business

Photographs of Shipping Preparations

By / July 8, 2011

Every time we do a shipping, I grab a camera and snap some pictures. Then when I review the pictures later I realize that they don’t really capture everything that is going on. What we really need is someone who can take photographs rather than snap pictures. Unfortunately we’re all much to busy to do more than grab the camera for a moment. But the pictures do capture some of the experience.


These are the fiddly-bit pin cards that the kids assembled on Monday afternoon. They put together over 800 of these.


The books arrive in a lift-gate truck. You can see a pallet descending on the lift gate to the left side of this picture. You can also see that our garage is completely full of pallets of books. The pallets that are outside in this image were later moved down the road to our storage unit. They contain the inventory that will fill orders over the next year.


Here is our garage full of books from another angle. You can see that we’ve opened a couple of boxes to check the contents.


I did not get any pictures of us stamping books for sketch editions. I didn’t think of grabbing the camera until we were done with that. However I did get several pictures of signing for box set assembly. You can see the piles of empty boxes accumulating. Hidden behind the counter is a large pile of crumpled packing paper.


This is the best shot I’ve got which gives an idea of the work space. Boxes are brought in from the garage (out of the frame to the left) and unloaded onto the counter. They are then stacked for Howard to sign. The signed books are then moved to the table. On the table they are either stamped for sketching, or as shown in this photo, inserted into boxed sets. The empty boxes are thrown into all the corners of the room to be cleaned up later. Some of them are used for re-boxing books to transport them to Dragon’s Keep.


Here is the growing stack of box sets. We assembled 110 sets today. We need to do about 190 more. After this picture was taken, we set up for shrink wrapping the box sets. I don’t have any pictures of that. I was too busy.

We worked hard all morning. 950 books were signed and stamped for sketching. 550 books were signed and assembled into box sets. We’ll have to do more box set assembly and signing, but that won’t happen until Monday. Tomorrow needs to be spent on normal business stuff and convention preparation. It was satisfying to process 1500 books so quickly. Of course it is a little strange to realize that all that work did not reduce the quantity of stuff in my garage. We just rearranged it. Still, it is a good start.

Planning a Book Release Party

By / May 12, 2009

Today my brain has been absorbed by party planning. A week from Saturday we’ll be hosting a book release party for The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. (4-6 PM ath the Raddisson Hotel 215 W South Temple in the Cottonwood room.) We’ve hosted book release parties before, but they were always at Dragon’s Keep in Provo. This time we decided to attach the party to a Sci Fi convention in Salt Lake. This gives us the chance to potentially catch the interest of foot traffic at the convention. It also nice to let the Salt Lake fans have a Schlock event near them, rather than always forcing them to drive to Provo. If nothing else, doing the book release this way will be an interesting experiment. The switch in venues presents logistical problems for me. I know exactly how to run a party at Dragon’s Keep. Today I’ve been figuring out how things need to run for the upcoming party.

The first thing to plan is the party schedule. Nothing is as boring as a bunch of people standing around in a room making small talk. Granted, Schlock fan small talk is far more interesting than the regular kind, but still. Things need to happen or everyone will get bored. One of the simplest ways to occupy guests at a party is to feed them. We’ve always done this at Dragon’s Keep, we’ll do it for this party as well. With our first book parties, I tried to be fancy about the food. I brought table cloths and serving dishes. We tried to give the food table real class. Subsequent book parties taught us that we got a far more enthusiastic response from boxes of pizza than we did from beautifully displayed little sandwiches and cream puffs. So for this party we’ll be ordering in Pizza. I’m still trying to decide whether to order two large batches or three medium sized ones. Some of that will depend on budgetary calculations. It will also depend upon having a volunteer willing to meet the pizza guy in the lobby. I’ll be too busy running things to leave and wait for food to arrive. The current plan is for pizza to arrive at 4 pm and 5 pm. This leaves a significant gap during which not much happens. We’ll fill those gaps by having prize drawings at 4:30 and 5:30. Or maybe drawings will happen every 15 minutes. Thus is the schedule set.

Set up will require some attention from me. Unfortunately I will not get a chance to really survey the room until the day before the party. I’ve been in the room before at past conventions, but at that point I was not looking at the room with an eye to running an event there. The biggest concern is traffic flow. We need to have a food table, a signing table, and a cashier table. We’ll need to organize these things in a way so that lines will not collide with each other. We want to make it easy for people to get their book signed and go socialize around the food. Fortunately there is a lobby space just outside the room. We’ll probably set up the signing out there and then have the food and prizes inside the room. Pizza will not be the only food. I’ll be making a Sam’s Club run earlier in the day to fill out the table and make sure that there is plenty for people to eat. The set-up hour is when I will haul this food from our room and get it all laid out. I’ll also need to hang the banners and signs so that everyone knows why there is free food. And there will be merchandise to set up as well.

During the actual party I’ll have to shanghai some helpers. Howard will be completely occupied signing books and talking with fans. I could in theory run everything else myself, but that is a recipe for me collapsing in a frazzled heap. Running the party will probably take three people: Someone to be a cashier, someone to do the drawings for door prizes, someone to monitor the food table and guide the pizza delivery persons. Fortunately at an open-house style event such as this, I don’t have to run around introducing everyone to each other. My hostess duties are limited to making sure that things happen on schedule and making sure that everyone feels welcomed.

So now that is all sorted in my brain. Unfortunately my brain is going to continue to pick at the plan and revise it many times in the next week. But I’ve a plot to foil my fretting brain. I will distract it with the arrival of 5000 shiny books and 2000 shiny slipcases. Or is this fretting over the party actually distracting me from fretting over the arrival of books?

Tayler Corporation To Do List

By / May 9, 2009

We have seven major events scheduled in the next four months. Three of them are occurring this month. Two are occurring in July. Two are occurring in August. It is tempting to ignore the end-of-summer events until after the May events, but I can’t afford to do that because some necessary preparations need significant lead time. This morning I tried to sleep in, but instead my brain kept churning with thoughts about even preparation. I finally grabbed a notepad and started scribbling down To Do items. That was smart because I finally feel like I may be able to manage this mess. I also had a revelatory realization “Oh, that’s why I’m feeling stressed.” So behind the cut is a glimpse at the To Do list for the Tayler Corporation. The Tayler family has a completely different To Do list, and yes they do conflict in more than one place.

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Tayler Corporation To Do ListRead More »

The process of Printing

By / July 8, 2011

We’ve now shepherded 6 books through the printing process and we’re halfway through a seventh. By this time it is all very familiar to us, although each project presents its own variations. I thought it might be to write out how the process works for us, both as a record, and because others might be interested in knowing how this works. The process will vary depending upon the printer, but this is how things work with Oceanic Graphic Printing.

1. The bid Like many things, printing begins with a bid. This is when we approach a printer with approximate specs for a project and they give us an approximate cost. A good printer will process bids for free. Getting a bid has become very routine for the Schlock books. We essentially say “The same as the last time, only with 96 pages.” This is because we’ve already sorted out exactly what papers and processes to use. Getting a bid on the XDM project was more complicated. We had to select paper and a binding, both of which required several rounds of emails to get answers to questions. Our printer even sent paper samples for us to evaluate.

2. Printing agreement Once we accept a bid, comes the printing agreement. This is the contract that includes all the specifics about the specs of the book and about the payment schedule. At this point our printer will create and ship a “dummy” book. This is an unprinted book with the exact same specs as our project. Having the dummy book is especially nice for us because it allows us to weigh the book and plan for shipping.

3. Shipping files Next we ship files to the production address, and a check to the accounting address. By “files” I mean an electronic copy of the full InDesign files along with all of the necessary images and data. We also have to send a print out of the entire book and cover for comparison purposes.

4. Digital proofs A week or two later we will receive digital proofs. These are pages done with the actual printer on the actual paper. This is our chance to check for color errors. With the Hold on to Your Horses printing, we had to do lots of color correction in the images because the yellows all showed up a sickly lime green on the digital proofs. For that project we had to do a second round of digital proofs (for extra money) to make sure we got it right. Digital proofs have to be sent back, so they can be used for color comparison. For the XDM project, color is not an issue, but we were a little worried about how the grayscaling and printing would look on the more textured paper. Because we have a long-term relationship with our printer, they actually let us do a quick proof test before we shipped the full files. With black-and-white on texture paper, it was actually called a wet proof rather than a digital proof. We have to approve the proofs before the process can proceed.

5. Plotter’s proofs A week or two after approval of the digital proofs, we receive a set of Plotter’s Proofs. This set of proofs is printed in low resolution on cheap paper. However, the pages are all cut and stapled into the sections that they will be bound into in the book. This is a chance to make sure that the pagination is correct. It is also the last chance to spot any errors. Once the plotter’s proofs are approved, the book goes into production.

6. Advance copies It takes 3-4 weeks for all the books to be printed. As soon as they are done, a pre-selected number of them are shipped to us via express mail. The remainder of the books will travel by ship and take an additional month to arrive. We can select any number of advance copies, but we have to pay the shipping costs, so we tend to keep the number low.

7. Books arrive Part of our printing agreement is that the printer gets the books through customs and arranges for them to be shipped directly to our door. We always make sure to clarify that we do not have a loading dock, and therefor the delivery truck will need a liftgate to lower the pallets of books down to our driveway. This is imperative because our book shipments are weighed in tons.

Once the books have all arrived then we have to ship them out to customers, but that is a whole different set of challenges. I wrote about it last year. Adventures in shipping phase 1.

Creating a process

By / March 26, 2009

This morning I sat down at my computer to begin layout on the XDM project. It took me 30 minutes of mucking around to figure out that I did not know where to start. All of my options looked equally laborious and some of them looked flat out broken. 30 minutes more sorted things out and the process began to fall into place. Now I have a list of steps that I can follow. I have created the process by which everything else will get done. Now that the process is in place, everything afterward is just following through.

One of the things that was baffling me this morning is that the process that Howard and I have established for the Schlock books, does not apply well to the XDM project. Partly it doesn’t apply because XDM has so much more text. Partly it doesn’t apply because we have two additional parties to include. But the biggest reason is that we need to get everything done so fast. The short time frame does not allow the standard process for book creation.

If we were not pressed for time, I would use the following steps. First have the author write the entire book. Next an editor looks it over and makes recommendations. The author revises and resubmits. At this point the editor hands off the book for a rough layout and sends it out for continuity/copy editing. The layout person throws text onto pages and then tells the artist where pictures will be needed. The artist draws the pictures. While the artist is drawing, the rough layout is approved and final text is handed over for layout. Then the layout person puts everything together. The completed package gets further editing passes to catch any errors. Then the whole thing goes to press.

This will not work in the time we have. Tracy and Curtis are still writing sections the book. Howard needs at least 4 weeks to draw all the pictures. I need several weeks to do layout work. If we wait for Tracy to finish writing, there won’t be enough time for the drawing, let alone the layout. So, we’re going to have to work in sections. Each section of the book will go through the process individually. So on any given day Tracy will write Section 5, Curtis will write Section 8, Section 2 will get an editing pass, Howard will be drawing for Section 3, and I’ll be tweaking layout for Section 6.

It will all be chaotic madness that will gradually coalesce into a completed book. The last week of the schedule is supposed to be the time when we all comb over the compiled book looking for errors and things to tweak. There are going to be so many errors. It is impossible to have a process this crazy and not have errors. Many of the errors will remain unfound until after the book is printed. Hopefully this will make the first edition special and collectible. Hopefully there will be many editions after this one in which all those errors can be eliminated.

Time to get back to work.

Business Deal

By / March 22, 2009

Frequently in our business there is a space of time when Howard and I already know something, but we’re not allowed to say anything about it yet. The delay is frequently caused by the need for paperwork of some kind. Contracts need to be signed, or nominations need to be accepted, or lists need to be compiled. The delay poses a challenge for blogging because my head is full of something and I have to work around it to put together something else to say. What I really want to say is “Baen is going to sell electronic versions of the Schlock Books!” (which we knew for 6 months before papers were signed) or “Howard has been nominated for a Hugo award” (which we knew for a week before we were allowed to say anything) or “We’re publishing a project for Tracy Hickman” (Which I’ve known for a month, but you didn’t know until right this minute.)

You heard me right. Tracy Hickman of the Dragonlance novels. He has a project he and his son Curtis collaborated on called XDM: Extreme Dungeon Mastery and The Tayler Corporation is going to publish it. I am going to be Tracy Hickman’s publisher and editor. This is a little bit surreal for us. Tracy needed a very fast turn around from a publisher who was willing to do the project his way. He also thinks that Howard’s art style would be perfect for the project. The bones of the agreement were laid down at LTUE in February. Last Tuesday’s Business Meeting was when we hammered out the contractual details and the schedule. The schedule is tight. The whole thing needs to be done inside 6 weeks so that we can get the books printed and delivered before GenCon.

This project is scary. We’re working with a Big Name, on a project where it is very important to get things right, with a very short amount of time to get things done. And yet, this is not beyond our capabilities. Howard and I really think we can pull this off. Tracy seems to think that we can too. Only time will tell if we were all deluded together.

By the way, I really recommend working with Tracy Hickman if you ever get the chance. Barely had he walked into our business meeting when he launched into an anecdote about how everyone is just making things up as they go along. Sometimes people pretend that they are not, occasionally they are right, but most of the time, on most projects, people are just muddling through trying to look like they know what they are doing. Tracy opened the meeting that way very deliberately because he knows that his project is pulling us into uncharted territory. (And yet the more we survey that uncharted territory, the more it looks similar to the ground we’ve already covered. We are only going to need a few new tools to make this work.) As we hammered out the contract, Tracy kept putting in clauses that protected us and we kept putting in clauses to protect him. We even told him right out that one of our measures of success for the project is that he is never sorry that he gave it to us.

So my relaxed month before book shipping has vanished into six weeks of being very busy. But I do not mind. This project opens up new avenues and contacts for us that simply were not there before. Howard will be going to GenCon with Tracy who will introduce him to business contacts and fans en masse. Not only that, but Howard is excited for the fun pictures he gets to draw.

So if my blogging felt a little lackluster or scattered this past week it is because my head was full of stuff I couldn’t talk about yet. My head is still full of stuff, but it is all loose bits that are flying about at random. Now that I’m allowed to blog about it all, I’m sure the thoughts will start coming together.

Professional Jealousy inside a Marriage

By / March 15, 2009

A few weeks ago, in preparation for an online interview, Howard invited his fans to ask him questions. One of the questions asked was more appropriate for me than for Howard. The question was “How does Sandra feel about all the attention you have been getting lately?” I presume the attention referred to was Howard’s front page appearance in our local paper and a couple of lecture invitations. The first thing I need to make clear is that Howard getting more public notice than me is not a new development in our marriage. He has always been more in the public eye. For most of our marriage I liked it that way. The real difference lately is not that Howard is getting more attention (although there is a bit more lately), but that I am somewhat visible instead of completely invisible. So how do I feel about being primarily noticeable as the support crew rather than on my own creative efforts? Am I ever jealous of Howard’s fame?

The short answer is that I am always happy for him. I love to see him succeed. I know how hard he works and I know that the attention he gets is not more than he deserves. When Howard is happy, I am happy. Additionally, I love Schlock Mercenary and anything that helps it grow makes me happy as well.

This answer is true, but it is not complete. It accounts for 95% of my reaction whenever Howard gets public acclaim. The remaining 5% is made up of much more selfish voices, whose responses are complex and layered. Yes this small percentage of me sometimes feels jealous. All human beings want to be recognized for their efforts. We all want praise and respect. It is very natural to want more for ourselves when we see an abundance being showered on someone else.

The occasional pang of jealousy is greatly reduced by the knowledge that without my help, Howard could not accomplish what he does. I am essential to his business, creative, and emotional processes. I know it. Howard knows it. And he expresses appreciation for it frequently. Therefore any success that Howard attains, is also my success. Howard is not shy about publicly giving me credit even if the public doesn’t pay much attention. I would probably feel much differently if Howard did not constantly praise and credit my efforts. He knows all that I do. I know all that I do. It is enough. This is the same emotional curve that many editors and creative support crew must ride. Private satisfaction rather than public acclaim carry the day.

Harder to manage emotionally is the comparison between my own creative efforts and Howard’s. I write stories, I write a blog, I’ve published a book, but none of these things have earned even a tiny fraction of the attention that Howard’s work earns on a daily basis. This is not for lack of trying on Howard’s part. He is very good about bringing my things to the attention of his fans, but he can not make them love what I do. I’ve had to accept that his audience is not my audience. My work does not get to piggyback on the swell of his success. Part of me grieves over this. It would be so much nicer if my efforts for Schlock Mercenary allowed me to skip some of the establishing steps for my own creative work. But careful reflection has made me glad that I can not piggyback. This way if my work ever does succeed I know it does so on its own merits rather than on Howard’s.

So then the question becomes am I ever jealous of the time I spend on Schlock Mercenary that I could be spending forwarding my own creative work? Of course I am. I’m also jealous of the time I have to spend doing dishes, playing with kids, eating, and sleeping. All of these things take their turn being what I desire most to do. They all are part of me and part of the things I love doing. If I could empty my life of these things, I could fill my days with writing. I could push forward a career as an author. Perhaps someday I will be able to push harder on the writing, but that is not what I need to focus on now. Emptying my life would probably empty my writing as well. Besides, I love the editorial work I do for the Schlock Mercenary books. It taps into and satisfies a piece of my creative psyche that is not touched by writing words alone. As we’re able to afford employees, I’ll probably hand off the shipping and office manager type work, but I suspect I’ll hold on to the editorial tasks.

One thing I do get jealous of is Howard’s convention attendance. Only “jealous” is not the right word. I don’t want to go instead of him. I want to go along with him. I want to meet the amazing people he gets to meet and share in the fun times. But this sadness does not drive a wedge between us because it is my choice. We could arrange for me to go much more often than I do, but I choose to stay home and provide stability for the kids. Knowing that it is my choice rather than some external denial makes staying home easier to bear. I also know that in the long term I will be able to go more often. Conventions will always be there, but the time for me to care for my young children is finite. I must care for them now, knowing that the future will have more public gatherings for me.

The most important thing to note is that the 5% of me that dissents about celebrating Howard’s success never sticks around for very long. I might feel it in passing for an hour or a day, but never longer than that. It comes in a flash and leaves just as quickly. On the few occasions it does not depart quickly, Howard and I have discussions where I air my feelings. Invariably Howard makes clear how important I am to him and how much he loves my creative work as well as me. And when I look into his eyes, I know he means what he says. Somehow compared with that, public acclaim seems a very unimportant thing indeed.

Of electronic files and task spillage

By / March 2, 2009

In order to submit files to Baen for electronic distribution, I had to dust off the old book files and open them up. I did some minor copy edits and then inserted the cover so there would be one electronic file instead of a separate file for the cover. Then I went to upload things to Baen. This is when I discovered that Tub of Happiness was 8 GB, Teraport Wars was 5 GB, Under New Management was 3 GB, and Blackness Between was 2.5 GB. Uploading Tub of Happiness was going to take three days. Hmm. Not good. So I stepped away from the computer and did other things while my back brain worked on the problem. At some point my back brain went “Aha! The files are huge because they are high resolution images intended for print. Since Baen will be doing electronic distribution, you can make the images much lower resolution!” So I went back to work.

I opened up photoshop and figured out how to set up a macro to reduce the size of the files. (I made a macro all by myself! The fact that I’m proud of this should tell you a little about how clueless I am when it comes to photoshop. Also a “macro” is a set of instructions like “Take all the files in this folder and make them 200 pixels per inch.” I learned a new word too.) I ran Under New Management and Blackness Between through. Then I had to re-link the images to the InDesign file. (Note to self, when modifying images for Indesign change either the files OR the directory structure, but not both or you will have to re-link all 768 files individually instead of by folder.) Except for the one little re-link annoyance, it went well and the result worked. Then I ran Tub of Happiness through the same macro and it rendered all of the strips unreadable. I turns out that Howard has changed his file formats several times as the strip evolved. So I made a new macro, figuring that it would work for Teraport Wars as well. Um. No. That macro changed the resolution of the strips to 200 pixels per inch, which works great for reducing a strip from 600 pixels per inch. When you apply that macro to strips that were saved at 72 pixels per inch, the files get bigger not smaller. I managed to turn Teraport Wars into a 19 GB monster and I spent most of two days doing it before I realized my mistake. (The fact that the process was taking so long, should have told me something, but it didn’t. See note above about cluelessness and photoshop.)

So, the upshot is that instead of being done with Baen edits on Thursday, I am still finishing them today. Fortunately now that I’ve sorted out my mistake, it is going very quickly. I should be done before noon. I also need to finish up the poster shipping that did not get completed on Friday because the cell print posters did not arrive until late. But I can’t start shipping until my computer is done thinking about Teraport Wars images. I feel like I’ve been waiting for my computer to think all weekend long. It is probably tired, poor thing. After the shipping will be the accounting. Then I will finally get to the house cleaning which was intended to be the major task for today. All my business things spilled over into my house cleaning day. Ah well. Sometimes family stuff spills into business time, so I guess it all comes out in the wash.

Life the Universe and Everything Symposium at BYU

By / February 21, 2009

Attendance at LTUE was the highest I’ve ever seen it. as usual, I met marvelous new people and reconnected with friends whom I seldom see. Also as usual, several exciting new possibilities have opened up as a result of the conversations. Now I need to follow up on those possibilities and bring them to fruition.

At the end of the convention a group of 21 people all went out for dinner. It was a delight to gather so many wonderful people in the same place. I had to duck out early. My departure was triggered by a phone call from Gleek, but honestly I’d reached fatigued burn out. I was listening to conversations more than participating and from talking to Gleek I could tell that the kids had reached a burn out of sorts as well. Kiki had two five hour babysitting stretches two days in a row, and her patience was stretched. The other kids were also over tired. So I came home and used the last bits of my energy and motivation to trundle the kids off into bed.

Now I’m really looking forward to Conduit in May.

Feeling professional

By / February 14, 2009

When I was twelve, my mother gave me some genealogy papers to copy. They were pedigree charts. I’m not sure why she asked me to copy them by hand because I’m fairly certain that copy machines already existed, but she did. I remember sitting at a small table with the book sitting in front of me. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was still in my church dress. I used a pen to carefully transfer information from one page to another. I imagined that I was in an office, doing office work. It felt so grown-up and important, even though a part of me knew that I was only playing at being grown up.

Howard and I have been publishing books for four years now. Much of the time I have felt a little bit like I did all those years ago while copying the genealogy sheets. I’ve felt like I was playing at being a publishing professional. I was like the stage magician waving my hands around and hoping that no one would notice the cards poking out from the ends of my sleeves. We tried to present a calm and professional exterior while behind the scenes all was a scramble to keep on top of things. But over the years we have learned a lot. We don’t scramble in frantic fear of getting it wrong anymore. Now we just scramble in a frantic hurry to get it done on time. And I’ve learned that the scramble is normal for the publishing industry. I still have days when I feel like I’m just pretending to be professional, but then I have a week like the one just passed. It is hard to feel anything but professional during a week when I work on book layout, participate in a newspaper interview, send off a contract, put new merchandise in the store, answer loads of email, and ship out multiple store orders.

Today Howard and I laid out plans for the book after Scrapyard. Resident Mad Scientist will take us about 4 months to compile. I took stock today and realized that we are down to our last 500 copies of Under New Management. We’re going to have to re-print that along side Resident Mad Scientist. We stood there discussing it and I had one of those “wow, I’m really a grown up now” moments. There I was planning ahead on printing two additional books and it was not stressing me out at all. Good heavens, I contract printing of things in China. I create whole layouts for books. I’m on a first name basis with people at Baen Books. When did all that happen? I still remember when the thought of owning a business was frightening to me, when I secretly hoped that Howard would just be happy collecting a paycheck. (We were only a year married, and I figured out quickly that paycheck collection was not the way to happiness for us.) How did I get from there to here? I look back and I can trace the path. It has been a long one and I am so glad that I traveled it. Am traveling. We’re far from done.