The SLUSHPILE Blog

I have been severely short on time this week. A Bermuda Triangle of teenager sports and after-school activities has formed around me and sucked me into a void of complete non-productivity. As an example, here is my schedule for today:
5:30 Get up
6:30 Go over Publishing Business for the day (including this blog, which hasn’t been [...]

I’ve gotten word from Gail MacMillan, author of Ceilidh’s Quest, our recent Maxwell Award winner, that the Toronto Globe & Mail has requested a copy of her book to possibly review.
The Toronto Globe & Mail is to Canada what the New York Times is to the US. It’s huge. Fingers are crossed that 1). the [...]

Updates:
For those wondering, we did find a new fuse for our furnace, but it still isn’t working. Turns out blowing the fuse was a symptom, not the cause of our problems. The blower isn’t spinning, and just makes a weird humming sound when it is supposed to be clicking on. We WD-40′d it and once [...]

As it is Monday again, I’m trying to get back on track with the editing series that we began on James Spurr’s pending release of One Sloop and Slow Match, his sequel to Sworn for Mackinaw (the second of a planned three book series).
Our last edit took us to the end of the first page. [...]

Busy is such a good thing. It means there are a steady stream of orders coming in for our DWAA Maxwell Medal Winner Ceilidh’s Quest by Gail MacMillan. It means that Skylar Hamilton Burris, the author of our bestselling Christian Romance title Conviction: a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, has turned in her [...]

After blogging about first his illness and then his death, I thought that some readers may be interested in putting a name, and a face, to the family member just lost to us. Below is his obituary which I took from the Heslop Funeral Home’s website. Anyone wishing to sign the condolence book should go [...]

Yesterday we got the exciting news that our Double Edge press title Ceilidh’s Quest by Gail MacMillan WON the DWAA Maxwell Award in the category Books: Non-Fiction.
This was Gail’s third time for winning a Maxwell Award, having won twice before for previous works. It didn’t diminish her exaltation, however. As she told me, she was [...]

Yesterday I delved into the accounting end of publishing, and my illustrations of books cannibalizing other books may have been a bit discouraging. How, you may have ended up thinking, does anyone, publisher or writer, make any money at this?
It is possible, and so, today, I want to delve into the more encouraging side of the [...]

Well, we missed the Monday Editing Series, but as it is already half way through the week, we’re just going to shelve it for now and pick it up again next Monday.
Sunday was of course my ‘no-Blog’ day, as I try to take at least one day a week off from work entirely.
Monday was ‘hospital [...]

Well, enough with gloomy reflections for a while.
On the upside, I had several good things come to me yesterday.
The first is that author Skylar Hamilton Burris is close to completing her second book. She expects to be submitting it to us sometime in the next month (of course, I know how my own deadlines go, [...]