Publisher's Note
Publisher’s Note: All Kinda of Learning
I’ve been in teaching mode a lot lately. Last week marked the end of the semester at Western Colorado University, where I’m a lecturer in the Publishing Concentration for the Graduate Program in Creative Writing. And, of course, we do all sorts of teaching here at...
Publisher’s Note: Improvement Projects
We’re in home improvement mode at my house. While I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, for example, we started painting walls.
Our house has a bit of an odd construction. It has a gambrel roof, which you can read all about here (https://worstroom.com/gambrel-roof/). The long and short of things is that this roof style is something not seen much in modern construction, and certainly not often on houses (it’s mostly barns and warehouses).
Adding to this oddity, the house is built into a hill, with the main living areas on the top floor and the bedrooms downstairs in what is technically a daylight basement.
Publisher’s Note: Getting Down to Basics
We’ve started a new blog/newsletter called Every Day’s a Holiday on Substack, and we’ve had some fun with funky holidays, some of them quite whimsical, but who’s counting, right? We’ve celebrated Everything You Think is Wrong Day, and National Get Over It Day, among...
Publisher’s Note: Mysterious Circumstances
I hate garage sales. I know many people enjoy them. The mystery of whether that found item is trash or treasure. The adventure of the hunt for great bargains found only at garage sales. The thrill of getting something useful for a steal.
I hate holding garage sales even more than shopping them. But for some mysterious reason, I seem to forget that hatred every decade or so and agree to have one.
This past weekend was one of those lapses.
Publisher’s Note: Tools of the Trade
We did some minor remodeling last week. At least, it was supposed to be minor. Home improvement project never turn out to be as minor as they should be, I’ve learned. Especially in older homes.
What was supposed to happen was the replacement of our kitchen sink and faucet, as well as the addition of an under-sink water purifier.
That all did happen, but for a while, it looked like we were in for a very expensive complication.
Once the old sink was pulled out, we discovered dry rot in the counter. As we figured out a plan to address that (without replacing the counter), we also discovered that the new sink (despite having the same dimensions as the old sink) didn’t fit into the hole. Different attachment system (who knew?). But that dry rot meant simply cutting a bigger hole was a real challenge. The plumber wasn’t entirely sure what to do (other than get a new counter), so I called in a neighbor friend from down the street who I knew had the tools and carpentry skills to problem-solve. What he didn’t have, it turns out, was the people skills to work with the plumber.
Publisher’s Note: A Decade in the Books!
I reached a milestone over the weekend: 10 years at the helm of WMG.
That’s really amazing, when I think about it. When I joined the company, I was the only employee, and it was in the very early stages of a startup. Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, the owners of WMG, could promise me a year’s salary, but the rest was up to us to make the company a viable endeavor.
And boy, has it grown since then. We had some rough spots in the early years, like all startups do, but we’ve grown every year since the start. We now have about 1,000 titles in our inventory, and our core staff has been on board for five years. Last year alone, we published more than 200 new titles, which is a feat that should not be repeated because of its insanity
But our book inventory is not all that’s grown exponentially.
Publisher’s Note: Time and Space
Reading the news these days makes me feel like I’m in some sort of alternate timeline. It’s like the past 40 years never happened and I’m right back to hearing about Russian invasions and nuclear war and World War III.
As a kid growing up in New Jersey, I was doing air raid drills in elementary and middle school much later than many of my peers. New Jersey was home to Bell Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs, but in the ’80s it was Bell Telephone Laboratories until 1984 and then AT&T Bell Laboratories). Bell Labs was considered a major target for a nuclear attack.
So, every few months, there we were, responding to a sound I’ve never heard associated with any other kind of emergency drill and quickly making our way into the hallways to get on our knees, facing the wall, with our heads down in the junction where wall and floor meet and our hands laced over the backs of our heads.
Publisher’s Note: A Galaxy of Options
Well, I guess the US Senate reads my blog because they unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act last Tuesday. I guess they’re as over the time change as I am.
Once I got over the shock that the US Senate unanimously agreed on anything, I did a happy dance. But I had little time to dwell the news last week, because we launched a new Kickstarter on Thursday!
Our latest Kickstarter is called Rescue Two: A Seeders Universe Kickstarter and it’s already doing spectacularly well. We funded in less than an hour and were designated a Project We Love by Kickstarter in less than a day.
Plus, we’ve already hit the fourth stretch goals.
The Kickstarter is the first and best place to get Dean Wesley Smith’s latest Seeders Universe novel, Rescue Two.
Publisher’s Note: Changing with the Times
I’m grumpier than usual about Daylight Saving Time this year. Maybe it’s just because this has been a hard year, and I’m tired, so I’m just grumpier than usual in general. But I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed by this twice-yearly time change for a while now.
It didn’t used to bother me much. Oh sure, it was really annoying when I was a kid and it got dark at like 4 p.m. (I lived in New Jersey), so if I had to take either of the late busses home from school because of after-school extracurriculars, I had to walk home from the bus stop in the dark. And I’ve always resented losing that hour of sleep every spring.
Publisher’s Note: Every Day’s a Holiday at WMG
Have you heard about WMG’s latest project?
The Every Day’s a Holiday at WMG newsletter offers specially curated ebooks and discounts only for subscribers! For your $5 a month subscription you get a story or collection (and even the occasional novel) every week that relates to an unusual and fun national holiday.
So, I thought I’d offer a sneak peek at what we have coming up for this week so you can see what it’s all about.
Wednesday, March 9, is National Get Over It Day. There’s so much we need to get over these days that this holiday seems more apropos than ever.