Quick update on the ongoing soap opera of disposal of old stock:
1. Pepper Smith’s brilliant initiative (please, please, see http://speedbump.peppersmithbooks.com/) has so far resulted in requests for fifty-two books, and I’m in communication with someone who may want several hundred. Pepper, you’re currently my favourite person in the whole world. If ever you’re visiting the UK, dinner’s on me.
2. The UK charity we supported with Criminal Tendencies, our one and only short story collection, has accepted a donation of most of the remaining stock, which they can sell at fundraising events.
3. A whole stack is going to Oxfam, one of the biggest UK-based disaster relief and third world support charities; they’ll even come and collect it! As well as the usual kind of secondhand Rose shops which charities use to raise funds, Oxfam also has a string of specialist bookshops which are always in need of new stock, especially great crime fiction, which flies out the door.
Meanwhile, life moves on here at the ranch. Well, office. Any thoughts I had of spending long afternoons with my feet on a cushion and my head in a good book seem to disperse at about 9.30 every morning when I switch on the computer to check the to-do list.
So what makes it on to that list? What does a former publisher do when someone else is publishing the books?
In addition to tying up an awful lot of loose ends, this one seems to be… editing.
Since early October last year, when my shiny new freelance life began, I have
- edited two books for the new imprint and begun work on a third;
- provided editorial feedback on five lengthy novel extracts and three short stories myself, and arranged for two more to be done by people better qualified than I am;
- discussed the progress of a major non-fiction project which I began to edit last summer; the author has done a lot of reworking, and now wants my input again.
Maybe not the volume of work an average in-house editor would expect to cover in four months, but add in all the general admin and running around I’ve also done, not to mention my various other lives (I was reviewing theatre last night, and two of my own short stories are currently out in the world seeking their fortune) and it still adds up to a full-time job.
Who mentioned the R-word? It certainly wasn’t me. Old publishers never retire; they just run out of words…
