So Musa, where Merm-8 has been published, is shutting its doors. They announced it via email to its authors today that, at the end of the month, all links will be pulled from buying sites and rights are reversed back to us. So in six short months I go from achieving my dream of being a published author back to the beginning. I won’t have a book to show off and say “yes, I’m in the marketplace”. I can’t point people to an Amazon page or promote on Twitter or anything. I’ll be back to where I started. I don’t blame Musa at all for this. No anger. They’ve been…
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The Book Club
My wife is a member of a neighborhood book club. Which is not, as you might think, a thinly veiled excuse to drink wine and complain about their husbands. It is, however, mostly filled with snacks and conversations. Most of which aren’t relevant to the book. They’re usual fare isn’t usually book clubby books — books with heavy subjects but entertaining stories like The Help or The Fault in Our Stars. This month, it was Merm-8. Hey, that’s my book. And to tell the truth, I’m disappointed in myself for not exploiting the opportunity as much as I could’ve/should’ve. For some reason, I just didn’t feel very writerly that day…
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Merm-8 on “Story Behind the Book”
Here’s a treat. Merm-8 is featured on “Story Behind the Book” today. Take a look!
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Guest Post: Always Striving by Daniel Ausema
Turnabout is fair play. If you read my guest post on his blog, now welcome Daniel’s article about persistence. Always Striving When I hosted Eric’s post on my blog last week, one line jumped out at me: “But it’s also important to know if you don’t stretch your limits, you won’t get better.” That encapsulates my approach to writing (and everything) as well as just about any one sentence could. So I wanted to riff on that for a bit. A big part of my background is in experiential education. We would create experiences for kids that pushed them in one way or another. And if an activity felt too…
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Looking for Mermaids
When I started thinking about promotions for Merm-8 (now in fine stores and outlets). I wanted to do a blog tour. Basically, that means doing guest posts on various blogs. I came up with a ton of good topics, but the places to put them seem to be as sparse as cuttlefish*. I thought there’d be more websites about mermaids. There were when I was younger. But when I Google, most of the results are for commercial sites that are for things named after mermaids, like models and hotels and cleaning products and… seafood restaurants. So I’m putting it out there. If you can help me find some sites about…
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Merm-8 Is Released
What’s that? You say you have nothing to read? Well, here’s something that might catch your fancy. Why, yes, this is my book. Merm-8 is a book that you can purchase and also buy. It’s mostly used for entertainment, but if you have some bytes on your flash memory drive that need feeling, then this will absolutely keep them occupied with important ones and zeroes. But say you do want to use it for its intended purpose. What would you find if you open the book? Well, many of the same words and letters you’re used to. Just in a different order. But if you read the words in that order,…
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Keeping You Informed On the Real Business of Getting Published
Well, here’s what’s going on lately. The cover got finalized after seven revisions. You know me, I believe there are only two ways to attract a reader to a book — word of mouth and the cover. Especially for small presses. It’s about the only way to advertise what the book is about. Ironic that you have to use an image to promote text (but there’s a reason they say a picture is worth a thousand words). I started getting cover art mockups a few weeks ago. The first was just a simple picture of a mermaid. I said, well this doesn’t illustrate what the book is really about. It…
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Too Many Things To Work On
There’s something about all the stuff coming down the line lately that’s starting to paralyze me with fear, at least according to my writing. Merm-8 is supposed to be published on 9/5 (mark your calendars), but there’s still a lot to do. I’ve gotten through content edits three times. But now I’ve got to go through grammar edits. And the problem is the grammar edits haven’t been marked, because they want me to go through the whole text and make sure it’s all right. Which sounds like a bad idea to me. I wrote the story to the best of my ability regarding grammar rules. How would I notice something…
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Second Edits on Merm-8
Second edits are back now. I was worried that now that the semantics and punctuation were out of the way, she’d really bring down the hammer and start asking for revisions on scene orders, characterization, big fundamental things. But no, they were actually easier (thanks to the fact that all that stuff was now out of the way). Didn’t get past the contentious POV scene though. Which was fine. I gave it some thought and realized, you know, she does have a point. Stylistically, it just doesn’t work. Story-wise, I think it does. But I’m the author, and there are more readers than authors. As much as I think it…
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The Experience of First Edits
Well, now things are moving on Merm-8. I’ve gotten contacted by my editor and promotions specialist. Weird how nothing for nine months, and now a bunch of stuff is all due at the same time. And meanwhile I’m 75% totally complete with the next novel. Lovely planning. The edits themselves weren’t bad. Mostly changing hyphens to em-dashes, worrying about commas. Interestingly, the editor is choosing to insert “and then” or “then” instead of eliminating them entirely. I thought was bad times. But I guess every publishing house’s style is different. For other things, I deferred to the editor ninety percent of the time. Like not using all caps for emphasis…
