The Boss of You

Well, here we are, a day out from our book’s official release date (though, somewhat anticlimactically, Amazon started shipping it a couple of weeks ago, not that we’re complaining [and many thanks to all of you who have already bought your copies!]), and we’re sort of in that “if it isn’t done now, it won’t be done in time” place. So there’s a letting-go of the trivial-but-interesting stuff we thought we might be able to squeeze in as part of our advance publicity, along with a number of psychological hangups about just how prepared we need to be for this whole thing. How does one prepare for one’s first-ever book launch? There are so many things you only learn by doing: for example, television interviews. I’m afraid we’re just going to have to take the advice Bobby Womack dishes out in his version of “Summertime” (which, incidentally, is just about the only version of that song I can stand to listen to these days, not that there aren’t a lot of beautiful renditions — it’s just one of those songs I’ve heard too many times): “If you want to get to it, you gotta go through it.”

Okay, so obviously I’m in a rambling kind of mood this morning, run-on sentences and all. (I tip my hat to Mark Morford, my personal stylistic hero. He also has many other very good qualities, but I do especially love the way he can turn a sentence into the grammatical equivalent of a clown car. A sexy, smooth-riding, fast and breezy clown car. Okay, I suck at metaphors.) What I really came here to tell you about is that Laura Mazer, former Managing Editor of our beloved Seal Press, has started guest blogging over at Girl w/Pen, dishing out advice on writing book proposals and such. For any of you who are interested in publishing a book the traditional way (i.e. through a book publisher, vs. self-publishing), Laura’s advice is golden, and it looks like she’ll be answering readers’ questions as well.

And if you like what you read and want more of Laura’s wisdom, you may want to check out her courses at Media Bistro.

Bonus links for the aspiring authors among you:

• If you’re on the hunt for a book deal, I recommend checking out episode 7 of Vickie Howell’s “Craft. Rock. Listen.” podcast (it’s from season one, so it’s not listed on her site, but just subscribe to the podcast and you should be able to download it), wherein she talks to Kelley Deal of The Breeders about her knitting book — they get into talking about publishing crafting books and for those of you in that industry they share a lot of useful info.
• Also recommended: Jenny Hart’s always-solid (and fun to read, which seems to be a highly underrated quality in business writing) “Crafting a Business” column at Venus Zine — she devoted a column to book deals and there is a whole lot of good stuff in there.
• For the bloggers among you (though in fact, I’d recommend it for non-bloggers too), check out Michelle Goodman’s post, “Ask the Cubicle Ex-Pat: How do I use blogging to build a platform for my book idea?” The title pretty much says it all.