Another month gone and very few signs of Spring have appeared. The winter aconite has arrived as have the snowdrops. But it’s cold and damp and I’m longing for warmer weather.
My mother’s left wrist is slowly healing from the break. She’s wearing a splint instead of one of those big, heavy casts that encase the forearm from fingertip to elbow. This is the result of modern orthopedic surgery; a few screws and a plate mean all she needs is a removable, lightweight splint to hold her wrist stable while the screws and plate perform the real task of holding the little bones in place while they heal. My parents are managing as best they can in Delaware.
Mark is staying with them for another few weeks and then we’ll see what happens. He’s installed more grab-bars and will soon install that non-skid adhesive-backed tape on all the exterior steps to help prevent slips. He lubricated all the drawers that my parents struggled with for thirty years. They slide easily, making it easier for my parents to open and close a drawer.
Handrails in that deathtrap of a stairwell are still under discussion as are handrails on all the exterior steps. My mother is reluctant because installing handrails says she’s getting old and frail.
Baby steps. I have to keep telling myself baby steps.
I’ve been traveling a lot between Hershey and Delaware. As you can guess, this has not helped my productivity. People like to talk about Life/Work balance. There is no such thing. You will never get all your work done, particularly if you are like me and Bill, running your own tiny publishing house. Work fills every available moment and life has to squeeze itself into the cracks. If you devote more of your waking hours to life, then work suffers.
Life/Work balance? A lie. Life makes its own demands and believe me, when a family member has a crisis, the work goes out the window. Or, if you aren’t fortunate enough to have some flexibility, something or someone suffers. People have gotten fired over Life/Work balance issues. It’s one of the many, many reasons I recommend having a serious savings account and several months of food in the pantry. Money and groceries on hand don’t make problems go away but knowing you can pay the bills and eat make the same problems easier to cope with.
So what work has gotten done while I’ve been putting plenty of miles on the car?
For starters, Bill just pressed [publish] on Career Indie Author Quote Book. It’s now available as a trade paperback or an eBook on Amazon.
While Amazon is slowly propagating all the links to Quote Book throughout its vast ecosystem, Bill got Quote Book set up on IngramSpark. Once IngramSpark has given approval, Quote Book will be more widely available to booksellers and libraries as well as via bookshop.org. Here’s our page: https://bookshop.org/lists/peschel-press
Because Quote Book is in Kindle Unlimited, we are not making it available as an eBook via any other service like Smashwords. This was a publishing decision. We chose the tradeoff of potentially earning more money via Kindle Unlimited versus a wider distribution with lower earnings. If you are unfamiliar with Amazon’s terms of service, here’s the deal. If you participate in KU, the title cannot be available anywhere else in digital form, not even as part of a story bundle. Many authors remain within KU’s walled garden because the money earned by page reads can be much larger than the money earned by selling ebooks on all platforms. Advertising is much easier too. Selling on all platforms is called going wide.
It’s a choice, but not a permanent one. If Quote Book doesn’t do well on KU, we’ll revisit the issue and make it available digitally on all the platforms to see what happens.
That leads me to the second project that Bill’s been working on while I’ve been on the road.
Publishing on IngramSpark
When we started Peschel Press a decade ago, the IngramSpark option didn’t exist. While we’ve always had both trade paperback and eBook versions of our books, it’s been only via Amazon and other eBook retailers. IngramSpark opened up to indie writers like us a few years ago and since then, Bill’s been putting our titles up there too. He assigns our ISBN to each title and jumps through all the hoops.
He’s got his procedures in place for each new title. Unfortunately, going back into the past to get older titles on IngramSpark is more complicated.
One issue is that when we started self-publishing, we didn’t use our own ISBNs. We used Amazon’s. We can’t do that with IngramSpark and anyway, real publishers buy blocks of ISBNs to identify their books properly to retailers. We bought a block of 100 ISBNs and each trade paperback gets one as we publish it. Ebooks don’t need them. However, every other format does. If we were to publish audio books (currently a daydream), large-print editions, hardbacks, or mass-market paperback editions of our titles, each version would need its own ISBN, in addition to the ISBN assigned to the trade paperback.
The project is moving along slowly but Bill hopes that by the end of March, he’ll have all 25 of our books available on IngramSpark and on our bookshop.org storefront.
Signed, Personalized Copies Available
That leads me to the newest way you can buy a book from us. In the past, if you wanted a signed, personalized copy, you had to hunt us up at a show such as the Hershey Art Festival. That’s not always easy, especially since the pandemic began. So we decided to partner with both of our favorite local independent bookstores. You can order any of our titles from them and they’ll ship the book directly to you via media mail. It helps us and helps support our local bookstores.
They are Cupboard Maker Books in Enola, Pa., and the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop in (where else) Mechanicsburg, Pa. Here’s the link with the details.
Future Publications
As for what’s coming? My crystal ball clouded over the day my mother broke her wrist. That said, the next book should be the last of the 223B Baker Street series: James Thurber’s The Cases of Blue Ploermell. This project has been a long time coming and Bill will be very happy to see it done. I can’t guess the timing. The end of May? Bill has to finish the essays and I’ve got to read the entire manuscript twice over, looking for mistakes that he has to fix. Then I’ll have to read it again, looking for those last few typos before he formats the book as a trade and an eBook.
After that, I don’t know. I hope to finish the edits of The Vanished Pearls of Orlov and get it to Bill, sometime when I am not driving back and forth between home and Delaware. I’m up to chapter 31 in Escape to HighTower and approaching the finish line. We’re keeping up with the Agatha Christie Movie project too, although the twice-weekly movie night has been scaled back somewhat to accommodate my new schedule.
So that’s where we’re at. A new book published, (Career Indie Author Quote Book), all of our books up on IngramSpark, and The Cases of Blue Ploermell and The Vanished Pearls of Orlov waiting in the wings.
Thanks again for joining us here at Peschel Press. We can’t live without our loyal readers. And don’t forget: install those handrails now, before you need them! Spring brings slippery rain and even more slippery ice storms so be prepared and avoid those broken bones.