The SLUSHPILE Blog

January is fast coming to a close, but I’m feeling a immense sense of satisfaction and relief. It appears as though I will finish out the month nearly caught up and back on schedule (darn that internal mental image I have of where I should be versus where I am. Rarely do the two correspond, but when they do, it brings on a feeling of near euphoria. Can you say the words work-aholic?)

So, where am I?

• 1099’s done, filed and mailed. Back around the fifteenth, I believe. No authors or merchants waiting on that one last tax form before being able to file. Not from me, at any rate. (And if you are an author or a merchant that hasn’t received a 1099 from DEP, go ahead and file without it. The amounts in your instance fell outside the guidelines of 1099 filings.)
•  Transferring Hummingbird World Media from one sales platform to another: 90% complete. All of Martha Dougherty’s pictures are now availabe (and at new, reduced pricing!). Considering that she added well over 400 new pictures during the process to the over 1400 pictures that were already on the old site, and you get an understanding of the immense tast this was to have her again set up and running on a new sales platform. The first thousand of her pictures can be found here (the site cuts off at 1,000 results in a single ’search’) but I recommend viewing by category, which can be found on the left side of the page.
• With Martha’s pictures in place, that leaves only two vendors to move, whose catalogs are only in the hundreds rather than in the thousands. I won’t say that it will be a snap, even comparatively, but I foresee having them done in the next week to ten days.
• Probably of more interest to many of you reading this blog (and who have hung in this long), is the progress of those writers who submitted via the Florida Writers Association Conference in October. The first batch of response letters were mailed this morning. Some letters are inviations for the writer to submit the entire work for a final decision on publication. Others, sadly, are ones expressing my regret that I don’t foresee a place in the Double Edge Press catalog for them at this time. Some of these decision were extremely hard to make and have to do more with budget and time constraints than quality and story premise. EVERYONE turned in such good works, and I distinctly remember praying as I finished out the conference, my booty in the form of multiple submissions in hand, that if I were going to publish all of these that God would need to provide a way in the form of more money and more time.
• Which brings us to the Silver Bullet. Yes, I’m still working on that. No, I haven’t impletmented it yet (see third bullet point of needing to move two more vendors to the sales platform). Yes, I will update you as it progresses, but if it succeeds to the extent of my wildest imaginings, you’ll be aware of it sooner or later even if I don’t. I’ll leave it there for now.
• The last and final thing to be done this month are royalty statements and checks to be mailed by the 31st. I’ll be working on those this week and expect to have them in the mail by Saturday.

After that, it will be February. The second batch of submission responses will go out, leaving only a few that will need attending to that were late comers or ones that I put aside for a second look. By then, the full manuscripts should be trickling in and I’ll be busy going through the entire works of those selected, offering contracts and setting a publishig schedule for the next year to eighteen months.

BTW–Double Edge Press will be celebrating its five year anniversary April 15 of this year. They say (whoever ‘they’ are) that it takes five years before you can expect a business to be profitable. I can agree with that. But we’re close, and by year’s end, we may just hit that milestone. Regardless, in looking back, all I can say is the old and trite, “We’ve come a  long ways, baby!” And we’re just getting started.