Carina Press

Hmm, 7pm on a Monday night and I almost missed my weekly update for the first time. Not good!

I feel like I don’t have a lot to report lately, because a lot of what’s happening is behind the scenes and well, not terribly exciting unless you want to hear about me conquering the contract system (I inputted eleven contracts today. Go me!), our path to getting cover copy written (it’s going, it’s going) or about all of my various travel adventures.

Okay, well, I DO have to share part of my travel adventures from last week. I was in Toronto for meetings with the team until Wednesday. Typically, my experience with the Toronto airport and specifically getting through customs and security is not a positive one. Last Wednesday, it took me a grand total of FIVE minutes from walking up to the customs booth to get my passport stamped to going through the security scanners. Seriously, five minutes. There was no one around. It was eerie! Last time, I stood in line for an hour. Heck, getting into Toronto through customs took me an hour. But that’s not all, I had a flight from Toronto to Philadelphia. There was no one in the boarding area (bad sign) but the flight wasn’t announced as cancelled so I had hope. When it was nearing time, they called me to the podium by name. That is ALWAYS a bad sign. But, it turns out? There were only two of us on the flight. Two. On the whole flight. I’ve never had that happen, and certainly not flying between two large cities. It was quite weird. But I had a whole half a plane to myself. Sweet!

Unfortunately, when I woke up on Thursday I discovered that though I’d declared nothing at customs, I had brought home a souvenir: a cold. Bad cold. So I didn’t do much work–almost none–from Thursday until today. Thus why things are a little blurry. Thankfully, I have learned that it’s better not to do business when my head is fuzzy, because I’m generally not as lucid and sensible as I think I am. But let’s see what else I can tell you…

While I was in Toronto, we had a Live Meeting phone call with as many of our authors as could join us. It gave us a chance to introduce the team, talk about the plans we’re making, the launch, and let the authors ask questions. They seemed to enjoy it and we’ll be doing it again in a month!

Cover art is getting done at a furious rate now, as is back cover copy, and hopefully we’ll be able to bring the two together and share them at the same time in the coming weeks. I’ve hired more copy editors and will continue to do so. Have I ever mentioned that good, thorough, competent copy editors are like gold? They are!

Coming up this week and of particular interest to some of you, I’m sure, is a submissions update. I’ll be spending at least a day, possibly two, updating submissions, sending out emails and making some phone calls. And I’ll post an update on the blog when it’s all done. I think I have submissions reports from the editors on over 100 submissions. The past two weeks of traveling really put a damper on my ability to do any work in that area.

On the blog coming soon, I’ll be doing some speed dating with the content editors. You do want to know what kind of salad dressing they like, right? Okay, seriously, if you have a question you’d like me to ask all of the editors, or a specific editor, in my speed dating round, please shout it out in the comments.

Last, if you’re in the New Jersey area, I’ll be at the Liberty State Fiction Writers Conference this weekend. I’m not sure but it looks like you can still register if you’d like to attend. I’ll be doing editor pitches, giving a workshop and sitting on the editor panel. There’s also a booksigning if you’re a fan of authors and want to get some books signed! If you’re attending, please find me and say hello.

Greetings from the Philadelphia airport. After a trip to New York City last week (more on that in a bit) and a weekend visit from my parents, I’m now on my way to Toronto, the Harlequin offices and the digital team for a whirlwind three days of face-to-face time and meetings. We definitely have some things to discuss while I’m there, and tomorrow especially I have a full day of meetings, so I’m hoping it will be a productive trip.

Last week I spent most of the week in New York City, attending the Tools of Change* conference, where I gave two presentations. Tools of Change is one of my favorite conferences because it brings together over 1000 publishing professionals for three days of workshops, presentations and keynotes about the future of publishing, and digital publishing in particular. I love the conference as much for the opportunity to interact with other publishing pros as I do for the information imparted there.

As I said, I gave two presentations. One with Kassia Kroszer of Booksquare on new business models and specifically the challenges we at Carina have encountered getting Carina set up, since we’re utilizing existing backend workflow, as well as the benefits of using a new business model. The second presentation was with Jane Litte of Dear Author and Sarah Wendell of SmartBitches, regarding “what readers want” in digital reading. We did a survey and received 2700 responses, so that data helped with our presentation. I was there to act not just as a reader, but to give a publisher POV, acknowledge some of the issues publishers face and give ideas for what can come next.

I enjoy speaking, but I find bigger conferences like this a little more nervewracking, and it does seem a little harder to relax and enjoy the conference when much of your time is occupied with making sure your presentation is good to go! Although, I must say, Tools of Change also holds conferences in places like Frankfurt (and I heard a rumor about Toyko!) so I wouldn’t complain about giving presentations at those locations

While I was away last week, I was able to share some of the new cover art with you here on the blog. I hope you’ve been enjoying it, there’s definitely more where that came from! I’ll see about putting up a few more this week. And I’ll try to have a submissions update for the blog next week. We’ve been flying through submissions, now I just need to sit down, update the spreadsheet and send out more letters (and make more calls, I believe!)

*Quick story that tickled me. My picture is on the home page of Tools of Change site in the upper right corner (I don’t know how or why, but cool, no?) Someone at an event I was at was bothered by how very familiar I looked to them, since we’d never met before. We tried to figure it out and then I realized, “My picture is on the ToC home page.” And that was it. That’s why I looked familiar. I think it’s a good example of how people will see something (like a cover, title, some marketing thing) and process it without realizing and then, when confronted with the actual thing (in this case me) think they know it or have heard of it. Marketing works, no?

This post is going to be a shorter one because I’m writing it up from my hotel room in New York City in between practicing for the two presentations I’ll be presenting tomorrow (Tuesday) at the Tools of Change conference. There are somewhere around 1000 publishing professionals here for this conference, and though I certainly won’t be presenting to a large percentage of them, it’s still enough to make me nervous!

Last week was a good week for Carina. I talked some more on the blog about submissions, including giving a glimpse into what we loved about the books we eventually acquired and what the editors are specifically looking for. I also shared the first official Carina Press cover, and will be sharing more of them this week on the blog as I’m able. I’m afraid it will be a bit of a slow week on the blog (see paragraph one).

I’m still working on hiring copy editors. Some of you have heard from me and others have not, because I’ve been visiting and revisiting emails and tests. I won’t get to that again this week, but it’s on my list of things to address when I’m in the Toronto offices next week.

I had a question I wanted to ask those of you who visit the blog. I’ve asked the webmaster to add a few things to the blog (like a subscribe to comments plugin) and I wondered if there was anything you’d like us to change/do differently on the blog, that would make it more user friendly? I’d like to hear your suggestions.