Expensive Email

Man, sometimes life is weird.

I got this email this morning, from Xlibris Self Publishing. They're a subsidiary of Random House apparently. I'm not entirely sure, but it didn't appear to be a form letter, though I could be wrong, hard to tell. Anyway, they say they got my email from blogger.com. What does that mean? They surf through the subjects in the profiles? They surf tags? Someone from there actually reads blogs in search of customers?

Anyway, of course they're soliciting for customers, and I'm obviously interested. I don't have enough knowledge of the publishing end to just publish this anthology myself, so I'm going to need to go through some sort of company - so I checked out their site, their options, and their prices.

Wow is it expensive to self-publish! $500 is their cheapest package, and that appears to be a template into which I get to plug the poems into. It doesn't seem to be a situation where I have much control over what my book looks like or how it's set up.

In order to get the control and input I'd like, I'd need their most expensive package. Of course, they plan it that way, it's very intentional - I mean, it is a business. But the top package costs $1600. That's INSANE. I'll never afford that!

It doesn't matter for now anyway. I don't even have any contributors yat. The only poetry I've got is my own, and I'm not in this to promote my own work particularly, or to spend $1600 on the 30 or so poems I even have available lol.

Man, what a shock. $1600! I'll have to search around and see if any others are comparable for less money, when I'm ready. But it still has my curiosity piqued as to how they came up with my email address - some sort of blog bot that extracts email addresses from blogs where they find the search term "self publish" maybe?