Craig is expecting to see a finished copy of Last of the Red Hot Poppas this week. With our first two books — printed in Iceland and Minnesota, respectively — I was the first to see them, but since we opted to print in Japan this time, Craig will get first glance and then try to convey the nuances of the book to me over the phone. Obviously, we're a bit jittery this week.

This project is a first in many ways for us: First novel, first book with just one author, first time to print in Japan, first time to have a dust jacket (one that unfolds into a poster!), first time to hire an outside marketing team, first time to use postcards for promotion, etc., etc. I've learned a lot in the last few months. And during this time, some thoughts about publishing have crystallized for me. Here's a quick, incomplete list of what working on Poppas taught me:

1. Even a novel is a collective work. I used to think that a novelist was 99% of a novel. It's just not true, especially if you're shooting to make a literary object. The designer, artist, editors and printers all go a long way to shape the book. One of the things CMP will not do is allow a writer the right to reject a cover. It's a fairly standard right conferred on novelists, but we opted to keep total control of the design. Because of that, Poppas is edgier, more interesting and will appeal to a whole different kind of reader than we would have drawn with a more conventional approach — or so I believe.

2. The sewn-in bookmark is part of our marketing budget. As we entered further into the world of blurbs and book promotion, I have been thinking a lot about how we differentiate ourselves from the pack. In the end, I believe it's by putting more money into production, refining the book, making it beautiful. That way of thinking helped us land a distributor with our first book. I believe we are better off spending $750 of that last thousand bucks on the book itself and the other $250 on marketing. It means we might not jump out of the gate as fast as others, but we'll slowly win the respect of readers.

3. Imitating large NY firms will bring certain failure. As we put Poppas together, we had lots of discussion about promoting the book, and some of that discussion inevitably centered on what other larger publishers do to promote their work. The more I learned how large publishers promote their books, the more I felt that to imitate them would be to bring certain failure. Yes, we send review copies to Kirkus and Publishers Weekly like everyone else in the industry, but beyond that, we need to use the Internet far more than the average publisher to build a community (not just sales), we need to do events in a unique way (not just typical readings) and we need to find low-cost ways to reach you (email newsletters, blogs and postcards, for example). Other publishers use these tools as well, but for us they are vital — we can't bank on reviewers reading our work, and we can't expect media to pay attention to us as much as we'd like, so these smaller tools are sometimes all we have.

More on the book itself soon.