What It's All About : 1) Print Publishing
The first order of this PEAPOD publishing mix is Print Publishing. I use Lulu.com to print my books on demand. Thus far, I have a couple of books out: The Cycle Calendar, a 5-year monthly planner for (peri)menopausal women, Strange Bedfellows, a book version of an epic dream I had, many years ago, and I'm presently working on Fuel: Memoirs of A Crisis, a memoir of the fuel protests in England in 2000. My partner Laney and I were vacationing in Cornwall when it all went down, and it was quite eye-opening to be stranded by political action, when you're expected back at work in a week.
I'm still finishing up edits on Fuel, but I hope to have it ready to go within a few weeks. One of the nice things about doing the PEAPOD Mix, is that in the process of reading the chapters for my virtual book tour (more on this fabulous idea later), I'm coming across places where the copy needs to be edited, and (horror of horrors!) some typos have slipped by me. It always pays to go back over your work with a fresh set of eyes, and the PEAPOD Mix lets me do just that, looking at print from the perspective of audio... and realizing that the site where the original was posted could probably use some help, as well.
I'll also be publishing my poetry (at long, long last). In book form. I had published a lot of it in chapbook form in the mid-90's, but I really do need to come up with a book-sized product that sits as nicely in my hands as the poetry books from other folks I've been reading for years. I still need to sort through what I've got -- decades worth of verse, some of it better than I remember, some of it hardly as good as I once thought. I need to balance out the amount of poetry I include in each collection (at this point, I'm thinking there will be three or four book-length collections) with an acceptable number of pages, so the books don't turn out too slim to be respectable... or too thick to be cost-effective.
Other projects I've got going on, are revised versions of "New Thought" classics like As A Man Thinketh, which will become As A Woman Thinketh, As You Think, and As I Think, with the gender specificity and the person of each version changed. I actually built a cgi program a number of years ago, that would replace all the gender specifics and person information to user-specified values -- for example, changing "A man does this" to "a woman does this", "you do this", or "I do this", respectively. I love the book, which is in the public domain (meaning it's open season on different people selling the content), and it's been a mainstay for my own personal development. And when I changed the person and the gender and re-read it, it took on new meaning for me, each time. So, I've used my "customizer" to generate four different versions of the "AAMT" text, and I'm going to put them into print format. Of all my projects I've got going, I think this is the easiest -- the least number of moving parts. All I have to do, is create the first one, get all the book formatting proper and such, and then duplicate that effort across the other three versions. The content is already created. I just need to format it, and publish it through Lulu.com.
There are other projects, of course... collections of short stories and other writings I've got on hand. But right now, I'm focused on Fuel, and I need to finish that before anything else. The four versions of "AAMT" will be my reward for finishing Fuel. They'll be the payoff.
Of course, all this will be fully documented, as I go, which is in fact another project in and of itself. I'm writing a book about how to create your own virtual book tours (more on that in a later post), as well as how to use Podtopia.net to create podcasts (much more on that in other posts, as well as at the Podtopia blog). And of course, there's more podcasting info I've got to get into book form, so that I can land squarely on my feet after Christmas, when everyone has their brand spankin' new iPods. It's a secret, though. That other project has much potential to generate substantial lucre, and I'm not giving it away so some one else can do it before me. No way.
I've clearly got my work cut out for me.
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