Back of the Envelope

So yesterday I quit my job to become a writer.

All right, that might need a little clarification. While Lincoln Laboratory's been good for me, it was time to move on from my current position. At first I was looking for other positions within the Laboratory, but I eventually decided to cast a wider net and look at jobs outside. I was offered one with Cardinal Intellectual Property, doing patent searches under contract from the US Patent Office. At first it struck me as a very interesting job that offered a lot of flexibility, even if it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. When I realized how I could benefit from the flexibility it gave me, I discovered that I was asking the wrong question. The real question was "How serious am I about my writing?"

I've always wanted to be a writer "someday," but lots of people say that. The difference is that while before I was planning on writing a book at some point, I have now written two books, and the question isn't "How do I write a book?", but rather "How do I publish one?" This will take time and effort, and a flexible job is a great benefit to accomplishing it. I am taking some risks to do so, but if ever there was a time in my life to take risks, this is it, and I think it's worthwhile.

Well, "The Office of Second Chances" is, according to an e-mail I received today, on the short list. My guess as to what this means is that they looked at it, saw that it was in English, had most words spelled correctly, and wasn't written in crayon, so they didn't peremptorily discard it with a contemptuous laugh.

In other news, I've been offered a book deal for The Eyes of the Shadow. It is not, however, a really good book deal. It's a co-publishing arrangement.

We use the term “co-publishing” to describe a hybrid between conventional royalty publishing and self-publishing (or subsidy publishing), utilizing the best of both worlds. ... We print the book for our own inventory, market it, distribute it, and pay the author a royalty on every copy we sell...

Our company has an outstanding team of editors, graphic designers and production personnel to produce books with the highest quality. Also, our company’s system of marketing would help to position the book to be widely distributed both in the Christian marketplace and general book trade. That system includes trade catalogs and fliers, sales presentations to independent retailers, chain stores, and distributors, representation at the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA), press releases, Internet listings and advertising in Christian Retailing, our premier trade magazine.

So where's the catch, you ask? What does the author provide to make this a 'co' process?

[I]t is made possible by the author’s willingness to purchase--at a deep discount--at least [a very large number] copies of the book from the first press run. For authors who have a means of selling copies of their own books, co-publishing works very well.

To be honest, it sounds like I'd probably lose money on this, unless my book is a runaway success and/or I'm willing to put in a lot of effort doing my own publicity, selling off the copies I've purchased via book signings, talking to bookstores, selling over the Internet, and all sorts of unusual distribution schemes. Probably both. I'm not even sure where I would put that many books.

I'm at least going to figure out what the actual sum would be, and do some research on the process. I'd certainly appreciate input. Does anyone know anything about co-publishing? Any experience with it?

Back of the Envelope was down this weekend. I doubt that many people noticed, but it was rather infuriating to me. The reason for it can be found over at the Powerblogs development blog website:

Yesterday, our service provider sent out this message:

This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

Aside from other Powerblogs sites, such as Dean's World and The Volokh Conspiracy, some other prominent sites suffered from this service interruption, such as Blank Label Comics, which supports Schlock Mercenary and Shortpacked. The main effect of this on my blogging is that it's set me behind on getting the Storyblogging Carnival put together. Hopefully, I'll be able to get that done tonight.

In other news, I submitted "The Office of Second Chances" to Coach's Midnight Diner on Saturday. I'm glad to have it done, although I'm not completely confident of what I submitted. I didn't think "Aha, this is the perfect version of this story," so much as "It's due today, I better send in what I have." Not that the version that I sent in was a bad version. I'm just not sure that it was the best version. I wrote four separate versions of Second Chances. Not revisions, mind you, which is merely where I take a story and edit it, changing the details but keeping the same basic plot. Versions are different enough that they don't tell the same story, and this one has had four. The first two were boring, and I don't miss them. The third, I thought, was pretty good, but a friend of mine thought it read too much like a Young Adult story (I didn't entirely agree), so I changed it. I wasn't certain that this fourth version was better than the third version, but it is the version I sent in. What I really needed was time away from this story, so I could come back to it with fresh eyes and then judge it for myself. Unfortunately, the compressed timeline for writing this story, and the decision to discard the second verison and write a third with just a week to go, didn't give me any time to do that. If the story gets rejected, I'll come back to it after some time away and see if I can produce the perfect version of the story.