2010 Book Publishing Thoughts
December 7, 2010
So, December 7th, moving into the holidays and that usually means a fair amount of Let's-Look-Back-At-The-Year and Let's-Look-At-Next-Year stuff.
Sure, why not.
THE FALLEN got published this year, my third book to feature Derek Stillwater, my first book with Oceanview Publishing. I don't know about sales yet, although word is they're pretty decent. I was very impressed with Oceanview's marketing efforts overall, especially the services of Maryglenn McCombs, who created a fair amount of buzz online through all her contacts with book bloggers. The book also managed to win the Thriller/Adventure category for the USA Book News' Best Books 2010 Award, which startled and pleased me. Which also reminds me that I need to get a frame for the certificate.
Jumping on the e-book self-publishing band wagon, I took some books that I liked but which didn't find a home and put them up on Amazon's DTP platform. In addition to re-titling and putting new cover art on EDGE, I published HOT MONEY, MONSTER SEEKER and THE BATTLE FOR ATLANTIS. Perhaps more importantly, I wrested the e-rights back from Midnight Ink for the first two Derek Stillwater novels, THE DEVIL'S PITCHFORK and THE SERPENT'S KISS and put them up as e-books. I'm in the process of making them available in paper formats via CreateSpace with the help of Natasha Fondren, who seems to understand that although I'm not an idiot, I can be terribly lazy about figuring out technology when it relates to formatting manuscript. (Okay, she may actually think I'm an idiot).
The nonfiction book I collaborated on was published this year. The title is 31-1/2 Essentials for Running Your Medical Practice. I enjoyed the collaboration/ghosting process quite a bit and hope to do more of it.
That ain't bad for a single year, I don't think.
posted by Mark Terry at 6:06 AM
7 Comments:
So if I hire Maryglenn and Natasha, I can be famous too?
Srsly, congratulations on a good year, may the next be even better, and thanks for all the snogging.
Yup. You can be as famous as me.
Sounds like a great year. For me, one book published is great so that many is pretty awesome.
Eric,
Sort of caught me off guard when I thought about it. Technically I really only count THE FALLEN and 31-1/2 Essentials for Running Your Medical Practice, because I have some ambivalence about self-publishing (I still cash the checks, though, such as they are).
Oh dude, seriously, figuring out how to format it around Word's quirks was way tougher than figuring out how to finally do that joystick navigation on the Kindle, or hand-coding an entire ePub file for B&N. Next one I'll do in InDesign, which hopefully will be easier, but we'll see. :-) It's fun, but it's world's easier to hand-code a Kindle file!
So no, I don't think you're an idiot. :-)
I found their instructions confusing.
More like their LACK of instructions, LOL! They tell you the margins of printable paper according to trim size, and I think they think their job is done. They prolly don't care what you do between the margins, you know? For that you gotta figure out the whole interior book design and formatting thing.
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