Not even five hundredths
A lot has been said about the margin of error. Or victory. How small it can be, and how such a small thing increases the size and meaning of easy-to-overlook details. I personally love Al Pacino's speech from Any Given Sunday. The cover for the first book has been done for months. For a similar span, the book has been available for purchase electronically at non-Amazon type places. I get a royalty check here and there. The plan, though, the plan was to push things through over at Amazon in the same interval to become visible to that many more readers. There was a whole timeline, which I dismantled with my incompetence. First the file was in the wrong format, so I had to go back to my artist. Then, it required one image, which included the front cover, the spine, and the back cover. I went back to my artist again. He was very kind to me, making all these after-the-fact changes. All of this because I wanted to fix an issue I had going back some nine years now.
At my publisher, before it went under, they decided on a very aggressive light purple, almost pink, for every spine and every back cover that they produced. The first cover of my first book was dark, to match the tone and subject matter. It is difficult to describe my level of disappointment when my copy came in the mail. It was mixed with the excitement of holding my work in my hands, so it was a complicated stew of emotion. I couldn't deny that one of the main ingredients was that something was wrong. I spent years ineffectually pretending like it didn't bother me. It was one of the main reasons I decided to stick with the publisher. If one was going to be - lilac, the color is called lilac - then they would all be so. I would crowd bookshelves with blocks of the offensive color. I would shock people with the quality of my writing after they reached, unsure, for that first volume. And then, when I re-released them again later with different art, as successful authors are want to do, I would buy back all the originals. I dreamed that the only record of their existence would be an obscure Wikipedia entry.
So, there I was, all my rights returned, a great new cover completed (he made the back cover black), all I had to do was put in the right information in the right order and I would be on a redemption path. Ten years later, where I wished I had been in the first place. Amazon has a previewer for print books that allows one to see what the cover and inside pages will actually look like. It requires a stamp of approval from the author for obvious reasons. However, unless everything jibes perfectly, the approve button will not appear. I had to go back to my artist three more times. I articulated, with my very limited understanding, what Amazon was saying from across continents, an ocean, and half a dozen time zones. It was a very discouraging process. I exchanged half as many emails with Amazon customer service, and it really did seem as though they weren't understanding me. That added frustration to the discouragement. All because of .048 inches. I will never forget that number.
A friend helped me out. It was a moment of evidence against those who would argue that money is more directly valuable and esteem is more logistically helpful. I cannot buy all the things I want, and despite how much I've worked, and for how long, I remain unknown. However to be able to reach out and touch, eventually, a person who has what I've needed, or known what I needed, and the willingness to help me has been invaluable. I wouldn't be here without them. For this friend, it was a labor of half an hour, and most of that was fiddling with the language of the image editing software he was using. I might have marveled more had I not been so emotionally deaf to the whole ordeal. Part of me had honestly given up, assumed it wouldn't happen. To protect myself, I think my mind had cocooned my heart in a distant kind of obliviousness, encircled my center in a kind of distracted concrete. I had almost forgotten my login and password. But I can attest: Late is better than never.
So, I'm just going to put this right here, lean back, and sigh for a while.
At my publisher, before it went under, they decided on a very aggressive light purple, almost pink, for every spine and every back cover that they produced. The first cover of my first book was dark, to match the tone and subject matter. It is difficult to describe my level of disappointment when my copy came in the mail. It was mixed with the excitement of holding my work in my hands, so it was a complicated stew of emotion. I couldn't deny that one of the main ingredients was that something was wrong. I spent years ineffectually pretending like it didn't bother me. It was one of the main reasons I decided to stick with the publisher. If one was going to be - lilac, the color is called lilac - then they would all be so. I would crowd bookshelves with blocks of the offensive color. I would shock people with the quality of my writing after they reached, unsure, for that first volume. And then, when I re-released them again later with different art, as successful authors are want to do, I would buy back all the originals. I dreamed that the only record of their existence would be an obscure Wikipedia entry.
So, there I was, all my rights returned, a great new cover completed (he made the back cover black), all I had to do was put in the right information in the right order and I would be on a redemption path. Ten years later, where I wished I had been in the first place. Amazon has a previewer for print books that allows one to see what the cover and inside pages will actually look like. It requires a stamp of approval from the author for obvious reasons. However, unless everything jibes perfectly, the approve button will not appear. I had to go back to my artist three more times. I articulated, with my very limited understanding, what Amazon was saying from across continents, an ocean, and half a dozen time zones. It was a very discouraging process. I exchanged half as many emails with Amazon customer service, and it really did seem as though they weren't understanding me. That added frustration to the discouragement. All because of .048 inches. I will never forget that number.
A friend helped me out. It was a moment of evidence against those who would argue that money is more directly valuable and esteem is more logistically helpful. I cannot buy all the things I want, and despite how much I've worked, and for how long, I remain unknown. However to be able to reach out and touch, eventually, a person who has what I've needed, or known what I needed, and the willingness to help me has been invaluable. I wouldn't be here without them. For this friend, it was a labor of half an hour, and most of that was fiddling with the language of the image editing software he was using. I might have marveled more had I not been so emotionally deaf to the whole ordeal. Part of me had honestly given up, assumed it wouldn't happen. To protect myself, I think my mind had cocooned my heart in a distant kind of obliviousness, encircled my center in a kind of distracted concrete. I had almost forgotten my login and password. But I can attest: Late is better than never.
So, I'm just going to put this right here, lean back, and sigh for a while.
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