She’s losing her mind and she feels it going…

Today I found out that we were supposed to do an ad trade with someone for Bare Bone #8 but I didn’t put the ad in the book. John arranged the trade and I don’t know if he forgot to mention it to me or if I just don’t remember it. But either way it didn’t get done.

Publishing is an on-again off-again business but I wanted to be the company that always did what they said they would. Presses are notorious for pushing back release dates and canceling projects at the last minute. I wanted our books to come out on schedule and I wanted to keep all promises to authors, readers and anyone else we dealt with.

I now realize that is a much bigger challenge than you would expect. Delays in release dates can be caused by any number of things. If you miscalculate one aspect it can through the whole thing off. Maybe you simply underestimate the amount of time it will take to get the project done. Or stores and distributors are late with their payments so you don’t have enough cash for printing. The project you just finished didn’t get quite as much interest as you were counting on or it got a lot more interest so you had to spend more time on it. You didn’t get as much help with promotions as you thought you would. Since you’re usually working on more than one book at a time, and they are often at different points in the whole process, the possibilities are endless.

I bet Murphy’s Law has some statues that apply specifically to publishing.