Please note that this post is NOT a review of the eBook Hard Lessons by Sommer Marsden,  although you can purchase the ebook by clicking on the cover.   This non-affiliate link is being provided because the cover image fits today’s post so well.

I’ve heard it said that life’s hardest lessons are the ones which you don’t quite grasp and have to keep learning again and again.    I am learning today.   What is funny is that the lessons I learned today are actually all things I quite thought i had mastered long ago.   I’d like to think I have always kept the really important lessons like  ”always keep your word”  and “never talk down about someone behind their back”.     But clearly  I forgot some other lessons like  ”always get it in writing”   and  ”don’t spend money until you’ve nailed the whole thing down”.

All of my real friends are still my real friends this morning.   People who have come to regard me as honest and honorable over the course of the past 47 years or so I’ve been on this planet  still know me to be an honest and honorable person.   (I guess I also didn’t forget the lesson about who really gets dirty when you start throwing mud.)    Putting on a hat doesn’t make one a cowboy.    And it seems that even writing a brilliant book is far from enough to make one a published author.    In my humble opinion,  what authors should most look for in a publisher is someone whom they trust.    Bringing a book along from a manuscript into actual readers hands is a unique process that takes a great deal of trust between writer and publisher.   And if that trust just is not there,  it is not possible for the relationship to work.

I will  continue to read manuscripts that come my way.    I will  find books to publish and make money from publishing.   I won’t spend any time crying over spilled milk.    I won’t let anyone else’s bad behavior inspire me to behave badly.    I suppose I should most be grateful that this deal fell apart before I spent more money than I did.    If you have no idea what this post is in reference to,   I made a brief statement on Libdrone Books  Facebook page.     That will be my only comment regarding this matter.

I spent most of the day copy editing Black And White.   While it is in fact a novela,   Biljana brings to the crafting of each line of prose, a poet’s  extreme care and craftsmanship in the choice or each word and the construction of each phrase.

Most of the editing was simply a matter of deleting formatting which does not work for eBooks,  and especially manually removing every  extraneous hard return and page break  (an eBook is one long uninterrupted stream of text).        I plan to completely set the manuscript aside for the next 24–48 hours so as to be able to read it with a somewhat fresher eye.     I am also recruiting a couple of beta readers to give it a final once over.   But the process of turning Black And White from a manuscript into an eBook is well under way.

It appears that Biljana needs to be offline for awhile.     I know that she has been concerned by the amount of time that social networking sometimes takes away from time spent writing, working and living.    I can’t promise you when Biljana will again answer fan mail or pop in to her blog to post a picture or say  hello.    But  the publication of Black And White will definitely continue.   And I will for now hope that the day will come that Biljana  will decide to log in again and say hello.    Or at the very least that she continue to write and allow me to publish such amazing books.     In which case she is more than welcome to skip Facebook and Twitter and let me handle marketing her work.