Going forward with iUniverse

I ended up choosing iUniverse, mostly because they were easy to contact, and called me back when they said they would. I still intend to follow up with Outskirts, though, since they apparently offer ala carte editing & marketing feedback.

I talked with my "check-in coordinator" (They have a lot of base-touching positions at iUniverse... I like that a lot)  about the editing feedback... I don't want encouragement, I want to know if the book will sell. She assured me that the feedback from the various passes would be professional grade. In fact, it's sufficiently hard-nosed that they actually have a preparatory email that goes out to ease more "fragile" authors' passage through the process.

I also wanted to talk about scheduling. My book itself is out with three readers right now who are all slated to get me my feedback by Jan 3. Assuming I start then, what does the schedule look like? My "eval" pass will take ~2 weeks, then there's some editing iterations. Whether I pay them to do it, or do it myself, there's some back-and-forth. Then printing, publishing, and marketing. A "good quick pace" has it out this summer.

So there's your time line: If your book is "Written and ready for editing" and it doesn't require too many editing passes you can go from "Logically complete" text to "Edited ready for publishing" text in about 3 months. Then you can go from "Edited ready for publishing" to "Available in amazon.com and iTunes with accompanying boilerplate marketing info" in 3 months. So a "fast" pace from logically complete text to first paper-book sale is probably on the order of six months.

Today's work consisted mostly of going through their editing guidelines (they prefer "e-mail" to "email" and always capitalize "Internet", etc) and applying those changes to my text. Some of the stuff I lazily left for them to find (spelling vs enumerating small numbers, hyphenating compound numbers) but most of it was easy enough to do myself before my first submission.

Sick as this may be, I've already got 15 ideas for chapters in the "next" book, if there is one.