My book is a book!

This showed outside our (very very hot) Belt offices last Friday:

Bill, our shipping guru, was out of town. I am afraid to operate our freight elevator. So Dan showed up to help me get this pallet through the doors, up three flights, and into our office.

They look gorgeous.

In June, I was with Meredith, our co-Creative Director, to do the final final final changes to the book before sending it off the printer. We had a chat about back cover colors and design. I adore what we came up with:

Those stripes! That orange!

After we hauled all the heavy boxes in, I sat down to take a look. I am in love with the little labels Meredith added throughout the interior:

Then I got to signing:

Cute, right? (This one might be yours!)

Since Bill was away, and we wanted to get these puppies out to our beloved people who put in direct orders (thank you!!!!), I moved to the shipping table, stuffing the signed copies into envelopes, printing out labels, slapping them on, and then putting boxes of labelled packages ready to go to the post office by the door. (This is also a long explanation of why I skipped this newsletter last week….)

Bill is back now, and packages are winding their way through the battered, slowed, humid United States Postal Service, and should arrive at your doorstops….soon. (And for you fabulous supporters out there, we’ll be reaching out for mailing addresses, do not fear!)

Once these beauties arrive, pedants and wanna-be pedants can start searching for the errors we intentionally embedded in the book. The answers can be found on a website we set up; the url is in the back of the book. Happy hunting! Oh — and you can read the book too. (If you want to hear me chat about the book, you can listen to my convo with Andrew Keen for LitHub here. It was great fun.)

Meanwhile, I have tons of new ideas. Some of them are coming to me via emails from folks who have great suggestions for cool new projects Belt might do. I can’t wait to have the headspace and wherewithal to start playing around with them. I have been thinking about the endemic problems with POD, and the work we do at Parafine Press with hybrid publishing, where we use IngramSpark. I have….thoughts. We are also crashing two new titles on the future of higher education, and those are keeping me busy.

All this to say that I cannot wait until… next week? the week after? when I can again publish posts about publishing per se instead of publishing posts about publishing a book about publishing. (I am definitely amusing myself this fine Thursday morning, the 12,398th day of the plague.) If you want to read those posts to come, you’ll need to become a paid subscriber (sorry not sorry) ($30/year), but you can do so on the cheap with this link which knocks down that price a bit. Bonus: you help Substack, which has this incredible fellowship program for writers. So cool.

Thanks for going on this ride with me.

Oh hey also: I’m teaching my book proposal course again, starting August 3. Join us!

Notes from a Small Press is a weekly, subscription only newsletter by Anne Trubek, the founder and owner of Belt Publishing. Subscribe to keep reading.