Mary Sisson's Blog, page 23

Progress report

I finished Part 1 and set up Part 2—definitely the best way to proofread an index is to use it as the basis for a second. This week is going to be kind of busy, so it may take some time to get everything finished up, but again, I’m definitely finding small mistakes in the trade paperback index (plus I caught a layout error!), so I think it’s worthwhile.

Progress report

Working on the large-print index. I’ve done the Introduction and am most of the way through Part 1, which seems to be what I can do before my eyes permanently cross.

Of course, working on the large-print index means finding errors in the trade paperback index! I did get Proof #3 back today, and the cover looks fine. So I’m fixing the index errors (like the strike-thru errors, they’re not big layout issues that would require another proof), and once that’s done I’ll re-upload the interior and approve it for sale!

Thinking about things....

So, I know I’m a hard sell when it comes to romance novels, but I read Jeannie Lin’s Pingkang Li series, which is a combo of romance and mystery/adventure, and it really got me thinking. The way a series works in romance is that Book #1 focuses on Couple #1, then Book #2 focuses on Couple #2 (who you’ve somehow met in Book #1—they’re usually friends or family of Couple #1), then Book #3 focuses on Couple #3, etc. And with Pingkang Li series (Jess Michael’s Wicked Woodleys series is a bit like this, too, although much more X rated), there’s some nice plot build from Book #1 to Book #2 to Book #3.

And thinking about it, why shouldn’t there be? Oftentimes when you hit, say, Book #7 in a romance series the plot is really petering out and everything’s kind of on autopilot, but if a writer planned beforehand, knowing they had X many couples, they could do a series that really built a plot that paid off well in the end. The move from Couple #1 to Couple #2 could actually move the plot along, because the different perspectives would give the reader fresh eyes on some underlying conflict that’s been driving everything all along.

Anyway, this interests me. I really like the idea of series that are all really one big book, and while the plotting can get complicated and difficult, I think this is a format that could really work.

Progress report

Whoo-hoo! Laid out and went over Parts 3 & 4, as well as the Resources section.

Tomorrow will be the Index…oy. The plan is to base it off the index for the trade paperback, so hopefully it won’t be THAT painful.

Progress report

Despite Scribus and the printer both getting the vapors at the exact same time, the Part 2 layout is done, baby! Laid out and gone over. Also while waiting for the printer to get over itself, I was able to put Part 3 into Scribus, so that’s 100% set up to be laid out.

Progress report

I went to work on Part 2, and of course I forgot that, given the length of the chapter, I should stop every 10-20 pages and make sure nothing’s been missed. I was 100+ pages in (it’s a looong chapter) before I went back and realized there was an error on about page 30 that will probably affect the rest of the chapter. Tomorrow!

Progress report

I was a little light on sleep, so I thought that today, instead of doing the Part 2 layout, I’d set up the rest of the large-print edition in LibreOffice so that it would all be set to be laid out.

Aaaaand in the process, I realized that the Strike Out coding in LibreOffice didn’t translate to Scribus. Furthermore, it never translated, meaning that the trade paperback doesn’t have struck out things in it, either!

I was a bit aiiigh! about it all, but then I realized that fixing that wouldn’t change the layout any. So as long as Proof #3 comes back OK, I think I can risk it and not order Proof #4. Since I was updating the interior anyway, I took the time to really look through the interior Proof #3 and found a couple of (very minor) things there to fix as well.

If you’re following along at home:

The Dislocated World trade paperback Proof #3 is coming to me soon, and hopefully once it gets here, I’ll be able approve the edition for sale

The Dislocated World large-print paperback is about halfway through production

Trials is still unwritten aside from part of the first draft. I thought I could switch off between writing and doing layouts, but I never seem to be able to do more than one thing at a time….

Progress report

Part 2, the heftiest of the parts, is all set up in Scribus and is ready to receive the actual laying out—i.e. making sure the bottoms line up as much as possible and the like.

This is not an improvement

Proof #2 arrived today, and I’ll be doing Proof #3. Some things are kind of unavoidable: Part of the back cover keeps showing on the spine (where it looks like ass), even though I moved it in the last proof. I realized that, since small shifts in placement of the cover graphics in different print runs are unavoidable, I should make some adjustments to the back cover so that the contrast isn’t as dramatic and it doesn’t look as bad if it overlaps the spine a bit.

Other things are just Amazon really not improving on what CreateSpace did. CreateSpace (like most printers) indicated that a proof was a proof by stamping “PROOF” on the last page of the book. I guess Amazon decided that this was not enough to prevent people from selling on their proofs, so now there’s a ribbon printed across the cover indicating that the book is a proof and should not be resold. (Like this is going to prevent people from buying and selling proofs, right? I mean, they know what they’re getting.)

Well guess what? That ribbon runs over the subtitle on the front cover, so I’m really having to guess as to how that’s going to look in the finished product (which pretty much defeats the entire purpose of a proof), and it runs over the jacket copy on the back cover.

That’s a real problem, because jacket copy is just a freaking minefield. Gimp doesn’t let you spell-check your text, nor copy-paste it from elsewhere. So there’s always about a million little typos, which are hard to catch because my (basic-ass) printer just isn’t able to produce a cover with legible jacket copy. Because of the limitations of my printer (no worse, I would argue, than most home printers), it’s also hard to tell if the color used for the jacket copy blends into the underlying graphic or stands out properly until I see the final, high-quality print. (Obviously that’s also hard to determine from a computer monitor, because it’s backlit, and I just have a harder time proofreading on the computer.)

Needless to say, having a ribbon over the jacket copy that makes it illegible and invisible isn’t helpful. At all. Fingers crossed I caught everything, but wow—Amazon is not making this easy.

Progress reportI

It looks like Part 1 is done—laid out and gone over! Part 2 (which is even longer) should go faster because I’ve got Part 1 to use as a template. Whoo!