Moe Lane

It was a long week, school tutoring edition: they crammed five days’ worth of programming into four, and that got old pretty quick. I don’t really blame the school, though. Nobody’s thought about how to do this stuff before; I’m sure that if/when we ever have to do it again it’ll go ten times as smoothly.

But in the meantime, I need to take a nap.

Moonlight Sonata

But I suppose their readers would have freaked if the Orion drive was even mentioned.

Via @CalebHowe.

Moe Lane

PS: That’s what deserts are for.

I did not quite hit numbers today. Trying to figure out margins took up a large portion of the evening.

Today might have been the last real pass-through for the text. At this point we’re just trying to find rogue carriage breaks and misuse of a/an. Assuming a clean slate, we’re… running out of reasons why not to slap various extras onto it and hitting publish.

Fun thing I learned about tonight: the difference between left/right margins and gutter/outside margins. The latter is what you use when you’re prepping something for publishing: you have to mirror your text and make the gutter margin wider than the outside, because the gutter margin is where they bind the pages to the spine. If you make both margins equal, or don’t mirror the text, it looks weird on the physically printed page. And now you know!

This is fascinating, in its way.

There are a couple of good deals on there that will go away when the book stops being a pre-order. Things are, as they say, moving along. In particular: we’re quickly getting to the point where I can actually sell this book on Amazon and B&N. Once that happens, I gotta worry about fulfilling the orders I got, up to that point. Clearing the decks, savvy?

So if you want the deals, sign up now.

In Your Eyes, Peter Gabriel

Mostly I’m trying to figure out advertising right now. I grabbed Backerkit mostly to coordinate surveys and fulfillment, but the preorder store has actually been pretty productive. Sufficiently so that I could maybe afford to buy some ads on Facebook or whatnot; I just don’t know whether it’s cost-effective. Although maybe I should do it anyway, as a teaching mechanism? There are a lot of elements to this self-publishing thing that aren’t immediately obvious.

Also: hopefully soon I’ll have a logo! My sister’s a graphic designer, and she’s working on it for me now. Gonna put it in all the books and stuff.

I am probably going to have to kill that one darling.