Auto Draft

What’s The Best Price For Your First Book?

I checked into my zine site today, www.howlings.com where I had incidentally put a link to my book’s ring on Amazon’s large beak. Have Crutch Will Travel it said was $20– or $.01 for the best price. This means there are enough copies out there that someone will sell the book for 1 cent and then presumably they will ask for $5 shipping and handling, not bad. Let’s see, it cost $2.51 cents to send it media rate, and if the sellor collected a few copies they probably were selling out of Denver, Colorado. The thing that’s kind of funny is that I just paid $1,545 or so to have the book sold in perpetuity, or at least like the popcorn in the microwave, until the majority of pops has slowed down to 1 copy/year. That brings up a question: What is the shelf life of a book that is sold off the ExLibris Author Self-Publishing Book store. I’m about to find out. I paid out the money so I could feel that I could take my mind off Have Crutch Will Travel, the Adventures of a Modern Day Calamity Jane and begin working on just writing. The goal is to finish the book I was working on when I lost the use of my arms for three years and had to find a new way to live now that I couldn’t use my arms for locomotion. That book was first called Miss American Pie back in 1996 when I wrote the short essay that introduced the reader to “the day the music died.”  That title has become a cliche by now so I’m going with an even older cliche, namely Shadow of My Former Self, which I like better now anyway as it introduces the penumbra, the umbrella I live under. (you will have to look it up)

I find that Shadow of My Former Self is almost already finished in at least six of the chapters, and I have drafted at least six more chapters, and then I wrote the description of each following chapter until I got to the end of my great idea of answer the question asked of me by no one.  What has your life been like? Only a writer would set themselves up with such trying to answer such a rude query. Every day you write changes your life based on what you have set down, and a changed person tries yet another day to answer it all over again. I call this Voice and Voice Over.

Well, that’s all for this week. I haven’t even cleared my mind enough to promise the new publishers I would get a manuscript to them. I just wanted to meet the half-price deadline that was already extended the day after I rushed to meet it. I rushed, let them wait. I’ll answers any questions I’m asked, so please comment or ask based on what you have read so far in the previous chapters of Shadow.