Moe Lane

I got, like, 13 people who haven’t. If you haven’t, fill ’em out. Check your email, if you haven’t yet. At this point I’m about ready to guess.

Feel free to pre-order from the store, too.

Didn’t get to the level of an actual electrical fire, but I had to yank everything in a hurry and get the tower on the porch. Guess I no longer need worry about whether to put a new video card in there, huh? Did have to order a new computer, though. Yay.

In absolutely unrelated news: I have a Backerkit pre-order store for FROZEN DREAMS!

Gah, this morning.

Not much happened today, honestly. I needed some distractions, so I went and got them. I am trying to figure out one thing, though: am I going to need an advertising budget? And if so, how much?

Title says it all, really. The sooner I lock down existing orders, the sooner I can start releasing rewards. That’s going to include the Kindle/Nook/PDF book, mind you. Also: once the book is live on Kindle I can get started on proofing it for print.

You should still be able to pre-order via Backerkit, but in case you can’t: link. And, if you haven’t filled out your survey yet… FILL OUT YOUR SURVEY.

I put more finishing touches on the book. What’s keeping me from publishing? Mostly my wife doing one last look-see and me doing the Special Thanks section. Which means, by the way: FILL OUT YOUR SURVEYS, IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY.

In other news, got more feedback on the short stories – and I got the character sketches first drafts for the worldbook back from Ben Fleuter! He’s going to use the sample characters to populate the cover art, and he’s enthusiastic about that part of the project. As am I: I feel it’s gonna absolutely pop.

Welp. At some point in the process, you have to slam back the shot of whiskey and say That’s all the goram rogue em-dashes we’re gonna find. We have reached that point in the book’s journey. It’s back from the editor, and as soon as EVERYBODY SENDS THEIR SURVEYS IN I can start in with getting the list together for the Special Thanks. There’s just not that much left at this point.

Well, for the book. The audiobook and RPG worldbook are both later-stage projects. But the book (and the physical copy) are still coming along. But a big milestone’s been passed here.

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!

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.

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 did some work on the RPG (you can see it on Patreon) and I got the continent map back! I’m now deciding whether to make it an add-on for Backerkit. It’s kind of spoiler-y.

Aside from that, right now I’m mostly keeping track of people doing stuff. Things are being reviewed, assessed, annotated, drawn, and generally worked on; there’s a lot of moving parts to this thing. I shouldn’t be surprised at that, yet here we are.