Journal mcgrew's Journal: Missed Deadlines 1
I "finished" writing Mars, Ho! early in the summer, and since it became a horror story I was aiming to publish it by Halloween. Well, that didn't happen.
I wanted it to be done by then so it would show up in bookstores by Thanksgiving. I still had hopes of getting it at least for sale on my web site by then, especially since a fan wrote with news he was planning to buy several copies as gifts.
It doesn't look like that will happen, either. I just finished making the changes I'd made in the second printed copy (the first goes to my daughter Patty, the second to Dewey, who stirred the muse) and sent off for a third. It will be a couple weeks before it shows up on my porch, and if there are no more changes, which is doubtful, it would be at least another week before I cleared it for publication.
I'll be lucky if it's for sale this year. I'm frustrated.
Oh, well. I'm not in it for the money, just for the satisfaction of writing novels and actually have people read them. It's a good thing I'm not in it for the money because I'm barely breaking even, after copyright registration, ISBNs, and buying copies, many of which are marked up in pencil, not completely edited, and not for sale.
However, even though I'm not in it for the money, I'm still planning to sell the e-book on Amazon. If I got on their best seller list it would get more people reading, and many might read other of my books from the web site. Mars, Ho!'s HTML and PDF will still be free. Few are downloading the free e-books of the first two books, most are either reading it online or downloading the single HTML file.
Anyway, I guess I'm on vacation again... oh, wait, there's Random Scribblings.
Deadlines are made to be broken. (Score:2)
Look at it this way - you're not competing with all the other Hallowe'en stuff now :-)
On the other hand, if you went strictly eBook/pdf/html, you wouldn't be dealing with many of the delays caused by the dead tree format. If you feel you need a printed copy of the manuscript to make edits, just print one up - and if you ever get monster-famous, those copies will be worth more than any marked up pre-pub edition anyway.