Tag: 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!

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.

Did a second revision pass-through of the entire book, mostly. That mostly involved formatting stuff, but there was a plot hole or two that needed to be rectified. And, yes, that ate the entire day.

In other news: we have a cartographer for the RPG worldbook! I went with Robert Altbauer of Fantasy Map again: he did the Cin City map in plenty of time and with no fuss, and it’s been popular with my Kickstarter backers. So having him do this one, too sounded sensible.

Long day. More productive than I was giving it credit for, but still very much a long day.

It was a productive day, really. Just not always productive in ways that can shown off. Advanced on some details on the RPG artwork and layout, for example. Tracked down somebody’s name for the dedication. Did some work that’s up on Patreon now. All useful, but not exactly telegenic.

Spent most of it fiddling with the RPG setting, and hunting down every stray space-and-carriage return I could find. I am starting to get sick of the sight of the book itself, which I understand is normal! This cheers me up, no end.

In other news: if you haven’t filled out your survey, fill it out. Also, if you bought a sonnet, get back to me about what you want in it. And, finally: feel free to let people know about the pre-order store, especially if they missed the Kickstarter and feel bad about it. Or if you think that they might get hooked. I mean, reading my stuff’s gotta be better for them than cigarettes, right?

The last of the short stories for the sampler has gotten its pass-through: next, I will hand them off to my alpha reader and have her tell me what’s wrong with them. I will probably have to proof-read them myself, though, and won’t that be fun? But that’s OK. This is good practice. So is putting them together in e-book form. I learn with this so that the book itself goes smoothly.

Also: the pre-order store is up. By all means, encourage people to check it out. I need to consult with Backerkit about exactly what goes on with locking orders, particularly when it involves digital rewards, and whether I can still do pre-orders there once I’ve locked down. Hrm. I may not make the Dragon Award deadline this year after all. Ach, well, it’ll be eligible for next year’s, then.