If you aren't sure whether to self-publish, ask yourself what you want.

[ResearchGuy]

This is an extremely frustrating subject for me.. . . John Grisham, . . . !

As pointed out already, it is a myth that John Grisham ever self-published. He did, however, reportedly (and I have seen this in his own words) buy a thousand copies of his first small-publisher-published book to sell out of the trunk of his car, because he did not know any better. Turned out well in the long run. ("I hauled them in the trunk of the car and peddled them at libraries, garden clubs, grocery stores, coffee shops, and a handful of bookstores. Often, I was assisted by my dear friend, Bobby Moak." http://www.johngrishamonline.com/grishams-ford-county-familiar-to-desoto-residents)

As for frustrating . . . read the booklet linked in my sig. block below, do the homework in it, and spend serious time with the resources cited in it. (You have my special dispensation to ignore the honor-system price notice on the copyright page.) I know too many people who have achieved trade publishing to believe it cannot be done. And I know too many people who have successfully self-published (by which I do not mean paying someone ELSE to publish their books, but rather running their own publishing businesses) to think that cannot be done.

Slow down. Relax. And while you are at it, you might want to check out this site, one of a few for entrepreneur/publisher Karl Palachuk: www.relaxfocussucceed.com.

--Ken

 

[Deleted member 42]

How are new authors supposed to know exactly what they want with no feed back and vague guidelines. If my work sux, tell me. If it is a formatting issue, yes they will reject for that too, tell me.

You might want to get 50 posts on AW as a whole, then post an excerpt for critique in share your work.

 

[scope]

. That's just getting it submitted, not to mention the fact they want you to wait 4-6 months to hear back without sending it anywhere else, only to at the end of that time get a generic "sorry we won't be publishing this work" letter. This sets me on fire more than anything else. How are new authors supposed to know exactly what they want with no feed back and vague guidelines. If my work sux, tell me.

I assume you are referring to agents and/or editors at trade publishing houses. That said, I think most will agree that the system stinks. However, it is what it is, and as imperfect as it is, the reasons behind what you describe are logical--maybe not right, but logical. It boils down to time and the amount of personnel. Each year millions of writers submit works to agents and publishers, and each agent and publsiher receives thousands of submissions each year. Unfortunately, as constructed they don't have the time or amount of personnel needed to give instructive replies. They barely have enough time to read even the first page of every submssion. I don't like it any better than you, but until (and if) they change the way they do business, nothing will change. I say go ahead and self-publish if that's what you want. But don't do so simply for the reasons you state. Know what's involved and be sure you are caable of handling same (e.g., money, production, promotion, marketing, distribution).

 

[KevinMcLaughlin]

You might want to actually look at copyright pages of some ebooks from major publishers . . . . Facts are stubborn things.
--Ken

Exactly.

Also, there's the use of an ISBN for internal tracking; all four of the ebook editions for my book have different ISBN numbers on the royalty statements.

Amazon assigns only an internal number to the Kindle edition. The ePub/iBooks edition has a visible ISBN-13. The .pdf versions each have a different ISBN-13.

You misunderstand, Ken - I was asking, not arguing. I know that Amazon doesn't actually track ebook sales by ISBN and therefore can't report those sales to an outside agency by ISBN. But what Medievalist is saying about using them for internal tracking makes perfect sense. And, if say Google eBooks or some other retail decides to start selling Kindle-format books tomorrow and wants to use ISBNs, publishers already have
them assigned to everything, ready to go. It's not like they're expensive (from a publishing business perspective).

 

[KevinMcLaughlin]

But when you have the book in your hands you can read a few pages, find out how it's structured, find out a bit about the author, see how it reads... I find this so much more reliable as an indicator of if I'm going to enjoy the book than reading reviews.

But when you're surfing for ebooks, you can do one-click downloads of a sample for any book that catches your eye. That gives you the first 10% or so of the book, for free, which you can read later at your leisure.

So a reader can scan the "new books" for genres they like, grab a dozen or more samples, read the samples when they want, and one-click purchase the book if they like the sample. No waiting.

Samples are a critical piece of digital reading, and a good chunk of why it works at all.

I have to admit, I've always loved and looked forward to going to a bookstore. Been a favorite for me since I was like 5 years old. But now? I have a hard time bringing myself into the local 2-story B&N. It's just not really worth it, for me. Most books they have, also have a digital edition. I prefer reading on the Kindle to print (except for reference material that I want to mark up and leave lots of bookmarks in, or something). And I can easily grab the sample for the ebook and read it wherever, whenever.

I still like going into bookstores. Part of me always will. But over the last couple of months I've come to realize that doing so is really just a waste of time, for me.

 

[KevinMcLaughlin]

Self-publishing is a ton of work. For folks who want to be their own publisher and do all the stuff that publishers do, this is a bit of a golden age. For folks who don't want to do all that stuff, self-publishing isn't a good option, because failure is almost a certainty if all those publisher-type tasks don't get done, or don't get done well. Writers in the second group are generally better advised to keep working on their craft to improve their chances at being picked up by a commercial publisher than to waste their time performing tasks they have no interest in doing.

Yes to all of this. Terie and I may disagree on some particulars, but we're of the same mind on the basics, I think. Self publishing is a lot of work, and involves some very complex skills, not least of which is business management. Not everyone has interest in developing those skills, but without them self publishing is much more likely to fail.

The down side of all of this change, though, is a contraction in the trade publishing markets. By most of the reports I've seen, the largest publishers are not buying as many books as they did a few years ago, and are likely to cut further. That's made what was already a very competitive market even more so. If Borders collapses and B&N continues their plans to slash their retail store numbers (and we're seeing British chains beginning to follow the same pattern now, too), publishers will tighten their belts further. It's not an easy time to get into trade publishing, in my opinion - or maybe "even harder than usual" is a better way to put it.

Still, these things go in patterns, so I imagine as the changes settle down in a few years it'll probably lighten up a bit again.

 

[kaitie]

AmBear, for what it's worth, I highly doubt you'll be rejected on formatting issues alone unless you're doing something highly unprofessional (purple paper, comic sans, glitter lol). Generally speaking if you're double spaced, 12-point TNR with your name and page number in the header, you'll be fine.

I've done a ton of submissions, and I understand the frustration, but it's really not that bad. I had a master file that was standard, and it didn't usually take more than five or ten minutes to make minor adjustments if they were required.

It's frustrating to not get a lot of feedback, but you can always ask for critiques on here or try to get a writing partner that will help you find problems with your work. Even just a good beta reader is invaluable.

 

[HapiSofi]

Of course, almost half the bestselling ebooks are self published.

No they aren't. Where in the world did you get that statistic?

If you divided all the published ebooks into extremely specialized microcategories, and then assigned an excessively large number of "bestseller" slots to each category, you might succeed in generating that result, but I can't see how else you'd do it.

Readers like what they like. Ebooks are just another repro and distribution technology. Rowling, Evanovich, and Patterson still beareth away the palm.

Frankly, the fact that you're self-publishing general titles makes me think your books can't be all that great. If so, writing a lot of them is not going to help.

Luckily, most readers seem to disagree with that first opinion.

1. Most readers are not your readers.

2. It's meaningless to say your readers think your books are okay. If they didn't think that, they wouldn't read them. Asserting that your readers like your books says nothing about the number of your readers, or the quality or commercial appeal of your books.

Self published titles are doing quite well, really.

Some are. Most aren't. I doubt yours are. You're determined to give us a view of self-publishing in which everything's good, nothing's a problem, and scads of people are going to buy and read your books. This has no realistic resemblance to conventional publishing or self-publishing as I know them. I think that you are your own real audience, and that you're trying to convince yourself that self-publishing is magically going to solve your problems.

If so, it's not a conversation that needs to involve the rest of us. It's also misleading to newbies who think you're talking about real publishing in the real world.

The rise of electronic self-publishing means the market's choked with sort-of-okay books. What you're calling "productivity" just adds more motes to the swarm. It's a strategy that would have worked better in the early days of the paperback revolution, when there was a huge appetite for new titles, and authors cranked them out as fast as they could.

Precisely! Welcome back. =) Readers are beginning to follow very similar patterns to those days. Inexpensive books. Lots of 'em. You're right on target.

Please don't try to score cheap points off me. It's a waste of everyone's time. Readers are doing nothing of the sort, and my remark did not support your agenda.

That was then, this is now. We swim in an ocean of easily available books. What sells are the standouts: books that are remarkably good, or good in some rare or special way, or that have some unique value.

No, that's what *used* to sell, when books cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce (minimum) and there was limited shelf space. Now instead we're in a world where book production is much less expensive, and where books don't "come down" off the shelves, so there's a financial imperative to produce more books, not less.

I'm tempted to call you a number of blunt but accurate names.

Listen: I wasn't speaking theoretically. That really is what readers are buying. It's how they've reacted to a glut of easily available books.

Readers care about packaging and editing, but they don't care how much it costs to do it. And they care about their own convenience and their own shopping experience, so they're not going to slog their way through virtual ebookshelves of virtually infinite length.

Publishing always strikes a balance between repro technology, distribution systems, socially mediated cues like packaging, and established reader behavior patterns, and it's always changing.

What doesn't change: there's never an oversupply of truly good books, readers only care about what a book is going to do for them, and they won't wade through slush. As a writer, you're as much in competition with the bad books readers don't want as you are with the good books they do want.

You will *never* hear me advocate for producing lower quality. That's a surefire way to tick off readers and lose them, in my opinion. But as I've commented before, the writers who can produce quality work at higher production rates have a strong advantage in the digital publishing age.

You're a rare writer, then, if there's no volume/quality tradeoff in your work.

 

[HapiSofi]

The rise of electronic self-publishing means the market's choked with sort-of-okay books.

No, it's choked with bad books. I'm not that worried about having to compete with 90% of the self-published ebooks I've looked at because no-one in their right mind would buy them.

Your challenge, then, is to differentiate yourself from those bad books while connecting with the readers who are trying to avoid them.

 

[HapiSofi]

Go to Amazon. Pick a genre, any genre. Examine the top 100 books. At least a quarter of every list I've looked at is self published, and several (romance and science fiction are stand-outs) were over 50% at my last survey.

Hogwash. The only people who are going to believe that proposition are ones who don't test it.

Caveat: I've been looking exclusively at fiction, not nonfiction; not sure the breakdown there. Should have made that more clear in the earlier post, sorry.

With the exception of erotic fiction and some specialized subcategories of romance, self-published fiction sells significantly less well than self-published nonfiction.

You really are just making it all up.

 

[HapiSofi]

The overall rate of top placing seems to be about 30-40%. About that percent of ebooks "in the money" are self published. However you define "in the money", you're gonna find the breakdown is about in that range, on average.

Not true.

 

[HapiSofi]

Only 100 books can be in the top 100.

And 99% of self-published ebooks I've looked at are barely readable, so the number that could get in the bestseller lists is far less than the number that are available.

True. Kevin's statistics are impossible.

 

[HapiSofi]

OK, $15 an hour. We can work with that. Please keep in mind, everything here is entirely hypothetical. Plug in YOUR numbers, not THESE numbers.

Good thing Kevin added that last line. His numbers are a crock of something unprintable.

You write a book. It is 60k words long.

The minimum length for a modern hardcopy book. Most non-YA books are longer.

It took you sixty hours to outline and write the draft. It took you another 60 to revise based on some beta reader thoughts. That's 120 hours or $1800 you owe yourself.

Occasionally, a decent book gets written in three weeks. Most books take far longer than that, especially the ones that are worth reading. A professional author who can reliably write two books a year is doing very well. One book a year is considered a reasonable rate of production.

You then sent it to a copy editor, who proofread it for $250.

I laugh at this derisively. Kevin has skipped editing (his own or anyone else's) and rewriting, and gone straight to copy editing. A professional copy editor would charge at least three times that rate, and more if the book is longer, is complicated or messy, or has other issues. Kevin has also left out the days you spend going over the copy edit and making corrections.

Other parts he's skipped: book design. Backmatter and frontmatter. Proofreading and further corrections. And that's just for starters.

You make a cover, which takes four hours and you pay $10 for some base art to modify. Total cost $70.

The cheap-out cover looks completely amateurish and offputting, and it lacks cover copy. The book also lacks sales copy and review quotes for Amazon and B&N. They're important.

You upload the book, which includes a $10 fee to get an ISBN registered to your publishing company on Smashwords.

Anyone who thinks the ISBN is registered to the publishing company doesn't understand the process.

Costs so far: $2150

Reality of model so far: not very.

Over the month following release, you spend twenty hours doing targeted advertising via social networking and forums.

Which is completely ineffectual, and gets you banned from several of those sites as a spammer.

Since these are taking time away from writing, they cost your company money; cost, $300.

For month two and three, you spend five hours a month keeping some minimal mention of the book going, continuing to send copies to reviewers, etc. All free stuff, but time is money: $75.

These methods are also ineffectual ways to sell books.

By month four, your next book is due out and you're promoting that instead (new balance sheet). Sales of that work should help sales of your past work as well.

Have you ever actually done any of this?

Total costs? $2525

Rental of unicorn to touch finished manuscript with horn: $12 if virgin; otherwise $2,000 - $2,300.

Additional fairy dust: $55/oz.

Cost to send follow-up press releases to Oz, Cockayne, Utopia, and Big Rock Candy Mountain: nothing, but time is money: $30.

Your book is selling for $3.99. You make $2.80 a sale.

Only if you make your Mom buy her own copy.

You need to sell 901 copies of the book over its lifetime to break even on your costs, including time spent (although personally, I think you're underpaying yourself - I use $50 an hour in my own calculations).

Odds that the procedure as described will result in the book earning out: Zero, unless you've written a one-hit wonder like How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday.

The big problem - and this is a problem for big publishers as well as small ones - is figuring out how long it will sell.

This is irrelevant. The marginal cost of keeping it in print is next to nothing.

Or to put it another way, how fast you need to make back that money. There's just not enough data yet. Nor do sales follow predictable patterns. One book with a big early push might sell a couple thousand fast, then drop to fifty a month and stay there for years. Another might sell a couple dozen, then slowly build until the book is selling a thousand or more a month, and stay there for years. There's just not enough data collected to make reliable predictions.

I know what real sales patterns and sales predictions look like. Dealing with them is a complex and arcane professional skill. What Kevin has just given us is the Lego version of a jet engine.

But you can do a cost and profit analysis on each book over time. Look back over the last three years of sales, and determine if you made your target or not.

Three years takes you back before ebooks started selling in significant numbers.

((((***Stressing this again - the above numbers are made up and not meant to be demonstrative of actual costs for a book. They might be radically different from your own costs. I know I would never consider a $15 an hour job successful, for myself. Plug in your numbers, do your own cost and profit analysis.***))))

The above procedures and pricing structure have only a superficial resemblance to real writing and real publishing.

Do not listen to this man.

 

[KevinMcLaughlin]

Obviously I touched a nerve.

Bottom line, you're incorrect and making bad assumptions without checking the data. Nothing I said there was false, and I've gone to pretty decent lengths to demonstrate it.

- Yes, indeed, in EVERY SINGLE WEEK since early March, self published ebooks have represented over a third of the top 100 on the Kindle bestselling fiction list.

- Yes, indeed, when I did the survey for that post, they represented 39 of the top 100 bestselling Kindle fiction books.

- If you scan the genre bestseller lists, you will not find any that are under 25% self published in the top 100. Some, as I mentioned, are over 50%.

What does this mean? It means that readers are looking for books to enjoy, and are not particularly bothered by who is listed as the publisher. It doesn't mean every self published book will succeed - and if you noticed, I *never* claimed that. It does mean that a well written and well produced self published book has a decent shot, which is all any book ever has in this business, regardless how you want to publish it.

Re: Golden Age writing - that wasn't about cheap points. We're there again. Readers are buying at a very fast pace, in large part because they can buy books cheaply. Readers are not really changing the dollars they spend all that much, but are buying more books - and yes, reading most of them - because they can buy 3-5 ebooks for the price of one paperback. Most of our market is not the book a month reader, it's the 2-4 book a week reader. And those people are reading more than ever. In a lot of ways, it *does* mirror the paperback revolution, because it's again a time where cheaply made but very inexpensive books became extremely popular and boosted overall readership. My very strong impression is that we're headed into a similar time.

Your obnoxious assertions without even bothering to check the data are offensive. If you want to call me a liar to my face, please at least have the courtesy to go check the data sources before making yourself look like an idiot in public.

 

[HapiSofi]

Not responding to anybody specifically, but happy to see that some people read the message as it was intended.

Your comments may not have been read as you intended, but that doesn't mean that what was read in them was wrong.

I like to believe I'm a professional,

A professional what?

I'm a professional editor, myself.

and as a professional, I can't get bogged down in the dirty fighting to defend a simple opinion.

But they aren't simple opinions. They're assertions about what reality is and how it works, in a forum devoted to providing writers with reliable information.

I stand by what I said.

The question isn't whether you stand by it. As always, it's whether what you said was true and helpful.

 

[Deleted member 42]

- Yes, indeed, in EVERY SINGLE WEEK since early March, self published ebooks have represented over a third of the top 100 on the Kindle bestselling fiction list.

- Yes, indeed, when I did the survey for that post, they represented 39 of the top 100 bestselling Kindle fiction books.

- If you scan the genre bestseller lists, you will not find any that are under 25% self published in the top 100. Some, as I mentioned, are over 50%.

The Kindle list isn't really that big a deal--and it's changed since then, as other posters in this thread have pointed out.

Your obnoxious assertions without even bothering to check the data are offensive. If you want to call me a liar to my face, please at least have the courtesy to go check the data sources before making yourself look like an idiot in public.

Actually, no, HapiSofi isn't the one looking like an idiot.

HapiSofi looks like someone who has a lifetime of experience as an editor.

 

[entropic island]

There are lots of valid points that have been raised by others, but the line that stands out the most to me is your claim that great literature cannot be held back.

Remember that, especially in self publishing, Sturgeon's Law applies.

 

[Terie]

It's just so.....amusing when people who've been AW members for a month or so, been researching, say, self-e-publishing for a couple of months come in and start telling people who've worked in publishing for decades, who've been both self- and commercially published for decades, who are recognised as experts in various fields related to publishing that they're wrong.

And as far as anyone thinking the Amazon Kindle top paid lists reflect reality best, well, Amazon only includes the numbers from a single retailer: Amazon. If Amazon added just one more e-tailer, Fictionwise, to their stats, self-published e-books would practically disappear. I personally NEVER buy books (print or e) from Amazon; I don't buy any e-books from the big online sellers. I buy them direct from publishers or authors/cooperatives. (I know I'm not exactly representative of the average e-book buyer, but there are quite a lot of readers who don't buy from the big online chains.) But the point is that Amazon doesn't count those sales, either. Bazillions of e-books (self- and commercially published) aren't sold via Amazon, so its lists are actually LESS reflective of broad public opinion than the NYT lists, which actually count sales from a number of different sources.

 

[Old Hack]

Obviously I touched a nerve.

No, you made several false or flawed assertions which HapiSofi felt were important to refute. Like me, she's concerned that others will come along and assume that you're right, and make bad decisions for their own work as a result.

Bottom line, you're incorrect and making bad assumptions without checking the data. Nothing I said there was false, and I've gone to pretty decent lengths to demonstrate it.

Actually, Kevin, you made a few contradictory claims. For example:

Of course, almost half the bestselling ebooks are self published.

And now you write,

- Yes, indeed, in EVERY SINGLE WEEK since early March, self published ebooks have represented over a third of the top 100 on the Kindle bestselling fiction list.

So which one is it? A half or a third? They're significantly different amounts.

You also wrote,

Go to Amazon. Pick a genre, any genre. Examine the top 100 books. At least a quarter of every list I've looked at is self published, and several (romance and science fiction are stand-outs) were over 50% at my last survey.

Hapi called you out on this and she was quite right to do so. Self-published books have little-to-no presence on print best seller lists, and print books still represent the vast majority of books sold.

I suspect you were actually talking about e-books only, but you didn't make this clear; and even if you were, your results are out of line with the charts I've seen.

Your obnoxious assertions without even bothering to check the data are offensive. If you want to call me a liar to my face, please at least have the courtesy to go check the data sources before making yourself look like an idiot in public.

And that outburst, Mr McLaughlin, has earned you a few days away from AW. I won't allow name-calling.

 

[juniper]

It's just so.....amusing when people who've been AW members for a month or so, been researching, say, self-e-publishing for a couple of months come in and start telling people who've worked in publishing for decades, who've been both self- and commercially published for decades, who are recognised as experts in various fields related to publishing that they're wrong.

Oh dear, I've been reading this thread on and off with increasing confusion and dismay and general WTFery.

The problem for me is who to believe where, when, why? I don't know who the Big Names on this board are in Real Life anymore than the little names.

I don't know who HapiSofi or Old Hack or anyone else who doesn't link to their professional profiles are ... some occasionally leave bread crumbs to follow out but others just appear here and give info and - how do *I* as a total N00b know who to believe?

And not just here, but all over the interwebz ... as it's been said (and drawn by Peter Steiner), "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog." Well, nobody knows whether you're a famous publisher or fabulous editor or in-demand-agent or just another guy in his basement pounding on his laptop and spouting opinions. Not to defend this guy Kevin but how did he know whom he was arguing against?

Big Sigh. I just wanted to learn to write a decent novel, but my mind gets bogged down with all the crap. I think I'm going to stay away from the publishing threads for awhile. I know some people who are self-pubbing /small press epubbing and I hoped to learn some things but it's too much for me at this point.

(hope I don't get in trubble for this. i'm a peace-loving person just trying to make sense of the nonsensical)

 

[scope]

Obviously I touched a nerve.

Re: Golden Age writing - Readers are buying at a very fast pace, in large part because they can buy books cheaply.

....because they can buy 3-5 ebooks for the price of one paperback. Most of our market is not the book a month reader, it's the 2-4 book a week reader.

....because it's again a time where cheaply made but very inexpensive books became extremely popular and boosted overall readership. My very strong impression is that we're headed into a similar time.


Kevin,

I find these things hard to believe. If it's your opinion, that's one thing, but if you are stating them as fact, please supply evidence.

 

[Deleted member 42]

The problem for me is who to believe where, when, why? I don't know who the Big Names on this board are in Real Life anymore than the little names.

I don't know who HapiSofi or Old Hack or anyone else who doesn't link to their professional profiles are ... some occasionally leave bread crumbs to follow out but others just appear here and give info and - how do *I* as a total N00b know who to believe?

I'm dead easy to find. My history in publishing is easy to find; it's on my C.V. You can find my own books in stores in print and electronic forms, and the ebooks and software and self-published books I've worked on have my mellifluous name on them somewhere.

I know HapiSofi and Old Hack both. I also know many people who know them in publishing.

HapiSofi is an award-winning kick-ass editor. She also has a great deal of experience in self-publishing in a variety of venues.

HapiSofi has a title "Absolute Sage" that's conferred as a sign that MacAllister feels this is someone who has expertise and experience both.

Old Hack links her blogs in her sig. She's very well known in the U.K. as an editor and a writer and an authority in publishing. I'd like her better if she used Mac OS X, but you can't have everything. OldHack was appointed by the board owner, MacAllister, as a Mod for this sub-forum. There's expertise there. Before she was modded, she also had the Absolute Sage title, but it's over-written by her SuperMod status.

Not to defend this guy Kevin but how did he know whom he was arguing against?

If you really know a field, you can spot someone else who really knows a field.

Here's an example; I'm an oddity in that I have an academic career, a writing career, and a production/publishing career.

I'm a specialist in a very obscure area of Medieval lit. It means that I know a lot of otherwise useless dead languages.

That means I can spot a fake wannabe Medievalist or Celticist in a heartbeat, and, also, that I can be recognized as a genuine, in an equal heartbeat.

When people who you can identify and know as trusted authorities appear to be dismissive of someone, there's a clue there too.

If you see people who are respected, if you see people who have positions of respect in a community, if you see people who have actually been there and done that questioning someone's level of expertise, there's another clue.

Big Sigh. I just wanted to learn to write a decent novel, but my mind gets bogged down with all the crap. I think I'm going to stay away from the publishing threads for awhile.

Write your book. Revise your book. Write some more. Get some beta readers. Post some bits for critique. Write some more. Read a lot. Revise. Write some more . . .

Worry about publishing when you have something that's ready to submit.

 

[juniper]

Write your book. Revise your book. Write some more. Get some beta readers. Post some bits for critique. Write some more. Read a lot. Revise. Write some more . . .

Worry about publishing when you have something that's ready to submit.

Yes ... best advice in this thread for me. Thanks for the kick in the butt.

I've read Old Hack's blogs and followed the bread crumbs so have an idea on her expertise, and your crumbs are right out there in the open (and they're getting soggy here in the PNW).

My writing group has a self-pubber and some small press pubbers and they talk ... and I listen ... and wonder ... I need ear plugs for now.

 

[Deleted member 42]

I've read Old Hack's blogs and followed the bread crumbs so have an idea on her expertise, and your crumbs are right out there in the open (and they're getting soggy here in the PNW).

Hey! No slanging the PNW.

I love this area! I've lived on the East coast and the West coast, and this place has the best of both.

Even if some days it ought to be called the Pacific North Wet . . .as another resident AW member terms the area.

 

[juniper]

Yeah, I love it too, but am afraid this summer is turning out just like last summer. No tomatoes, and my lavender plants drowned. I'm not a native ... I choose to live here ...