Publishing Industry (Patreon)

I try to not air dirty laundry, but I know several people have congratulated me on the "new release" of Saddled. I'm ignoring them, but then that gets awkward. So, I'm going to tell you guys what happened, and trust you to keep it between us.  

I sent Saddled to MLR because the editing costs were going to be more than I could bear and I didn't want an unedited book out there.  They accepted it and set me up with an editor.  I got the first pass back from the editor, and I was horrified to see all he had done was correct a few commas. I asked him about it because I was specifically worried about pacing (I wrote it in chapters, after all) and wording.  Sue always catches me repeating words and just being a bit "off." He said that he likes to take care of the small stuff first, and he would look at that on a second pass.

That scared me. So I went out of my way to clean up chunks of the text.  I did a search and destroy mission for the types of errors Sue usually finds and shot it back to MLR. Then I waited.  Months I waited. And more months.  I emailed and asked for the manuscript rights back, and I was told I couldn't get them because MLR had already invested in editing, but they said the editor had left and they would get me a new editor and get the project back on track.

And I waited more. Months more. We're looking at close to a year now, and I thought they had ditched the project. That would leave my rights in limbo, but I didn't care.

Then I got an email asking for approval on the cover, and within weeks, the book was out.

Other people have had great experiences at MLR and I know I am probably finding new readers by being on a new platform at the MLR website. So in the long run, the publication will probably be good. In the short run, I am embarrassed by having what I consider an unedited book out there. Hopefully it was edited without my knowledge, but given that the editor listed on Amazon is the one who quit (the one who had only started the process), I am unhopeful. 

So I am choosing to ignore it and hope it goes away.

So if you congratulated me, thank you.  I am never again mentioning it here, and I'm not going to bring up any of this in Facebook because I don't want to go public with the drama.