There’s An Other Side To Everything
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008Ohhhh yeah! High Fives! Do a little war dance!!! Yesterday, I crossed the Great Divide and I did it, I did it, I did it! After all the worry and high tension of the past week, while old erstwhile Hurricane Fay was messing with other people’s lives and the weather all over the State of Florida, I was facing a final showdown with my computer. At last, I had pdfs for both my book cover and my book interior and things had come down to me to upload them into Lightning Source’s system.
Innocently, I had thought that an email & attachment to my account representative there would do the trick, but learned that it had to come from within my own account. Quaking in my boots, I tiptoed through the steps, messed up once, but finally saw that my files had been successfully received. There I was, on the Other Side of that scary task.
I’m not out of the woods yet. It remains to be seen whether everything is actually print-ready, but nothing seems quite so hard any more. I went right to the beach for a many- miles’ walk and a chance to talk to God. That’s where I dream up all my audacious publicity schemes. Wait till you see those!
What is your Great Divide? What makes you uptight or irritable just because it’s all coming down on you, and there’s this deadline, and you want everything to be right? Well, soon you’ll be on the Other Side of that little tiny fissure, which, now you can’t imagine would have made you nervous in the first place.
And you’ll be doing your own high-fivin’ victory dance. So sweet it is!
BUT, that said and all… for any of you considering self-publishing… you might just shop the ads attached to this column for companies that do a lot of this for you. You must consider carefully, because I see good ones and not so good ones there. But, I’m not saying I wouldn’t consider that route for my next book, now that I’m a savvy consumer in the whole book publishing thing. My do-it-yourself route has not been cheap, but it has given me total control and that’s a good thing. If you can combine fixed price for service with a retention of all rights and ownership of your book, then you can probably save time and a lot of hair (that doesn’t get pulled) by going with an agency of sorts.
In retrospect, of course, with your feet firmly standing on the Other Side, putting together a book of your own suddenly feels very easy and you start to think of doing it all over again.
Just exactly, (as you will learn) the same way that your around the world trip will take on this smooth easy glow once you get back to sleeping in your own bed. I’m already planning my next RTW.
Just exactly the same way that a new mother will forget the pain of her labor and delivery and will wind up having lots of children. It’s all about the Other Side.
Pssst! That’s the secret of death, don’tcha know!
lindajbrown