Another year has passed, and I have decided to take the time to be frank and open about how things have been progressing with the company and with our book projects. There has been little communication recently due to various factors. The first step to rectifying this is by reaching out to everybody and letting people know how things stand.
Several things went well:
We managed to bring the word of our anthologies to a very broad section of the writing population, with write-ups about them in the standards such as Duotrope and Ralan as well as more genre-oriented market listings such as DarkMarkets.com, Englands’s Writing Magazine, and mailing lists of various writer’s organizations. A large amount of writers ended up being referred to our anthologies by friends and colleagues. We have ended up with a wide variety of awesome submissions from around the world, by both published authors and new talents. Suction Cup Dreams has been blessed by the talents of a fabulous young illustrator you’ll be certain to hear more about in coming weeks.
Several things didn’t:
Due to a variety of factors (detailed below), progress has been slower than a snail’s pace, something which is unacceptable. Every start-up has growing pains, but it is something that has to be worked on for obsolescent.info’s second year (the first year of it actually releasing its products). Until the entire path from the conceptualization of an anthology to its publication can be streamlined, we have some serious and very necessary work ahead of us.
A major issue on our side has been the lack of communication. While the year started out great with a lot of communication with fans and authors and a lively social media presence, this has weakened towards the end due to a concentration on other tasks. One of the major fixes we will have to do is to delegate and hire somebody to take over this responsibility for our customers.
SUCTION CUP DREAMS – AN OCTOPUS ANTHOLOGY STATUS
Right now we have the eleven stories and eleven illustrations (by Natasha Aldred, a talent who we will introduce more extensively to our readers before release) in a basic formatted layout; we are just waiting for the introduction. Everything else is already set into place – ISBN number, distribution channels, and we have even booked advertising space in several print magazines just waiting for us to give the go-ahead.
The original person slotted to write the introduction had to leave due to personal reasons, so we did spend some time getting ahold of a new author for this segment of the book. We can’t reveal who it is at this point, but we are proud to say that it is somebody who knows octopodes quite well, and their contribution will be a great addition to the book. As soon as we receive the final draft of the introduction, we will finally have the missing puzzle piece and can finish up the layout.
DALI-ANCES: THE SALVADOR DALI ANTHOLOGY
We have made most of the decisions towards the contents of the book, but not all. We decided not to notify people until the final decisions have been made. We are sticking to that process for this book, although for the future we won’t do it again, since we are basically holding people’s works hostage, which isn’t fair for the authors. As soon as we decide which of the last stories we are going to put in the book (side note: like for Suction Cup Dreams, we were overwhelmed with great submissions), we will be able to move much faster.
WHY WE ARE LATE
There can be no true justifications for our tardiness, but for completeness sake I would like to describe what has been going behind the scenes so that people understand what has been going on.
This publishing imprint is currently run by myself and several really awesome volunteers. obsolescent.info is a project in which I have personally invested much time, effort, and money to start up and run, but it is not the only focus of my time. I currently work two positions in order to support myself and my family and this project, and sometimes it is easy to underestimate the work necessary to successfully work on a project in a field one has not worked in before.
This past winter, I was hired to be AD for a feature film project being shot in Rhode Island, a project which consumed the great majority of time and caused me to neglect searching for an alternate introduction writer for Suction Cup Dreams and work on Dali-ances. For many of my friends and colleagues I disappeared as I began to focus on the pre-production for this project which finally ended principal photography in December.
Then I had my car accident, an accident which caused me to lose my car when it crashed into the side of a church. While I have come out of the incident relatively unscathed physically, it has caused a lot of life changes which are only now starting to settle.
FINAL STATEMENTS
We would like to apologize to everybody who has been wondering about the progress of these two books, and would especially like to thank everybody for their ongoing support. We are striving to better ourselves and provide everybody with some great books this year. Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook and stay tuned for some blog posts where we’ll introduce our Suction Cup Dreams authors and illustrator, and maybe even some more surprises up our sleeves (and remember, an octopus can have eight sleeves)!
