Watch Me

The print copy is taking longer than I thought to get ready. Oops.
I spent most of Saturday formatting the book's text and fighting with page margins. Turns out when you shrink the page margins your book gets longer. This is probably common sense for some people, but I never put two and two together to realize that. With 1.5 spacing and the new page margins Twisted went from 337 (about) to 623 pages! Whoa. I was a little bothered that the book was only 300 pages(ish) but 600 pages? Um...unless I'm trying to write the next American thriller book, that's WAY too long.
I shrunk the spacing from 1.5 to single. Now it's a respectable 423 pages long. I can live with that. What I'm not very happy with is how much of the royalty I'm NOT getting. The book is going for about $13.50 in American money (I'm new to this so I don't know how to calculate money from other countries) and I only get $1 from that. Um....hello? (short gripe) I wrote the book. Why are they getting all of the royalty?
Yeah that was a real shocker to see last night, I was reasonably upset to see how little I was getting. Why do the publishing companies get all the money for the author's hard work? Anyway, I'm holding my chin high. No one expects me to succeed. In fact I wouldn't be too shocked to learn that people expect me to fail. Like one of my relatives who gave me a well aren't you adorable? kind of look when I told them I was writing a book. I'm sure that they thought it was impossible for a stupid little kid like me (and I was a stupid little kid. Weren't we all?) to be able to write and publish a book.
Can't wait to show them the print copy of Twisted and say "Yeah. I wrote and published this. What did YOU do this week?"
Expect me to fail? Don't expect me to succeed?
Watch me.
I've done things in this past year that surprised myself. I stayed on a cantering horse (major accomplishment, first time I did that I nearly flew from the horse's (Scarlett, not Gypsy, I don't think Gypsy would allow me to go soaring off of her) back when she took a corner too sharply) I managed to survive the woes from the editor. I DREW THE COVER FOR A BOOK!!!! And I didn't even know I could draw that well on the computer. Go figure. Then I learned how to read html, how to fix the dpi and size of images. How NOT to quit when things go wrong. Then I read the entire Lord of the Rings series in a month.
In other words I've surprised myself. There have been times when I look at what I've done and I don't see it as an accomplishment. That's stupid. I'm published and I'm only eighteen. It would've been when I was seventeen....buuut the editor took longer than I expected, but oh well, her work was excellent.
What I'm trying to say is, who knows? Who knows what's going to happen? I refuse to think that my book won't ever be noticed. I KNOW it will be. The reason I kept going was because I firmly felt that my book needed to be read that there were people who needed to read it.
So now I just need to finish the print version. Sheesh.