Going Through The Steps

Getting things moving along again today. "Dream Weaver" has been available to the general public on lulu.com since early November or so. I put it up there very quickly (because if I didn't I'd chicken out!) and was able to purchase several copies to give to friends and relatives at Christmas. I also sold about 15 copies....too funny! Since then things have sort of stalled with it, I don't expect to make a million bucks off of this but I'd like to get it out there to a wider market.

I'm all set with the LOC to be a beta tester and submit for copyright online. I'm very excited about that. I had a book copyrighted a long time ago and it was a general pain not to mention the waste of paper. I should have my confirmation email soon and submit, hopefully, over the weekend. That will be taken care of. I know there are some copies out there but I'm going for a copyright for an 'unpublished' work. This saves me from having to submit two separate copies to the LOC and I don't consider friends, family and 15 risk takers to really be 'published' in the larger sense of the word. A small goof on my part but I think it will be all right.

Next week I'll submit for the ISBN...bummer there...must have different number for each medium; hard cover, paper back, audio, ebook. The price is a bit prohibitive! If I buy a lot of 10 it's 225.00 which isn't bad when you stop to consider a single ISBN is 125.00! That doesn't count the bar code at an additional 25.00. Gods forbid anyone type something into a cash register...everything must be scanned these days. I'd like to have four, one for each medium above, but what the hell am I going to do with 10? Save the other 6 'just in case'? (Not a horrible idea, I'm aware. I'm also poor.) So at this point in time I'll have to consider which way I want to go. I love hard cover and the price difference isn't all that much but I suppose people might be more willing to buy a paperback. I'll have to think about it.

In anticipation of that I've gone and reformatted the file so it will fit easily into a small hard cover or medium paperback size. I cheated, I used 10 font instead of 12 to make the page requirement and get it out of 8.5 x 11 paperback, the price of which was no doubt putting people off. I've also reformatted the file so that it conforms to 'industry standard' (wasted 7 pages in the process!) and all I have to do is add in the LOC# and ISBN when I get them on the appropriate page and I'm all set. I used "Duma Key" as a guide...LOL. That turned out to be a good thing because I totally forgot the little 'this is all fiction' disclaimer. I had to add publisher information along with publisher contact information, I used the office address.

This is definitely the suckier end of writing but in this day and age when agents are still so hard just to get your foot in the door and you can pretty much forget about a publishing house without an agent.....whatcanyado? At least I don't have to buy 500 copies and try to shuck them around to the local bookstores. That's something, isn't it?