Stopped by the PO box on the way home today from the South Sound Writers Lunch to a lovely prize. The paper edition of Blaze Ward Presents 001: An Interpretation of Moles had arrived. Looks lovely.
The rest of the way home, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I were reflecting that the world has changed, yet again. “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Nothing remains the same, because change is constant and ongoing. Tomorrow will be different than yesterday, that is the only promise worth understanding.
We tossed the idea for the anthology out just about May 1 (we’ll round for ease). I closed submissions June 1. Published July 1. Got my paper copy printed and delivered July 13.
Seventy-five days. An Interpretation of Moles.
In order to survive and thrive in this modern age of publishing, you must Surf Chaos (with an Eff, not a Vee).
You must be efficient in your use of time and money. Every day, things get cheaper and faster, but that means that you must constantly take into consideration investing in the tools that will improve your life.
I am just now finishing edits on a new Business For Breakfast book for the fall on writing Series and understanding Continuity. There’s the usual section in there about writing fast and clean, but we also need to publish fast and clean. I use Vellum to make fast, clean, pretty books. They take minutes for me to format, as compared to a friend of mine who demands that everything be done in Adobe In-Design, because she has to have complete and utter control of the final document. (Control freak of the first order.)
She spends days getting everything formatted exactly the way she demands that it must be done. DAYS.
I spent minutes. And it looks almost as good.
Plus, the cost of a refurbished Mac Air I picked up on amazon with points, plus the one-time fee for Vellum ($250), versus the annual subscription for what looks like $600 USD.
So in one year, it pays for itself, just out of pocket.
Plus all those days spent tweaking a manuscript, when 99%+ of readers won’t notice. Days when I’m writing the next novel and she’s still formatting the last one.
And next year, someone will probably invent something better. I have no idea what it is, but it will handle some chunk of stuff that’s either impossible today, or not cost-effective to pursue. (I’m personally waiting for the day that your Alexa/whatever device can pick up the text of a book and do a human-acceptable level of audio book. That’s coming)
The world has changed.
That is my refrain in publishing as well as in writing. Tomorrow will be different from yesterday.
I could take an idea from “fuck it, let’s do an anthology” to holding the print edition in my hands, in under seventy-five days. Worse, I’m kinda lazy, so I took a three weeks reading submissions and organizing them, before putting it up for pre-order.
I could quiet possibly do the next one in forty-five days, if I was feeling crazy.
Compare that to my friends who spend a year writing a novel. Or a week formatting it over and over again to get it just right. (Mind you, print, which is even funnier, since print keeps representing a smaller proportion of total book sales every year, as ebook and audio keep getting to be larger slices of the pie.)
Tomorrow will be different from yesterday.
What are you doing to keep up?