I am very, very happy to have signed Phaethon to Pandamoon Publishing, and for a lot of reasons. One is the obvious writing career landmark. Another is that I met my new best writer-friend and possible alternate universe twin Tiffany Rose through Pandamoon. On top of that, I have faith that the editors and artists are going to faithfully execute our collective vision for my weird little book and that the result will be amazing.
But more than anything else, I am happy to have signed a book with Pandamoon because the book is their problem now.
I have self-published two books, with plans for a third. These books, the Planetary Tarantella trilogy, were never meant to be a big deal. I started writing them to see if I could, because I wanted to, and always intended to just throw them up on Amazon if I published them at all. Of course, it turned out that 'just throwing them out there' clashed with my work ethic and hatred of all things half-assed.
I ended up hiring an artist for the cover and an editor for the interior, and then doing every other job involved in book production myself. I finished the cover designs using the commissioned art. I formatted everything for Kindle. When people requested a paperback edition, I designed that, too. In the end, the first book took more hours of my life to release than it did to write in the first place, and the whole time I worked on it, I was a huge jerk to myself. Nothing I did was good enough. I'll sleep when this is done became I'll sleep when I'm dead. Whole chunks of the project were scrapped and started over. Sometimes I would wake up thinking, I need to get back to work, followed immediately by My, the boss is in early today, isn't she? I learned more about two separate word processing programs than I ever thought possible.
The book got done. I managed to avoid getting into any actual fistfights with myself over what a horrible boss/employee I was.
But I am SO glad that Pandamoon has the next one.