We went for a prenatal check-up last week and Max had to stay home with Zach. I told Max we were going to to the baby doctor to have them make sure the baby is okay. Max must have misunderstood me because, when we got home and walked in the back door, Max looked at my empty arms and demanded, “Where’s the baby?!”
In the BookLocker submission guidelines, we feature this note: “All BookLocker authors are part of our family. We treat all authors with the same kindness and a smile. We don’t work with “prima donna” authors-people who think they’re more important than other BookLocker authors. To put it simply, we don’t work with jerks. If you fit this description, please do not submit your manuscript to us.”
The funny thing is this statement really seems to offend the “jerks” out there and makes everybody else (the nice people) laugh. So, it’s been a very good way of weeding out the “jerks.” Let’s face it, life’s too short to work with jerks, even if they’re willing to pay us to do so.
Every once in awhile, one of those jerks will send us a scathing diatribe about how our statements mean we’re self-righteous, horrible human beings. I received once such letter by mail this week.
Letters will return next week.
Authors, heed my words. Hire an editor. Find someone you have never met before, some good soul with a great resume and references, but someone who has no emotional interest in you or your project. Hire an editor who won’t give a rat’s shiny fanny whether your manuscript changes the course of history; hire an editor who just wants to know what your deadlines are and whether your check will clear.
I sent a magazine a story a couple years ago now, and after repeated follow-ups (I’m a pretty patient person still working toward my first print fiction clip), I got word this summer that they had accepted my story for publication in their next issue. The e-mail said that their publisher had been in a life-threatening accident and was recovering, but they thought the next issue would be out soon. That was in July. I sent them an e-mail again in November to request an update as to when that issue would be coming out, but I haven’t received a response yet. In the past, I always got a response within a couple days. I can’t find any info about them when I do a web search, but they are listed in the 2006 Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market.
It was 1965 and, at a time when most of my contemporaries were grooving up on the Beatles, I was a teenage folksinger–and proud of it! When I went to the recently built Seattle Opera House to catch Ian and Sylvia, Josh White, and my hometown’s own Brothers Four in one glorious show, it was one of the most memorable musical experiences of my young life. Unfortunately, the critic whose review appeared the following morning in a local paper was considerably less enthralled.
This Week:
We had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving Day! It snowed here all day long and between that, and the homemade hot chocolate, and the cute snowman Frank built, and the children bringing down the Christmas decorations from the attic, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation playing in the background, the day couldn’t have been more warm and magical.
What does it matter if the market is “saturated” as you put it, when “oceans” of POD books fail to sell?
If “cold turkey”, a POD publisher suffers no financial loss in readying a book for sale, does it really matter whether it is thought of as a late comer?
One feels loathe in thinking that they, i.e. the POD publishers at large, presume to be gifted with an un-erring ESP as to what will sell and what won’t.
No letters this week. I guess everyone was too busy eating! 🙂
