Mary Sisson's Blog, page 17

Large-print prep

I prepped all the chapters in LibreOffice today so that they’ll be ready to lay out.

Just to give you an idea of what that entails:

Copy the original LibreOffice file

Make text flush left/ragged right

Make text 18-pt san serif (I’m using Tahoma this time around, because I like it)

In paragraph formatting, set all the indents & whatnot to 0”

Except for space between paragraphs, which is 0.3”

Set spacing to proportional 125%

That gets me near-enough to APH for my satisfaction, while still having the text blocks line up once it goes into layout.

Progress report

Let’s see—I’ve finished what needs to be done in LibreOffice with 15 chapters (out of 31), and laid out three. I didn’t get quite enough sleep last night, because the first job seems too easy and the second job seems too complicated….

Progress report

So, I figured I should go ahead and do the large-print layout for Tribulations—I haven’t done a layout in a while, so I’m not feeling burned out about it (yet). I set up the first 10 chapters in LibreOffice—the nice thing about not waiting five years or so between books is that I feel like I’m not having to start again at the very bottom of the learning curve.

After this I think I’m going to work on the romance series for a bit. I think it goes better if I take a break from the Trang series between books, just because each book is so long and complex.

And it's out! (and free!)

Whoo! The third book in the Trang series is finally OUT! Just on Amazon as an e-book for now, but yo, it’s FREE for the next five days! Get yourself a copy!

(Seeing it in really small thumbnails on Amazon…I think I’m gonna noodle with the cover a little more.)

ETA: Did that, and I also fiddled with the Trang series books in Kindle Create—I don’ t know if these are new features or if I just missed them before, but there’s now some decent presentation for your other books in the back matter, so I’m upgrading those.

I’m also re-uploading A Dislocated World minus the drop caps at the beginnings of the chapter. This is SUCH a case of Amazon’s 90/10 issue, but drop caps never rendered properly in the “Look Inside!” feature, even though I just used the regular settings in Amazons’s own software. Of course having it look like it was made wrong is just the worst thing with nonfiction, because you’re trying to present yourself as some kind of authority & not an idiot nut job. I made various attempts to get this fixed, but no—they couldn’t do a thing, they were so very, very sorry. So the drop caps will be gone, and hopefully the “Look Inside!’ feature won’t find something else that was done right to totally fuck up. (EATA: It did exactly that. JFC.)

Whoot-whoot!

I have submitted the e-book! Shouldn’t be long now!!

I think I’m going to fiddle a little with the old Amazon e-books at some point, because you can link people to your other titles now.

Whoo AND hoo!

I finished inputting the changes to the layout, checked it all over, submitted the files to Amazon, and have ordered the proof! WHEEE!

Progress report

I finished reading over the corrected layout. I was going to input changes, but I’m a little tired, so I’m going to call it good.

Progress report

I read through a little more than half the layout—I haven’t read it in a while, so I caught some typos.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but really I don’t think it will be more than a few weeks before Tribulations comes out. I have some family stuff coming up, but really not anything that should drastically slow down production. It will be nice to have the third book out!

Progress report

Finished inputting the copy edits to the layout! Whooooo!!!

Progress report

Things are a bit hectic at the moment, but I was able to input the copy editor’s corrections through chapter 19. Whoo!