One book down, another to go. I've got the files all ready for my new commedia dell'arte book, and it looks like I'm finally getting that multi-year project of the Marriage a-la-Mode done as well.
Marriage a-la-Mode is an old play by John Dryden, which I liked quite well on first reading it. And like many plays of the era, it has songs noted within the text and yet not a single edition seems to print those songs. So, I decided I should do something about this, and a few years ago I got some library in Europe to make copies of one of the last surviving editions of "Choice Songs and Ayres for One Voyce" from 1673, which contained the sheet music. But then, the trouble was A)The library technically owned the copyright on those scans, and B) The originals were so hard to make out (300 years had done a number on the paper and there was a lot of bleed-through and smudging) one could hardly read it anyway. So I needed to find someone to transcribe the music into a cleaner copy, that I'd be free to publish.
I wound up with a bad-luck-leads-to-good scenario. I advertised on Craigslist for someone to transcribe the music, for a price I could afford to pay that, while maybe not great pay was fair given it's only 2 pages of music, and someone wrote back saying they were interested. I sent her the music and described what I had in mind, but unfortunately, hearing the word "publish" apparently put grand ideas into her mind that I was some kind of millionaire trying to rip her off, in order to make thousands of dollars off this book while paying her a pittance. So she suddenly flipped and demanded double the pay we'd agreed upon, claiming it was still meager pay for something that was going to be published (and it would be true if we were talking something by Random House or the like; but fact is we're talking Talia Felix the POD publisher who can't always afford $9 for a proof copy and is usually lucky to sell a copy a month.) Given I'd offered exactly what I could afford for this project -- probably more than the book will make in 6 months -- that was totally out of the question, and I complained about this on my Facebook. It happened though, that a friend of my sister came forward and wound up offering to transcribe the music for free, which is even better! So FINALLY the Marriage a-la-Mode is being prepped.
If this publishing thing ever takes off, I will hire an editor to proofread these books. I know that all my books so far have ended distributed with some ghastly typos in them. Since I have to do all the work myself, once I've finished the layout the fact is I am so familiar with what the text is supposed to say, that some jokester could probably replace it all with Lorem Ipsum text and I'd scarce notice the difference. The layout person and the proofreader should not be one and the same, no siree.
Anyway, I have a new website under construction, sort of to promote the commedia book. My idea is to put all the text of the book online -- most of it's public domain anyway and could be found easily -- along with other useful info, and see if this might drum up more interest than normal in the piece. My new site (which is half finished and full of placeholder text as of this writing) is http://www.la-commedia.net
Marriage a-la-Mode is an old play by John Dryden, which I liked quite well on first reading it. And like many plays of the era, it has songs noted within the text and yet not a single edition seems to print those songs. So, I decided I should do something about this, and a few years ago I got some library in Europe to make copies of one of the last surviving editions of "Choice Songs and Ayres for One Voyce" from 1673, which contained the sheet music. But then, the trouble was A)The library technically owned the copyright on those scans, and B) The originals were so hard to make out (300 years had done a number on the paper and there was a lot of bleed-through and smudging) one could hardly read it anyway. So I needed to find someone to transcribe the music into a cleaner copy, that I'd be free to publish.
I wound up with a bad-luck-leads-to-good scenario. I advertised on Craigslist for someone to transcribe the music, for a price I could afford to pay that, while maybe not great pay was fair given it's only 2 pages of music, and someone wrote back saying they were interested. I sent her the music and described what I had in mind, but unfortunately, hearing the word "publish" apparently put grand ideas into her mind that I was some kind of millionaire trying to rip her off, in order to make thousands of dollars off this book while paying her a pittance. So she suddenly flipped and demanded double the pay we'd agreed upon, claiming it was still meager pay for something that was going to be published (and it would be true if we were talking something by Random House or the like; but fact is we're talking Talia Felix the POD publisher who can't always afford $9 for a proof copy and is usually lucky to sell a copy a month.) Given I'd offered exactly what I could afford for this project -- probably more than the book will make in 6 months -- that was totally out of the question, and I complained about this on my Facebook. It happened though, that a friend of my sister came forward and wound up offering to transcribe the music for free, which is even better! So FINALLY the Marriage a-la-Mode is being prepped.
If this publishing thing ever takes off, I will hire an editor to proofread these books. I know that all my books so far have ended distributed with some ghastly typos in them. Since I have to do all the work myself, once I've finished the layout the fact is I am so familiar with what the text is supposed to say, that some jokester could probably replace it all with Lorem Ipsum text and I'd scarce notice the difference. The layout person and the proofreader should not be one and the same, no siree.
Anyway, I have a new website under construction, sort of to promote the commedia book. My idea is to put all the text of the book online -- most of it's public domain anyway and could be found easily -- along with other useful info, and see if this might drum up more interest than normal in the piece. My new site (which is half finished and full of placeholder text as of this writing) is http://www.la-commedia.net