Overplaying One’s Hand
Overplaying One’s Hand
I love to see an arrogant man or woman overplaying their hand and wondering stunned how it happened that they lost. I watched it unfold today. A contributor to ‘Asian Shorts’ decided he had me over a barrel because he has access to staff at Asia Books. He said he’d try to get our book sold there if I gave him a load of free books and a percentage of the sales.
I agreed to the percentage, but at the moment, I can only get paperbacks from Amazon in Europe or America at about $10 each including postage to Asia. I said i would rather remove his story from the book. ‘But what about Asia Books?’ he protested. ‘If I walk you can forget them, and you want in, eh?’ ‘I’ve forgotten them,’ I replied and set about removing his story from the anthology. ‘You’d better do it,’ was his parting shot, ‘I didn’t sign a release!’
But he had already disappeared from the book. I could picture him sitting somewhere thinking ‘How the Hell did that happen?’ Easy, by overplaying your hand, old son, you assumed that everyone is as greedy as you are. Well, you’re not hijacking our book for a few dollars.
Anyway, that did us a favour, actually, because, as I wrote yesterday, experts say that 30k words is perfect for an anthology and ours is now 33k.
The cover for the new book is going to be difficult using the images that I have at my disposal and the image-manipulation software I have. If an agent or publisher doesn’t take the book on, i think I will have to outsource this one. The only other ones I have done that for were the Leks, Behind The Smile.
All the best.
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Podcast: Overplaying One’s Hand
