bladespark | Can't get a break

Every time I get good news, something bad has to happen. Every time I take a step forward, something has to kick me in the teeth.

Jaffa Books, the furry publisher I've been with for years and years now, is closing down. All upcoming releases canceled.

I JUST signed THREE fucking contracts with them!!!!

And none of them are for things I can send elsewhere, either. I mean, the whole furry vampire collection thing felt like a *miracle* that they wanted it, because absolutely nobody publishes single-author short story collections unless the author is fairly famous, which I am so not. Now I have all these stories, several of which are too long to go in the usual dozen-stories-on-a-theme anthology, all of which are quirky and unusual and hard to find homes for, none of which are erotica so I can't dump them in the self-publish queue (if that project even works out because right now it's looking like it might not and I might end up scrapping that too, and having even more unpublishable stories I get to just sit on and do *nothing* with) and I just...

I am completely crushed. I don't expect the world to get handed to me on a silver platter, but I work so hard on my writing, SO, SO, SO, SO HARD, and it seems like every time I get any traction with it at all something has to come along and yank that back. (And that's not even getting into my other bad news today which if I start on that I'm going to end up saying things I probably shouldn't.)

It really feels, though, like I can't get a break. Like I haven't had a success that wasn't immediately tainted or thrown back in my face or turned out to not actually mean anything since... I don't know. Publishing Honey Pie on the ponyfic site in 2014, I guess. But even if that was a pure joy at the time, it also came to failure eventually.

I was so excited. I was going to mail a copy to my paramore who kinda appears in fictional version in one of the stories in The Sanguine Canvas, and now that's just...not happening. For no reason. Because the universe wanted to be cruel to me today.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

alexseanchai

What the fucking bloody fuck. How DARE they do that. How dare they even consider signing a contract when shutting down operations is a realistic impending possibility.

Um. Tea?

bladespark

Heh. Tea is good.

And I don't know. I can only assume some sudden disaster happened, or...something. It's a very small press, nearly a one-man operation, so it's not like it's some big corporate to-do. But I admit I'm kinda angry about it too. I was so excited. I almost do hope it's a disaster, because otherwise it's a complete betrayal.

armaina

aauuuggghhhh

What did they even do like.. stuff like that doesn't happen by accident. Maybe it could be a good thing? If you can find another publisher that is..

What are you looking for in a publisher, I know some people that have done book covers for erotic furry books, I have no idea if they used the same publisher but if they don't I could ask them to ask the author for what publisher they use? And what publishers have you already tried/used that didn't work out.

I haven't "tried" any publishers with this. The problem isn't that I don't know any publishers, I have a list of furry publishers that I actually believe is quite complete. But the slightly odd circumstances that resulted in Jaffa Books wanting a furry vampire story collection from me is unlikely to be repeated.

The first rule of submitting to a publisher is you do *not* submit things unless they say they take those sorts of things, because publishers generally reject "I know you don't publish this, but..." out of hand without even looking at the story itself at all. Every submission page I have ever seen has things such as "Novels in these genres can be submitted X way, and here are the themes for the anthologies we are collecting, submit those Y way." "Here is an anthology, but the theme is of my own invention and all the stories are mine" does not fit that.

I'm *not* going to be that person who submits things that publishers are not asking for, because I'm just so special I can ignore their guidelines, it's pointless and useless and futile, and a good way to get on a publisher's shit list if you should happen to have something they *are* asking for later.

I *may*, maybe approach Thurston Howl about it, as the Jaffa Books' owner said he had specifically asked them about possibly taking on their authors, so that's at least not submitting something out of the blue that the company doesn't even publish at all, but I don't have particularly high hopes for that, as it really is almost unheard of to publish single-author short story collections from an author who isn't already well known. It was shockingly unusual that Jaffa wanted the collection in the first place.

Edited Date: 2019-02-19 08:17 am (UTC)

Yeah the anthology thing is a unique case, I just wasn't sure if you had other non-anthology stuff that would need help for this. Good luck with the new publisher. Even if they don't do single author anthologies, maybe they'll at least host a multi author anthology that can work with the ones you've written.