Brochure printed.
The advertising has begun. We printed personal cards and pamphlets for distribution at the Fiddler’s Green convention this weekend. They are plain, but tidy, and nice to look at. At least, nice for me to look at. It’s hard to avoid a thrill at seeing your own name under a book title.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a bit less thrill. Eileene is delighted at the whole process. She’s the one with the skill to assemble graphics and text, and to manage a web site (amateur-friendly Moveable Type notwithstanding). She’s excited to be part of the process. I, on the other hand, have a bad case of nerves. It isn’t really fear, at least not at a conscious level, but an unfocused anxiety I get before performing. Stage fright. I’m going to be trying to sell my book, and to some degree myself, to people in the publishing community. When I put it out of my mind, I’m merely nervous. When I imagine you readers out there looking at even these harmless paragraphs, my hands…well, they don’t shake, exactly, but my typing gets awfully jerky.
I went with a public domain graphic of a sphinx for the pamphlet, a Greek urn version of the sphinx, not the Egyptian monument. It would never have occurred to me on my own, but when I saw it in a list of graphics, a sphinx made a lot of sense. It’s a readily recognizable figure of myth, and the most famous of riddlers. (Well, Bilbo and Gollum are better known these days, but they aren’t public domain. And Odin is a riddler who might be more famous, but not famous as a riddler. But I digress.) Though I enter the publishing phase with an open mind, prepared to take any suggestions an established professional may offer, I think I’d like to keep a sphinx on the cover of the real printing.
The inner two pages of the pamphlet contain a condensed version of the introductory chapter. I wanted to clip out cautions about sources, but found that what remained was still too large for a single sheet, so several paragraphs of flavor text had to go, too. A shame, but anyone interested can read the entire first chapter here at mdlake.net, since the address is on the brochure.
The back page is the Rules themselves. That isn’t giving away the store, is it?