I'm Having a Better Day Than Julius Caesar
I found a British publisher for Tatterdemalion. The acquisitions editor emailed me early this afternoon to tell me he loved it (I submitted it on March 3rd). I can't mention the name of the publisher just yet until I sign the contract, which ought to arrive in the mail in a couple of weeks.
But these people are legit. I'd checked them out on their website both before and after I'd submitted and they're not some vanity press or third party publisher like the one from Athens that approached me on Christmas Eve (they wanted 200 Euros to cover advertising costs). They've also published two of my Facebook friends. I'm going to get 50% on the Kindle sales and 30% on the print edition, with author copies sold at 40% off. They also want to sign me to a three book deal, plus the two Scott Carson short stories and the Carson novella on which I've been working since 2015.
Hopefully, they'll do for me what Bookoutre (another startup publisher that recently got snapped up by the Hachette Book Group) did for Robert Bryndza and his The Girl in the Ice (which I'm reading right now). That book sold over a million copies in just under a year.
I'm so excited right now, I don't know whether to shit or wind my watch.
posted by jurassicpork @ Wednesday, March 15, 2017
12 comments
12 Comments:
Hey JP: Do both! Wind your watch while shitting!
(Premature) Congratulations (all fingers & toes crossed).
Good advice, Anton.
Sounds promising. I hope this doesn't fall through due to some vacillating editor or act of God.
Boy, no black cloud is thick enough to block your neverending ray of sunshine, huh, CC?
Believe me, I'd like to see you post an image of the contract when it arrives and then one of your first royalty check on this site.
Will the publisher give your book a facelift?
Sort of.
He wants to go with a new cover and I readily agreed to this. I was pleased with the work done by my first graphic designer. I just wasn't too crazy with the layout. We are, however, keeping the VTKS Choice font for branding purposes and I assume we'll use it as the title font for all the entries in the series (I may have mentioned he bought the entire franchise to date, including the two short stories I'd sent you plus the two sequels, plus the novella on which I've been working).
I have absolutely no idea what we'll decide on. But his design dept. will send me three mockups to choose from and will work closely with me just as my first two cover artists did. We have to keep the time frame intact and referenced but I think he'll still wish to go with a more contemporary and trendy format. I just don't want it looking too generic or trendy so people will pass it by in a bookstore. That means the spine will especially have to pop out.
But I already plan on taking a picture of the contract as well as photocopying it here in the house and then posting a pic of the first royalty check, which unfortunately may not come for another year.
Great news, JP! Congratulations!
Weren't you working on a second 'sins of out fathers', too? I really liked those characters...
What still haunts me is the one from years ago with the girl scavenging Chernobyl... I've never forgotten that one...
Thanks, CR. No, you're thinking of GODS OF OUR FATHERS. Yeah, I got almost 100,000 words into that one when I realized it was going off in a direction with which I wasn't comfortable. So I shelved it and began working on other things. Now I'm hard at work on TATTERDEMALION's sequel, THE MURDER MACHINE. The other novel you mentioned was CHERNOBYL DREAMS, which is the third novel in the Joe Roman trilogy. God, I haven't touched that one in ages. I always have a lot of irons in the fire, though.
Oh wow, congrats! Sorry I'm a little late to the party on this one, the last six weeks have been really busy and I haven't had much time for internetting, so I'm catching up now. This is great news, I'm so excited for you! Once it's published, would there be a way we can get a copy of the new version of it from the UK? This is seriously cool, will you be going on tour in England or anything like that? This really sticks it to all the naysayers and trolls who said you'd never be able to do this, but you DID and you should rub this success in their faces. So awesome! Again, congrats! Did you sign the contract yet?
BD22: I don't quite know how to explain what's been going on but it's been a crazy three weeks on Facebook. Actually, bizarre is more the word.
Let's just say I haven't gotten the contract nor will I sign it. It seems there's been a cabal of lunatics on Facebook who've been committed to my destruction, led by a deranged woman named Katerina Diamond. Diamond is a bestselling author in the UK. And she did something to me out of the blue that was unforgivable. I called her out for her lack of manners and that seemed to have set her off on a rampage that, from what I'm hearing, is continuing to this day. She'd cost me over two dozen friends.
Enter my wouldbe publisher, who was creepily monitoring everything I was writing on Facebook and he thought he was entitles to tell me to take down my post in which I defended myself. I was eloquent, methodically expressed my position, used no profanity orno ad hominems.
This apparently set off this author to start a new rant, even though I'd already blocked her and moved on. But this guy who offered me the contract kept insisting I take down the offending post and I would not. Finally, I'd decided I couldn't work with this clown. Remember, all this happened after he sent off the contract two Mondays ago. There were many things in it I didn't like, such as him grabbing the rights to the Scott Carson franchise for a full decade, him providing no links to his authors' books on the publisher's index page, the vagueness of some of the wording in the contract. But I was still willing to along with all the clauses until this maniac Katerina Diamond began her jihad against me.
So when the contract arrives, it'll be DOA. I cannot and will not work with some asshole who thinks he's entitled to dictate what I can nor cannot write on my own FB wall. So yesterday I began sending out queries to other startup publishers and TATTERDEMALION's got the attention of the largest independent one, a real publisher, in the UK.
I'm sure they'll offer me a contract. This series of incidents will only set me back a few weeks.
Well that sucks! Is there anything we can do to help? Was there any collusion with the long-term trolls on this website that shall not be named? I was really excited, but now I'm mad. That shouldn't have happened to you! How can we help make this right? Be sure to keep us all updated.
BD 22: I deeply appreciate your words and feelings. But there's no need for anger or sympathy. It was a hard decision to make but I made it because, above all else, comfort with your publisher is an all-important thing and this bird Mike Linane was getting to be a real creepozoid.
The very next two days, I began sending both Tatterdemalion and Gods of Our Fathers out to dozens of agents and indie publishers and I already mentioned the interest from one major UK outfit (from the Publishing Director). I won't mention their name until a contract is actually signed. But, trust me, I am far from out of options.
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