Making Sense from Nonsense II: Electric Boogaloo
Welcome back! I had planned to try to do this once per week, but I caught a pretty bad flu, and then flew back to China still recovering and was met by mountains of work, so…
Anyway! Next steps on the self-publishing journey!
So the first thing I had to do after paying Friesen Press was to upload a manuscript of the book. Now, I had already used Microsoft Publisher (the 2007 version) to make my book and print it myself here in China. I used the AI art I generated, chose specific fonts for the poems, typed it all up, formatted it properly, and everything else all by myself, with some guidance from a good friend of mine back in Canada and a very kind printer here in China. And that process was extremely satisfying, I can tell you. Something about learning how to do all that and putting all together myself, including the bumps in the road I faced, is something I now look back on fondly, and I highly recommend anyone interested in self-publishing to just go for it. It’s a fairly small investment, and you get to put out your vision without any interference from anyone.
However, I have no idea about marketing strategies, have no connections to online or offline distributors, and don’t know how to jazz something up to the extent that it could find a wider audience, which is why I decided to go with Friesen Press in the end and go through this entire process.
Now the agent who set me up with everything at the beginning had asked me questions about the document I had, and suggested to me that a .docx file would be more suitable for their purposes. When I tried to convert my pdf to a docx, of course, all the formatting and everything just went out the window, and when I saw the result, my honest reaction was “fuck this — this is what I’m paying them for”. And I readily admit that it probably isn’t the most mature reaction, but at the same time…isn’t that what I’m paying them for? So I just sent the pdf. To be continued…
Then I had to fill in a questionnaire, which they use to get to know you as the writer and what the purpose was behind the book you’ve put together. Since my initial purpose was purely the proliferation of nonsense, I really did have to think about my responses to a lot of the questions. I especially liked the questions that asked me to consider my short-term goals, long-term goals, and what success looks like to me for this book. Honestly, these were questions that I hadn’t really asked myself. I was just following a muse and enjoying a process that distracted me from the pandemic and all the shit that accompanied it. So being forced to put these things into writing was actually really helpful.
They also asked me to consider who the audience was for the book, to which I responded “Weirdos”. And that was only partially facetious on my part. I added something like “people who like to be challenged, and who appreciate something different and unusual”. I don’t know how big a market that is, if I’m being honest. But that’s who the book is suited for.
And that was about a week ago, I suppose. I saw in my e-mail today that I have been assigned an editor, so that’s the next step in the process! Once I have something to write about again, I’ll make another post. Probably once I have had a few back and forths with the editor.