It's also those scarlet suggestions, notes, generalized messages that teachers and editors are prone to making. They often use red pencil, actually, which likewise does not erase from the page.

When I am an editor working on someone's paper manuscript, I like to use green ink or purple, just to mix it up. Still, even if it's purple, it's red.  And when you are a writer, red = love.  

Or in my world it is.  Because when I have plunked down cash, it's nice to hear from my editor that they like a turn of phrase or the story is interesting. But far better is the attention, time, and—yes--love poured into a note that says something along the lines of, "I think this section could be tighter. Does this word convey the emotion you want? Why are we learning this right now?"

The point of a critical editorial reading is to improve the work. In the immortal words of the original Soloflex ad, it's hard to make improvements. 

So when the manuscript returns with lots and lots of red ink—and yes, the modern version is a Word or Google annotated file, which provides less emotional connection, as you aren't seeing the hasty checkmarks grooved deeply into the page —it's a joy.

Because it's gonna hurt, but it's gonna be better at the end.

"Mathy Math, Math-Math."  That's how one of my friends hears any discussion of numbers: "Mathy-mathetty-math-math."

But even the most innumerate of us have landmark numbers.  These are the numbers that maybe we learned to count by (5-10-15-20, for instance) or numbers that just feel less challenging to keep in mind (100 vs 97, or a dozen vs 13).

I'm approaching a landmark number as an author—a fact that is truly of interest to nobody but me. Has that yet stopped me from writing about anything? No.
​

During my feverish rush last year to get current in my understanding of modern publishing, I gathered some depressing facts. About half of the US population does't read even a single book a year. Not a surprise, but oh! poor creatures!

Also, most books will sell less than 300 copies in the US (1000 copies factoring in all formats across the world). Not just in the first year, btw, but ever.  So if, let's say, you just so happened to be pouring your life-force into the creation of a book, this base truth is helpful for framing one's expectations.

Joyfully for me, I have at least 300 friends kind enough to buy my book. I am grateful for each one. It's a deep thrill every time someone tells me they have read it.

Which brings us to the wonderful-to-me landmark number: 1000.  On Goodreads.com, a website helps 150 million readers track and rate books, She Taught Me Everything is inching closer and closer to the 1000 mark.  

​Meaning that nearly 1000 readers on that site—mostly strangers! people who love to read and who judge by covers!—have either already read or plan to read the book. 
​

They might be getting it from the library (ooh! If you use the library, consider requesting STME), or from a bookstore, iTunes or Kobo, Barnes & Noble or Amazon...

But 1000. Whatever expectations I had six months ago, this number feels a lot bigger than 999. ​

I spent most of the school year when I was 10 hiding out at the school library. Not really hiding out: my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Jarosz and I had what my mom described as a "personality difference." 

It's happened several times since: I meet someone and, AbracaBADra: I'm unable to say anything without offense; my attempts to reverse course only make it worse, and--ugh. It's weird. It seems chemical. It's inexplicable and powerful. 

​But the fifth grade, a person has fewer options.

So my love for libraries runs deep. And part of my lifetime writing dream has been to see my own book on those shelves.  

​I do understand, with the perspective of decades of library visits under my belt, that the shelves of a library are not immortal. Titles churn through and are lost to library fundraising sales.

​But then again: a book in the library...that's something. 

I dutifully submitted a copy of She Taught Me Everything to the local county public library system, but while awaiting the thumb up or down, I noticed this...

Looks like the system has already purchased an e-book copy, and THERE ARE SIX PEOPLE IN LINE to get it!

Well, how about that? I wish I could share this joy with the librarians who helped me through 5th grade. 

One of the funny things about publishing is that nearly everyone involved—from writers themselves, to editors, sales people, service providers, web designers, readers—has an interest in words. (I promise you, this statement is not reductive.)

For example, I use an internet service that helps me keep track of where and when I send stories into the world. The service, duotrope.com, also tells me about sketchy markets to avoid, contests that might appeal to me, and publications that might match my story.   It's a nifty tool, especially if you are submitting a lot of stories to a lot of publications.

But to my wordy point: let me share this little gem from Duotrope:

This is a partial screen grab from a story submitted somewhere in 2020, and which I just recently updated as "Never Responded."  This is a LOT less uncommon than you'd think. A roaming black hole in the publishing universe swallows many a hope, dream, and story. 

But note, if you will, how the designer of the page labels that date when I say the publication "Never Responded."

​It's not the date Accepted or Rejected. It's the Capitulation date. I have capitulated, which means "to cease resisting" or "to give in." 

Someone behind the scenes at Duotrope is absolutely slaying it. 

I am psyched to see reviews coming in, but honestly, I almost don't look at them myself.

First, I have a generous dollop of self-confidence already––without any real external encouragement. (And I'm reluctant to burst that bubble on purpose.)

My brains are not quite oozing out of my ears, but it could happen. At any moment.

Did you know that when you search for something online, those descriptive words (fast-acting, best, organic) have a price tag?

It should not come as a surprise.  Ours is a world of fully-fledged capitalism. Naturally the very words we use are monetized.  It might look like a library, but it's not.  

Marketing on Amazon, the world's largest bookseller, goes a bit like this: say I've written a romantic romp involving a pair of collegiate hockey players.  I've done my homework and am a canny marketeer. I know there are readers for my book and I am pretty sure Amazon can locate them.
​
Ads on Amazon are not like the "Plop-Plop, Fizz-Fizz" 30-second video clip we know from broadcast television, it's actually a quite brilliant and fully automated system.  

As a canny publisher, I've invested in Publisher Rocket, a software that helps me figure out what categories and keywords are likely to lead buyers to my product. I mean book.  

For this hockey romance, we're going to skip right to the part where we start an advertising campaign around keywords.  One starts, naturally, with the phrase "hockey romance."   Amazon might suggest that "hockey romance" is worth $1.87 per click.  Which means that IF someone types in "hockey romance" AND clicks through to the longer description of the book, I'm out $1.87 WHETHER OR NOT they put the book into their cart. 

Given that I stand to clear $3.45 per copy of the book, I might want to lower that amount, say, $.87 per click for "hockey romance."  Of course, a lower bid means I might be outbid by other books with the same keyword, and my hockey romance book will slide lower on the page. ​
​

You places yer bets, you hedges yer bets, and then you waits to see what Fate (or the Almighty Algorithm) will reveal.

​Carefully selecting 40 or 50 keywords for the campaign, go ahead and set a price on each word (in broad, close, and exact match categories. This is not a quick process for the faint of heart.).

Ideally, you pick a price that will outbid other vendors by a penny or two, to keep you near the top of the page without breaking the bank.  You set a daily budget ($10/day is the recommended starting point), so after the clicks add up to $10, you're done. Sort of. Until the next day.  

So much of the process is shrouded in secrecy, but it's freakin' brilliant: Amazon is a store where not only can you get everything, it's a store that charges for browsing. It doesn't charge the buyer, true, but someone has to pay.

It's also a bit like a modern-day coal-mining company store: Who is tracking clicks? Who's writing paychecks? Who is setting the prices? Who is doing the accounting? All points awarded to the man in the brilliantly shrouded secrecy. 

But convenient.   And someone in France bought a copy of my book last month. How cool!

I got chatting with a lady in line at the grocery store (yes, that's me, randomly striking up a convo), and I whipped out a postcard  of She Taught Me Everything (again, me with the marketing material to hand).  She swished her phone and Poof! my novel downloaded to her Kindle. 

What a world.

Nowadays, when looking for books online, I tend to mooch around in the stacks of Goodreads (owned by Amazon but not as monetized yet) or Libby/Overdrive.  

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm about to dip a toe into the marketty world of TikTok...

"So, what was making you swear?" my sweet husband inquired.
 
I gave him a level look and said, "Do you really want to hear about hard-returns, frame-anchors, or formatting?"

After a considering pause,"No, not really. But did you prevail?"

​"Grrrrr."

It seems so simple: convert my document to ePub, upload it, add the beautiful cover, and Bob's your not-so-creepy uncle, a book!

My experience says electronic publishing is as varied and random as evolution. Like the creatures in WTF, Evolution, actually, all weird decorative feathers and hidden poison.  

But even with a colorful metaphor, there's no dressing it up: this part of publishing is dead boring and hard. Glued to my MacBook ("Getting tired, boss," it tells me, randomly requiring a hard boot in the morning), I've been rearranging punctuation marks.

Here's the boulder I have been rolling uphill: there's an MS Word document that has to be opened in Pages, from which I can export an ePub file, which can be uploaded and then checked for (she giggles) accuracy.

When building a book, there's a fussy little formula to keep in mind to place typeset pages in the correct order for "imposition."  

To produce a book, commercial printers started with a very large piece of paper. They'd lay out 8 or 16 seemingly random book pages on one side of the big piece, and then also on the opposite side.  After both sides got printed, and after being folded just so, when three sides of the folded paper were trimmed, the result is a "signature."  

​A signature is a nested, ordered set of pages that pops right into a binding.   One signature is followed by another and another, until the whole book had been laid out, printed, folded, trimmed, and gathered for binding.

That imposition was critical: one misstep and page 12 goes in upside-down on the back of page 3. Misplace a signature, and whole chapters end up in the wrong place or backwards. Quality control was always an issue.

These days, we generally rely on the unimaginative brains of computers to calculate our impositions. They do a good job of counting and placing and calculating cut margins.

More binding? Sure: we got spiral bound (with metal or plastic like datebooks and notebooks), and perfect bound that goes into a chip wood case (modern casebound hard-cover books).

​Binding less often used for fiction, but worth noting: what looks like staples (like on class newsletters) is called saddle-stitch.

Handmade, coolio craft binding, like stab or Coptic binding, joins each signature in a daisy chain to the next with often decorative stitches along the spine and the front and back boards.
​

So long story longer, imposition and the requirements of printers is why picture books are traditionally 32 pages long (including title page, copyright notices, etc.). And why, if you should find yourself in a library, you can win a bet that those fat volumes contain a number of pages divisible by 8 for sure,  and by 32 more often than you might think. 

In figuring out my own book in 2023, the math is SO much simpler. The physical book needs only have an even number of pages. The ebook does not. 

I won't deny I spent a great deal of time gazing into the soft glow of my monitor trying to make pages look good. There are things I like and don't like in my physical books, though to be honest, I rarely think about them. But this summer, I thought about them. A lot. ​

In a physical book, the pages on either side of the spine are referred to as recto and verso (right and left in fancy book-person talk). 

In my world, recto pages need to have the heading and the page number out on the right side and additional margin on the left to make room for the "gutter."  The gutter of course is the page-side of the spine. Mirror these elements across the gutter: verso type need to slide out left, with the page numbering and header also at the left side of the page. 

That way when a reader thumbs the pages, the numbers flicker along front and back on the lower outside corner of the page, and when the book is open, nobody needs pry at the book to read words near the gutter.

To make my book design unified, I picked the same display font (Instrument Sans) for the chapter headings as the artist had used on the cover. That meant importing the font (hi dafont.com) and checking to be sure I was using it legally. Then embedding it and Linux Libertine (a snappy font for the text NOT the same old Times New Roman by way of Microsoft) into the document.

After long consideration, I made the Instrument Sans headings a couple of degrees less black than the text, since that font is fairly heavy, and I liked it to look a bit more subtle.

I decided whereabouts to position the start of a chapter on the page (165 points from the top margin, I think is the measurement. Point? Yeah: it's 1/72nd of an inch. 12 points makes a pica. 6 picas are an inch.  When are we going metric again?).  

​Why 165 points? Because, frankly, I trial-and-errored that margin until I got the least number of wonky-looking last pages of the chapters. To check this, I zoomed out and scanned the document 46 pages at a time.  There's no getting away from those darned multiples of 8.

I added and subtracted and modified the Chapter Heading style until the least number of lost last lines of the chapter hung solo on the page like laundry flapping in the breeze. The things we do for love. ​

Before Gutenberg,  when scholars spent hour after hour hand-copying books to make a library, they sometimes kept themselves entertained by making fancy initial letters. We call them "drop caps."  I find them a bit distracting, but I DO like a bit of ceremony at the start of a new chapter. So instead of trying to find a handsome big first letter, I put the first word or two of each chapter into capital letters. Only instead of garden-variety capitals, I picked "small caps." which look like this:

 When there's a break in the story––less than a chapter break, but more than simply the next paragraph––there's often a line or two of extra space. Some designers chose to put in a tiny design element, like a leaf or an asterisk, known as a "dingbat."  Again, I find these elements both charming and distracting, so I decided instead  to use those same fancy small caps on the initial words instead.

Rewind...dingbat? I love English. So many odd words with odder etymologies. It's not a very clear story, but "ding" probably comes from the Dutch for "thing."  So a dingbat is a thingamabob.  It also, separately, means a foolish or useless person, and a sort of visual, verbal riddle. ​

Then, to save myself extra misery, I made an entirely new Word document into which I poured the formatted manuscript.  It's very important, by the way, to set the document up as the size you want. For instance 5x8 inches versus 5x7.

Just sayin.

Because who is going to forget something basic like that?  <raises hand shyly>

​Then cross fingers and toes and save it all as a PDF (Printer Document Format) file. The printers at Kindle Direct and at IngramSpark both read the PDF and use it to make a book.

And with the snap of a finger (plus a week or more waiting for the UPS truck and the application of some money), a proof copy shows up, and you find out if it looks the way you hoped it would. Go back and forth a few times, getting that margin right (5 by EIGHT, 5 by EIGHT).

​Approve the draft on IngramSpark and re-cross fingers it will show up on their catalogue in two weeks and be available for libraries and booksellers to order in October. Approve the other draft and it too will be available in October.

October! Dang! Already?!

​
For the ebook, I copied that same formatted document and stripped out nearly all of those careful stylistic choices. There are no recto-verso conventions for an e-book. There are no page numbers and no headers. The font is an either/or: either serif or sans serif, and individual readers have pre-set that choice already, at least on Kindle.  Any blank pages get ditched in the interest of electronic reading.

I saved the barer-boned document as an EPUB (electronic publication file), uploaded it it Kindle, and quadruple-checked it on the preview to be sure nothing had gone pear-shaped.  

I approved the changes, took a very deep breath, and poured myself a small libation. May the gods of printing presses look kindly on me and my offering. 

Apple Books, Kobo, and Nook will wait for another day, but as of now...the book is really, truly, for sure, actually on its way. 

Publication date is October 15. ​​

Book reviews. 

How often has a person's opinion hitched you up with a book? Not just the professional sources, like NPR's "All Books Considered," The New York Times Review of Books, Publisher's Weekly, but also your friend Fran who ADORED something and insists you MUST read it.

So you do.

As an independent publisher, I don't, as the Brits say, pull––not the household book reviewing names, anyhow.

Lucky for me it's a brave new world. 

Instead of sending my book baby out to work the streets without any bona fides, I have options.  

For instance, NetGalley. This is a service that hooks up reviewers, librarians, booksellers with Advance Readers Copies (ARCs or electronic e-ARCs). The publisher pays for the service and the reader gets a free copy in exchange for an unbiased review. 

​There are some hundreds of thousands of readers on the site, and if we know nothing else, we are sure that FREE is a magic word.

Anne of Victory Editing recommended being brutally ruthless in sorting the asks. Go with your gut, she said. 

Heard and acknowledged!  If anything felt suss or sketch, I clicked "no."

​So Madam Butterfly with 27K+ Instagram followers requested the book, and I notice that her Insty posts are focused on beauty care products?  Nope.

Mr. Mixalot has over 5000 titles downloaded, but only 4 reviews posted in the last year? Nope.  

Lady Snippet's reviews are unkind and brutal? Uh, no. 

Prince Agu says he makes all the purchasing decisions at a bookstore and sets up monthly book clubs? Well, let's see. That would be a bookstore specializing in anime and used books in rural Pennsylvania, and his name is nowhere on the website? I think not. 

For every yes, there was about one and a quarter no. 

The results: according to the stats, 1700 or so people stopped to look at the title. Around 120 people downloaded the book to read.  Reactions to the book, I'm very happy to say, are trickling in.

Reviewers post to the NetGalley site, but also cross-post with Goodreads, Amazon (after publication), Insty, TikTok, the X formerly known as Twitter, and their own reading blogs.

Here are a few of the early reactions. Squeeeeee.

I know the metaphor has flaws, but baby book can strut those streets a little prouder now, with a few references in her back pocket. 
​