Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
While waiting for the designs to arrive, I continued to working on the blog One Candle in the Darkness, which cohabitates with APerfectBlindness.com on wlancehunt.com: all united so that any success on one will help the others. Ideas continued presenting themselves and my list of things to do and explore grew to spread over three notepads, multiple pages in Evernote, plus various scraps of paper, notes, and emails to myself, some seeping into Mac Reminders in an effort to prioritize the ever longer lists.
Throughout, I peppered my contact on the Rising Star Board with questions about what to do, what not to, book prices, and how books might get stocked in Europe so that if I vacationed there, I could try to get my books English language Bookstores. Any books sold in Europe would be printed at their shop in England and shipped from there, it turns out. The same holds true for Israel where I was headed in April. I wasn’t sure if the book will be ready by the flight, but why not prepare?
On December 8th, the package of mockups arrived in an email: four covers and three interior looks. The task now was to pick the cover and the interior, including the possibility of mixing elements from several versions.
The covers were universally good, but I had my prejudices, and the people closest to me knew them. I needed to find a way to get reactions from people, who didn’t know mock-ups were mine, and especially, which was my favorite. Having strangers join in —proxy for the millions of people who browse books for one that grabs their attention—would be extra good. For this, a poll with deep reach would be perfect, but holding one with radio buttons and all on a FB feed seemed to involve a subscription with fee, and that’s more annoying than it was worth, and possibly a tar pit of time and money as I know I’d be tempted to poll this and that and several dozen other things, so to avoid that, I started a FaceBook group, which allows polling without third-party software and would keep polling only to the novel. There, I posted the four mock-ups, and invited all my FB friends to gather there and vote on the one they’d most likely pick up in a store, or click on a page; this way, they could also get updates if they wanted. I also put a crude poll for the covers to my main FB feed: asking anyone who had an opinion to let me know in the comments section.
As it was the holidays, I decided to let the polls run until after the New Year. Meanwhile, I poured over the interior designs, liking a mix of them. I wrote out what elements I wanted from each of the three interior designs. With the yearly trek back to my mother’s house for Christmas, things slowed to a stop.
Once again in Brooklyn and back to working on future promotional ideas, specifically collecting a list of venues featured in A Perfect Blindness, I found an anachronism. The music venue I have always remembered as The Agora had changed its name. I vaguely knew this but hadn’t remembered. Checking the date of the name change, I found out that it was already called The Newport Music Hall by the time Mercurial Visions, the band Jonathan and Scott founded, had their concert there. After going back and forth with a person from Editorial and my contact on the Special Recognitions Board, we decided I needed to change that. Not long after that, I stumbled over another error: I misremembered the name of a song Book of Love played at Cabaret Metro the night band Mercurial Visions opened for them in the concert, kicking off their Micherigan Tour.
Will I keep finding mistakes like this?
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