Hello again, dear readers. Another month has passed and along with it, the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. 2021. It has to be a better, less exciting year than 2020.
There was a year for the history books. Let us all hope and pray that 2021 is calmer. Boring years may not make for exciting history but they are much easier to live through. I much prefer my excitement in my fiction, read at my leisure on my patio with a cooling beverage close at hand. Or a hot cup of tea, depending on the time of year.
How about you? What beverages do you prefer with your fiction? Somehow, a plain glass of water never comes to mind. Iced tea, lemonade, hot tea with plenty of lemon and honey, milk with a spoonful of molasses, a cup of strong, milky coffee, hot chocolate, ooh, a mimosa. I like mimosas but too many of them and the words on the page start misbehaving.
I ask because you’ll want to plan your reading for the year. This being the beginning of the year, as promised, here is our tentative publishing plans for 2021!
Agatha Christie’s Chimneys
We started the year with The Complete, Annotated Secret of Chimneys. This is Agatha Christie’s fifth novel. It’s not nearly as well known as her other books which is a shame. I’d never heard of it until it came up on the list and I enjoyed it. So did our minions who read it carefully for annotation topics. It’s a fast-paced thriller/mystery with everything you want. You get a dashing hero with a mysterious past, an adventurous lady, stolen gems, kingdoms with vast oil reserves, gorgeous English country houses, and political intrigue to spare.
Bill did a wonderful job with The Secret of Chimneys and we’re very proud of it. In fact, let’s give you a peek inside. Our design philosophy has been to create books worthy of collectors, but available at reasonable prices. Two pages from Chimneys shows you what we mean.
Writing and Business Wisdom from Authors
What comes next? The Career Indie Author Quote Book. Bill’s been collecting interesting quotes from writers for decades. Unlike your typical quote book, you won’t recognize many of these. While working at various newspapers (Charlotte Observer, Rock Hill Herald, and The Patriot-News) and reading even more, he read a wide variety of author interviews and profiles and snagged whatever was pithy, interesting, or amusing.
We’ve already published the bibliography for the quotes online if you want to see where a quote came from, visit our website.
The Career Indie Author Quote Book covers the writing business as writers see it. There are a few non-writers in there, but not many. I know because I’ve already read every page for errors and I’ll be reading it once more with feeling before we press [Publish].
Since we here at Peschel Press believe in delivering much more than minimum standards, every page of the Quote Book print edition will have an author photo on it. It’s nice to put a face with a name and a statement and you’ll meet almost two hundred authors this way. The index lists all the authors and provides their birth and death dates. Authors five hundred years ago had some of the same issues they do now with imbecile critics, greedy publishers, and the unwashed public wanting to know if they’re a serial killer in their spare time like their characters are. There’s even a quote on that subject from Larry Niven:
“There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is ‘idiot’.”
We’ve gone through this book multiple times, looking for errors and kept finding more and more and more. It’s astonishing how many ways there are to misspell John le Carré’s name. I learned them all and red-penciled each one. I hope. That’s why I’m going to be reading the manuscript again.
We hope to release Quote Book by early February. It will be available as a trade paperback and an eBook. The eBook will not contain the author mug shots because of file size limitations. If we added them all, the eBook would cost as much as a trade paperback and if we want to keep costs down, we can’t.
To whet your appetite, here’s a sample page:
James Thurber’s Sherlock Parodies
By the end of February, we plan to publish The Cases of Blue Ploermell. This book has been a long time in the making. It is the final volume of the 223 B Casebook series of Sherlock Holmes parodies and pastiches. Fan fiction, in other words. In the case of Blue Ploermell — the name of the character — it’s high-end fan fiction. Back when he was a cub reporter in 1923 at the Columbus Dispatch, James Thurber wrote a dozen charming short pieces about his own Sherlock Holmes knock-off.
They have never before been collected in one place. We’re the first, and Thurber’s stories will receive the full Peschel Press treatment, complete with essays, extensive annotations, and as much vintage art as we can cram into the pages. We had some setbacks along the way, including not getting all twelve stories. Luckily, one of our readers was able to supply the missing story and soon, everyone will be able to read the very, very early James Thurber.
For you non-Thurber scholars, Blue Ploermell was part of a Sunday column that Thurber wrote called “Credos and Curios”. Those columns have never been collected and reprinted. Since Bill is primarily a Sherlock Holmes fan, we’re focusing on Blue Ploermell and ignoring the rest. If you’re up for a fieldtrip to the Columbus Public Library and spending days reading microfilm, there’s a void out there waiting to be filled.
Return to Mars
After Blue Ploermell, we will publish The Vanished Pearls of Orlov. I can’t give a date for this, yet, because I’m waiting on one of my beta readers. Angel already checked in and she has plenty to say about my mistakes.
I see a lot of rewriting and tightening in my future, followed by Bill working over the manuscript. I want to release Pearls by summer, if not earlier. We’ll see.
I’m currently writing chapter 25 of Escape to HighTower, the sequel to Pearls. I fully expect to have it finished in a few months. I know the ending, having worked it out several years ago. I’ll be getting the cover done in March of this year. Does this mean we’ll publish Escape by Christmas? There’s always hope but no promises.
Too many other books get in the way and here they are.
Making Quilts the Easier Way
I’ve got a book as Teresa Peschel that’s been on the back burner for years: NotQuilts. We’re still working on the title and thank you to everyone who submitted a better one! We have the best readers. I wrote NotQuilts as a series of blog posts several years back and rereading the sections now, I can see how much rewriting I have to do. I’ve also got to write more detailed instructions, photographing the steps as I go along. Then NotQuilts will go off to be beta read, get rewritten, edited, and then, finally, we press [Publish]. Maybe we’ll make December of 2021. Maybe not.
More Annotated Christie
In addition, Bill has two more Complete, Annotated titles on his plate.
I mentioned The Man in the Brown Suit a few years ago. Agatha Christie wrote this high-spirited thriller adventure back in 1924. We all read it and enjoyed it (like Chimneys, it was completely new to me) and it was slated for annotation and publication. Life intervened and Brown Suit never got finished. We want to get it done and out this year.
What could get in the way? It’s in the public domain so we don’t have to wait.
This becomes one of those publishing decisions.
The other Complete, Annotated title waiting in the wings is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Roger Ackroyd put Agatha Christie on the map. It would have done so based on its own merits, but a few months after publication, she disappeared for eleven days, causing a worldwide sensation. The two incidents were unrelated as Agatha didn’t do publicity stunts. Her marriage was collapsing and she was distraught. The upshot was that anyone who didn’t know who she was, now did. The entire world raced out to read Roger Ackroyd and were wowed.
Roger Ackroyd enters the public domain in the United States on 1 January 2022. We want to have every version finished and ready to go, taking advantage of all the free publicity. That is, we need to have the trade paperback via Amazon, the trade via IngramSpark and available through Bookshop.org, and the eBook versions done.
Finishing one version does not finish the other versions. Amazon’s trade paperback format and cover requirements are different from IngramSpark’s. They are similar, but not identical.
We already knew that, but Bill discovered, via Chimneys, how dissimilar they can be. A font that Amazon was happy with made IngramSpark choke. As I write this, he is reformatting the entire Chimneys manuscript with a font that IngramSpark accepts. Naturally, a new font moves the page breaks around, changes the length of the book, and all the art moves around too! Fixing everything is very time consuming.
The eBook has its own quirks, both Amazon’s version and everyone else’s.
Bill likes producing a book in a specific order: Amazon trade, Amazon eBook, IngramSpark trade, and then any other eBook format. As he constructs each version, he discovers typos and then, when all four versions are done, he revisits earlier editions and makes corrections.
All of this takes time, often far more time than we allotted for. Thus, we come to this year’s first publishing decision and it’s a hard one.
Does Bill finish annotating The Man in the Brown Suit first? It can be published immediately and start earning some desperately needed money. However, we cannot be late with Roger Ackroyd. The minute it enters the public domain, other publishers will flood the market with their hastily assembled pdfs, typos and all. We want to be first; with our lavish, foot-noted, annotated edition loaded with art and essays.
As Chimneys keeps proving, these projects always take longer than planned. If Bill annotates Roger Ackroyd first, it’s finished in plenty of time. We can even make it available for presale, delivering on 1 January 2022. But no matter when he finishes Roger Ackroyd, we cannot earn a clipped copper penny from his hard work until 1 January 2022.
January of next year is a long time from now. Brown Suit probably won’t earn much but something is better than nothing.
We’ve been going back and forth on this one, not reaching any kind of decision yet. Then there’s Bill’s own fiction. He’s got several novellas and novels near completion and it would be nice to get them published too.
If you have suggestions for solving our dilemma, dear readers, let us know.
So that’s our tentative plan for 2021; these books in roughly this order:
● The Career Indie Author Quote Book
● The Cases of Blue Ploermell
● The Vanished Pearls of Orlov
● The Man in the Brown Suit
Very tentative for 2021:
● Escape to HighTower
● NotQuilts
And on 1 January 2022, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Since Roger Ackroyd has to be finished this year to meet the 1 January 2022 deadline, that’s a minimum of five titles we have to edit and format during the rest of the calendar year. Add Escape to HighTower and NotQuilts and you can see we’ll be busy.
And in the background, I’ll be working away on Teresa and Agatha Meet for a Movie, our collection of reviews of every film adaptation of Agatha’s novels. That title won’t be ready until late 2023. At two films a week, it will take almost two years to watch all 190-some titles. I review as I go, publishing a review every Tuesday. We’ll be adding Friday posts soon. Then the reviews have to be cleaned up for publication, formatted, and assembled in a coherent book with lots of pictures.
Anyone who states you can write and publish with the snap of your fingers is … misguided, let’s say. Simply correcting typos and grammatical errors takes time. Rewriting to fix plot holes adds time. A good, legible, interesting layout and cover take still more time. Each version takes its own time and has its own requirements.
So here we are. We’ve got a publishing schedule for 2021 and, God willing, we’ll get all the books done and out. While we’re writing, consider your beverage choices to accompany each new book. Or, like Mr. Parminder in Escape to HighTower, you can lace your tea with Scotch and sooth your jangled nerves.
Thank you again for joining us. We couldn’t do it without you. What is a writer without readers?
