Progress report

So, pretty good weekend, all things considered.

a) I finished inserting the “epilogue” into Death’s Lady Book 1. It’s around half as long as the actual prelude novella. The novella is around 130 pp and the “epilogue” is around 70 pp. I wound up calling it an “interlude” rather than an “epilogue” for two reasons: 1) it’s so long; and 2) it takes place about eight years after the prelude and thus about eight years before Book 2, so it is truly an interlude; and 3) it’s largely, though not quite entirely, from the pov of a character we will never see again and involves a bunch of minor characters we also won’t ever see again. Daniel and his daughter Jenna both appear, though. Jenna takes the pov for a brief tidbit of the Interlude, which is actually fine as she takes quite a few pov scenes in Books 2 and 3.

Also, the first person to take a look at the Interlude really liked it, so that’s excellent news.

I thought dealing with the Interlude would take much longer. Since it didn’t:

b) I started revising Tarashana. I took the comments of the first three readers (thank you all so much!) and turned them into a single bulleted list. I’m happy because almost all the revision will involve trivial detail work, no matter how important it will be in smoothing out the story and fixing up problems that might otherwise have been jarring to the reader. One element of the worldbuilding will require a little more thought, but even that won’t require a huge revision by any means. Nothing like the massive revision of Tuyo itself, that’s for sure.

Probably I will wind up making a particular revision that impacts descriptive details through about a third of the book, and that means I am absolutely certain to miss some description somewhere and leave the previous description in the story. I can’t believe I will get it all. It’s like when you change a character’s sex and a year later, after you have re-read the story yourself four times, a proofreader says, “Shouldn’t this be “she” rather than “he” in this sentence?” (I actually did switch the sex of one character in Tarashana, but I made the switch early, so by this time I THINK I have switched every single pronoun.)

Anyway, it feels to me like it shouldn’t take more than a week to whip through all these revision notes. That probably means it will be more like three weeks, but either way, barring acts of God and so on, I should be sending the manuscript out for proofreading by the end of the month.

c) I came in to the office on Saturday and spent four hours doing this and that — I swear, I hardly remember what — oh, right, putting The Year’s Midnight into KDP format so I could see how many pages the manuscript is and tell the cover artist. But I also ran through through one million links to services that will promote an ebook for free rather than as a paid service. I got the links here, by the way, if any self-published authors want to take a look. This post is old and some of the links are dead, but many are still functional.

I’m setting Tuyo free on February 5th and using four or five of those promotion services and I will then compare the result to setting the book free for one day and promoting that day via Freebooksy, which is the most expensive promotion service other than Book Bub, as far as I know. As far as I can tell at this point, using Freebooksy to promote a free book will move quite a lot of books, but I think it may be cost effective only if there are more than two books in the series — not an earthshaking revelation, but useful to know. It was definitely cost effective for Black Dog, but not for Tuyo. Of course, I am building toward the Tarashana release, so it doesn’t necessarily matter to me whether promoting Tuyo is cost effective right this minute, as much as whether it pays off in sales later. I put a new endnote into the Tuyo ebook, with a teaser for Tarashana as well as for Nikoles. I do think the Freebooksy promotion also paid off in boosting the number of Amazon reviews from 40 to 50 practically overnight.

Up for this week:

a) Format Sphere for Kindle, KDP, and Draft to Digital. If I do that too early, I may shortly be correcting a few typos in three different version of the manuscript, which is a tedious pain in the neck. But it may be worth the risk of that tedium in order to get the basic formatting done. I will have to come to my office to do this, as MY LAPTOP IS STILL IN THE SHOP and the word processing program on the borrowed laptop is not capable of this kind of formatting. But I can come to work an hour early a couple days and get it done this week, probably.

b) Look for other places I can ask to review the audiobook of Tuyo. I have lined up three reviewers, I think two smaller and one bigger, and applied to two other big audiobook review sites, but last week did not have time to look for more. That, again, is something I have to be at a real computer to do. It may need to wait for next weekend.

c) Revise Tarashana. Yay! This is the fun project for the week. It was painful to tear myself away from it this morning.

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