I just received the final line-by-line edit of my novel from my agent and we will begin submitting to publishers next week!
It’s almost done…. publishing a novel will be the achievement of a lifetime dream … one I set aside to nurture my marriage and family to the point of unassailable strength …. here is a list of my regrets in making my husband and family more important than my personal ambitions…
Wish me luck! Wish me a sale! Can’t wait to hand that check to my husband, for all he has done for me over all these years.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
AHHHH!!! Congrats! And good luck!
Love your list.
LikeLike
Congratulations! I’m so excited for you, and I agree with having absolutely no regrets for putting marriage and family first. I’m sure your husband has no regrets for putting you guys first, either.
LikeLike
Well done indeed Janet, congratulations.
LikeLike
Good luck, and put me down for a copy!
LikeLike
Awesome! I will be in line to buy it!
LikeLike
Congratulations, JB! Your list of regrets was the epitome of eloquence.
LikeLike
Congratulations, and good luck.
LikeLike
Congrats to you JB! Can’t wait to see this on the shelves!
LikeLike
🙂 Well done!
LikeLike
Congrats JB!
LikeLike
Buyer here.
LikeLike
Great news, JB. As a former editor who did that kind of line-editing, I know that some authors welcome it and others don’t. I suspect you’re the former. Sounds like you’ve got a good agent (though sad that agents have to do this work that editors at publishing houses used to do. The world has changed.)
I very much look forward to buying and reading it. Epub version. If your eventual publisher isn’t doing “digital first” you might want to rethink signing with them…
LikeLike
What is digital first!?!?
LikeLike
Wish me luck! Wish me a sale! Can’t wait to hand that check to my husband, for all he has done for me over all these years.
To me this almost sounds like bearbaiting for feminists…
However, congrats and good luck, I look foward to seeing you on the best sellers list.
LikeLike
Did you put the words “bearbaiting” and “feminists” in the same sentence?
Shhhh….
LikeLike
Good luck to you! If you need a handsome fella to pose for the cover, let me know.
LikeLike
The list looks really long..How do you still manage time for men’s rights and writing so many blogposts?…OMG…best of luck. 😛
LikeLike
I think you could publish a book based on all the work you posted on the web. Plus some of the comments. That would be exceptionally exciting.
But, maybe political correctness would make it hard for you to publish.
LikeLike
He may have meant go through the Amazon Kindle. With it professionally edited, a good cover and blurb, who knows what may happen?
Considering you keep 70% of the revenue from books priced between $2.99 to I think $7.99, it does not take much to start raking in the money. Take a look at the comments at this site on how many people have been doing so well self publishing.
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/08/2014/indie-authors-quitting-their-day-jobs-redux/
Considering that you have a fan base, you have a head start in getting noticed.
LikeLike
Congrats.
I think essay is your natural ground. But trying a novel? Why not?
Better your pic appears in the back cover of the book cuz you are very attractive.
LikeLike
Most publishers are moving to a publishing schedule where ebook versions are released at the same time as the first print edition. The practice used to be to embargo the ebook edition for a period of time to spur print sales, which in some cases really only spurred piracy. “Digital first” merely refers to the new simultaneous release in both Kindle format (.mobi) as well as epub for all the other ebook outlets.
As for Jeff’s comment, for some authors, self-publishing on Kindle can make sense, but the benefit of a publisher is the ability to gets advance review copies (ARCs) to reviewers and other marketing efforts. Most review outlets won’t review self-published books.
LikeLike
Very interesting. Thank you for explaining that. I know that advances are not just pulled out of a publisher’s ass but are based on calculations of expected sales in different formats (hard/trade/soft). How do the ebook sales factor into advance calculations?
LikeLike
Say to go, JB; way to go! Mark Waldie. 🙂
LikeLike
Congrats 🙂
LikeLike
I am ejoying so much this struggle WomenAgainstFeminism vs. WomenAgainstWomenAgainstFeminism.
It is the proof that women are compulsive liers and not only lie to men but they lie to their sisters.
Now, this WomenAgainstFeminism are tasting female´s medicine (all the manipulation about the concept “feminism”: one thing is what diccionary says and the other thing what actually is) and they are in rebellion against the semantics//facts manipulation.
It means that all the shit that is written in female magazines -as I suspected for years- is a bunch of lies. Lies FROM women TO women. But not only from feminists to anti feminist women, but, as well, from feminists to feminists.
I belong to a generation of men who used to read Cosmopolitan, in the 80s and early 90s trying to understand the female mind in order to shag as much as possible. But I always suspectd there was something wrong there. Too much contradictions not only speech/facts but as well speech/speech.
Now the Queen is naked, we are going to have a lot of fun laughing about the Queen. And thinking that she is not only naked but she is retarded.
LikeLike
Nietzsche was right: women are a surface with the costume of a depth.
LikeLike
Congratulations! Just getting an agent is an incredible achievement. I have a novel that I am about to begin querying agents on, a baseball comedy. Any advice?
LikeLike
Authors usually thank their agents in the acknowledgement section of their books. Take your favorite sports books and find out who the agents were. Start by querying them. That’s my advice. Good luck!
LikeLike
Well done!
LikeLike
It’s been a while since I’ve read a standard commercial publishing contract and your agent can probably explain ebook royalties better. But yes, advances are generally calculated based on about the anticipated first year of sales or so. Sales tend to be more front-loaded anyway, with most sales coming in the months after publication. Therefore, it can take a while for the advance to “earn out” in actual royalty earnings; many books never do “earn out.”
Advances are normally paid in installments. A typical arrangement is for a third to be paid on signing the contract, a third on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript, and a third on publication. Though it can vary from publisher to publisher.
Royalties on hardcovers tend to be higher than trade or mass market paper and often contain escalators that jump the royalty rate as certain sales milestones are met (say 10% on the first 5,000 copies, 12% on the next 5,000, and 15% on sales over 15,000 copies). Trade and MM paper tend to remain the same.
Those may seem small percentages, but with most publishers, royalties are a percentage of the cover price, and since books are sold at wholesale discounts approaching 40%-50% of the retail price, royalties effectively represent a larger percentage of the per-copy revenue than the royalty rate. (This whole Amazon/Hachette business in the news recently is really over Amazon trying to force a much bigger discount from publishers.) Some publishers base royalties on percentage of revenue, so if an author is offered this, the percentages should be higher.
You’ll probably also see something about a “Reserve Against Returns,” a portion of royalties held back for a period of time. This is because print books are generally sold on a fully returnable basis. Which means, if a retailer doesn’t sell a copy, they can return it to the publisher for full credit. But only hardcovers are actually shipped back; Trade and MM Paper have the front covers removed and sent back. The books are supposed to be discarded/destroyed. But you’ll sometimes see street vendors or flea market vendors selling books without the front cover. Don’t buy them; the author gets paid zero for those copies.
My understanding is that ebooks are handled a little differently, usually paying a percentage of revenue received. This is because the sales model can differ between ebook outlets. But ebooks are becoming a very significant part of a books sales, still, as far as I know, under 20%, but growing.
LikeLike
Oh, JB that’s such wonderful news!!!
I’m ecstatic for you, and also envious as can be.
I’ve started five novels in the past seven years and haven’t finished a single one…you are my inspiration to get off my backside.
YOU ARE AWESOME!
LikeLike
OMG! OMG ! OMG ! You are so awesome ! Please,please… never ever stop cursing. You seem to have managed the impossible, be a lady in your deeds and beliefs and curse like a sailor to scare the shit out of those hypocritical femtards.
All the very best in your endeavors. I am envious of your husband [in a very nice way !]
LikeLike
Or a fishwife? Fishwives are well known for their cunts and arseholes. Ooh er!
LikeLike
Well done! Do you have a title? Will it be available in Britain? Or an eBook that I can eventually pirate? (I’m kidding on that last one…promise).
LikeLike