Moar Publishing Updates
Saturday, March 22, 2025 at 10:00am
Some assorted updates to my publishing plans since last week’s post, in no particular order.
Business change-over complete
My LLC has been successfully converted (legally) from a video game company to a book publishing company. The business name is “Matthew Buscemi Publishing LLC,” but I have yet to decide if I want to have a logo done for that, or if I want to come up with a press name and publish under that name as an imprint of Matthew Buscemi Publishing LLC. I will not be reviving Fuzzy Hedgehog Press. That era is fully and thoroughly done.
Zhivko Zhelev will create the covers for the new editions
Zhivko Zhelev did a number of lovely illustrations for Schrödinger’s City, Our Algorithm Who Art Perfection, The Other, and Intersection Thirteen. He also did all the covers for the 2020 editions of my books. He will be returning to do the covers for the 2025/26 editions as well! I’ll likely be teasing each of these a few weeks before each book’s respective release.
Beati Qui Inveniunt Feles to appear in print for the first time
During the pandemic, I wrote a novelette called Beati Qui Inveniunt Feles. I released it as an ebook, but so far, this work has never appeared in print. I’ve decided to pair this work with Our Algorithm Who Art Perfection and release them together during my print publication refresh. Similarly, the current ebook will come down with the rest of my publications (one week left, everyone!), and this one will stay down permanently.
I don’t have a title yet for the combined edition. It certainly won’t be the two titles combined, as that would be unwieldy. But I have lots of time to figure that out.
Hear Ye, Hear Ye! to be added to Transmutations
Back in 2022, MacroMicrocosm published my (very) short story, Hear Ye, Hear Ye!. My original thought was to lump it in with the next set of short stories I wrote, but most of the short stories I wrote in that “era” ended up in Chronicles of Ytria. Like Beati Qui, Hear Ye has also been looking for a home.
Any new short stories I write would likely feel different from Hear Ye. It will also be quite some time before I’m writing short fiction regularly again; I plan to, but I have to get through a great deal of republication first. As it happens, Hear Ye would fit quite well thematically with the Aesthetic section of Transmutations, so there it shall go.
The third edition of Transmutations will contain this story for the first time.
Initial stages of print layout work has begun
Sometime in the late teens, I got fed up with Adobe’s pricing scheme for InDesign and Photoshop and started looking for alternatives. I tried Scribus for a while, which is completely free, but that software had too many bugs and performance issues for me to convert my workflow over to completely.
I eventually happened on Affinity Publisher, which I used to layout all of my 2020-21 book releases. Publisher costs money, but you shell out once for the software, rather than having to cough up monthly for a subscription.
During my video game hiatus, Affinity released a major version upgrade for all of their products. I’m happy to report that my Publisher v1 layout file for the Voyage Embarkation paperback converted over smoothly to v2. I shouldn’t have to rebuild much, if anything, from scratch. And I love the new UI!
