Summer thoughts: On publishing

I’ve been amazingly (and wonderfully) busy, reading the first two book manuscripts for the new publishing house. Okay, let’s be truthful. I’ve been reading one (Laila El-Haddad’s), and Bill the spouse has been doing the main reading on Chas Freeman’s first of two manuscripts.
Also went to Philly for a meeting (unrelated) with AFSC.
Also been doing more work on the Just World Books website, etc. I am really excited at the discourse-stretching aspect of the whole book-publishing project; and I was really buoyed up by some feedback I got from a longtime friend who’s been in mainstream publishing all her life and expressed real excitement at the JWB project, saying niche publishing like this really is the future of the business…
Bottom line here at JWN, though, is that I see I haven’t blogged since Monday. That’s how it goes in blogging.
Reading through Laila’s manuscript, which is a compilation of many of her blog posts and other writings, December 2004 through June 2010, has kind of confirmed the intense, personal, quirky, and incredibly rich quality of the whole blogging experience– and therefore also of its product.
By the way, Laila’s manuscript will be not one but two books! Yay! Just a bit more work of tweaking and editing before we can start laying out the pages, producing the books, and making them available to the waiting public! Let’s say as of now that we hope to get Gaza Mom, Book 1, out in late October, and Book 2 out in early December, in time for the second anniversary of Israel’s launching of the 2008 assault on Gaza.
… I have also been hoping to blog some of my own thoughts here on the nature of and prospects for our country’s horrendous continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq…. (Snip. I’ll make the rest of this a new post.)