Mary Sisson's Blog, page 18

Progress report

Note to self: It’s ragweed season, and your allergy shots didn’t cover ragweed because there’s none in the Seattle area. You’re not going to get a night of actual restorative sleep without the use of antihistamines, so use them.

Anyway, luckily it turned out that the work I did on the Dislocated World LibreOffice file to clean up the .epub file also resulted in a pretty darned clean .doc file, so I was able to upload that without much drama today.

And I got to work on the copy edits of Tribulations, finishing the first seven chapters! Whoo!

Done!

I’ve uploaded Dislocated World to Smashwords, yay. They act like you should convert it to .doc instead of .epub, but dear God I am not going through that again….

Let me convert you!

Since I’m getting ready to put Dislocated World on Smashwords, I needed to convert it into an ePub file. I know in the back of my mind that at some point I was planning on figuring out some new, fancier way to do this, but I’m not up to making the effort today, so I used Calibre.

Wow. The book didn’t have the MASSIVE formatting problems that happened when I converted it into a DOC file, but there was a lot of random underlining, mostly in specific sections of the book, plus some random strike-thrus. I have no idea how to edit an ePub file, so I had to go back and forth editing in LibreOffice—which at least did work.

The thing is, I could not figure out some searchable formatting mark causing the issue—it wasn’t the “underline” mark, that’s for sure. So it would look like this in LibreOffice (note that the paragraph marks are visible, and there’s nothing weird):

And like this in ePub:

And no clue as to why. Sometimes it did seem like there was an invisible character in there, but other times it didn’t.

The above, which you would think would cause difficulties? No problem whatsoever.

Anyway, I was able to fix it by deleting the paragraph marks and everything around them, and then replacing them. Who knows why this happened, or why that worked? LibreOffice still beats the shit out of Word, but the conversion issues are definitely an irritating phenomenon.

Ugh, I'm a hot mess

I had family visit for the first time in a year-and-a-half, which was wonderful, but then of course I get a sinus infection and now have to wait for the results of a COVID test. I will be VERY surprised if the test is positive (get vaccinated!), but obviously it’s better to be safe than sorry, especially because I have to think about my mom. The visiting family is all testing, too, just because of time spent traveling and being around so many people.

(Just to PSA for a moment: In my extended family, four people got COVID pre-vaccine, and one of them died from it. At least sixteen have been vaccinated with no deaths or serious illness.)

Obviously I haven’t been too focused on book stuff. Today I started to look over the copy edits of Tribulations, but I quickly decided that (although I am feeling better) I was still a bit too sick to deal with it.

Instead I went on Amazon to double-check that A Dislocated World was leaving KDP Select. (I need to prep the e-book for Smashwords, but that’s also not going to happen today.) It was supposed to do that three months ago, but apparently re-enrollment is automatic, and they don’t bother to alert you or anything, so I missed it.

The book is supposed to leave KDP Select on the 19th, but then I realized that, since I hadn’t expected the book to re-enroll, I hadn’t thought to use the free days from the second enrollment! So I’m going to do the lazy & bad thing and just make it free without any marketing from the 16th to the 19th. Go get it if you want it!

Nice timing!

The copy editor got Tribulations back to me! That’s nice—assuming it doesn’t need too much work, I should be able to have the e-book and regular paperback out sooner rather than later.

Ugh, I feel like I should figure out some kind of marketing plan, especially since people have waiting so long for book three, but…bleagh. I mean, the issue is that my life is quite a bit busier now, and I never really enjoyed marketing, so…. For sure, if you don’t market you don’t sell books, but I don’t really need to sell books to make a living, so it’s hard to motivate. If it were a stand-alone book I just wouldn’t care, but I do feel badly because the series did have fans who have waited forever…le sigh.

Progress report

I heard back from the copy editor of Tribulations, which makes me hopeful it will return to me sooner rather than later. So today I updated the cover, since that needs to happen. That was a more-complicated one, so I’m glad it’s done.

I’m going to be pretty busy the next week or so, so I’ll probably take a little holiday from book stuff. Then if Tribulations gets back to me, I can put that out, and if not, I’ll get to work on the second romance book (I want to write out the entire series before publication—it’s just that kind of project).

THE END

FINISHED BOOK 1!! WHOO!

I wrote 2,700 words to do it, yeah! As a whole, the book is 47,000 words long, which kind of puts it between a novella and a novel, but romance novels are often on the short side, so I’m fine with that. The idea is to have nice, bite-sized individual books that are satisfying on their own but also fit together into a longer story.

Progress report

2,700 words, and I think the next chapter will be the last! WHOO!!!

Progress report

2,100 words! Whoo!

Progress report

2,000 words! Yeah!

I am getting pretty close to done here with book 1, which is nice. (No jinx!)