Well, this is cool. The eBook Builder says our first adventure in self-publishing will be ready to go this week. And my old friend Jim Metcalf came up with a very handsome cover, despite the fact that every image of the rest of us could unearth with was totally, hopelessly politically incorrect. It is, IMHO, amazingly good.
🙂 I really like this. He came up with another with these sort of shadowy handcuffs. But those evoke law enforcement, to my mind, more than indentured servitude. The kind of cracked marble effect evokes the crumbling of the academy, a phenomenon epitomized by the fact that 50 percent of US faculty are now adjunct. Meanwhile, tuitions continue to soar: students get less and less for more and more.
This subject is starting to pop. The New York Times noticed us adjunct slaves a few days ago, and this morning the Diane Rehm show on PBS devoted an hour to the various attempts to organize adjuncts into unions (pretty damned forlorn, as you’ll know if you have any experience with academics, every one of which is a wild hare). So we’re anxious to get the book online as soon as possible.
This little gem will be my first experiment in self-publishing, after three books through scholarly and trade presses (William Morrow, Columbia UP, and Folger Shakespeare Library). I think of it as a sort of sandbox, since there’s no reason to expect it will sell many copies. It represents an opportunity to learn from mistakes, of which I’m sure there’ll be a-plenty.
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a print version of Slave Labor. There’s an adventure, if ever there is one: I are a english major, i are not a artist, and while you could say I’m not very fond of Word’s eccentricities, I truly do hate the ditz entailed in trying to format documents in the Microsoft’s accursed program. It crashed my whole system again today: asked it to import a photo…can you imagine the effrontery?
At any rate, this afternoon I got about three-quarters of the way through importing copy into a Wyrd template formatted for CreateSpace and finally got around to registering an ISBN for the print version. So there’ll be a physical version of the magnum opus as well as a digital one.
So this one will be a learning experience, through which I hope to develop a little familiarity with so-called “indie publishing” — i.e., self-publishing. With any luck, this will redound to the benefit of the next few books I intend to market.
Waiting in the wings is How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, a diet guide and recipe book. That, I think, has more potential for sales. Who doesn’t want to lose 30 pounds these days, eh?
Then the first installment of The Cottrite Chronicles, set in the far future: a novel called Fire-Rider. I hesitate to call it science fiction. Looks like the term for it is speculative fiction. Now, IMHO, that one is a fun read. So I’m hoping it will actually build a readership…specially since I’m already launched in the second book for that series.
And I have an idea for another sci-fi story…completely off the wall. Haven’t started writing it yet, but whenever I contemplate its premises, the damn thing strikes me as funny as a Douglas Adams novel. But funny may be in the eye of the beholder. 😉
And of course, there’s the usual array of how-to’s and pet stories. Hope to have four books in circulation by the end of this year and eight by the end of next year. That’s how much copy I have in the can, languishing on the hard drive.
Welp, it’s past bed-time and I have to be out the door at 6:45 tomorrow morning. And so, to bed.
Congrats on the upcoming e-publication and the start of your own publishing empire.
Congrats and best wishes on the new book. Having sent two DD’s to college what has become very apparent to me is…It’s a business…plain and simple. To be deemed successful they need to fill those seats. Forget the caliber of graduate and what they have learned and what they can do with this education…..It stuns me as to the amount some graduates carry in student loans. A recent applicant for one of my rentals, a fine young man, has $36K in student loans ….at 8-9%….and he’s 5 months behind on these loans…not good. These loans are “superior”…that is they get their money before everyone else and along with the IRS are the only entities that can garnish SS checks….
As a not so recent college student but recently freed of my own college loan shackles(but of course my husband still has plenty of loans for the both of us), I’m really interested in this book. Even engineers, who were thought to be mostly immune to downturns in the economy, had felt the bite of the last great recession. I’ll keep my eye out for this, especially if it does come in a paperback format! 🙂