Second day of 2008, and I’m feeling..disoriented

It feels like it can’t be just the 2nd, it must be the 3rd or 4th. Does anyone else feel like that today? My weekly routines have been thrown off by the holidays and snow storms. Normally I do grocery shopping and errands on Monday, but I haven’t done that for two weeks. This is a transfer station week, and I normally take the trash and recyclables over on Tuesday, after I change the litter boxes and bunny cage, but this week, Tuesday was a holiday. So, I spent most of yesterday cleaning, and went to the transfer station today. I did wake up to a nice clean house! I went a lot further cleaning than I’ve done for a long time, dusting and mopping some of the floors. All the holiday decorations and paraphernalia are put away except for the wreath on the front door, which is hard to get to because the front door is now snowed in. I didn’t plan to be so fast with the holiday decorations, but most of them were fresh greens that had gotten quite dry, and I was nervous about fire hazards now that I’m burning a lot more cordwood to supplement the furnace heat. I had greens on the mantel, and Cerridwen could not be dissuaded from sleeping in them. There have been a lot of ghastly fires in the news for the past few weeks.

I made up spreadsheets for my personal budget and By Light Unseen Media for 2008, and I figured the year-end totals for BLUM for 2007. Mortal Touch alone has cost me $1,697.96 to print, promote and market so far. That’s without paying for editing, proof-reading, typesetting or cover design, all of which I did myself. I also, so far, have spent almost nothing on actual advertizing (I took advantage of a bargain rate on FantasyBookSpot and paid them to run my banner ad–that’s about it). That’s not primarily PPB (paper/printing/binding) costs, either, although I did order a “short run” for hand sales and promotional copies. If anyone wonders what it costs a publisher to publish a book, there ya go–and that’s the low end of the bell curve (very low!).

I’ve been reading some of the New Year’s resolutions, or goals, of my fellow LJer’s with interest. Mine is very simple for 2008: make enough money selling books to at least break even, and cover the costs of the books I’m publishing. I have other ongoing objectives, but they’re sort of unstoppable at this point. Making money is a hard one!

Two books will definitely be coming out in 2008 under BLUM’s imprint. If I can manage more, I will!

WOOF, is it cold tonight. Right now, it’s 10 F (-12 C), with a wind, and the forecast low is 0 F (-18 C). Tomorrow’s forecast high is only 15 F (-9 C)! But then it’s supposed to warm up and be in the 50’s (12 C) next week!