NEW BOOK COMING SOON

No, dear readers, I have not dropped off the face of the earth. Nor have I been fortunte enough to be traveling around the world. Instead, I have been licking my wounds after once more evaluating the possibilities of having my short story collection accepted by a traditional publisher, grinding my teeth over the audacity of those rejection letters, and sucking up the disappointment. I surrendered to going the POD self-publish route.

That quest took up more time. My first publisher, Ann Phillips, with her Star Publications (no longer in business), was a dream editor/publisher. I managed to even sell a nice number of books--and it is still on Amazon until the copy supply runs dry. The second book publisher I used was PublishAmerica; it was quick, no cost, they did an excellent job of manuscript set-up, the cover is out of this world, and I was my own best customer. LOL Since it is a memoir, it's no surprise that for the publisher it was a hard sell. They don't like writers like me I'm sure (I didn't sell enough books although I really tried) because they weren't interested in my publishing with them again.

So I spent weeks reading up on every well-known POD publisher (and some obscure small ones)I could find. I found that they are not all cut from the same fabric as Mama used to say. I also discovered I'm not computer savvy enough to do some of the girations those companies want you to do in order to submit your book. Do you know what a manuscript looks like if you "eliminate all hard breaks?" Let me tell you, if you use * * * for time breaks, it is not a pretty site. Several of the biggies required that.

Then several wanted you to design your own cover, front and back, and spine; with all the right dimensions too. I felt that so many of them required me to do everything except print the book--so when I put out the big bucks, I was merely paying for a print job.

I do reviews for a New Jersey publisher, and for an online book review magazine. Many of those books are published by iUniverse. They are clean, virtually error-free, perfectly set-up, and the covers are outstanding. I was impressed by the look of each book I read, or received. I also spoke with a writer friend who had a book published years ago. He vouched for the editing, quality, and for the marketing help.
I read all I could at their site, signed up for an account and received contact from a publishing representative. We talked by telephone where I asked more questions, discussed all publishing levels (and prices), and I went with them.

It was a little scary downloading my book (my rep had me send as attachment for her, she put it in pdf form to see if I had a "clean" copy according to their submission requirements--which were simple to follow). It was fun to write the blurb for the back cover, a media tag, a web site posting of part of one story to hook readers in, and a new bio. Yesterday I downloaded the entire file and received a confirmation that the book had arrived. Today I went into my account and it shows that the manuscript is in the first stages of the process.

"Pink Poodle Pie (and Other Tales of Women Getting Even)" is in production.