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

With the first proofread, all I was allowed to do was respond to the changes the proofreader made or suggested, as listed in a pre-formatted Word document. Any additional changes I wanted were to be held for this second proofreading. In other words, I hadn’t any reason to reread the manuscript, which was going to be changed anyway after I submitted the proofreading sheet. Occasionally, I flipped to the manuscript when I needed to check some context, but that happened rarely.

Now that I looked at the typeset manuscript carefully, the advice of the Quality Editor came back: that after the book is typeset, it needs to be proofread as things can happen when the conversion is made from MS Word to the typesetting software. Read More

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

While waiting on the response to the lyrics from songs I’d pressed into service, I sifted through the collected lists of every book, movie, music venue, bar and club used or referred to in the book, organizing them by chapter, coding them by how a work was referenced or used, or if a venue, whether a scene is set in it or it functions as set dressing. These venues are as important to the book as the music, in fact, they can’t exist apart from one another, and I had plans for the venues with scenes set in them, especially given that several no longer existed, yet people still speak fondly of them on social media. Read More

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

The road to publication still had a few twists to ride out, starting with the final proof having problems that needed fixing before I could check the accept box. A Perfect Blindness is about, on the surface, two close friends and their escape to Chicago to finally make it with a band. They found a new band called Mercurial Visions, and much of the narrative backbone unifying the three interweaving stories follow the fortunes of the band. Music is the milieu, and as such, the text is drenched in music: songs play when they are in their loft when they go out to the bars, and clubs, and even in their thoughts. Sometimes references spill from their mouths in phrases or entire sentences, either verbatim lines or riffs based on lyrics of songs from the era. Mostly. A couple of references are anachronistic, coming from songs after this time, but they are kindred. Read More

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

Part of the appeal of self-publishing is writer control: the author can publish the book they wrote in whatever shape they wish, from rough draft to fully polished or any state in between. A writer can call it whatever genera they care, and fill it with idiosyncratic grammar, such as using then as a coordinating conjunction. No editor will command something be done, or it won’t get published—the prohibitions of defamation, plagiarism, and explicit underage sex and drug use excepted. Read More

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

Of course, publishing a high-quality book has never been cheap. Once Gutenberg gave the Europe movable type in the 15^th century, the first mass-published books were religious texts, including the Bible (in many cases in the local language and not Latin for the first time), costing 30 Florins—the equivalent of three years of wages for a clerk—and then the Greek and Roman classics: Important books for important and wealthy people. The literate wealthy could fund their works of science, poetry, and fiction, but these were for their peers—these works were fantastically expensive, and most of the public was illiterate anyway. Read More