Potpouri

I managed to get my next test in the AWC block taken in 6 weeks instead of 3 months, but it still hasn't been graded,and its been a week since I submitted it.  That means my timeline is in the toilet.  There is now no way I can finish it with several weeks between tests.  Not before October.  But the good news is I don't have to devote so much of my time to it.  I have an extra year tacked on now till the next board meets, so I can focus more energy on my writing.

To Pay, or Not to Pay? That is the Question ...to the editor I mean.

I've been thinking a lot about editing lately.  I can't judge how good my own writing is, I'm too close to it and have read it so many times I can't evaluate it objectively.  I also want to know where the glaring problems are so that I can fix them.  Thankfully I have a writing partner, but even after that process I might want to have a "Real" editor take a whack at it (no offense meant Stacy).  Looking at the average cost for a novel of 500 pages or 120,000ish words it runs around $1500.  It can vary up and down from that several hundred dollars, but let's use that as a baseline figure.  In order to recoup that cost I have to sell books.  If I put it up on Amazon for $3.99 I get to keep 70% of that or $2.79.  That would require me to sell 536 books to hit the break even point and that is not even counting the cost of getting it published.  If I choose to sell it at $2.99, I get  $2.09 and have to sell 718 copies.  If I choose the $.99 pricepoint many new authors are using I get $.35 a copy and that requires 4286 books to sell to hit the break even point.

The Life Cycle of an Idea

     Kids are able to make up stuff on the fly, but as adults we have a really hard time with people changing stuff on us. Why is that? Do you remember when you were a kid and the world was full of wonder and nothing seemed impossible? We could dream big. One of my dreams was to be an astronaut -- I really wanted to be Han Solo, truth be told. We could tell outlandish stories to our friends that made no sense, but we told them anyway because it was fun! Remember fun? I see my kids do it all the time. They take a simple idea and run it over and then back over it and run it over several more times, making it different each time and laughing all the way.