Mary Sisson's Blog, page 45

Progress report

Today was a bit of an eye-crosser. After looking at Chapter 9, I realized I really needed to get in there and make more text boxes like a proper book designer, so I went back through the previous eight chapters and fixed anything that really wasn't satisfactory.

I believe the source of the problem is the amount of space between paragraphs--I used an odd number of points in there, and I think that's why the two sides of the spread are sometimes off by half a line. (A line off would be simple to fix, because you can usually figure out how to put in or take out a new line, but half-a-line off means it's just never right.) Live and learn--hopefully next time I'll start with a more-efficient template.

Anyway, then I went and lined up the spreads for chapters 9-11. Then I realized I hadn't actually proofed chapter 9-11, so I did that. Mostly what I'm catching there are extra spaces I put after em dashes to make a line break properly in the original edition, but I also caught a typo that had made its way into both the paper and e-book edition!

I should note that because this is the large-print edition, I'm always lining up spreads by inserting more space into the shorter spread--I think that serves the purpose of a large-print edition better than crowding up the text lines in the long spread.

Blergh

I was trying to get back into doing the large-print layout, but I've hit some difficult spots and I'm just too tired. I have family stuff tomorrow, but we'll see if I can get something done....

Oy

I was out of town yesterday when my Library Thing giveaway ended, so today when I came back I immediately opened that list up and started sending copies of The Weirld to people!

Until I was about a dozen in, and realized that these were people who had asked for a copy of Trang lo those many years ago.

Ugh. Yeah, the way it's set up, the first list to pop up when you click "Winners" is...the first list of winners you've had....

So then I sent out about a dozen apologies, and then I sent out copies of The Weirld....

Progress report

I started going over the large-print edition on the computer--I think it works, because at least I can immediately hop back into the Scribus file and fix whatever looks off. I've done seven chapters so far.

I'm a little nervous because I'm making aesthetic decisions, like I changed the chapter number because I thought it wasn't dramatic enough. I think I'll print out a full-sized copy of a couple of spreads just to ensure that I'm making the right call there.

Progress report

It was kind of one of those days, with Scribus suddenly acting up with one file for no apparent reason. But everything worked out.

I received the "final" paper copies of The Weirld (in the meantime, I of course found a typo and realized I needed to tweak something on the cover), so I sent them off to the Copyright Office. I did the cover for the large-print edition of The Weirld. And after fighting with Scribus, I made all the chapters into PDFs and combined them into one big copy--I'll either read it on the desktop or on the phone. Whew!

I might as well put up the paper covers here, right? Here's the normal one:

And here's the large print--instead of just making it large, I did the borders because I felt like the fancy colored script would be harder to read.

If you're curious, those photos were taken at Yellowstone, although they're actually pastiches.

Done!

Yesterday was kind of a lost cause, but today I managed to finish laying out the large-print edition of The Weirld! Whoo! Now I need to proof it--part of me is thinking, Oh, God, just print it out, but of course I'm tired of working on the computer right now. So I think I'll wait until I'm fresh and then try proofing it as a PDF--I can always try reading it on my phone if the desktop just drives me crazy.

Progress report

These past two days have been like, Yes, It Is Allergy Season. Yesterday I was really groggy and exhausted, so I only did one chapter. And then when I went to bed, I took an antihistamine. I had also washed the sheets and blankets that day, and that night, it rained.

I woke up 13 hours later! Today was productive in the extreme, and now I am done with the large-print edition through Chapter 20! I could probably keep going, but my neck is objecting, so....

Tomorrow I won't be able to do much, but hopefully I can finish it off this weekend!

You know, one thing that I'm wondering about with this edition is if I should even bother with proofing an actual print-out. I'm sure there would be errors, but a large-print edition uses so much paper that I'm wondering if it wouldn't be more economical to just order a proof from CreateSpace (since I'm never OK with the first proof anyway) and go through it very carefully.

Progress report

I finished the first eight chapters (two yesterday, six today) of the large-print edition. It's going OK, but there's a little bit of a hitch. Per the AAPH guidelines, you're supposed to have a certain amount of space between lines, as well as a line space between paragraphs.

The problem is that the amounts I chose don't quite line up. So, if you have a spread with a bunch of paragraph breaks on the left-hand side and long text blocks on the right, the bottom lines don't quite line up. I realized this a few chapters in, so going back and fixing the spacing would be a big pain. Instead I'm cheating by slightly stretching the text on one side and smooshing it down on the other--hopefully it won't be noticeable!

(And the nice thing about real layout software is that it lets you do that sort of thing....)

Doing the large-print edition

I was a bit torn about what to do next--obviously I've been doing a LOT of production lately, and I wasn't super-eager to do more. Plus I noodled with making the transition and realized that I would lose the italics. Again. I don't know why it's been The Revenge of the Italics lately, but it has been.

So I would have rather started in on Trials--I've made a bunch of notes and actually had a bit of a breakthrough talking over a story problem with my sister--but the way things are right now, I just don't have the time.

Today I started in on the large-print edition of The Weirld and completed a couple of chapters. It's going pretty well--I do have to go Scribus => LibreOffice => Scribus because the formatting is so different, but it's not too clunky a process. The main thing is that I wasn't sure what to do with the illustrations--obviously the chapter ornaments just get replaced with stars, but there are actual pictures, and it's not like they've been optimized for the visually impaired. I kind of went back and forth, but I've decided to have them all be full-page art and to have a black box around them. Hopefully if the reader just plain can't see them, at least the box will make it obvious that this isn't some messed-up page of text or something.

Industry counts--still unreliable

I'm taking a couple of days off from book stuff--I was ignoring other things, plus I'm feeling a need for a break.

Buuuut...via Lindsay Buroker, Forbes did an article about how opaque the e-book market is (citing a post from The New Publishing Standard). It's been a while since I've paid attention to this kind of thing, but it's not surprising to find out that what gets peddled around as industry data is still pretty much bullshit. Remember, "industry data" is typically generated by those within the industry, and they have their own agendas.