The Paperback is Very, Very Close

     And I mean that literally.  Redemption on the River's first two proofs from Createspace are scheduled to arrive tomorrow.  If there is no problem with them (knock on wood) I should be able to activate the listing on Amazon to offer the physical, hold-it-in-your-hands-and-turn-the-pages, book for sale that night.

     It's another milestone.  When I started the entire write-a-novel project I told myself, and anyone who cared to listen, that if the result wasn't good enough to seek publication then I wouldn't do so.  Furthermore, if I did seek publication and didn't achieve it, then I wasn't going to be one of those authors who paid a vanity press to print 500 copies, then inflicted 23 of them on friends and family, and the balance sat in boxes in the attic for the rest of time.

    Things have changed drastically in the publishing industry since I wrote the first words of RotR down.  First—ahem —I did decide that the novel was worth publishing.  Second, I realized that I had a snowball's chance in a very hot place of being traditionally published, which might be the subject of another post on another day.  Third, very often, and certainly in my case, independently publishing one's book via digital files and Print On Demand (POD) services is much the better business decision.

     There have been many milestones in the course of this project—completing the first draft, printing a draft (the 4th) for the first time, getting the feedback of the first beta readers (they were honest, just as I asked, ouch), etc, and another significant milestone is 24 hours away—holding the physical book in my hands.

    I never really expected that to happen, and it didn't have to happen to accomplish my goal, but I'm pretty sure it's going to feel good.