborate symbol passed down from Solomon himself with interlocking circles and triangles and words in dead languages written with letters you don’t even recognize”–”upload PDF”–magic–”Pirate ransom note about ghosts.”

Ha, that’s a little pagan humor there for you. Please don’t beat me up, ceremonial magicians. I don’t even know if you draw elaborate symbols passed down from Solomon himself. I just assumed you did because who else has the time? Ooo, yeah, I said it! (Please don’t turn my cat into a frog. I have a great respect for ceremonial magicians. I just also like to talk a lot of smack.)

Anyway, so I was all “What am I doing wrong?” to Samantha, who took a look at it and got some help from this dude she knows and long story short, it is not magic. It’s kind of a pain in the butt.

I mean, it still looks like magic from my end,  because I am just sitting here befuddled. But it is not.

Adobe even has directions for how to go from PDF to Kindle’s MOBI format, which you might use, if you ever need to do this.

Though, I think we should all appreciate how close “Get this open source program” is to “magic” for geeks.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Weirdly, this reminds me a little of Stephen King.

I just sit there in my cabin in the woods, and I wait for the voices. And if they say, “Sleep,” then I sleep. And if they say “Run” I do a few miles. And when they “Story,” I sit at the lap-top, until I tire them out with questions.

Writers are big on instructing their pupils on time and schedule–four hours a day, at a set time seems to be the general rule. But what I know, and what’s been confirmed to me here, is I’ve never been able to make myself do much of anything. It really doesn’t feel up to me and I am afraid, because I don’t know what’s coming or when it will arrive.

Over at The Gods are Bored, there’s a guest post from Margot Berwin talking about her debut novel. It sounds really interesting. But we are not talking about books! No, we are talking about publishing.  Ha ha ha.

Anyway, she has some suggestions about how to get published:

1.      Get published in smaller venues first. I went right for the big novel but I might have gotten published sooner if I’d had some smaller pieces out there. Getting published in journals or magazines, literary or otherwise, online or off, lets editors and agents know that you have an audience and that someone else believed in you enough to publish you. They love this.
2.      I really hate this one but it works. If at all possible, get an MFA. While it’s true that no one can teach you to write, editors use this degree as a weeding out process. They’ll say they don’t, but they do. They get so many manuscripts; they have to separate them out in some way, and having an agent plus an MFA and a few published short stories, really helps. On another note, people in MFA programs become very close. They share information. Three people in my class of twelve have the same agent and two are being published at Random House. It’s a place for serious networking that actually works.
3.      Go to readings. Read your work at readings. Network at readings. Being on the shy side, I never read out-loud. I was the only person in my class who skipped the reading portion of the MFA graduation. When I finally got published and Random House called me to tell me they were sending me on an 18-city book tour, I acted excited and then immediately got a prescription for beta-blockers. It was terrifying and I wish I’d practiced all along. And besides, I met my agent at a reading for Amy Hempel and he’s since signed two of my MFA classmates.

I want to walk a tricky rope here because I want to say that I believe that what Berwin is saying is true. I also want to say that, if it is true, it’s really depressing. About the only thing available to all writers, regardless of local, is the first one. You can, indeed, submit your writing places.

But getting an MFA? In this economy? With book publishing being where it is? That’s a lot of debt to acquire without a guarantee of a job or a book contract (even if it does make a book contract much more likely). And what about people who can’t just pick up their lives and move to a place that offers MFAs? How do they get access to networks and such?

Or going to readings? What if you don’t live in a place that has book readings?

I mean, in some ways, a good chunk of her advice can be summed up in “live in New York City.” Which, again, is fine and is probably true.

But it makes me wonder, as publishing shakes out how it will, will it become more regionalized? I mean, it’s funny, if you think about it. If you or I write a book about Nashville, that’s considered regional and not having a very big market, of interest to people only in Nashville and the surrounding areas. But if someone writes a book set in New York City, it is 75% of the time not considered a regional book (though it is interesting to think about the lines that demarcate a “regional” NYC book from one that isn’t. Outside the scope of my point, but I’m trying hard to not get distracted by it.), but a book that has wide appeal.

It makes sense. No one lives in a place and constantly thinks “oh, how quaint and unique!” Even if you do think those things at first, eventually, it just becomes the place you live. And the experiences you have there start to feel like universal experiences. So, of course, you think about books about the place you live as being kind of universal.

I think these things are understandable. But as we break down into a more boutique world, I wonder if we’ll see the rise of more regional publishing.

I don’t know. Just something I wonder about. If folks perceive that their stories about places other than NYC are going to be at a disadvantage with NYC publishers, will they look for other options? Will they make other options?

I don’t know. But I’m watching.