Welcome to the September 2020 edition of The Peschel Special: Pieces from Peschel Press.
We made it! Hurray! And in the nick of time too, or so we hope while praying that Amazon’s Print-on-Demand wing delivers the books as scheduled. We got in line in the printing queue and then paid extra for faster shipping. They claim they’ll deliver thirty-six copies of our newest book on Saturday, 19 September by 8 pm.
We’ll soon learn if Amazon’s forecast is accurate. Faithful readers will recall my mentioning in an earlier newsletter that prudent indie authors always allow Amazon three full weeks of lag time for ordering and receiving books for use at book events. When did we order our newest title?
Monday, 7 September 2020.
Ack. We really cut it close, but we kept finding errors in our latest opus. Bill was rewriting and I was editing up to the last second prior to pushing [publish]. The book is — drumroll please:
Oh no. Wait. That’s the wrong font! Ack. Another mistake.
Let’s try that one again.
Damnation. That’s not correct either. This is what happens when you hurry. Grammasites creep in unnoticed and introduce new errors and when you fix those errors, other mistakes breed in the pages you’ve ignored.
All righty then. Once more with feeling:
This font looks closer to the actual cover.
Career Indie Author is our distillation of everything we have learned about being indie authors and self-publishers. A decade of work in 280 pages. We don’t spend much time on crafting jewel-like prose, as there are plenty of books to tell you how to write glittering sentences. There are also loads of books that discuss marketing, guaranteeing you will become a bestselling author and make millions!
We do not make that sort of ridiculous promise. No one can seriously make that promise and have it come true. It just doesn’t. If someone tells you this, ask for written proof with names and dates that can be confirmed. The other question to ask is that great classic: “Where are the customers’ yachts?”
What we can promise is that after you’ve plowed through Career Indie Author, you’ll have a better handle on setting up your newsletter, keeping track of expenditures and sales, and know why you need a will so your heirs can benefit from your intellectual property for another seventy years after your death. We give you a basic business plan, talk about branding, logos, covers, and give plenty of examples of how other authors do it. Some of them are quite successful too. The trade paperback edition is loaded with art because we here at Peschel Press believe that nothing succeeds like excess. Less is a bore, so more, more, more.
Here’s its page on Peschel Press so you can read it for yourself. Bill will be updating the website page as he adds our IngramSpark version and the ebook, along with links. The ebook version, it should be noted, will have considerably less art than the trade paperbacks. We can load on as much art as we want in a trade paperback and not increase our costs by a bent copper penny, but ebooks…. Well. Amazon gets testy about the file size so a lot of decorative frills have to be jettisoned to keep the ebook within accepted prices.
You may ask why we waited so late, for a book that’s been gestating for several years and even has its own dedicated website (https://careerindieauthor.com/).
We had a drop-dead deadline for Career Indie Author and other things got in the way as they always do. This made the last few months a mad scramble of writing, rewriting, editing, and fixing thousands of mistakes from minor to glaring. But we (if Amazon’s delivery schedule is accurate) made it.
What is our can’t miss deadline? On Sunday, 20 September 2020 Bill and I will be teaching a class for Cupboard Maker’s Story Makers’ writing school on the business of writing. Story Makers is a series of twelve lectures on all aspects of writing, taught by local writers. While we’ll be handing out copies of our presentation, we wanted to have the complete book ready as well, in case anyone wanted a copy.
And we made it. If Amazon’s delivery forecast is accurate. Naturally we did not want to take this risk, but errors kept appearing. Anyone who tells you that a book can be written in a month’s time and then published — error-free! — is kidding themselves. Bill and I must have gone through that manuscript a dozen times and each time, we found something else. This is after running spellcheck and grammarcheck and doing cleanup while writing.
All books should be looked at multiple times to make them as good as they can be. If you’ve ever read a book in which a character changes names, you saw a typical rushed error. This is over and above errors in spelling, grammar, word choice, typos (form instead of farm which is an error spellcheck will never notice), and structural errors like continuity problems and having snowdrops and foxgloves bloom at the same time. They don’t, by the way, although I read a novel not too long ago that claimed they did.
One reason why our books so often take so darn long to produce isn’t the writing. It’s the editing and proofing and layout and then editing again, along with covers, design, spine, back cover copy, along with all the folderol involved with actually putting the book up for sale. Since Bill and I do everything in-house, other than the covers for Odessa Moon, the time needed adds up fast. We’ll never produce a book a month, unless other people write them and then there’s still the editing.
So that’s our new book! Career Indie Author is finished and available at last.
In other news, I (as Odessa Moon) wrote “the end” for The Vanished Pearls of Orlov. This manuscript is waiting patiently in the wings for its turn onstage when it will be sent to my beta-readers. For those of you who are reading along on Wattpad or Archive of Our Own, chapter 39 will be the last chapter. I’ve already started writing Escape to HighTower and I’m up to chapter nine. I like having a big safety net when I work, thus the many chapters I’ve already written prior to serializing the book, chapter by chapter. When The Vanished Pearls of Orlov finishes up in the next few weeks, I’ll start publishing Escape to HighTower on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own.
I’ll provide more details about Escape to HighTower in next month’s newsletter. In the meantime, thanks again for joining us! We couldn’t do it without you.