Launched by a Gibbering Gnome

There are probably as many ways to go about publishing a book as there are ways of writing one. As I conceived the Moon Realm series and wrote the first several books, I envisioned a publishing journey that involved agents and editors and publishers—oh my! But after so many queries and so few offers of representation, I realized I’d have to come to terms with going it alone. But I didn’t want to be alone. So I did what any good, sensible writer would do. I started making things up.

I hadn’t planned it. I didn’t just sit down one day and think, well, what comes next? I didn’t make a list. I didn’t see it coming. I was sitting on my porch on a beautiful day. I’d made a PDF version of the first book to slap onto a Kindle so I could show a friend how it was coming along. But there, at the very bottom of my title page mockup, was a lonely space . . . right where it was supposed to say Scholastic or Bloomsbury or Hyperion Books for Children or Viking. (Ha! Viking! What, am I supposed to believe they actually have Vikings working there? And even if I did believe—I mean, anymore—what about Viking Penguin? Are these Vikings and Penguins working side by side? Or are we talking Viking Penguins? Like the kind you might wake in the middle of the night to find waddling through your coastal village, swinging axes and carrying torches?) I had even once entertained the idea that the bottom of my title page might say—key heavenly music—Candlewick Press. But no. All I had was this big white place of hopelessness, messing up an otherwise perfectly typeset page. Empty. Desolate. Abandoned. Devoid of all meaning.

Actually, the writer in me perked right up. Oooh! A blank space! What am I going to do with that? The story of how L. Frank Baum named OZ rose to mind, but I didn’t need to name a world. I needed to name a press. It had to be dignified, something with both gravitas and chutzpah. Or maybe something hard to pronounce, like Houghton Mifflin, or Knopf. (As unlikely as it may sound, those names were already taken.) And then, in the beat of a butterfly’s wings, it came to me: an idea so obvious one might have imagined it sitting right there in the room, or maybe perching . . . on a three-legged stool.

At the bottom of the title page I typed: Gibbering Gnome Press, a Division of Ingenious Inventions Run Amok, Ink. And just like that, a new indie press was born.

With editing nearly complete, and my press needs met, all I needed now was to find a top-drawer illustrator who LOVED my book. The way I saw it, I had better odds of riding a tornado to Oz than of finding a professional illustrator who loved The Moon Coin. More on that next time. By the way, what ranks above top-drawer?

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The Moon Coin, by Richard Due, is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the iBookstore for $2.99.

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Copyright © 2011 by Richard Due. All rights reserved.

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Gibbering Gnome Press, A Division of Ingenious Inventions Run Amok, Ink^®

The Moon Realm^®