Category Archives: Publishing

Release day!

01 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Publishing, The Jane Austen Guide to Life

≈ 17 Comments

So the official release day for The Jane Austen Guide to Life is here!  Excited to see this baby go out into the world.  This day has come faster than I thought it would.

Amazon’s actually been shipping for a couple of weeks, and some bookstores may not yet have the title on shelves (sometimes it takes a little longer), but officially, the book is “real” now.  Kindle and Nook versions aren’t yet available, but I’m hoping they will be soon. Just waiting, at this point, for Amazon and B&N to process those files.

Yesterday I stopped by Barnes & Noble in Fairfax, by Fair Oaks Mall.  They had the book, and I was thrilled to discover that it will be placed on the front “New Release” table. (Sad truth — publishers pay for that kind of placement.) They went ahead and put them out a day early, after I signed them.  I’m thrilled!  Took these pics on my little phone.

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Jane Austen’s Self-publishing Success (and what we can learn from it)

05 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in Jane Austen, Publishing

≈ 12 Comments

Did you know?  Jane Austen was self-published.  Yes!  Can you imagine?  Jane Austen — one of our Best Writers Ever — could not get a publisher to take a chance on her.  And not just for her first book.  Three of the four books published during her lifetime were self-published.  (I must thank Juliette Wells for drawing my attention to this in a conversation we had a couple years ago.)

Of course, writers love hearing stories like this, because if you’re having trouble getting a publishing house to take you on, it makes you feel like maybe you aren’t the problem.  Maybe you really are an unrecognized genius who will go down in the annals of history as having permanently changed the course of the novel and your works will enlighten readers for hundreds of years to come.  The publishers are wrong about you, just like they were wrong about Austen. Continue reading »