Marinated Publishing

You can't be anywhere in the reading/writing blogsphere and not be privvy to all the self-publishing love it - hate it conversations going on.

When I was a wee child of advanced years (heh), self pub is what a person did because their writing sucked. Self pubbed = can't write. In fact, maybe about 5 or 6 years ago, I mocked a fan fic writer for self pubbing a horrible story because well, the story was horrible and she admittedly was doing it to try and cash in on the fan angle of fan fic.

She didn't know how to write and she seemed rather straight-laced and her book tanked as well as it should. But then a few years later JA Konrath started passing out the Kool Aid and Amazon was handing out the Kindle candy and everything changed.

I wanted to follow the trad route to publication. I'm not a young woman and my dreams have been around a long time. I believed in publishing as that golden tower in New York where agents were dapper and book deals were discussed over martinis and borscht in the Russian Tea Room and it was something.

I wanted that.

So I wrote a little book and got a couple of epubbed offers and I signed with Lyrical because they seemed classy and it was a good choice. I had an amazing editor, Antonia Tiranth and the process was awesome.

Carolyn subbed a story too and joined Lyrical and it was way cool.

Then we subbed our book The Bodice Rippers everywhere and got the best rejection letters ever. Everyone loved it and no one would publish it. So I badly formatted it and we self-pubbed it.

Carolyn has pubbed 4 books with Lyrical. I've pubbed three books with Lyrical, one with Noble Romance, two short erotica with a press that folded and I've self pubbed three novellas and an anthology.

I've gotten really good at formatting. Lea's covers are so excellent that we're trying to launch her as her own business. Antonia, my original editor, is willing to freelance edit for us and so we've decided to be our own business.

MARINATED PUBLISHING

The Marinated is a joke because we (Carol, Lea and myself) met on a fan board for a musical group called Il Divo. Carol and I are fan of the bariton Carlos Marin so we claim we've been marinated.

This is Carlos by the way. He sings even better than he looks which means he's fucking amazing.

Anyway, last night I uploaded a well formatted file of Letters from Greece onto Createspace and Lea tweaked and tweaked the cover to perfection. The ebook is being released on July 9 by Lyrical but we'll be releasing the paperback through Marinated.

After this, we'll be publishing as Marinated only. We have a roster of four authors right now and a release schedule of three definate books and more on the pipeline.

I know I'm crazy excited. I've discovered that the journey of publishing changed in my head from one of being agented and sold to a New York house to one now of endess conversations with Lea about covers, constant tweaking with formatting and planning sessions with Carolyn.

Controlling the writing from the first germ of an idea to the finished product is amazing. I'm glad we decided to take this step.