An idea occurred to me recently, that's been worming around in my brain ever since.
I think, once I've stopped working - or taken a long break from it, whichever turns out to be the case - I'm going to look into self-publishing a collection of my short stories. There are lots of vanity presses out there, I'm sure, that'd be more than happy to take some of my splurge money and print up a few hundred copies of anything I feel like cobbling together, and call it a book. I know people who've done this before, typically with the intention of selling the result as a means toward becoming rich and famous. In my case, I think I'd like to do it, and then just give copies away to all my friends, family and hangers-on. That assumes, of course, that it's really something that could be done for several thousands of dollars or less, and not an endeavour requiring tens of K's or more.
It obviously wouldn't be the same as being published for real, but I still think it would be cool to have a book on my shelf that bears my name, and contains my own words in it. It's not exactly immortality; it's more like a slightly better chance at being remembered.
How crazy an idea is that?
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5 comments:
sounds to me like you should look into lulu.. they're all about self publishing (that's assuming you don't want to contract yourself some editor or publisher-like folks)
drop off some excess copies at local libraries - i know the public libraries used to take new book donations and shelf them. you could sneak your way onto the nonfiction shelf...
d'oh - i meant fiction. but it's all the same.
That's good info that I'll definitely look into, Mike! Thanks! I don't think I'd care about getting an editor, because I'm sure any such professional, worth his or her salt, would look at my stuff and proclaim that it was hopeless! I don't need to pay someone to tell me I'm no professional-grade author!
At the moment, though, I'm so brain dead following the 4-hour Story Point Workshop that I'm doing nothing more demanding than watching Game 5 of the NHL Finals.
Oh I like the idea of donating one to the Library. There is also the website that has instructions on how to track a book that you've left lying around for someone to pick up with instructions inside to enjoy, track on the web and pass it on. It's fun to see what countries the book visits.
As Vicki and I were discussing in the pool today, I probably need to write another fifteen to twenty short stories, if I want to have a book that's at least 150 pages long.
I have a current backlog of about a dozen stories, just counting what's shown up on this blog. (And I'm not really convinced everything here is of a high enough quality to warrant printing in a book with my name on it!) A few are of a reasonable length (Skipped, Rosewood, Return of the Enigma, Worlds Apart) but most would only fill two or three pages of a book, unless I did very wide margins! So even using an average of four or five pages per story, I'm probably only 1/3 of the way to having enough material. That means I either need to write another twenty-five or so short short stories, or maybe a dozen longer ones. Or some combination, totaling around a dozen and a half, to give me at least another 100 pages of fiction.
All in all, though, I have to say that that's a good problem to have. Seeing as how I like writing, and all!
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