Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
Before I was able to dive into all these remarkable new ideas about social media, email lists, outreach and the like, the nearly complete book still had growing pains to overcome. Once iUniverse effected the newest round of changes, they sent me another PDF version of the typeset book. I had only to check the few changes I’d last requested, so I attacked that right off. The cover changes looked good, and I had to convince myself, again, that not asking for more changes was the right choice.
Still, it would be more conceptually coherent…
I shut that thought off immediately by turning to the interior changes. Not as pleasing. Why? Allow this excerpt from the email to the production person to explain:
But in one place, the person corrected the spelling error properly, but for some reason made the word italics.
All we need to do is removed the italics in that one word, and it seems we’re good on the interior.
Another correction sheet was filled out and sent, it was back to waiting for that last change to be made, and so my attention returned to marketing: The Launch.
I had known for a while that the book could launch in April. According to my contacts, traditional publishers like to release new titles in April, and if this last change got make quickly, A Perfect Blindness would sneak in, giving it the whiff of a traditional launch.
As I assessed all the work I had done, the realization that even if it became available in April, I was utterly unprepared for its launch. Sure, I had done all sorts of things, kept myself terribly busy, doing a hell of a lot that was—now that I culled through it—not going to do the book much good.
A sense of panicked dread, angry frustration, and nauseating disorientation set in, seizing my thoughts into infinite loops: I should do that. Or shouldn’t I do this first? Doesn’t this need to be in place before that? What about this? I can’t forget that. Doing that is only an indulgence, not something that will help.
Round and round these thoughts chased one another, leaving me unable to do anything except look at all I had to do and keep reorganizing it all until finally, I did nothing but stare, stunned by the seriousness of my mistakes and the sheer enormity of the task.
I’d botched this. Badly.
And no way out presented itself.
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