I've been resisting reporting on the progress with self-publishing my novel lately because the whole thing has been getting rather fuzzy. I'm in the cover design phase, and have been for about three weeks, making no recognizable headway.
A word about iUniverse -- and perhaps about publishers in general, a breed I've never had any experience with, despite being of advanced age (where are the fucking emoticons around here?) and having written since I was 15. They don't exactly seem to do things in a hurry. In order to design the cover, I have to speak to a cover designer. But in order to speak with a cover designer, I have to make an phone appointment. But in order to make the appointment I have to go through my design consultant. Suffice it to say I now have an appointment for Thursday of next week, but it took two weeks of unanswered phone messages and e-mails to get it. I just had to call my consultant every day until she finally picked up the phone and talked to me. Then she was able to give me an appointment ten days in the future. (Another emoticon, if I had one -- not a happy face.)
I'm paying them, right?
I also made the mistake of Googling iUniverse Scam. There are LOTS of complaints about iUniverse on the Internet. They appear to be a company that has no idea what it's doing and couldn't be of use to you even if they wanted to. Good thing I didn't do it before I started or I never would have gone with them in the first place. But I am of several minds about their competence. They themselves know nothing about the editorial content and design of a book. All the services they are providing me are being provided through contractors. They're like a general contractor. I'm the client. They're overseeing the work of all the subcontractors, but they're not doing any of the work themselves. Couldn't if they tried. That leaves a rather important part of the process up to me, to make sure that what's supposed to happen is actually happening. Normally that's part of a good General Contractor's job (that is their job), but the business of publishing would seem to be different in some ways from the business of construction.
It's interesting, because I've often seen an analogy between writing a novel and building a house. It's a long, painstaking process of making sure everything that's needed is provided and it all gets put together in the right order and in the right way, and in the end you've built something. Out of words.
And things can go wrong. Not just in the writing, as I'm now discovering, but in the publishing process as well. Just pray they don't, or if they do I can fix them.
So it's a learning experience. Ha ha! (Emoticon?) I have submitted my own design for the cover (you can see it in a previous blog) without any images. I'm pretty certain I don't want an image on the cover, and I like the design I came up with. But if I did use an image this one by Karl Bang (never heard of him until yesterday) which I came across on Tumblr would be good. Dynamite Linsa and a dynamite Otorongo. The problem is . . . .
Well, I'd probably have to pay Karl Bang something. Don't know how much. And the action in the book that's reflected by this image comes at the end. In other words, it's not generally reflective of the character of the whole book. It's very good for the end of the book, but might lead the reader to wonder what's going on for the first four fifths of the book.
Whooeee. (Yeah. I know. I could search around for some emoticons and copy and paste them in. I'm just too lazy.)
That's where things stand.