Weekend Work

Don't really have anything comparable to follow up Nathaniel's epic--and awesome--Harry Potter marathon post from yesterday, so I think I'll be pretty brief today.

So far, it's been a busy weekend of…well, work, mostly. And there's plenty more in store, as I have lots of stuff going on, both at work and in my at-home work endeavors.

The work-work stuff is, well, it's work and there's lots of it today, but I'm not gonna talk about it here. The at-home work, though? That's the fun stuff.

As I’ve alluded to in the past, I’m in the process of self publishing a children’s book. I’m now pretty far along in that process, and things are getting to the nitty gritty—but the fun part of the nitty gritty (if that makes any sense). I'm in that wonderful stage where I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing, which despite how it might sound, is actually a lot of fun.

You see, it’s one thing to write something, and to then stick it in a (digital) drawer for a while before making a decision to do anything with it. I've found that I'm quite good at that part of the game.

There's plenty of stuff that I've written and just socked away.

But, for a number of reasons, I decided to go all out with this latest project and sometime around October of last year I took the first big step--teaming up with an artist. Just getting to that step can prove to be quite the task, but this time it just felt like the right thing to do.

Since then, things have progressed nicely and I've received layouts for the entire book. I am, to say the least, incredibly excited with what I've seen, and I cannot wait to see what the final product looks like.

While the artist is hard at work on the finished pages, I'm now venturing out into the big, scary world of printers. There's lots of options from which to choose, and there's quite a bit of a difference in price with...well, with everything. Low print runs, in color, with a hard cover?

Incredibly expensive.

Because it's a children's book, we need to print this bad boy in full color, which ain't cheap, let me tell you. Still, along with some very smart friends of mine, I think I've narrowed things down enough to at least have a very real possibility of producing a high quality product for a price that isn't going to ruin me.

And, while those words may well come back to haunt me in the future, Present Day Alex is quite happy, and quite confident in what's to come.

Which, if you know me, is not like me at all.

But just going over page layouts and planning out both the printing and the marketing strategies for the book have me riled up--in a good way for once.

I know full well the pitfalls and the landmines of the publishing business. But, like one of my very first baseball coaches used to say, you can learn a whole heck of a lot more by watching someone who's doing everything wrong than you can from someone who's doing things right.

And I've watched plenty of people go about doing things the wrong way over the course of my career.

So we'll see what happens, and as I like to say: What could possibly go wrong?

: )


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Enjoy your Sunday, Exfanders.