Come now, come dry your eyes

Everything I considered writing about this week seems so negative to me today, as I sit here at the substack dashboard. Our distributor taking out huge “misc” fees, diminishing our January payment for sales in September (we don’t know until the day the payment is processed how much our September sales will net, after they deduct returns, their share, and fees, and the January amount was less than I had estimated, and yes we are paid in Jan for books sold in Sept). The “best of 2020” lists being circulated that don’t include our titles, damnit, and we hustled to get galleys to those outlets on time to be included, and have really good titles coming in 2020 (see a few of them here.) Those photos by review editors showing their enormous piles of galleys gathering dust, which cost us so much to send to those folks, posted with the subtext: “I’m never ever gonna even open that envelope you sent.”

But these are the small annoyances that grate, and stick out when casting about for somethi…