Slugs and Rails
On my day off yesterday, I mostly pottered around the house in slow motion because of the intense heat, accomplishing far less than I’d hoped to. In the evening I did make it down to Crawley though, to meet up with Vince, a former colleague from my Gatwick Airport days; he wrote a series of short children’s stories three or four years ago, which I illustrated for him. I’d thought for ages that the project had washed up on the rocks of the publishing world, but apparently now someone has taken an interest in the character.
It’s one of these deals where the author pays to have their work published, rather than the publishers doing it at their own expense and then paying out the royalties - which, I’ve always been led to think, is the proper way of doing it - but this company uses the emerging new “print on demand” technology to reduce their operating costs and their terms and conditions seem to stand up to scrutiny, so I think I’m up for trying them. We’re going to split the publication costs fifty-fifty (or, at least, we will when I’ve managed to save up enough) and it doesn’t seem like a huge gamble to take, relatively speaking. Even if no-one buys it, I’ll still have contributed pictures to a book, and that’s something I can be proud of. Some kind of deal will hopefully get struck between now and the end of the year.
On an entirely different subject, I had been playing with the idea of going to Synthetic Culture this Friday, but I think I might have to ditch that plan now, as it would clash with the twenty-four hour rail strike that looks as if it’s going ahead - I probably won’t even get home from work until about eight o’clock, and by the time I’ve eaten, got changed and gone all the way back up to King’s Cross by bus… bad move, I think. Will try to organise a big night out sometime in the coming weeks, though.
It’s one of these deals where the author pays to have their work published, rather than the publishers doing it at their own expense and then paying out the royalties - which, I’ve always been led to think, is the proper way of doing it - but this company uses the emerging new “print on demand” technology to reduce their operating costs and their terms and conditions seem to stand up to scrutiny, so I think I’m up for trying them. We’re going to split the publication costs fifty-fifty (or, at least, we will when I’ve managed to save up enough) and it doesn’t seem like a huge gamble to take, relatively speaking. Even if no-one buys it, I’ll still have contributed pictures to a book, and that’s something I can be proud of. Some kind of deal will hopefully get struck between now and the end of the year.
On an entirely different subject, I had been playing with the idea of going to Synthetic Culture this Friday, but I think I might have to ditch that plan now, as it would clash with the twenty-four hour rail strike that looks as if it’s going ahead - I probably won’t even get home from work until about eight o’clock, and by the time I’ve eaten, got changed and gone all the way back up to King’s Cross by bus… bad move, I think. Will try to organise a big night out sometime in the coming weeks, though.