A little disappointing

I was hoping to be able to use Kindle Create, but it does NOT handle artwork well at all. I was thinking that, if it was easy to use, I'd go ahead and reformat the Trang books, but it can't even properly handle chapter ornaments, much less the actual illustrations in The Weirld. But it's made me a little more ambitious with my e-book formatting, so I'm fiddling with stuff by hand--we'll see how it all turns out.

Just a reminder to keep things simple

Today was spent appeasing the tax accountant, and I want to point out something: I've mentioned in the past that I (and my father) ran our own businesses for many, many years without ever doing any of the more expensive and complicated small business things that people sometimes say you have to do if you want to be a Serious Writer. 

That era is in the past now, and I have to say that I long for the days when I was a sole proprietor. It makes sense for us to be doing what we're doing, but JFC, the only reason to do it is because the alternative takes up even more of your time. I do not understand why any Serious Writer would voluntarily choose to spend the day generating fiscal statements when they could be writing, or even just formatting an e-book or fixing that proof that finally arrived from CreateSpace.

Progress report

I came home to...discover that CreateSpace had sent my proof to my old address (boy, it HAS been a long time since I've done a book, hasn't it!). I have now updated my shipping address with them, and hopefully it will come before long.

Tax stuff is pretty much wrapped up, with some exceptions that I'm sure will blow up in my face with delightful unpredictability over the next two months. In any case, it looks like I should be able to start working on the e-book fairly soon.

Thoughts on the road

I'm a-wandering in search of...everyone's damned 2017 tax forms! In the meantime, I've been thinking about the release of The Weirld as an e-book. (And I'm feeling quite thankful that I'm not using Word and not having to worry about all kinds of random extra coding getting shoved into the book for no reason. It's so much easier!)

I saw that Amazon has really upgraded their tools for authors! What they've got looks like something (assuming it's not buggy) that will very quickly turn out an especially nice e-book. I'm genuinely looking forward to playing with that when I get home.

It doesn't look like much has changed with Smashwords, which is also nice--they've always been easy to use.

Buuuut...because I don't intend to do the long marketing push I did with Trang, I'm eyeing going exclusive with KDP, albeit just for the first 90 days since I don't like relying on a single retailer. Exclusivity would give me access to some promotional tools that are very easy to use and hopefully would get me reviews so that I don't feel like I'm completely neglecting this book. Plus I like the idea of offering the people who follow me (especially those who have stuck out this long dry period) an early-bird special price, and with exclusivity I can just make the book free for five days. So I think that's where I'm headed.

Whoot!

I ordered proofs! It will take a couple of weeks, and if history is any guide, I'll have to do fixes, but! An Important Milestone has! been! achieved!

And you'll notice that I've put up sample chapters and prettied up my home page--oooh la la! I even posted to Facebook and Twitter...trying not to notice that the last time I've put anything up on either was 2016. Yoikes.

The reality is that I'm quite a bit busier now than I was. Like, obviously the next step is to format the e-book and release it, but...that's going to have to wait a couple of weeks as well because I've got to go focus on the family business for a bit. I'm actually really happy that production fell as it did, because tax time is usually a bit too distracting to get much writing done, but I can do things like formatting or inputting copy edits between putting out the inevitable fires. It's nice to feel like I'm making meaningful headway even though I'm not writing.

And I'm thinking about what's going to happen after the book comes out. I still want to do a large-print edition--that actually should be much easier to do now because I'm using real layout software. (And I should note that at this point, I have actually sold a few!) But I'm just not going to have the time to experiment with lots of different kinds of marketing like I did in the past. Maybe I'll run some Facebook ads and branch out to Google or Amazon, or maybe not.

The more I think about audiobooks, the more I think that's just never going to happen, especially not me doing them myself. Maybe one fine day I'll hire somebody.

Hm, better start gearing up....

Seeing that I'll probably have an actual book out fairly soon (!!! It's been so long!!), I decided to finally, you know, act like a real writer and get Mail Chimp going. I've been collecting e-mail addresses and names from people who want to know when the next book is coming out (OK, so they really want to know when the next Trang book is coming out, but no harm in letting them know about this one), but I haven't really done anything with that information, because you know, no book was coming out.

So I signed on to Mail Chimp and put those names and e-mails onto a list, which was easy enough to do. Then I realized that I could have a direct-to-Mail-Chimp sign-up form on the Web site (much more easily done through the Web hosting service than through Mail Chimp). Its over there to the left now. I'll just keep the all-purpose Contact form the same--if people want alerts and use that form, they can just tell me that's what they want, and I'll add their information to the list by hand.

Whoo!

Finished the last read-over, glommed all the separate PDF files together into one HUGE PDF file, and uploaded onto CreateSpace! (Well, still waiting to get cleared there, but Whoooooooo! anyway!)

ETA: Man, the tiniest thing came up--the 5s in the font I use for page numbers stick juuuuust above the other numbers and into The Forbidden Zone. I'll have to move all the page numbers down juuuuust a smidge. Oh well!

FT...What?

So, in the YA book, there's a punky teenager who has an "FTW" T-shirt. This confused the copy editor, who was like, "Why don't you spell out 'For the Win'? Clearly 'FTW' has no other meaning." So I had to explain to him that, this being a punky teenager and all, the shirt they wore did have another meaning that the teenager was hoping adults don't know about--namely, "Fuck the World."

I told this story to my sister, who works with punky teenagers, and--you guessed it--she got really annoyed and was like, "Of course it means 'Fuck the World'! Clearly 'FTW' has no other meaning!"

I think we're lucky she didn't assign us all detention....

Progress report

I wound up thinking about how close I am to being done with the YA book...if I just push a little more.... So today I worked on the copy edit and got done through chapter 7 (plus some whole-text stuff) before I was like, ughughughugh. It's not the most exciting work, for sure. I honestly don't know what I'll do tomorrow.

Progress report

I went over the copy-edited layout of the YA book--yeah, he took his time about it, but he certainly hasn't gotten any less awesome since I used him the last time!

The downside is, since it was a good copy edit, lots of little things need fixing. That's going to screw up the layout in a lot of little ways, which will also need fixing...hmmm. I feel like I'm on a roll lately with Trials (it's amazing how much the change in POV has opened up the book), and I don't really want to fuck that up by switching to something that's going to require detail work (especially because tax time already gives me plenty of detail work). So I think I'm going to pack the YA layout away and focus on writing for now.

Ahoy! A plan!