Haymaker vs Haystack
Lesson Learned © diane green
It’s not like writing is something new to me. Heck. I was writing poems when I was in elementary school. I even illustrated them. When I finally managed to convince my mom that art school was worthwhile, what did I do upon graduation? I joined a rock and roll band! So yeah ok, I’ve been busy.
But I never knew anything about publishing a book. I was kindly introduced to Substack by a friend last year just as I was starting to write a book. ADHD poster child that I am, I wrote fast and furiously losing grip on editing and format as I was researching and getting distracted over and over again..
I remember reading ages ago about sending a paper manuscript of one’s book to various publishing houses…the big ones, yeah? Knopf, Simon and Schuster, Random House, Macmillan, Viking, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, even Ballentine…I read many of all their star writers’ books. But by 2023, I was ready to be a self published author, since, of course, I belong to the “blank generation” as sung by Richard Hell when I was just exiting my teen years. I’ve been a DIYer for decades.
So on I went with my book, “God is a Woman in a Rice Field” with a title I summoned when I was only 15. At first putting chapters here on Substack then eventually gulping down the nerve to publish my book on Kindle. Yeah! an eBook! I can do that.
So the swirling rabbit hole opened quickly and I raced along the Wall of Death with no Maureen Swift to back me up. I was getting emails and phone calls trying to ignore them as I tried ever so intensely to figure out how to put page numbers on an eBook?
I finally gave in and returned a call to a so-called book publisher with “Amazon” in their name. They actually have no real connection with the actual Amazon.com or even Kindle unless you give them your username and password. So I will repeat that which has recently been repeated to me: “Writer Beware”!
It took about four months for me to realize how badly I was getting ripped off.
The worst of the worse was that they quickly got a version of my book published in the “case laminate” format, something I never wanted. The Table of Contents - what I was having a rough time figuring out how to make in the first place - was hideously wrong in page numbers and even chapter titles. As I looked through the book I found many errors, realizing these that people had not edited my book. No one had even read it. Plus they charged me well above retail for a minimum order of 25 books. Well it was when these first 25 books arrived that I discovered and came to grips with the reality of how badly I had been swindled.
However there was one word…the last word in the first chapter…that seemed more than anything else to captivate the entire affair. The last sentence in the first chapter said, “Abby could sell a needle to a haymaker.”
Wait a minute! What?!
Yes. I had to look that one up. Haymaker = a punch, a blow…according to Wikipedia: Punch (combat) - The name is derived from the motion, which mimics the action of manually cutting hay by swinging a scythe. The haymaker is considered an imperfect/impure punch, as the angle of approach is unsupported by the remainder of the forearm.
That it was. All together. The final blow.
I called the credit card company. I called the Chicago Lawyers for the Creative Arts. I was not gonna let these people go until I got every bloody red cent back that the fraudulent book publishers took from me.
I went back to editing my book, replacing book numbers, correcting chapter titles and odd words here and there including the final word in the first chapter: “Abby could sell a needle to a haystack.”
And maybe my experience can create a Haymarket Riot.
Thanks for reading! Tips are welcome: https://buy.stripe.com/28og1L26o26J3E4cMM