Alia Luria's Blog - Posts Tagged "updates"

I was also incredibly relieved and gratified to receive three reviews this week from Readers’ Favorite. You can check them all out at Readers’ Favorite by clicking here. Two of them were glowing five star reviews, and the third was a positive four star review. Here is an excerpt from Samantha Coville’s 5-star review:

If you have plans for the next few days, do not pick up this book. I repeat: do not start unless you are willing to read for hours on end, gripped by the racing story line and breathtaking intrigue that fills the pages. I cannot wait for the next book to come out and I hope the series continues for many more books after that. I’m bookmarking this author because I know I will fall in love with every word she writes. Wow. -- Readers' Favorite

That quote made me feel excellent! I conceived of the basic idea for Compendium in the summer of 2013 and started writing it in August of that year. After almost two years of work and four revisions, it’s very hard to maintain perspective on my work. I don’t know if this is true for all authors, but I stopped having an emotional reaction when I read a book I’ve revised four times. I still feel that thrill with new material, including the chapters of Ocularum I am working on now, but it’s validating to know that others might read Compendium and enjoy it, especially since my brain is tired of looking at it! I know not everyone will love it or even like it, but knowing that some people do is incredibly motivating as a writer.

In other news... Editing is done! My amazingly awesome editor, Angela Brown, turned back the proofed version of Compendium to me on Tuesday. Having not yet acquired my corneal abrasion and despite my blurry right eye, I incorporated all of her proofed changes and formatted the book for ebook that same night. On Wednesday, despite my newly acquired corneal abrasion, I formatted the book for print. The ebook looks great on my phone in the Kindle app, and it looks great on my Kindle as well (although the cover isn’t showing up on the Kindle, probably because I emailed it to myself instead of downloading it from the Kindle store). I’m REALLY excited for everyone to get to see it. After a proofing mishap with the print version, I have some proofs on preorder for that as well. They should arrive Tuesday of next week. It looks like I might need one more round of print proofing, as Day has expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of bleed on the cover via the online proofing tool. We will see! I will post pictures of the actual book as soon as it’s ready for public consumption!