One book is proofed and ready to go. I said to Peter last night ‘It looks like a real book!’ and he said ‘Could that be because it is a real book?’ in a sarcastic tone of voice. The other one I’m waiting on a proof copy of. (There will undoubtedly still be at least one proofreading error that got past both my eyes and Cas’s, mind you, because that’s human beings for you).
Today’s wrinkle is that Lulu is insisting on only letting me price one book in pounds and the other book in dollars, and I have no idea why. I’m fairly certain it shows prices in pounds or dollars depending on where you’re logged in from anyway, but if I don’t manage to get this sorted out and it causes anyone problems I apologise.
Publication date is looking like some time next week, though it probably won’t be September 11th for obvious reasons. It takes a while for the details to propagate out to online booksellers, so I’m not wholly sure how long it’ll take for them to be available on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, but when I know more I’ll let you know.
For some years now, I’ve been thinking every time the new year ticks round: this is the year I’ll get a book published. And this year it really is. So I had to get off my backside and do it all myself; pretty much everything else of note that I’ve achieved in my life has been done through the power of getting off my backside and doing it myself, and I don’t know why I thought publishing a book would be any different.
(A friend of mine made a blog post a week or so ago saying that having other people to work with made them much more productive and happier, and I was fascinated, because it was so far from my experience that they might as well have been saying ‘I work best with a frog up each nostril!’ I am absolutely terrible at teamwork. I resent doing the small social adjustments that stop people getting offended at each other, I resent having to deal with office politics and power games, and I generally feel like I’m back at school and a bunch of other kids are trying to copy my homework.) The one good thing that came out of this: I discovered that self-publishing is great if you are a solitary control freak. 🙂
Would I sooner have a contract and more readers? Yes, of course I would, though I would not like to have to go to conventions or to deal with the various ways in which published friends tell me that the industry drives them batshit. But I am not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
This is the year. That’s good enough.
Ankaret Wells 
It’s more than good enough, it’s amazing! Seriously, I’m so impressed and I know that these will just be the first books of many.
And I’m totally with you on the teamwork. Such a waste of time.
I am OK with teamwork if the other person has skills that I plainly don’t, because I respect expertise – I mean, if someone said to me ‘You design a brochure for this charity event and I will bake the cakes!’ I would be both delighted and relieved, because I have zero baking skill. But when it’s a bunch of people sitting in a room trying to achieve synergy, it drains me faster than a phone battery.
This exactly. I’ve had a great time with team work when it has been a bunch of different people with different skills or views to offer, but my experience of trying to work in a team where everyone is supposed to have the same skills and views, is that it just makes me twice as much work – editing different academic’s work into a comprehensible whole is generally more work than just writing the whole thing myself!
Also, I’m with Ros – seriously impressed 🙂
It’s been a learning curve. I don’t think I’d have tried to do my own covers, for example, if I hadn’t had years of messing around with The GIMP doing LJ icons and roleplaying handouts and so on.
*dances with joy*
Also, if we are ever called upon to do a charity event, I will absolutely make the cakes.
I think that will probably be a great relief to everyone concerned!