DIY Publishing
Published June 30th, 2009 | 
DIY publishing services are not equal. You need to shop around. It’s not quite like picking out auto insurance.
The considerations are different.
For example, how much of this process do you want to do yourself outside of writing your book? Obviously, the more of the process you handle yourself, the less money it will cost you. However, if you plan on hiring a copyeditor, an artist to design the book cover jacket, etc., you’re talking about a nice chunk of change. So DIY outfits offer these services and often these services are not cheap or of suitable quality. Also, you have to consider the printing costs. Are you going to do traditional offset printing or print-on-demand? Traditional printing may have less cost per unit on the front end, but will cost more on the back end. POD is the opposite. It may, in fact, cost more on print initially, but save money in the long run. However, with POD, you’ll find it more difficult to get books into physical bookstores. That’s going to change sometime in the future, probably, but for now, you’re basically stuck with Amazon and a handful of lesser online booksellers with POD.
So when picking a self-publishing service, you need to know what you want to achieve and compare those aspirations to what each company delivers.
WTF?
Published June 28th, 2009 | You may have noticed the old Wordpress theme has been replaced (hopefully temporarily) by the default Wordpress theme. What happened was this: Went to update my blog and discovered a problem. When I logged and clicked on a permalink, it loaded and empty white page instead of the blog post I had written. When I was logged in, I could view the page fine. I looked at several things and as far as I could tell everything looked fine. I hadn’t made any significant changes to the blog in the previous 48 hours and the thing was working fine just the day before. Permissions were set where they were supposed to be, etc. My web host had been experiencing some problems with the servers, so I checked my other blogs to see if they were suffering the same problem. No, not my other blogs. Just Diary of a Mad Editor. I consulted authorities who know far more about PHP and Apache than I do and got some suggestions — most of which were not that helpful. One person suggested a problem related to upgrading to Wordpress 2.8. The only problem with that is I’d upgraded to 2.8 a at least a few weeks ago and hadn’t had a single problem until yesterday. Another suggested an Apache bug but, again, wouldn’t I have experienced this bug previously? Another person suggested that I change themes and see what happened. I figured I had nothing to lose so I switched to the default template and tested it and, sure enough, the permalinks were working the way they should. So, until I fix the problem with the old theme or decide on a new theme, we’re all stuck with the bland, default theme, so don’t be to alarmed by the sight of it.
The Man Who Looked Out His Window and Saw Rain
Published June 27th, 2009 | June has been a bit of a bad month for me. Not a lot of money coming in. Persistant health troubles. Father in and out of the hospital. Red tape and ugly, uncomfortable weather among other little things. As such, I have fallen behind on all my correspondence. When you add the fact that I am hardly a social butterfly and kind of absent-minded too, it’s easy to understand how this situation could have snowballed to the extent that Facebook is sending my queries as to why I haven’t logged-in in a while and friends are sending letters and emails wondering if I’m even still breathing. And don’t think I haven’t noticed a drop-off in the readership of this blog in the last few weeks! I realize I haven’t been posting all that regularly of late. No, I am not the type who one is likely to receive party invitations from. I tend not to attend parties either and when I do, I usually find an excuse to duck-out early. Like this past weekend, I attended a wedding of an old friend. If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t have gone at all, as I don’t do well in large groups where I’m expected to be sociable and on my best behavior. I went to the wedding and made an appearance at the reception, but felt out of place there. Aside from the bride and groom, I didn’t know a soul and am not usually eager to meet new people. Too much small talk and inane ramblings about nothing of significance.
Of course, the ability to express those little social niceties — to schmooze and rub elbows in public is part of the job of a writer and publisher. You have to promote yourself to others. So, it’s ironic, I suppose, that I should be a writer and small press publisher. It understandable why I’m not more successful. And yet, I discovered the written word largely due to my inability to engage in those social niceties, to find a way to express on paper what I could not in the flesh. As I say . . . ironic.
Anyway . . .
