Meta Writing Post

[jeriendhal]

Found an interesting article courtesy of haikujaguar concerning beginning authors self-publishing. The upshot is that an author without a Name might be better off just e-publishing, if they can market themselves well. Otherwise they run the risk of getting a pittance for e-royalties and their publication rights never being released by the Big Publishing House they signed their baby away to.

It's given me a bit to think about. My own professionally published work in SJGame's late and lamented Pyramid Online was sufficiently minor that I can't expect it to give me a foot in the door with any publisher, and I just don't have the ability or the inclination to produce the volume that a mid-list author needs to come up with to make a living these days (or any day really). I think after I polish Triumvirate and finish The Ship I'd be better served just publishing them myself via Smashwords and Lulu.

In other writing news:

1. Need to get back to working on The Summer Intern. I've got one or two filler scenes to stick in before The Plot rears its ugly head.

2. Need to move my nose onto the grindstone and get back to work on re-editing Unexpected Diversions, which is so daunting that I'm only about 10 pages into the 200+ I've got to work on. But it needs to be done. It was my best-seller (such as it was) on Lulu and it's got a decent chance on Smashwords thanks to the Elf Porn mrket.

3. National Novel Editing Month will be soon, which means I need to go over Triumvirate again. Aside from simple grammar and formatting errors it's got at least one major structural problem and a couple of minor ones that need fixing before I can think about publishing it online.

4. The Far Future: Need to work on The Ship. One Of These Days.

Comments

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

Sorry I didn't get back to you about Unexpected Diversions in the timeframe I promised. I got an earlier than anticipated date for giving a presentation of my Bachelor thesis project thing, and just started coming apart at the seams.
That presentation is tomorrow, so I guess I can get the second chunk finished by Sunday. The last third or so might have to wait until after the paper proper is finished, though. (Needs to be handed in by the 23rd.)

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Believe me, you've got no reason to hurry. Just correcting the basic formatting is a task that's going to keep me occupied until Spring at least, never mind grammar, word dropouts and spelling.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

Did you at least get it converted so you don't have to get rid of the linebreaks at the eand of each line?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Nope. That's what is really making me tear my hair out. :(

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

Mhm. I did try converting the file with Calibre to RTF (which any word processor should understand). It did get rid of those surplus linebreaks, though on closer inspection it may have dropped some that it should have kept. It seems to have some trouble with italics, too, running words together occasionally, or inserting linebreaks around a single word.

hmmmm...

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. If I could just figure out the marketing/distribution conundrum I'd be self-publishing in a heartbeat. But I don't want to be a tree falling in the forest, and I'm no marketing guru.