Solipsistic Meanderings » For want of an artist … (the book was lost?)

December 26, 2005

For want of an artist … (the book was lost?)

I’ve been considering Publish on Demand very seriously lately. I’m tired of waiting for agents to respond, the long delays, the lack of communication and the exclusivity that they all seem to require from you. Once an agent accepts your book to read, you can’t submit it to anybody else. Or, they phrase it as, "we’d prefer that you didn’t" or "we give more consideration to exclusive works". I’m sure there are plenty of people who go ahead and submit to multiple agents at the same time and even have a few agents/publishers reading their manuscript at the same time as well but it feels somewhat dishonest to say that somebody is exclusive and then do something else.

However, as I mentioned before, I’ve gotten tired of all the waiting. I’m a naturally impatient person and waiting without any updates makes me even more impatient. If somebody told me, "OK, we will be done by such and such a date and we’ll update you then", that works for me. But if somebody tells me that they’ll update me and then don’t, that makes me even more impatient. Yeah, it’s all my fault :p

The thing is, I’ve got six other books (at least) that I want to write. But I don’t want to proceed with them till I’ve figured out where the first one has gone or is going to go. The direction of the first book will to an extent decide how the others evolve. So, I’ve been impatiently waiting for something to develop with the first book and I’m tired of waiting any longer. Once I’d done the research on Lulu a couple of days ago, I was leaning more and more towards going with them and so putting the waiting to an end once and for all. Unfortunately, there is one thing stopping me – a good cover 🙂

I don’t want to slap any cover on my book and start publishing it – I want the right cover. I had looked around for artists and I had finally found somebody a few months back. He seemed perfect and I really liked his work. It turned out to be a bit of a struggle to find contact information for him but I was able to finally contact him and then it turned out that book covers weren’t cheap 🙁 This guy was a nice guy though and when I told him that I couldn’t pay him much since I didn’t have a book deal and might even have to self-publish, he said that he’d read the book and if he liked it, he’d do the cover and will wait for payment until such time as I could pay him or get a publisher. I sent him the manuscript but haven’t heard from him since then.

I tried to contact him a couple of times but nothing. However, after I sent him off the second e-mail yesterday, I did something I should have done in the first place, I went to his site and took a look :p It appears that he has been pretty busy – gotten married, gone for big conference and so on. So that’s a lot of stuff to take up two months and might explain why I haven’t heard from him. However, since I haven’t heard a word from him at all, I have to conclude that perhaps he’s too busy (or too annoyed by my queries :p) to do anything about my cover. So I’m on the look out for another artist now … Anybody out there? Anybody at all?? :p