business

I have spent the majority of the last three days on Teraport Wars layout. I also spent several days last week in a similar manner. I’ve reached the point where I don’t even want to look at it anymore. This means my judgment is now suspect because part of my brain will say “Oh that’s fine. Just leave it. No one will notice.” I now have to rely on the judgment of others and not complain if further edits need to be made. It would be good if we could let the project lay idle for a week and then look at it with fresh eyes. We can’t do that. We need to package and ship the files on Friday. At this point there are no major errors left. We’re just tweaking, but we want it to be as close to perfect as possible.

Back to editing with me. I’ve printed out a paper copy to go through because you notice different things on paper than on a screen. At least with the paper copy I don’t have to sit in my cave of an office.

This morning I opened photoshop and figured out what I’d been doing wrong yesterday. I then stayed at my computer for most of the day and flood filled two dozen strips. Tomorrow morning Howard will review what I did, make some tweaks, and they’ll be ready for me to drop into place. Those are the last major piece of the book. The next task will be to go through the file page by page to make sure that everything is correct. It is almost done.

After all the strips were colored, I realized that I needed to be away from computer screens for awhile. Our business and much of our recreation is very focused on electronic screens. Sometimes I need to get away from that and reconnect to reality. What I really wanted to do was get out of the house and away from the kids. Unfortunately this leads to the problem of babysitting. I can require Kiki to babysit for me, but there are limits to the amount of time I can put Kiki in charge of Gleek without them having a major altercation. With as edgy as Gleek has been lately, and as tired as Kiki was feeling today, I decided not to leave the house. I do that frequently during the summer, decide that leaving the house is more trouble that it is worth. I think I’m wrong about that. It would be good for me to get out. I think I’ve been out without children in tow only a couple of time since Summer began.

I did get out into the garden. I spent an hour out there. I pulled some little weeds, but mostly I lay on my back in the grass and stared at the shifting canopy of leaves above me. The sun was setting. It shafted light through the trees at an unaccustomed angle. There were beautiful patterns of light and shadow contrasted with the architectural strength of the trunk and branches. I wish for my camera while I lay there, but I was too lazy to go and get it. Then I wished that I had the skill to really catch the beauty I was seeing in a photograph, so it was just as well that I didn’t get the camera.

I have belatedly realized that this is crunch week for The Teraport Wars. Howard and I have both been moving full steam ahead. We hope to get it all done by Friday. It is a push, but it is a realistic push. It is also a necessary push because we need a week to stare at the final version and make tweaks. This thing has to be shipped off to the printer before the end of June. So today I started by doing some tweaks on the cover. Some text lines were spaced too close together. There were places where an apostrophe was fighting with a lower case “g.” There were also segments of text that needed to be italicized or made bold. There were corrections to be made on the interior too. Most of those were pretty simple. The biggest piece left to be done is the re-scanning and coloring of a some strips at the end of the book. Somehow the high resolution files for these got misplaced and so we’re having to repair them. There are 25 of them. This is a significant chunk of work. The good news is that I have already located all of the strips. We’ve gotten them scanned and prepped for coloring. The bad news is that Howard may have to sacrifice a week of buffer to make our deadline. Ordinarily letting the buffer slide for a week would not be an issue, but Howard is coming up on three conventions in seven weeks of time. There is not much wiggle room for creating comics. It would really hurt to lose a week right before the flurry of travel.

At times like these, I wish there were more I could do to help carry the burden of creating Schlock Mercenary. I tried to sit down and do some of the simple flood-fill coloring on the 25 strips. In theory flood filling is tedious, but easy. Except that Photoshop kept doing things that I did not expect. And I could not figure out how to do some of the things I expected to be simple. I fussed and grouched for over an hour before I admitted defeat. I’m just not sure how to make it go. I would feel dumb for not being able to figure out photoshop, except that Howard had a very similar experience when trying to use InDesign. So I guess I’ll stick to layout and let Howard manage the image editing. Fortunately Howard has been training Kiki to help with the coloring, so he doesn’t have to do it solo. She is very pleased to be adept at something that I can’t do properly. In fact, she is quite smug about it. I’ll let her have her smugness so long as she is smugly working.

We also hope to open pre-orders on the warning sign magnets this week. This is dependent upon getting production samples from the manufacturer. The pre-order will add a whole new level of craziness to the week, but it will probably also pay a month’s worth of bills and that is growing increasingly important. The space between this book and the last is longer than we intended. The next book won’t be quite so long and Howard won’t be traveling to conventions, so hopefully we can get it out much more quickly.

Yesterday morning Howard blogged about Hold on to Your Horses. This was it. This was the big moment when people would either plunk down money, or they wouldn’t. The first order came in and I almost cried. Someone who I’ve never met or even heard of before liked the book enough to spend money on it. It was a small piece of proof that I’d helped create something that people could love even if they didn’t know or love me. Over the course of the day lots more comments and orders came in. There were many emails, some from friends, some from strangers. Each one brought me joy. I am so grateful for each and every one of these messages.

I need them all very much because not as many orders came in as I’d hoped for on that first day. A couple of days ago I talked about feeling like a sky diver who had already jumped from the plane and not yet pulled the parachute cord. I talked about hoping for a solid parachute. Deep inside I was actually wondering if I’d pull that cord and have a jet plane pop out. That’s what happens for Howard’s books. His pay for themselves in less than 24 hours. But he has spent 8 years carefully building a fan base. Not all of those people are going to be interested in my project just because I’m married to Howard. They’re his fans, not mine. (Except for a few of you. Hi! Thank you!) Hold on to Your Horses still has a long way to go before it pays for itself. It has an even longer way to go before I could feel good about investing time and energy into another self-published project, which I’d dearly love to do. I guess what I really want is a hang glider rather than a parachute. I want this project to have wings. I think it can, but I’m going to have to put even more work into it. I’m going to have to get that free PDF out there. I’m going to need to arrange blog book tours. I’ve got other ideas as well. Mostly I need to feel good about where we’re at, instead of whining “Are we there yet?” before the car even gets out of the driveway.

So here is the request for help. If you read this blog and you have thoughts or ideas about how I can further market my book online, please comment. I can’t do any physical appearances until after I have books in hand. Right now I just want to get the pdf out there to as many people as I can so that they can fall in love with the book and come buy it.

Edited to add: If you have friends who would be interested in Hold Horses, I’d love for you to tell them about it, but PLEASE do not perpetrate spam on my behalf. Thanks!

Addendum: My sister reminds me (and she is right) that what I need to be shooting for is “sleeper hit” status, not “blockbuster” status. This lets me see that things are going really well. We’ve already had more than 3000 downloads of the free pdf.

Two last things. I hope that no one feels obligated to buy my book, particularly if finances are tight. Bills before books. I hope that no one feels obligated to blog or email people about my book. If you don’t want to for any reason, no excuses are necessary. Thanks again.

Last week Howard asked for merchandise suggestions from Schlock fans. There was a deluge. Fortunately some of the deluge came with offers to help from people who have done this kind of merchandise before. Today I spent a large part of the morning sorting through the possibilities and making plans. Between 20 and 30 emails passed through my box as I discussed various possibilities with various people. I’m looking forward to getting some of this stuff made.

May is going to be very busy. Already the calendar is full of events. In addition to those there will be a big merchandise shipping somewhere in the middle of the month. If anyone local is interested in helping with shipping in the next month, please let me know. Today I’m looking ahead to all the busy events and I’m excited by it. I’m fascinated by the challenge of getting it all done. I hope I can hang on to the joy of being busy rather than feeling buried by the stress of it.

The future rushes toward me. I have less than two weeks until April is gone. Since “end of April” is our goal for finishing the Schlock book layout, I have much work left to do. Howard and I also had a discussion today where we tried to decide when we’ll open pre-ordering for Hold on to Your Horses. I won’t have books in hand until mid-July. I don’t want people to have to wait too long. However, I’m honestly not sure how well the book will sell. Sometimes I feel like we’ll be lucky to hit 700 books (our break-even point) other times I wonder if 2000 books will be enough. Unfortunately the “you must decide how many books you are ordering” point comes mid-May. After that the numbers are set. So we’re considering opening orders before that point, to get a good count. But then people will have to wait three months before they can have the book they paid for. I don’t like making people wait so long. I’m pondering incentives like autographed bookplates.

Further complicating things, we’ll be opening pre-orders for The Teraport Wars before mid-July. This means that I’ll be running two pre-order sorts simultaneously. Apparently we are incapable of making the process simpler rather than more complex. Fortunately the system I run can handle this kind of thing without trouble. I’ll just have to buy more file boxes. Also between now and July will probably be further runs of merchandise. We’ve got to keep bailing so that we can plug those debt holes and make this boat really seaworthy.

Today none of this oppresses me. Summer is a good time for me to be busy with shipping because I don’t have to run the kid’s school schedules. I’m looking forward to getting to finish off old projects and begin new ones. Hopefully in May I’ll get to start layout on “the Schlock book formerly known as Out from Under New Management which has yet to be renamed.“

This morning Howard and I had one of our “meetings” where we talk about business stuff while one or the other of us putters in the kitchen. Today we were talking about finances and I suggested that we probably want to do some more merchandise before the end of this month. Howard responded that he wasn’t sure he was allowed to do more merchandise (other than books), considering how stressed the t-shirt mailing made me. After the conversation was over I pondered, trying to figure out exactly why I was so stressed with the last t-shirt printing and why contemplating more merchandise doesn’t make me that stressed again.

The Rule one shirt printing came at the beginning of March. Howard was leaving for a convention the next week. We were both leaving for Ad Astra two weeks after that. My Hold Horses project had just come back in the door with big image editing problems that were yet to be solved. The bonus story for Teraport Wars was barely begun and I hadn’t done any lay out work on that project for nearly two months. Biggest of all, the stress of everything else led me to make the enormous error of deciding that it was simpler for me to do all the shipping myself rather than rounding up help.

What would be different for a new merchandise project: Howard has no conventions until the second week of May. I’m not going anywhere any time soon. The Hold Horses project has been fixed. The bonus story for Teraport Wars is all scripted and drawn. It will probably colored and laid in by the end of this week. I sat down this morning and did a pile of Teraport Wars layout work. There is lots left to be done, but it feels like a couple of weeks of solid work. And I have learned my lesson about not doing big shipments all by myself.

In short, it looks like by the third week of April I will have cleared my slate of all other business tasks. This means that my business brain space is available for merchandise shipping.