"The notion that such persons are gay of heart and carefree is curiously untrue. They lead, as a matter of fact, an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats."
- James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Do not adjust your TV*

*For you young'uns, this was a line from the TV show "Outer Limits", which claimed to take over your TV set for an hour every week. If I could only have that power...

What I mean to say is "Calm down everyone. Everything's fine."

You may notice, to the right of the page, there is something missing. Freezer Burn is no longer advertised. If you go to Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, you will not be able to order it in e-book form. It looks like it's still available in paperback, but I think you may only be able to get it from third-party vendors before too long.

It's okay.

My contract with the publisher for the rights to Freezer Burn ended this summer, so I sent her a little "head's up" email that I planned to take my rights back. Not because I was horribly unhappy and trying to gnaw my foot off to escape, but because I have found, even with all the work I'm doing to promote and market all my books, I just like having the control. It makes it easier. Mostly, I like being able to fiddle with the price and offer freebies and do things that I don't need anyone else's consent to do.

I sent the early email primarily so I could buy up any leftover stock of my books. I figured, if she had cases and cases of my books laying around, I'd need to know now so I could start saving my pennies to purchase them all. She's a busy publisher, and I thought I'd hear from her eventually and we'd work it all out and I might have Freezer Burn republished by the fall.

Imagine my surprise when she sent me a very cordial email, granting my request early. As in, that day. Turns out, she only had 26 copies of my book left, so that was an easy purchase. And just like that, with a snap of the fingers and a letter via email, my rights to Freezer Burn reverted back to me.

This means, instead of working on the third mystery and the Snoopy memoir, and even the horse show mystery, I am frantically digging out my final draft of Freezer Burn, commissioning my cover designer to put something together and trying to get my first book back on the e-shelves.

Stay tuned - I'll definitely keep you all posted. While you're waiting, here's a little craziness for you to watch over and over again.

2 comments:

Tameri Etherton said...

Okay, that Corgi is way too funny. If he does that every time, I would start to mess with him, like run around the house before feeding him. Then he'd gnaw off my fingers in the night, probably, but it would be worth it.

SO glad you've got the rights to Freezer Burn! Now you can go wild and dance like that dog.

Gayle Carline said...

I'm actually thinking of starting a company called Dancing Corgi Press - ha ha ha!

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