(no subject)

Stumbled over this fascinating article last night and thought people would be interested: Keep Calm and Carry On: The Pinup Of Our Age. I'd no idea that Keep Calm And Carry On wasn't actually used during WWII. It seems much catchier than the two slogans that were.

And if you're into the genre of Keep Calm parodies, aside from the Keep Calm And Make Tea poster I used in the Collage Of Doom (oh my god who made that poster? I know it's someone on this journal but I went to look it up and comments are gone from that LJ entry) try the Get Excited And Make Things poster. I'm pretty sure that's hanging on Jack Baker's wall in some alternate universe.

(no subject)

So! People are interested in ISBNs, and in a press that provides them.

My life often takes directions I did not think it would take.

(This is why I have developed the foolproof answer to the "Where do you see yourself in five years" interview question. I will share it with you now, because it is genius. You give them a very sincere look and say, "I tend to find that life isn't that predictable, so I put my energy into serving the job I've been assigned to do to the best of my ability. I prefer to focus on the work at hand and practice being flexible about the future." Why yes, I am awesome!)

I want to stress, given the discussion we had about publishing on Tuesday, that you can get an ISBN for free from Lulu.com if you publish through their website. The cost comes in some extra formatting you have to do to your front matter, and perhaps in the touchy area of Lulu being listed as your publisher. I don't believe Lulu being the publisher has any actual legal ramifications, but certainly it means that whatever you publish will officially have had its first print run, which apparently makes books unattractive to publishers. As e-publishing grows more common, I suspect they may have to change this policy or GTFO.

I suppose the advantage to forming a co-operative publishing company is that it's a little more guerilla. You're not working with a corporate entity. There's a human being providing guidance without trying to sell you anything, and let's face it: Lulu exists to sell you stuff. They're a vanity press, they've just made the process more user-friendly by not requiring you to buy a huge stock of books in a single go. So a publisher working through Lulu is acting as a sort of bodyguard, getting you through the process without getting you fleeced.

There was a lot of interesting discussion in comments about how such a press would work, what its standard of print would be, that kind of thing. Really the point would be to get the ISBNs without having to go through Lulu, but it also became evident that this could be a new kind of press: one that accepts work that meets a certain level of quality rather than work that one believes will sell. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not -- I think it is, but I also wonder whether that concept lowers standards as a whole, makes a publishing house into a vanity press in and of itself. I don't think so, because sometimes shitty books sell really well and great books languish, but who can say. And who establishes the code of quality? I'm pretty sure I've been down that very wanky road twice already, when Skyehawke opened and again when it instituted the Illiterati. Which I suppose does make me a veteran, at least.

This is all very weird -- I don't often foray this far out into uncharted territory. I'm still learning, but even the experts at this stuff are only a few steps ahead of the amateurs.

And in the meantime I have plenty of edits on Nameless to work through, so I'm letting the rest rocktumble.

I am totally going to go home and take another nap today.