Books – Page 248

05/28/2020 Snippet, MARIE AND THE CONTINENT.

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

05/28/2020 Book Report, FROZEN DREAMS.

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!

Reminder: the FROZEN DREAMS pre-order store isn’t permanent.

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.

05/27/2020 Book Report, FROZEN DREAMS.

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.

05/27/2020 Snippet, MARIE AND THE CONTINENT.

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

05/26/2020 Book Report, FROZEN DREAMS.

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.

05/26/2020 Snippet, MARIE AND THE CONTINENT.

Oh, dear.

Didn’t do much on the book today, really.

Sent some stuff out for people to look at, got stuff back, played videogames and generally didn’t sweat it too much. My wife made a lemon curd pie with fresh-made whipped cream. It was delicious. That was my day.

…Course, I was also up until 4 AM last night/this morning playing Civilization VI, because that’s what you do when you get a new version of Civ, right? And then you remind yourself never to do that again, and you don’t! Until Civilization VII comes out. Ah, the circle of life…

It is also the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May.

This is a Discworld holiday; if you’re curious about it, the details can be found in Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch. Which is… really rather good. Even by Discworld standards. Admittedly, I am very ecumenical when it comes to Pratchett; I can’t think of a Discworld novel that I actually disliked.

05/25/2020 Snippet, MARIE AND THE CONTINENT.

And this isn’t even the big reveal here. Also: this is a more ambitious project than I first considered. I am going to get so many people complaining that I got the details of London wrong: guess I’m just going to have to burn down the entire city in the backstory and redraw the map…