dotHill Press

"We gotta have an imprint,” hackoff.com publisher and webmaster Kelly Evans told me.

“Huh?” I asked.

“Even if you’re self-publishing, you gotta have an imprint, the name of the publisher.  And you can’t use your own name, either,” she warned me.  Kelly’s been reading a lot about self-publishing.  We don’t mind inventing some of the online part that hasn’t been done before but there’s no point or fun in inventing what’s already been invented.  We have a lot to learn about how a physical book gets printed and gets distributed.

“OK,” I said, “dotHill Press.”  We call the little bump our house is on in Stowe Hollow “dotHill” although it’s real name is Dewey Hill since it was farmed by the Dewey’s before it was subdivided.  Back in Web 1.0 days everything was dot something or other.

The next thing I know the RSS feed I run off a Technorati search for “hackoff.com” is blinking with new content.

“dotHill Press is proud to announce its plans to publish a new murder mystery entitled hackoff.com set in the dotcom bubble and rubble. Author Tom Evslin is publishing it first via blog at www.hackoff.com. We expect a hard cover edition out late Fall ‘05.”

This being Web 2.0 days, I should have known that our imprint would have a web site and that the web site would itself be a blog.  And given the tools of Web 2.0, no reason why that should take more than a day to get into operation.

www.dothillpress.com is the home for information about our blook publishing project.  It will also be the home base for our blook tour.  Once it’s fully populated, it’ll have press and other information about both the blook edition and the book edition.

We’ll also provide open source there for tools like blookmarks that we’ve developed.

Kelly is the blogger at dotHill.  She’s blogging there about the nuts and bolts of publishing, probably more detail than most readers of Fractals of Change want but stuff you’ll find very useful if you’re thinking about publishing yourself or being a part of the publishing industry as it’s evolving.  You’ll find it fun if you just want to follow our project.  Kelly’s posts are much shorter than my essays.  Yesterday, for example, in toto:

“I am thrilled to announce that we have chosen a cover designer for hackoff.com.  Rodrigo Corral’s work is great!  See here.”

His work is great and the link to his flashy site fun to follow.

Meanwhile, winter has come to the physical dotHill.  Since I haven’t taken the summer tires off my car yet (winter tires are just called “tires” in Vermont), I had to snowshoe down to the mailbox.