Casperian Books Blog

Technically, I’m on vacation this week, though nobody has noticed so far, since I haven’t actually pried my fingers off the keyboard long enough.

Mindful of the fact that I am theoretically not working, I did take some time off yesterday to go to our local SPCA’s biannual fundraiser book sale and returned with whole paper grocery bags full of books. While I was putting the finishing touches on the cover of the March release and uploading it to the printer, the SO got started reading and is currently on chapter 14 of the first book. Methinks we didn’t buy enough to last us until the May sale.

In the meantime, I’ve caught up on orders and e-mail and everything else that needed to be done this morning, and I will step away from the computer now until some time this evening. I’m even wearing my determined face.

My somewhat longer-term plans include to vacation further by holding a basting spoon in one hand and a manuscript I’m currently reading in the other come turkey day–though in this house that day actually involves roast lamb and other Greek delicacies, since the designated cooks (the SO and myself) broadly fall into the categories of Cretan and raised in Athens.

Most importantly though, our next major manuscript review session will be over the Christmas break, which means that if you’ve been thinking of querying us, now would be a good time to get started on that process. We’re reading mostly for spring 2009 at this point, with one slot left for fall 2008, and I have approximately 48 hours of flight time lined up between December 21st and January 6th, so I should be able to get through a fair number of manuscripts.

One of the side effects of having an author writing in a fairly scary-but-almost-real universe like Manna Francis’ Administration is that, occasionally, I have edits like this:

Really, really important question: are you terribly attached to that [unusual in the English-speaking world] name for the torture victim? Only, I think my sister might get all paranoid and think I deliberately had the character named after her…

I’m glad to report that after Manna had stopped laughing hysterically, she was only too happy to change the name, so my sister will still talk to me come Christmas (maybe).

I also had some longer exchanges recently with a writer who was preparing to give a work shop on small presses, and who asked me to give him some feedback on the pros and cons of running one. I almost replied, “Dear Santa, for Christmas, I would like everyone who queries us to have read at least one of our books.” Manic D Press actually has it as part of their submission guidelines for reasons similar to mine, and as with them it isn’t necessarily a question of sales (though we’d be turning a profit this year if it happened). Rather, it’s a question of getting submissions that are appropriate to our editorial vision and up to the writing standard we expect. (Conversely, as an author, I would never, ever want to sign a novel to a publisher whose work I hadn’t seen and studied in some detail to make sure they could turn out a professional-looking product.)

A little anecdote concerning the question of appropriateness: I’ll never forget that practically the first submission we got after Mouth of the Lion was published with the, I thought quite obviously, deeply ironic tag line “Family Values for the 21st Century,” was a submission for “a Republican chick lit novel that would also appeal to a Conservative male readership.” Now, anybody who’s read Mouth of the Lion could probably tell that this would not be a good fit, not in a million years… I grant you it’s hard to judge a publisher by just that one novel, but now that we’re up to five novels, with three more coming out next spring, it should be getting a lot easier to get a general idea of where we sit on every fence.

A while ago, a prospective author got upset because while he got a reply from us within the time specified on our website, it wasn’t a yes or no, but some questions/clarifications for the query. As a result, we upped our response time a little and specified that “response” doesn’t necessarily mean yes or no.

However, I do have something to share that will put that into perspective: I just received a response for a query I sent out more than two years ago! So really, a 1-2 week turnaround is probably pretty damn good for this business.

Or at least I’ve had countless hours of fun with the Gender Genie, which invariably guesses my gender wrong. Try it out on some of your stories!

Today is National Coming Out Day and the twentieth anniversary of the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and the first public display of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

We here at Casperian Books are quite proud that four out of our five current titles feature LGBT characters in one form or another.