I have all but finally decided to self-publish Jake and the Dynamo, which was my original intention with the series anyway. This is admittedly a self-own, but I’m having a hard time getting a publisher to acknowledge my existence—and I don’t mean accept my manuscript; I really mean acknowledge my existence. I think something serious has happened to the industry in the last decade because I used to be able to collect polite, pre-formatted rejection slips. Now I can’t even get a “you suck so don’t write to us again.”
I’m currently swimming in a bewildering array of advice, much of it obviously bad or exploitative, about how to move forward with this. I will certainly have to commission cover art, for which I have some leads, and also format the manuscript. I’m assuming the latter task will require learning some new software, though I’m unsure of that as of yet. My former publisher used Vellum, I think, but that’s only available on Mac, and I don’t have one. At the very least, I know something about web and document accessibility, which will probably help.
So that’s what I’m up to right now, which is part of why the content here is so slim. I really want to get the first two volumes of Jake and the Dynamo available in the near future; the first needs republished, and the second needs to be published for the first time. I am in the midst of the draft of the third. I don’t want to be too hasty and have a bad roll-out when a little more legwork could produce a better product (and more sales, of course).
Rag & Muffin is currently on an editor’s desk, and the requested wait period has not closed, but considering how things are going, I expect that it will (about three months now) without my existence having been acknowledged. At that point, I will consider self-publishing it as well, though I might attempt more submissions first.
