Mary Sisson's Blog, page 47

The Weirld is FREE until Monday midnight!

Whoo! Get it here! It's free until midnight Monday night!

Sometimes it's good to have low expectations

My shot today wasn't entirely debilitating, so I fixed a lot of the italics and hard return issues with Trang (and did the same for the first couple of chapters of Trust, since they also appear at the end of Trang). Then I went through the Kindle Create process--that does seem to be pretty easy to use, although I've been screwed around often enough that I'm going to put in a 0.01" indent on everything that I don't want indented. It basically acts like a really easy-to-use HTML editor.

The main issue for me is that if you "publish" the file in their spanking new KPF format, you can't download the result or even sideload it onto your phone. I understand that they really, really want Kindle Create to be kind of the ultimate What You See Is What You Get editor, but 1. that's impossible, sorry, and 2. at least let me put this on my phone so I can switch chairs!

Oh well--I shall watch television instead and work on this tomorrow.

And The Weirld should become free at midnight tonight!

Uf

Well, today has been a bit of a grind. I wanted to reformat the Trang and Trust e-books using Kindle Create, and that's proving a bit more difficult because the only files I have are the MOBI ones, and the MOBI => DOCX conversion process creates all kinds of weird issues (with things like italics and paragraph breaks, sheesh). I should be able to get them done in a few days (I have to get my shot tomorrow, which slows everything down), but it's going to be a fiddly process.

I signed my book on for the five-day freebie and was going to e-mail the people who signed up for alerts...but there's a new law that's just gone into effect saying you have to include your physical address in any e-mail sent for commercial purposes. To which I say, FUCK, NO. Jesus, I've had enough problems with fucking stalkers for a lifetime, OK?

So, my apologies to anyone who ever signed up for alerts--you're not getting them. I'll take down the form.

It's up on Amazon!

Whoo! But don't go buy it yet, I'm going to run a free promotion!

The e-book has been submitted!

YEAAAAA!!!!!

God, that seemed like such a process--part of it being that, if you're going to force me to learn Kompozer, I'm going to go ahead and make the book a little nicer.

Anyway: I have submitted the e-book to Amazon, and hopefully it will be up soon. Then I can do the five-day free promotion, whoo! 

All righty....

So, today was spent getting the hang of Kompozer--you can do a lot with it, but my God, it is not an intuitive piece of software.

I had to use Kompozer because it's an HTML editor, and Amazon has actually gone backwards in terms of what you can do with your e-book without getting into the HTML. As I mentioned, chapter ornaments are suddenly this HUGE problem, and other things are harder to do, too--it's really annoying that they've actually managed to make it harder to create a decent-looking book, because it seems like with Kindle Create, you're going to have so many nice interiors now.

Anyway, I think I'm 99% of the way there.

ETA: I do think I'm going to sacrifice the chapter ornaments for Trang and Trust and reformat them through Kindle Create one of these days. I kind of want to update them anyway, because there's stuff like the links in the back that don't work any more.

Progress report

I (hopefully) fixed the cover issues, and I have submitted the whole, improved shebang to Create Space--I should be able to order a second proof tomorrow if all goes well. I turned the first proof over to my crack team of illustrators, who were both delighted and chagrined to see their artwork in an actual book.

The e-book stuff is still fairly aggravating--I'm having to slog away editing HTML, and honestly it feels like Amazon has really made zero progress when it comes to books with art. I think I can make this work, and of course it still takes less time than a paper layout, but I also think it's been six years, and maybe they could have made this process a little easier in the meantime? Maybe?

Progress report

Since yesterday was a little frustrating on the e-book front, today I worked on the paper book, giving the interior its final polish and working on the cover, which always needs a solid noodling.

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.