Things are poppin around here now. We’re approaching the finish line with the tiny homes book. pieces falling into place. It’s been a long haul, and still 6 months to go (Feb 2012) until books are in stores. This sure ain’t no instant book. Every day here is exciting right now. From our little recycled wood studio in the middle of a vegetable garden we’re in touch with the world via our many Macs and the web. Yesterday for example:
I did about a dozen emails preparatory to going to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. It’s a huge event, been going on since the 1500s, the super bowl of the publishing world. I stay in a small hotel in the elegant spa town of Bad Homburg, about 20 miles north of Frankfurt,and usually use my 3-wheel K4 scooter to go the mile or so to the train station from the hotel; thinking of taking my new Bhangra long skateboard this year. So far I have appointments with publishers or agents from Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia, mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, and South Africa.
We’ve been having repeated problems with our DSL connection, and may have, knock on the pine desk here, solved it yesterday when we talked AT&T into replacing the fiber optic card down the road. We’re really crippled when off-line. Thanks to Steve, our tech guy…
I feel like a juggler each day. Sometimes it feels as if things are skidding out of control. Permissions requests (mostly to reproduce drawings from Stretching), reprinting books when inventories get low, marketing, watching sales, trying to get the $$ to update our stretching software for Lion, and the big one: trying to figure out how to use the web to maximize publicity and sales.
Someone once said, at a publishing conference, that no one was in this business for the money. It’s true, and my publishing brothers and sisters know this: we’re doing this because we love books. We’re readers! And communicators. For some 40 years, Shelter has been tiptoeing through the publishing game, trying to get the money from bookstores in time enough to pay printers. We’ve always seemed to squeak by. In the old days, Random House would advance us money, Lately we’ve been making it on our own, but we’re approaching a very lean period, with sales down and the tiny homes book taking forever. We’re betting the farm on this new book.
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