Progress report

I went over chapters 3-6. There are nine chapters—I feel like I’m not 100% able to edit from a pacing standpoint without, you know, having the book written, but I should reacquaint myself with what’s already written before I push ahead with more.

Progress report

I figured I should get back to work on Trials, so today I went over and edited the first two chapters again. I was laughing out loud! The Trang series is kind of a pain in a lot of ways because there’s so much to keep track of, but I do enjoy it….

At least it's done

Yesterday and today were committed to 1. inputting corrections to the e-book that I caught while laying out the paper book, and 2. uploading the interior manuscript and cover for the paper version to Amazon.

It took two days, and it wasn’t like #1 was the problem. Amazon’s changed the old CreateSpace platform—I don’t know if it’s any less fiddly than CreateSpace, but it’s fiddly in a different way. You make a PDF this way, and it works just fine, but if you make a PDF that way, all is lost.

I did a PDF of the cover and uploaded it—and the software oriented it vertically rather than horizontally, which of course was confusing for all concerned. There was no way to adjust that in Amazon’s software that I could find, so I decided that the best way around was to upload a PNG file into Amazon’s “Cover Creator” program, which worked…except Cover Creator did the whole 90/10 thing Amazon tends to do, where 90% of their software is really intuitive and easy to use, while 10% is completely opaque.

Case in point: I decided after previewing my cover that I wanted to adjust a few things, so I needed to swap out the PNG file (which was the entire cover) for a new one. Well, good luck figuring out how to do that! The very simple, easy-to-use interface had nothing telling you how to do that, you couldn’t go back to an “upload my image” page, and it was all saved so that shutting everything down and starting over helped not at all—the old PNG file was, to all appearances, there to stay.

Finally I found instructions on a completely separate page that wasn’t part of Cover Creator—and all you have to do is click on a certain part of your image, and then this super-easy, super-clear drop-down menu will emerge from hiding and you’re back in The Good 90% of Amazon. I mean, I’m grateful that they’ve got The Good up to 90%, but one unintended side effect of the 90/10 contrast is that it makes you feel really stupid—this tool is so easy to use, once you’ve unearthed it from its secret tomb.

Anyway, I’ve ordered a proof (always always order a proof!), and assuming that looks OK, the paper book will be up on Amazon sooner rather than later. (ETA: Well, Amazon’s proofs are definitely cheaper than CreateSpace—you can splurge on expedited shipping, but I didn’t, and it was less than $10.)

After that, I have some non-book stuff that needs attention, but then I’ll get back to writing Trials until Tribulations comes back from the copy editor. I do still intend to do large-print editions, but I’m a little layout-out’d at the moment, and I’m going to have to do more with layouts once Tribulations returns.

Progress report

I proofed the index and then did a spot check—not surprisingly, when there were typos, the page number tended to not be accurate. But the post-proofread spot check revealed all of one error, and in all honesty I don’t know whether that should please or worry me. I didn’t see any errors in the Part 3 page numbers that came up.

I’ll do the cover tomorrow, probably—it’s spring, and if I don’t pay some attention to the garden, I’m going to be overrun.

I guess the cat needed waxing....

I didn’t get quite enough sleep last night thanks to one of the furrier and mouthier members of the household, but I was like, Darn it! I’ll just have some more caffeine and push on through!!! And I got through Part 3, whoo-hoo!

And then of course when I was looking over the page numbers I’d written down for the index, they were off—aye yi yi. Well, I guess I’ll be doing the more-careful check after it’s all done rather than the more-casual….

Indexing and its purpose

After waxing the cats, I proofed and indexed the rest of Part 2.

Indexing this book is a little weird, because the standard advice is that you don’t index a name mentioned in passing. So, yeah, my grandad says something about Marlene Dietrich, and I don’t index it, because it’s not like he knew her or has anything important to offer.

But when he writes something like, “Yesterday Fred Smith told me that Joe Blow is in Africa,” and that letter has a date on it….then I feel like I should index Joe Blow, because his family might be very interested to know where he was and when. So I’m indexing a lot of trivial mentions of non-famous people, but then again, I kind of feel like giving people access to information about relatives who haven’t had history books written about them is why I’m bothering to do this damned index in the first place.

My First Index

So, it turns out that indexing is one of those activities that’s actually pretty easy to do…until you absolutely hit a wall and just can’t do it any more. A little like long-distance driving, for me at least. It definitely helps to know the material—it also helps that I was careful not to actually read the book again when I did the layout until now. Definitely when doing an index you don’t want to be so used to/tired of the material that you just say, “Oh, yeah, Jim again—he shows up a lot, no big deal.”

I’m indexing and doing a final read at the same time, which so far I think is working OK? I have found a couple of errors, some of which I’ll need to fix in the e-book, so I feel like I’m not completely worthless as a proofreader just yet.

I did the Introduction and Part 1 before I hit the wall, and if the schedule allows I’ll probably be able to do Part 2 in one day and Part 3&4 in one. Then it’s a matter of getting the cover ready, and I’ll have a print book!

Progress report

I finished & checked the layouts for Parts 3 & 4 (which together are about equal in length to Part 1 or Part 2), plus I laid out the front matter and the Resources page in the back. The other bit of back matter is going to be the Index, which…pray for me. I’m going to try giving the layout a final read while indexing it—we’ll see how that goes. This is my first index!

Progress report

Part 2 (which is even longer than Part 1!) is done—that seems to have gone a lot quicker. I’m going to be optimistic and say that’s because I sorted out how I wanted to handle laying out letters back during Part 1, but it could also be just that I didn’t get enough sleep last night and am missing all the errors. The final read will tell, I suppose….

Anyway, I’ve got Part 3 into the layout software, so yay.

Progress report

I was a bit busy today, but I figured I’d at least get Part 2 set up so that I could get a lot done on it tomorrow. When I started the new file, I realized that I had set the pages up in the earlier sections to be 8 x 5.5 inches instead of 8 x 5.25 inches. Whoops! Given the length of what I’ve laid out already and the fact that this book isn’t part of a series, I decided to just make the pages 8.5 x 5.5 inches with a slightly larger top & bottom margin than before. Making do!

Progress report

Part 1 has been laid out, and the layout has been gone over. Yay! That’s a big job—Part 2 is just as big and starts on the left-hand side instead of the right, so…hard work is good for the soul, I guess? Probably won’t get to it until the weekend.

As I mentioned, Part 1 is 49 pages long, which is reeeeeaaallly long for a chapter layout. It occurred to me earlier that I should probably print out only 5-10 pages, because a change early on could alter the next 48 pages. So naturally I printed out the whole thing at first…oops. We’ll see if I learn my lesson when I’m doing Part 2.

Progress report

So, I had foolishly initially laid out Part 1 before laying out the Introduction—it turned out not to matter, but if you ever decide to lay out a paper book, I strongly recommend you start at the book’s actual beginning, it will potentially save you a lot of time. Anyway, after I did the initial layout of the Introduction and printed it out, I decided that the font was too big, so I took the font down two points.

Those two points reduced Part 1 from 79 pages to 49! So, yeah, as much as I hate the teeny-tiny print, you do want to make the font as small as you can while keeping it readable. (Also a big font makes a book look like a kid’s book.)

I’m looking at this book and realizing that, since it’s nonfiction, the paper version should really have an index. That’s not going to be too much fun to do. But I think I should, because you can’t search it the way you can an e-book.

The font is, of course, Georgia.

Progress report

Dislocated World is back to paid on Amazon—I’ve started to advertise it as a Sponsored Product there. I don’t have any great hopes for that sort of campaign, but I think given that the book is niche-y history, it’s probably the best approach. Facebook has managed to piss off so many people that it’s stopped letting you target your ads, which of course was what made Facebook ads actually work! So I won’t be advertising there—that company cannot stop shooting itself in the foot….

I’m starting to lay Dislocated World out as a paper book—because it’s in four parts instead of a much greater number of chapters, Part 1 is more than 75 pages long! It’s going to be a bear, for sure. Not to jinx anything, but at least I don’t seem to have completely lost the hang of Scribus.

Progress report

OK! I uploaded a Dislocated World onto Amazon as an e-book—it will be exclusive there for a bit, just because I can’t deal with the rest of it right now. I’ve also activated the bonus content on this Website—there’s no actual link to the book yet, but I’ll add them once the book is actually up.