I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
Reflections of an Inside-Out, Upside-Down, Backwards Book Publisher
For the National League of American Pen Women, I got to tell the surprising story of my book, Souls at Rest – the inside scoop for fellow writers and artists. People understandably think I’m a bit crazy for self-publishing the first edition of SAR instead of going the more conventional Real Publisher route. (It is now available from a Real Publisher: Angelico Press!)
But, since the whole process had been sort of upside down and backwards already, getting to a Real Publisher in this round-about way was just par for the course. My motivation was not market-based, for instance. I had no idea, when writing, who my audience would be.
So differently from preparing a talk, when I’m avid to know who I’ll have in front of the podium, I wrote this for every Catholic, hoping, actually, that they’d all want to read it – improbable as that is. I’ve spoken with college students, men, women, children, at-home and working moms, teens and old people about Sabbath rest, and we all of us need to think more about it, I can promise you!
Anyway, these ladies weren’t especially interested in the Sabbath content…just the experience of self-publishing. But they understood that my process was upside down when I told ’em how much it cost! Lucky for me, the days of vanity publishers getting authors to shell out upwards of $5,000 for a garage full of their new books are over. I was able to publish Souls at Rest on an as-purchased basis with only the costs of paper, ink, and a lovely professional book cover to add to my hundreds of hours of (free?) labor.
I considered myself well-invested in something I’d have been happy to give away. Again, lucky for me, the print-on-demand publishing option did save me the cost of continually photo-copying my book for my enthusiastic spiritual director. Those gals with vows of poverty are happy to give everyone’s stuff away freely!
As for backwards, I am that part of the equation. God must have a sense of humor to put someone so technically challenged in charge of a word processor, mirrored margins, footers, headers, and FTP uploads! As for ‘platform’ I had zero, and one is told one needs a substantial one of those in order to market one’s books. It has all been a humbling experience, and turned into a surprisingly rollicking sort of talk for these literary ladies.
I’d love to discuss this again, with the more perfect vision of further hindsight, and the Rest of the Story.
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