Rindis.com

Well, I’ve done it. It’s official, I have my own business: Fox Den

I should point out here that there are four people and three businesses where I live now. I guess I felt left out. (Smudge and Baron of course have one joint business.)

This started early this year, when I read a few ebooks of public domain works with horrible, horrible quality control and editing (effectively, none). This got me thinking, ‘I can do better than that.’ And the concept of my own publishing company was born.

Of course, things have changed a bit since then, and Fox Den’s current projects have nothing to do with the original impetus (I may well come back to it, however). My dad has just published a new book, and I’m now working on reprinting his earlier books, with the hope that they will both help each other out. Smudge was about to self-publish a book of her own through Lulu, and just let Lulu be the publisher of record. I’ve picked it up, and will provide the ISBNs, and so Fox Den suddenly has a Fantasy line.

I’m all official with a business license and Doing Business As paperwork. But this is really just a hobby, and I don’t expect to make any profit off of it; but it would sure be nice to get my costs back. Setting up for a website for the business caused a rework of my site and is why things suddenly look different here (if anyone’s paid attention enough to notice).

The two initial projects of the new company:

No Turning Back – My Dad’s first book now long out of print. The scanning is done, and I’m finishing off the text conversion. I need a cover, and maps, double-check the text, work out the formatting, and then put it together for hardcopy and ebook.

The Keeper’s Warrior – Smudge’s book is about done, with illos and cover… it just needs to clear editing, and finalize the blurb and other annoying things.

And it joins all the things I’m already doing with my life:

Reading: If I wasn’t reading, what would the point be of publishing? I’ve been trying to say something about most of the historical books I read, and if I am going to be publishing SF&F, I should probably start saying something about the books I read there to help force me to think about the genre….

Gaming: At the moment, I’m in a couple of PBeM games, and only occasionally get much else in (I’m not even on an MMO at this moment…). And lately I’ve been playing Professor Layton as well as my usual big strategy games.

Anime: We gave up cable some time ago, but I watch a few anime series through streaming services (mostly Crunchyroll), after getting them recommended to me by Smudge.

Paradox review series: Okay, there’s a good number of games to cover, and I do really long reviews, making this a huge project. It also keeps stalling out. I’m finally wrapping up #7 nine months late, and… #8 may take as long.

RPG reviews: I occasionally review various RPG items, but started an actual effort to review the old TSR FR-series modules last year. I’m stalled part-way through reading FR3, and I may never really get back to it. Though I’ll certainly keep doing the occasional miscellaneous review.

Electronic ASL Rulebook: This is a huge project for something that has to just be for me. But I refer to the thing often enough, and MMP’s project seems stalled. The law of irony says the best way to be able to buy theirs is to finish mine.

Federation & Empire for Vassal: I’ve poured a lot of effort into this, and have actually gotten to use it myself, and there are others using it. So, of course I want to do it all over again. Right now, I’m actually working with the original to update it for a new version of Fighter Operations (pretty much done, but I want to see the final product first), and adding the LDR as an extension. The new one keeps getting stalled by difficult new features.