Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Submission Question

Just after private detective Jack Watson vowed not to be choosy about taking any case to end a lull in business, who walks into his office but his ex-wife. Dr. Victoria Pressler. The famous psychologist also known as The Mind Bender, had once made Jack’s life pure hell. Now she wants him to figure out if her new lover, a handsome young tennis player, loves her -- or her money.




Question from the e-mail:  Why are your submission guidelines so complicated??  Why are you so particular about what you want to see in a ms. after it has already been accepted? Isn't that the editor's job?

Answer: The simple answer is you can save us time and get your book finished and on sale faster, with fewer things that have to be changed. If you follow the guidelines you will save us a lot of time and your book should certainly get finished faster.

The unfairl part is that if people who "blow off" the guidelines and just send what they have as "good enough," are ahead of you, it will definitely delay your book's production time.

That's because we use the file they send us to set the type.  If there are few mistakes, that saves us time and the things we ask you to do in our submission guidelines, will be beneficial to all of us. Yes, it will take you more time and trouble to prepare the files as we ask. But if you blow it off, then we still have to do it before we can go to press. Worse, it doesn't only affect your book's timing, because we are already working on that. BUT it delays Every Other books waiting in line behind it.

Just now, all we have to do book production is me. I edit the files, set the type, do the layout...you get the drift. Shelley is concentrating all her time on marketing our books in wider outlets. That means I get to do her job and mine, too, while she does her best to get your books noticed in more places. The good news is that the work she is doing will result in more sales for many of you, so given a bit more time and patience, things should improve. I figure we might be back to normal about this time next year.

Also we have a lot of books that we accepted before Shelley started working on marketing exclusively. We have signed contracts for those books and have promised to complete them, and have every intention of doing so. But things ARE going more slowly just now. I am working as quickly as I can and still produce the quality books we are known for. In order to be as fair as possible, I have a list and do the books in the order they were accepted.

I wish it could be more quickly and that I could answer "Yes," to everyone who has asked me if their book would be on sale by Christmas.  All I can say is, I hope so. Our philosophy is that we accept as many good quality books, chosen by professional writers, as we can. Some of you have been waiting a long time, and we do apologize for that.

Together, Shelley and I did two or maybe three books per month. In the last two months, I did 8 books, attended to payroll, and suffered computer problems. Yes, I am going a bit crazy... Please try to be patient.

It's true that doing both the print files and e-books at one time is a quicker process. Thank goodness for that. Over the weekend, I put 8 new e-book titles up for sale on our site at WriteWordsInc.com, on amazon.com, on Nook, and at Kobo and ARE/Omni, and then passed them along to Shelley to do at Smashwords.

Why are we so intent in our pursuit of Smashwords? Because last month they sold more e-books for you than amazon.com. Shelley has 100 books for sale there now.  We have 350 titles in our inventory
and Shelley will get the rest of you up there as soon as she can.



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