Back from the printer!

Book publishing is just SO much fun when the books finally come back from the printer! There it is, the beautiful finished work! All that sweat and blood and grumpiness vanished in a trice, wiped from memory as one holds the new compendium of words and knowledge and wit in one's hands. The pleasure of presenting to the author the fruit of their long labor is wonderful. The author gets to forget the suffering endured from the editor's nit-picking, the publisher's money worries, the printer and the shipper taking FOREVER. But at last, here it is, a physical object, immortalizing the author forever.

Now the publisher has to get down to business and market the heck out of the thing and get the damn piles of boxes full of books out of the warehouse yesterday. And then there's all the accounting, and paying out royalty checks, and convincing reluctant distributors that they really do want this marvelous little gem in their catalogs...

For now, though, it is simply a delight to hold the book and turn the pages and smell the fresh new-book scent. WAY better than that pukey artificial new-car smell, by the way, which is toxic anyway. And books last much, much longer than automobiles, both in the physical sense and in the minds of their readers.

YAHOO!