Writing a book for fun is all very well and good, but once it starts to become serious and you consider self-publishing, there is a cost. As many of you will already know, there are no guarantees that you are going to get a cent of that money back, so you have to be prepared to lose all of it. The first company I approached didn’t work out because I would have had to practically re-mortgage the house. Yes, this new adventure is now very important to me and would be a huge achievement (even if only a handful of friends and relatives buy it!), but not THAT important. I don’t even gamble when I go to Vegas!!
I have touched on this dilemma in an earlier post; when that door closed, another door opened. The company that I’m now working with seems to be, so far, a better choice altogether, and yes, the cost is much more acceptable, but still, deciding to potentially throw that money away was a huge decision for my husband and I to make. My motivations were (and still are) more emotionally driven, whereas my husband was thinking more along the lines of ‘we could renovate our en-suite with that’. He had his mind on the financial risk, of potentially recouping next to nothing. Both of us could see the other’s point of view but neither wanted to be the one to make the final decision.
Then, over the Christmas holidays we were out with friends for dinner. Us girlies sat on one side of the table and talked babies, children, motherhood and general girl stuff! Across from us the boys talked about… whatever boys talk about! These friends knew about my book and my recent aspiration to become a published author. The book was discussed between the four of us at some point in the evening, and then, later, it turned out we ended up having separate boy/girl conversations about it. Unbeknown to me, while us girls discussed the content (of course!), the boys were discussing the financial dilemma. It wasn’t until I had to make a final decision about the offer Friesenpress had made that my husband relayed his side of the conversation he had had that night…
It turned out that our friend had helped my husband see that really the non-financial benefits of supporting me in this venture far outweighed the potential loss of the amount of money we were talking about. Why not throw the money into it, even if it is just to fulfill a sense of achievement, he asked him. It was apparently the non-invested outsider’s perspective my husband needed to hear to steer him towards saying ‘ok, let’s do this’!
Since then I have received my pension pay out, so the money in the end wasn’t as big a deal as it was back in December. However, we were out for dinner again with these friends at the weekend. Inevitably the subject came up again, as they are aware that things are moving along with publishing. It gave me the opportunity to offer this friend the HUGE thank you I owed him, and to get his permission to tell this anecdote.
Then there was the conversation about the content. Both these friends are anaesthetists, she being my husband’s colleague. She was somewhat in awe of the fact I had even written a book, never mind the whole publishing thing. At some point in the discussion she put herself down by saying she felt rather inadequate, as she was ‘just a boring, part-time aneasthetist’! I protested that anaesthesia is far from boring anyway, but I also pointed out that, if she watches this space, I am about to make being a female anaesthetist even more interesting and very, very sexy!!
louiselindley 