Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?

Well! Here’s a clarion bell announcing good news: from PBS NewsHour‘s Business Desk comes “Why the US Sits at the Brink of a New Boom.”

Let’s hope Mr. Morris has got it right this time, as he apparently did when the prognosticated a major crash. Think of what it would mean:

• The US deficit would shrink some more.
• Private industry and government jobs would bloom in gay profusion.
• The increased tax revenues from all that employment would revive Social Security, Medicare, and a wide variety of other key public programs.
• Our homes might increase in value to what we paid for them — for those of us who have managed to cling to our homes, that is.
• Most important: Our young people would have a shot at jobs that pay well enough to get them out from under the saddle of their college loans. They might even be in a position to save for their retirement and to help their own kids get through school without outrageous debt.

Speaking of “wouldn’t it be loverly,” we have that e-book I mentioned a couple of days ago. In a je ne sais quoi moment, I followed an impulse to run the manuscript past an old friend who happens to be a fairly big cheese in academic publishing. To my astonishment, she liked it.

A lot.

Enough to suggest I send it to a friend of hers at a very prominent academic press, with a recommendation from her.

Can you imagine?

Well, I think it’s a pretty long shot. But since cover design, page layout, and e-book formatting for print and electronic versions would set me back almost $1,200, I would be very pleased to get someone else to foot the bill for production, printing, warehousing, and fulfillment.

If a miracle happens and this publisher accepts the book, it will have to go through peer review, revision, and then design and production. So it’ll be a year or so before it sees print. But WTF? The interim will give me time to put together the three cookbooks I want to publish, which will be easy and relatively inexpensive to put together as e-books. 🙂