Ran into a friend this afternoon at the dollar store, which led to coffee and about 3 hours of conversation ... including the possibility of my getting to publish three books for his group over the next several months!
I would love to "get back into publishing" for stuff other than my own projects ... as long as this time I'm able to actually make some money at it. The book I did "for hire" last fall was the sort of thing I'd be happy to be doing ... and I was reasonably well paid for my time on it. If I could get a couple of projects like that a month, I'd likely be able to make something approaching a real paycheck for my efforts.
There's a lot of details to be dealt with on this. Last fall's book was done via print-on-demand (after an initial run with an overnight printer) on the client's own account - so I'm not getting any residuals from on-going sales on that. This 3-book project looks like it's going to be coming out under Eschaton's aegis, so I'd likely to be getting ongoing income from them. However, it sounds like they want to do a big initial order from a regular print place (for hardcover books), so the funding of same is going to be something that needs to be dealt with (by them, trust me - I'm not in a position to pull together that cash!).
I guess one of the best things I did when I started Eschaton a quarter century ago was to buy a block of 1,000 ISBNs, as I still have 900+ of them, giving me the ability to pretty much rush anything into print without having to mess with that end of things (or have books come out with one of the print-on-demand services' ISBNs - which is often "poison" for distribution).
Got my fingers crossed ... I really do like shepherding books into print!
