Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness

The last changes sent, the manuscript now started forming its chrysalis.

Now all I have to do is make sure nothing breaks before it emerges as a fully formed book, such as checking the changes once effected. Protect yes, but also work on getting people to notice it exists once its pages can be touch or swiped: Major shifts, yet the transforming manuscript weighs on my mind still. These last changes don’t nettle me as much as the lyrics I used or transformed, and that because of silence: Neither an “okay, you’re good,” nor a “look, you can’t use this, so change it.” Simply nothing. 

I soothed these troubling thoughts by reminding myself of two things. First, that I’d altered some cases, introducing minor mistakes imitating how an actual person remembers songs’ lyrics—a few details mixed up, absented or added—make them more like the way I remember lyrics, sort of right, but rarely verbatim. Second, by remembering one of the very first steps in the process is a content evaluation during which they examine a manuscript for violations of the terms of service, such as plagiarism and “un”-fair use.

This freed space in my thoughts for marketing, what that means and requires. First, it doesn’t mean what I had thought it did for most of the last two years: blasting away on as many social media accounts as I could wrap my head around, creating content and then hunting down alluring images for that. I signed up for Canva, a simple, easy to use online design application, which, in spite of my impending illumination, I continue to use—for far more than merely social media.

Dutifully, I copy out on a pad of paper all the great advice Guy Kawasaki, and Peg Fitzpatrick gave in The Art of Social Media, organizing each piece by priority, and if the item was a one time idea (using the same image on all sites) or an on going one (things to check before each post). Pages of things to do. Felt good. The higher priority one-time items made it into my Mac reminders I could see what to do next, then I attacked them full force, getting a new headshot with an eye at a 1/3 mark horizontally), and rewriting a master biography to use on all sites, and then creating an Editorial Calendar featuring all the platforms, deciding what to post where, on what day, with quotas for the number of posts each day or week as appropriate.

That will take a lot of content fulfill, including reposts and original work, which sent me off to start writing this blog, as well as finally building a website for the book. I’d had the aperfectblindness.com URL, for some time using Weebly, but after reading about blogs, I put wlancehunt.com on WordPress.com, and then realized I should have both the book and my sites in the same place, so forwarded the URL to my brand new page for the book on wlancehunt.com. What to do with the money already spend on Weebly, I’ve yet to decide. I told myself this is the kind of waste to expect when one does not have a plan.

This current blog “One Candle in the Darkness” has it’s own page too, and I imagined a grand mission of reviving Enlightenment-style thinking as expertise and facts have been so denigrated recently and damn if it didn’t feel good to be so busy and to have so much to do. So much, I’ll never get it all done, but I’ll never want for something to do.

This book launch will kill.

Or so I thought until I discovered I had this all bass ackwards.

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