June 3, 2012

• Whistle While You Work

  You may have noticed I did not mention work at all in yesterday's post. I did so because I knew it would be long enough to be a post of it's own and the post I had already written about the month of May was more than long enough to start losing your attention  

  The publishing company assigned me two manuscripts at the same time, we'll call them EB4 and EB5. Both were relatively short and thus should have been just as easy, if not more so, to edit than one longer manuscript. The catch being was I had to attempt to keep track of two due dates and my memory is not always what it should be. I could have sworn that both manuscripts were not coming out until the mid- to end- of June which would mean I didn't have to get the ms edited until the first of the month. 

  You may recall my possibly mentioning that there was a snafu in the previous manuscripts, EB3, due date as well. I can't recall if I wrote about it here or maybe just mentioned it on facebook or just whined to a friend about it. Anyways, on that manuscript, whomever was filling out Delphi (which is the behind the scenes website for authors and editors to check their assignments and share documents and such) put one due date for me, and another for the author. So when the author emailed me freaking out about the looming deadline, I was wondering what was the deal considering we still had three weeks. Yeah, turns out someone typed mine in way, way wrong and we only had one week. 

  So one of two things happened that caused me to be confused about EB4's due date. Either I just wasn't paying close enough attention to the dates OR someone messed up typing in my date and later corrected it without notifying me. To this day I am still not sure what the release date is for that manuscript. It is either the first of June -which is also the due date for EB5- or the fifteenth, which makes about as much sense because the due dates are to be four weeks before the pub date, and neither of those dates fit. 

  It also didn't help that my boss had canceled two work meetings in a row prior to that wonky due date. During those meetings I go over my assignment information, though I should check it far more often I suppose. Last month we actually only had ONE work meeting, which would have been awesome had I known they were going to be canceled with more than an hour's notice. I turned down plans twice because of said supposed meetings. Anyways, I found out that I was LATE with EB4 during our single meeting of May and freaked out. I asked boss-man for an extension and managed to not only finish the second round of content edits, but did a third as well. How awesome am I? Though the cooperation of the author was very crucial. She is my fave of all the authors I have thus far worked with, as I had worked with her before and will be doing a third manuscript with her soon. 

  I managed to get the EB5 in on time which is actually a two-in-one book. It was all right when I read it, but very "tell" instead of "show" and so I asked for some changes -one being to entirely change the point-of-view perspective. Instead of doing what I asked the author did something else with it, and made it even worse in tone. I had the author change it yet again and, due to that little horrible side-route, the author actually got to know the main character better and the story ended up being really good. The stories are only ten pages each, so it only took about a week per rewrite thankfully. We managed to get it to my boss for formatting one day before it was due in line edits

  Yesterday we surprisingly got mail -seriously, mail on a weekend?- and I actually got a little something from work. You guessed it, my very first pay cheque from the publisher! Sadly, only three books of EB1 sold in the first three months it was out which is the same amount of books sold in one month for EB2. I know for a fact that one of those EB1 was sold to my dad's friend, and another was Caroline1983! I only get 10% of royalties with direct sales from Musa's website and about 7% from third-parties which means my cheque was a grand total of $1.83, but I also got a signing bonus or quarterly bonus or something that was $25. The cheque may be small, but at least mum has to now stop saying that I am not getting paid for my work *L0L* 

  I did get good news in regards to my payment though! I don't have to worry about getting the two government tax forms dealt with before getting my cheques, though I will have to do it soon. I just wish I didn't keep getting the run around from those eejits! One said the company had to deal with it -wrong!- another said not to worry about it until next year -also wrong!- another said I had to contact the freaking american IRS and gave me the number which had been freaking well disconnected -big time wrong!- and a third said i had to use an agency which, by the way, will cost me about $200 for them to do -I don't think so!- so I will be going to the local governementy people to talk to them about it in freaking-well person since contacting the tax people via phone got me all the aforementioned help. Oh, I actually found more assistance on people's blogs about how to fill out the form than I did by anyone who is actually supposed to deal with it. 

  If you haven't checked out the books I have been working on, even if you don't plan to buy any of them, you can do so here: http://jkbooklover.wordpress.com

   

  SUMR

   

  • 4:33 pm
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