Taking a brief rant break…

I just need to rant. I’m not feeling quite as bad as a couple of days ago (“bad” = depressed, isolated, totally unsupported, like no one cared about what I was doing…etc etc etc self-pitying whine ad nauseum…), because my dad surprised me by asking me what I’d been doing with my book plans, and I waxed quite enthusiastic talking about it. But…

*sigh* This is what I’ve always wanted to do. It really is…I’ve always wanted to be a publisher. I never really just wanted to be “a writer”–never. I’ve always wanted the whole damn thing. That’s exactly why I’ve acquired so many of the necessary skills over the years. The first desktop publishing/page layout program I learned was Publish It, back in the early 80’s. I worked with Pagemaker on the job in the 90’s. I know how a phototypesetting machine works. I learned typesetting markup code when I worked on Fireheart magazine. That’s part of why I was able to learn HTML in 2-1/2 days flat. I learned about circulation, marketing, bulk mail, shipping and advertising in several different jobs and when I was Circulation Manager for FireHeart. “Fulfillment”–packing up books into envelopes or cartons and sending them off, handling PO’s, invoices, billing and orders–doesn’t scare me a bit. Bring it on! I’m computer savvy, I have art talent and training, I can compose music and mix it (I’m planning to do book trailers). I know graphic design. I love, love, love books–every aspect of them, and I always have.

And of course, I can write. Like no one else. I know all this.

I always knew that being self-employed would be hard. I guess I just didn’t fully appreciate HOW hard it would be.

Every…single…day. Seven days a week. I get up, I feed the cats, I do minor chores, I get my glass of cold tea…and I’m at work. Every day. All day. Until I go to bed. I do my workouts, I do the bare minimum spiritual requirements, I make healthy food for myself, I do the bare minimum for health and hygiene maintenance–and it’s all work. I never got to the grocery shopping this week. I read the newspapers in two-week chunks. And with all this, it goes so slowly. It’s so…damn…hard.

I feel heartened by an e-mail I found in the self-publishing list archives, a successful author-publisher who does her own editing. Frances Grimble from Lavolta Press states my philosophy exactly:

I long ago gave up on a really clear distinction between writing and
editing my own work. It’s a bit artificial anyway. When I was an
editor, some writers would hand over half-finished work and expect me
to rewrite it heavily; I was pretty much a coauthor for some books.
Others were perfectionists, and feel they’d let themselves down if
they left a single typo in the work they handed in. Not surprisingly,
editing the work of this second category was a breeze.
What I can say is that I probably do what the second category of
authors did: First work on the content, and then keep refining it to
the level where there is nothing more to look for than typos. Every
time I start to feel burned out on a piece of the work, I put it aside
and go do another piece. It can be another written part, but our
books have a lot of graphics, so very often it’s graphics editing.
Then when I feel fresh again, I look at the book again. I don’t think
in terms of chapters, but of whatever size pieces I can keep wholly in
mind at any given time. The pieces get bigger as the work gets more
refined.
I’m a “do a million passes” kind of person, except I don’t count them
as passes. I just keep working. I get the work (even, incidentally,
if it’s someone else’s) about half memorized, parts fully memorized.
So if I have a tricky phrase, I take some what would otherwise be
mental “dead time,” like taking a shower. I go into the shower with
the goal of working out a difficult organizational question, even a
difficult sentence, and usually it’s worked out by the time I’m done.
I did all this even when I was a magazine journalist and other people
were, in theory, editing my work–except even for magazines everyone
else said did heavy rewrites, my work was hardly ever touched. It was
unusual for anyone to do as much as rewrite an entire sentence.
So I figure, why pay another editor, if I’m going to do all this
anyway?

Having finished the fourth edit of the ms, I read over the relevant chapters in Pete Masterson’s Book Design and Production about typography and choosing your typeface, arranging the parts of the book and what’s on them, and setting up the InDesign templates. He gives step-by-step directions for formatting the ms specifically to import into InDesign, so I was going through, both visually (I set the view to 150% and turn on all the “hidden characters”) and with Find-and-Replace, picking out nitty little errors that can make InDesign cough up hairballs, like tab characters where they shouldn’t be [anywhere, basically], spaces before or after end-of-paragraph markers, em-dashes in the right places, stuff like that. In the course of doing this, I decided that the text could be cleaned up even more, so I did a FIFTH edit. I tightened up phrasing, removed redundancies, ruthlessly zapped anything that wasn’t needed, and I wound up excising over 800 words more. In four painstaking passes, I’ve taken out over 7,250 words from the ms since the end of the major edit/rewrite on March 5th! My dad thought that sounded like a lot. In fact, it’s exactly 4%.

I’ve registered my account at Lulu.com, for the Advance Reading Copies, and I’ve started registering with Lightning Source, for the printing. I must have downloaded 10 PDF files yesterday, specs and contracts and informational materials–some of it was marketing stuff I got as free bonuses from Shel Horowitz’s website when I bought his new book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers. However, I need to get my company website up, ASAP. I have the domain name all registered, and all I need to do is design the pages and then call my ISP, Net1plus. I went through their hosting procedures doing the website for my last employers, so I’m familiar with their protocol. They’ll give me the info and I upload the pages, and I’ll also have an e-mail addy in my domain name. I want to have that for Lightning Source. So, these are my next steps: do the InDesign template and design the website. I don’t need a finished cover design for the Advance Reading Copies, although it would be nice. I’m chewing over trim size, too, because Pete talks about 5-3/8″ x 8-3/8″ being more economical for digital presses, but 6″ x 9″ is standard. Lulu doesn’t even offer the smaller size, while Lightning Source offers a 5.5″ x 8.5″ but doesn’t indicate whether there’s a pricing difference. I’ll have to get quotes for different sizes, I guess. 6″ x 9″ would allow me to print hardcovers without re-typesetting, which might be handy if I get library sales. Then there’s the signature count. It’s most economical to print books with an even number of signatures–usually, 32 pages. I might do a sixth edit, just for that!

Then there’s the EAN/ISBN bar code. I do need that for the Advance Reading Copies. I can download a free barcode generator from the Free Software people, but it’s not “guaranteed.” Several pros on the self-publishing list say it works fine for them. Commercial bar code software costs $150 and up. OTOH…that would be tax-deductible and a legitimate business expense, since every edition of every book will need a bar code. Not only am I doing all my own cover design, I would not refuse contract jobs designing for other people. (That’s exactly why my company is named By Light Unseen Media, not “Publishing” or “Press” or “Books”.) Hmm, hmm, hmm…

While I’m thinking about all this, I’m also thinking about my next products, er books. I would like to have three titles out by the end of this calendar year. I’d like to think that once I get a lot of these foundations laid, future books will be easier. I’m probably kidding myself!

The publishing journey…when you’re the publisher! It’s great!! I love it!! I hate it!! I feel so unsupported!! I’m so lucky!! This is so hard!!

*sigh* End of rant break. Back to work.