Category:

Reuniting Myselves

10/27/2015

Way back when... 2008 and which seems two lifetimes ago. Depending on your perspective, it can be. Like, if your a hamster.

I'm not a hamster though. I'm human. Nevertheless two lifetimes ago I made a decision to separate Me, Myself,and I. But my attempts at creating a clone army has failed and I blame George Lucas. He made cloning look so easy in the movies.

Anyway, Me, Myself and I get along so fabulously I've decided to reunite myself. That means content from second blog will be transferred to Green Gecko Publishing, promotions for GGP titles will show up on mr-jordan.net and my book is going into the GGP catalog. The latter has to do with convenience and finances. Creating one publishing company that doesn't make a profit on Bowker makes way more sense. Creating zero even makes more sense, but myself threw a temper tantrum and got her way. Me and I are bad parents, clearly. Though something of a compromise was reached. No Bowker until 2016. Probably.

I'm busy on Passion for Cats and then Passion for Dogs, so the changes will happen slowly and sporadically, but they are coming.

~
Me, Myself and I

The Life of a Small Publisher

6/6/2015

Monday through Friday, I get up at seven, take a shower, eat breakfast, feed the cats. I occasionally brush my teeth.

I arrive at the day job by 8:30, have a coup of coffee and prepare for a busy day. Around 9: am the chaos begins. Students arrive for Experience. Footfalls thunder overhead. The building rings with excited shouts of forty to a hundred children on their field trip. I grab my things and head to class. At lunch, I have a forty minute break and then its off to teach After School. At 5:30 I head home eat dinner and feed the cats.. My work day wraps up about nine, because I don my publishers hat after dinner. I have made commitments to authors and I feel terrible about not having already met those commitments.

Saturday I go horseback riding with a friend, though I have to get up at seven.We have lunch and sometimes I stay at her house for dinner. It's the only social life I have right now.

By Sunday, I'm exhausted. I procrastinate about donning my publishers hat and half the time end up lounging around the house. Geumbi cuddles every chance she gets. She's a foster cat turned adpotee, and she can't get enough love.

Three days after bringing her home from the shelter, she had her second bout of fatty liver. She was so skinny at the shelter, but I didn't know about the health risks.

She was a sad cat that was (still is to some extent) stressed and anxious. She was abused by the man in her first home, sent to the shelter, sent to a foster who returned her back to the shelter for non-stop mewing and all the while, her real problem, her teeth went untreated.

For our first month I had to tube feed her off and on until she gained enough weight and her liver healed. I developed a strong bond with her through all this and due to her stress, I decided that this would be her last home. It was shortly after this that I learned she was allergic to her teeth. When I say I have to feed the cats, it's not a normal routine. It's trying to medicate and coax one into eating while staving off the the other. Bear loves first, second and third breakfast.

Often, when I sit down to get work done, my cats want my attention. It's hard to say no. Maybe I'm only a cat mom, but I feel the working parent guilt. Thankfully, fifteen minutes of scratches is about all Bear wants. Geumbi, however, will snuggle for hours if you let her. Everyday she gets a little happier and a little more normal, but we've lost the battle with her teeth. Next Tuesday she's having all but her canines removed.

What's left is an uncertain future for GGP. When I started this company, I thought it would be easy. This was based upon a very limited experience and a thought. They're doing it, so can I. And it was exciting!

When I look back, I think, how naive. The summation is, being a small publisher is completely different from being an independent author. Tedious is one word that comes to mind often. Exciting only happens when the project is nearly finished, and then it is fleeting. I have one thousand and one more things to do, and a sad cat sleeping on a blanket next to my computer, patiently waiting for snuggles.

What's Happening

6/4/2014

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Today is election day in Korea. That means no work. So I worked on GGP stuff.
Progress is slow but steady these days and the back log of stuff is getting done.. The database has helped me catch several minor, but nonetheless important things.

And thus I spent the better part of the day tracking down missing records for Dirty GRE. Also accepted the last story of the twenty, so that title is no longer seeking submissions.

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Go database, go!

5/21/2014

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My old system

I've been thinking for two weeks now, that I ought to take a second run at getting some non-fiction stories for Passion for Ghosts. I knew shortly after, how I would go about it and that I'd want to notify the current GGP authors.

I had just one problem: an incomplete contact list. Well, this has been a big problem actually as I needed it for other things (like payments and, the very technical "other stuff.")

However, the way I was going about building the contact list-- searching for correspondences to get the email and insert the most infective method here, blah, blah, blah.

Obviously, the easiest way would be to remember to add writers to the contact list but remembering to that is kind of like when I was fourteen and I kept getting in trouble for forgetting to turn shower back to faucet. I still forget despite countless accidental showers (see Korean bathroom) that has resulted in becoming moderately waterlogged to saturated (it really sucks when this happens before work). Okay, so I've digressed.

Two weeks ago when I started setting up the database in-between editing, I had no idea in what ways it might be useful. I had an idea there were, and I'm going to get technical here (as if this joke wasn't already old) "things" and "stuff."

My new system. See it has pretty colors.

So to make this long story end, the database enabled me to create a contact list in under an hour instead of days. I also was able to fix some pen names and because it's a database, what I changed in one place, has been updated on other linked whatchamacallits. This is another extremely technical publishing term.

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Yeah, I can do that and what's happening behind the scenes at GGP

5/18/2014

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A few years ago idea lightning struck. "I know, I'll start a publishing company!" Since first getting struck by this idea, Green Gecko publishing has Passion for Horses and Passion for Weird Tales, and this year Passion for Ghosts, Passion for Puns, Passion for Dogs, Passion for Cats and the Dirty GRE are slated for publication.

In the process, I also learned why small publishing houses close their websites shortly after opening: it's not easy. Also, there's a lot more paper work than I ever imagined.

And while organized chaos has worked well for me to an extent, it has meant slow going in the publishing business.Well, here's a teensy bit of personal wisdom: You can't know what you don't, and since you don't know what you don't know, you don't know what questions to ask to learn what you don't know but need to know. Confused? Great, now it's not just me.

Anyway, I've decided to record my publishing growing pains publicly. (If you were worried I was closing my doors know that doing this is a love-hate self imposed purgatory. I hate the work, but I love the books when they're finished too much to quit.) As for the specific growing pains, here's a look behind the scenes. Well, actually it's not a look, because I don't have a reality TV crew following me around and so there's nothing for you see beyond the words I type here.

Technicalities aside, right now I'm in the process of importing spreadsheets for authors, payments, book titles, story titles, and( to be seriously technical) "stuff" into Access.

I've never used Access before, so progress is akin to watching paint dry. So why am I torturing myself? Because I've spent countless hours duplicating data on this spreadsheet or that spread sheet, only to end up with this or that wrong and gosh, I'd just want to look the author of those two Dirty GRE stories that share the same word but I've disorganized my chaos, gahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

It's going to take me a solid month to get my chaos organized again, but clueless as I am about Access, there will be long term benefits for writers (and me. Mostly me.) as GGP continues on it's mission to share passion and puns, and articulate the world one dirty story at a time.

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Passion for Dogs Closed

5/10/2014

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Passion for Dogs is closed to further submissions. Only four authors with submissions for Passion for Dogs have not received information about their story status. All four stories are being considered for Passion for Dogs.

If you have submitted to another project and not received a response, please let me know.

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My Week in Couplets

4/8/2013

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In preparation to write my first post of this blog, I thought, "Write something interesting about what you did last week." OK. Interesting….but then I realized that last week my work was not very interesting. In fact, it was super boring (for you, of course, I kept myself busy). So, to bridge the gap between interesting and what actually happened, I thought I'd spice it up. Here's last week a la Dr. Suess:

Though the day was dark and gloomy,
my working spot was bright and roomy.
Looking for the perfect place,
to find myself some free ad space.
Adverts posted, ad space found,
time for corporate look around!
Six dozen sites or there about,
I feel I have new skills to tout.
It's not much, but one thing's certain:
I can FIND a corporate contact person!
Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, too.
Just a couple things I have to do.
Though the work’s not much to mention,
Perhaps this style caught your attention.
Don’t worry though it’s not the norm,
Next week, I’ll scrap the poem form!

Later, Blog readers!

Author: Shannon Anderson

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Meeting Day

4/3/2013

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Wouldn't you like to conduct business here?

Me too.

Today was our bi-weekly meeting. We discussed mundane things like remembering to comment on submission for the Cat Photo Contest.The contest started yesterday and it's off like a heard of turtles, so submit those cat photos!

We'll be start a weekly to bi-weekly publishing and books round up, so if you have some links to interesting stories please send them in.

We're also planning a meet and greet to introduce ourselves locally, so if you live in local Nashville be sure to come out and see us. Shannon is in charge of this little project.

Our editorial intern, Gari Grooms will be leaving GGP but I deeply appreciated her while she was here. In the meantime I'm on the prowl for a new editorial intern.

I finished up the sponsorship video, voice overs and all. It sure did take a while, but I think it's good. If you're waiting to hear from me, it's been a busy past two days, but I should get to emails tomorrow.

I need to do a few site updates including fixing the links on Passion for Horses. What else... ah, yes. I will be creating a review information packet for volunteer reviewers that are not internet savvy and/or don't know where to submit reviews. Of course packet is a bit of misnomer because, ideally all the information will be contained in one page. Just trying to keep it simple.

Finally, Shannon will be joining us on the blog. We'll sign every post with our names so you know who is writing.

~
Renee` Zuchniak
Editor
Green Gecko Publishing

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GREEN GECKO PUBLISHING

Reuniting Myselves

The Life of a Small Publisher

What's Happening

Go database, go!

Yeah, I can do that and what's happening behind the scenes at GGP

Passion for Dogs Closed

My Week in Couplets

Meeting Day

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