Laptop in limbo

My beloved G4 iBook was DOA last evening. Hubby and I made an early morning trek to the Apple Store at Lenox Square in Atlanta this morning, where I made an appointment with an Apple Genius, who did what I did at home, plus trying to run it via a remote server and came up with the same conclusion that I did: hardware problem. That means a trip to a service center, and I have applecare on it, so the repair won't cost me, but my hard drive may or may not be salvageable. I do write some of my Pam's Pages posts a bit ahead of time, and I have one on getting published ready, but it is on that computer and not on this one. If Lazarus makes it back, I'll have that post in a week or two.

In the mean time, I'll mention some of the things going on in the publishing world—
•A romance ebook publisher, Triskelion, just folded. Some of their authors are scrambling to find new homes for their books, so that will make publishing that genre and method a bit more difficult for a time.
•Whiskey Creek Press continues to have issues with distribution. Right now, the authors on their Yahoo group are bemoaning the fact that Barnes and Noble stores won't even order a trade paperback book from WCP, saying they are non-returnable. Actually, WCP does take returns, but B&N is quite arbitrary in their policies, so good luck changing that, folks. Unless WCP will bow to publishing conventions and use a distributor such as Ingrams, the books will experience very slow sales indeed.
•Some of my author friends are saying that My Space is the way to promote authors and books. One of them told me that his My Space profile gets more hits than his website and his blog, combined. I don't yet have a My Space. I have looked at it, but it seemed so busy and confusing that I just went back to blogging. I have looked at some profiles of my teenager's acquaintances, and all I can say is that the entire site should be rated "R"or "X" and I prefer to have my promotions be family friendly.
•POD pricing, which was high to begin with, is getting higher. Booklocker went up on set-up fees and cover prices in June, and they are among the cheaper such publishers. It will cost approximately $500 to get into print there, and you'll pay a bit more for Lulu or iUniverse. Xlibris, once a viable printer, is up to a couple of thousand, so I wouldn't recommend that to anyone, although I have done so in the past.

That's it for this week folks. Let's hope the repair facility can resurrect my computer without sacrificing my hard drives' contents. BTW, all of my current manuscripts are on it, and they haven't been backed up lately. If it goes, so does a few months of work...