What an interesting year 2020 has been, and we’ve still got the rest of November and then all of December to plow through. Who knows what will be in store for us in 2021?
The mind boggles, especially considering how 2020 turned into a banner year for all kinds of events over which normal people like us had zero control.
We’re starting to plan for 2021, keeping in mind how often my 2019 crystal ball forecasts were wrong. The theme for 2020 has turned out to be flexibility and resilience. What will the theme for 2021 be? We’ll know by December of next year.
One of the things we’ve been considering for 2021 is a newsletter dedicated to Odessa Moon and the Steppes of Mars. I would write it, like I write this one but unlike the Peschel Press newsletter, it would be dedicated only to Odessa and her books.
Is anyone interested? If so, email me at [email protected] and tell me what you want in her newsletter.
Help Us Finish Our Next Sherlock Parody Book!
We’ve got many books planned for 2021 as you would expect. However, to make one of them happen, we need your help. I’ve spoken before about the final volume in the 223 B Casebook series: The Cases of Blue Ploermell by James Thurber. It’s almost finished, including essays and annotations.
However, we have a problem.
Due to circumstances beyond our control (hello Covid-19 shutdowns), we are missing one of the stories and have been unable to get it through our normal channels. We’re looking for someone — it could be you! — to go in person to the library in Columbus, OH, and page through the microfilmed records of the Columbus Sunday Dispatch from 1923.
Do any of you, dear readers, live in or near Columbus? We’re looking for the March 18, 1923, edition of the newspaper. It’s in Section 8, and it’s a half-page titled “Credos and Curios.” It contains the Blue Ploermell story entitled, “No. 5. The Famous Detective Does Some Daring Deducing.” [UPDATE: Thank you faithful reader for supplying the missing story!]
If so, we would be deeply grateful if you did the legwork, made copies of the pertinent pages of Credos and Curios, and mailed it to us. To show our gratitude, you’d receive a heartfelt thank you in the acknowledgements of the book. We will also mail you a signed trade paperback copy of the finished volume for your own personal library. Plus, we’ll reimburse you for micro-filming costs and postage. There’s also the satisfaction of knowing that you, dear reader whoever you are, advanced scholarly research for both James Thurber and Sherlock Holmes parodies.
Renovating Suburban Stockade
In other housekeeping news, we retitled and recovered an older book of ours. This particular title was “Suburban Stockade,” a book I wrote and we published back in 2017.
Here’s the old cover and title:
Here’s the new cover and title:
They’re the same book, but the new cover and title better describe the contents. Bill did make a few updates to websites and fixed some typos. One of the great virtues of indie publishing is that we can fix titles and covers. In traditional publishing, this doesn’t happen often other than the racier cover attached to a mass-market paperback as opposed to the more tasteful hardcover.
This was another of our publishing decisions. Suburban Stockade is a good book (I should know, I wrote it) but we weren’t as experienced as we are now, years later. With a better title (Safe, Fed, and Sheltered) and a much better cover, we may find the readers who are looking for this book. Thanks to print-on-demand and digital, this book won’t go out of print. Indeed, it remains pertinent and can sell for years to come. That’s harder for a traditional publisher to do because they have to contract with a printer for a set number of books and when those are sold or pulped, that title may not get reprinted.
We’ve also entered Fed, Safe, and Sheltered in Kindle Unlimited, allowing members of KU to read it risk-free. Bill also published it via IngramSpark.
Bill’s Adventures with Craig Johnson and Lou Diamond Phillips
Last month, Bill got a chance to interview “Longmire” author Craig Johnson and Lou Diamond Phillips for the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop. Tech expert Sarah did a great job putting it together, and the result was a fun interview. Here’s a link to the YouTube interview, keyed to a fun part of the interview about 47 minutes in.
What We’re Working On
That’s another step in our masterplan for 2021: publishing all our titles with IngramSpark as trade paperbacks. Although Amazon does have a wider distribution network available, IngramSpark is better at getting our books into local bookstores and libraries. Not everyone likes ordering books from Amazon. We want to offer options.
In other news, I’m still plugging away at revising The Vanished Pearls of Orlov for Anne and Angel, my beta readers. When I’m finished, I’m going to start work again on NotQuilts.
We haven’t settled on a good title for this book. It’s about a method I devised to turn a salvaged blanket into something that looks very much like an orderly crazy quilt or a disorderly pieced quilt. But it is not a quilt, as all three layers (top, batting, underside) are pieced and quilted as one. Hence the name NotQuilt. No knots are involved either.
I’ve sewed a number of NotQuilts and written about the process. The next step is to compile the blog pieces, edit them into coherence, and add any missing sections. One of the most interesting parts of sewing a NotQuilt is designing on the fly. When I start one, I don’t know what the finished quilt will look like. I know some things such as overall theme (cats) or a main color (blue) but that’s it.
This is a challenging concept: not knowing what the final result will be. There’s no diagram with color choices nor a tested recipe. It’s exciting and very different from a typical quilt book. NotQuilts are designed to use up whatever fabric is lurking in the stash along with dead electric blankets and sheets with plenty of life in them. They are the very definition of thrift.
If any of you, dear readers, have a better potential name for the book, shoot me an email. Good titles for books are a challenge. A one-word title says nothing. Titles can’t be copyrighted so several very different books can have the same title. Nonfiction books can have a subtitle offering more information to the reader.
I expect NotQuilts will end up with a subtitle along the lines of “a new way to quilt” or “empty out your stash” or “you won’t know what you get until you’re done.” As you can see, the title needs work so suggestions are welcome.
So that’s where we’re at. We’re finishing up 2020 and tentatively planning for 2021. In my December 2020 newsletter, I’ll cover our publishing plans for next year (do you hear God laugh?). As a special bonus, since we’ll all be getting ready for the winter holidays, I’ll be including my recipe for Butterscotch Crunchies. These are the cookies we hand out at shows and they make an excellent, easy to make addition to holiday cookie assortments.
Thanks again for joining us at Peschel Press.