Progress report

Part 2 is done! Whew, this has been some heavy sledding. I did a bit of Part 3, and then I figured that since I am about two-thirds of the way through it, I really should input the page numbers into the large-print index layout. So I did that!

It’s been a solid week since I started this index—ugh. It’s certainly helping the trade paperback edition as well, but it is a little frustrating to know that I can’t put either print edition up until I finish eating this elephant. I guess it’s better to do the work now than to mail off review copies and get told the index sucks ass….

Progress report

Kind of an ugh day—the pollen count is…where it is. I’m partially through Part 2, which is slow going because 1. Part 2 is HUGE, and 2. there are definitely a lot more errors in it. The good news is that transferring things from a trade paperback index to a large-print index is definitely a really good way to proofread—I’m catching a lot of typos, or places where the trade paperback index is off by a page. The bad news is that of course finding and fixing those errors takes a lot of time.

Then on top of everything, the copy editor contacted me to tell me he couldn’t find the Tribulations layout. Turns out that I had deleted the PDF, so I had to convert the chapters and put them together again. That also might be a good thing in the long run, since the way I had done the PDF before made it harder to work with. (I honestly don’t really understand the different flavors of PDFs, I’ve just realized that if you want to do this with a PDF, you should make it this was in Scribus, but if you want to do that, you should make it that way.)

Progress report

I finished Part 1 and set up Part 2—definitely the best way to proofread an index is to use it as the basis for a second. This week is going to be kind of busy, so it may take some time to get everything finished up, but again, I’m definitely finding small mistakes in the trade paperback index (plus I caught a layout error!), so I think it’s worthwhile.

Progress report

Working on the large-print index. I’ve done the Introduction and am most of the way through Part 1, which seems to be what I can do before my eyes permanently cross.

Of course, working on the large-print index means finding errors in the trade paperback index! I did get Proof #3 back today, and the cover looks fine. So I’m fixing the index errors (like the strike-thru errors, they’re not big layout issues that would require another proof), and once that’s done I’ll re-upload the interior and approve it for sale!

Thinking about things....

So, I know I’m a hard sell when it comes to romance novels, but I read Jeannie Lin’s Pingkang Li series, which is a combo of romance and mystery/adventure, and it really got me thinking. The way a series works in romance is that Book #1 focuses on Couple #1, then Book #2 focuses on Couple #2 (who you’ve somehow met in Book #1—they’re usually friends or family of Couple #1), then Book #3 focuses on Couple #3, etc. And with the Pingkang Li series (Jess Michael’s Wicked Woodleys series is a bit like this, too, although much more X rated), there’s some nice plot build from Book #1 to Book #2 to Book #3.

And thinking about it, why shouldn’t there be? Oftentimes when you hit, say, Book #7 in a romance series the plot is really petering out and everything’s kind of on autopilot, but if a writer planned beforehand, knowing they had X many couples, they could do a series that really built a plot that paid off well in the end. The move from Couple #1 to Couple #2 could actually move the plot along, because the different perspectives would give the reader fresh eyes on some underlying conflict that’s been driving everything all along.

Anyway, this interests me. I really like the idea of series that are all really one big book, and while the plotting can get complicated and difficult, I think this is a format that could really work.

Progress report

Whoo-hoo! Laid out and went over Parts 3 & 4, as well as the Resources section.

Tomorrow will be the Index…oy. The plan is to base it off the index for the trade paperback, so hopefully it won’t be THAT painful.

Progress report

Despite Scribus and the printer both getting the vapors at the exact same time, the Part 2 layout is done, baby! Laid out and gone over. Also while waiting for the printer to get over itself, I was able to put Part 3 into Scribus, so that’s 100% set up to be laid out.

Progress report

I went to work on Part 2, and of course I forgot that, given the length of the chapter, I should stop every 10-20 pages and make sure nothing’s been missed. I was 100+ pages in (it’s a looong chapter) before I went back and realized there was an error on about page 30 that will probably affect the rest of the chapter. Tomorrow!

Progress report

I was a little light on sleep, so I thought that today, instead of doing the Part 2 layout, I’d set up the rest of the large-print edition in LibreOffice so that it would all be set to be laid out.

Aaaaand in the process, I realized that the Strike Thru coding in LibreOffice didn’t translate to Scribus. Furthermore, it never translated, meaning that the trade paperback doesn’t have things struck out in it, either!

I was a bit aiiigh! about it all, but then I realized that fixing that wouldn’t change the layout any. So as long as Proof #3 comes back OK, I think I can risk it and not order Proof #4. Since I was updating the interior anyway, I took the time to really look through the interior Proof #3 and found a couple of (very minor) things there to fix as well.

If you’re following along at home:

The Dislocated World trade paperback Proof #3 is coming to me soon, and hopefully once it gets here, I’ll be able approve the edition for sale

The Dislocated World large-print paperback is about halfway through production

Trials is still unwritten aside from part of the first draft. I thought I could switch off between writing and doing layouts, but I never seem to be able to do more than one thing at a time….

This is not an improvement

Proof #2 arrived today, and I’ll be doing Proof #3. Some things are kind of unavoidable: Part of the back cover keeps showing on the spine (where it looks like ass), even though I moved it in the last proof. I realized that, since small shifts in placement of the cover graphics in different print runs are unavoidable, I should make some adjustments to the back cover so that the contrast isn’t as dramatic and it doesn’t look as bad if it overlaps the spine a bit.

Other things are just Amazon really not improving on what CreateSpace did. CreateSpace (like most printers) indicated that a proof was a proof by stamping “PROOF” on the last page of the book. I guess Amazon decided that this was not enough to prevent people from selling on their proofs, so now there’s a ribbon printed across the cover indicating that the book is a proof and should not be resold. (Like this is going to prevent people from buying and selling proofs, right? I mean, they know what they’re getting.)

Well guess what? That ribbon runs over the subtitle on the front cover, so I’m really having to guess as to how that’s going to look in the finished product (which pretty much defeats the entire purpose of a proof), and it runs over the jacket copy on the back cover.

That’s a real problem, because jacket copy is just a freaking minefield. Gimp doesn’t let you spell-check your text, nor copy-paste it from elsewhere. So there’s always about a million little typos, which are hard to catch because my (basic-ass) printer just isn’t able to produce a cover with legible jacket copy. Because of the limitations of my printer (no worse, I would argue, than most home printers), it’s also hard to tell if the color used for the jacket copy blends into the underlying graphic or stands out properly until I see the final, high-quality print. (Obviously that’s also hard to determine from a computer monitor, because it’s backlit, and I just have a harder time proofreading on the computer.)

Needless to say, having a ribbon over the jacket copy that makes it illegible and invisible isn’t helpful. At all. Fingers crossed I caught everything, but wow—Amazon is not making this easy.

Progress report

I didn’t have a lot of time today, so I focused on getting the headers and page numbers right for the Introduction and Part 1. Yes, I’m still on Part 1 and am not done yet, but it’s been a lot of figuring out how I want the layout to look overall. The other parts will go a lot faster for having the layout sorted in Part 1, instead of me deciding that I absolutely hate how it looks and must do it again after it’s all laid out….

Progress report

Well, I’m still working on Part 1 of the large-print layout. I decided that not having the bottoms aligned was driving me crazy, especially because it was happening when there was no real reason for it to happen—i.e. in situations other than, That’s the way this particular letter fell. The issue (and I have a vague recollection of this being a problem in my earlier books as well) is that the APH guidelines set you up so that if you don’t have the exact same number of hard returns on each side of the page, the text blocks won’t line up. So I fixed that by putting less space between paragraphs—which, if memory serves, is why all my books are mostly APH compliant rather than entirely APH compliant.

Because you don’t indent the first line of paragraphs in APH, you automatically put line space between paragraphs. So the places where I had inserted line spaces between paragraphs in the trade paperback now look like this:

Which is completely ridiculous. So I fixed that…I think to my satisfaction, although I’ll give it another look tomorrow. I’m leaving a lot of line spacing in some situations, just because I think it gets confusing not to. This is just a tricky book to lay out, because you have the letters and you have my commentary, and it’s important that readers are able to tell the letters apart both from each other and from the commentary.

Progress report

Since yesterday went well enough, today I was like, “I should get going on that large-print edition.”

Dear God.

For starters, LibreOffice decided to crash rather spectacularly. It crashes so much less often than Word that I get confused when it does. And this was one of those sneaky stealth crashes, where it pretends like it’s saving what you’re doing, but then you realize that you’ll have to do it all over again.

So I restarted everything and worked in a manner designed to put the fewest expectations on LibreOffice, and I managed to get each part saved so that it’s at least roughly ready to be laid out.

Then I laid out the Introduction and started on Part 1—oy. The very large parts of this book mean that the large-print sections are HUGE. The main design issue is that I don’t think I can line up the bottoms given the fact that there are letters and explanatory passages that I’m trying to make look different from each other in a way that doesn't utterly run afoul of the APH guidelines. I’m not thrilled about that—I think uneven text blocks in a layout look really amateurish and shitty—but if you’re following APH you’re already sacrificing design for accessibility, so I guess I just have to accept it. I mean, it’s World War II nonfiction—which skews to an older audience that is more likely to be visually-impaired—so arguably this is the most-important book for me to make accessible.

ETA: I updated LibreOffice, which will either make things better or SO MUCH WORSE…..

Progress report

The allergies are interfering with sleep, so I decided to prep Dislocated World for when it leaves Amazon and goes to other e-retailers. A lot of removing tabs and that sort of routine stuff—the main concern is that when the file is converted, it will fuck up all the italics and underlines and strike-thrus, but there’s not a lot I can do about that at this point. Just got it as clean as I could, and fingers crossed that the conversion goes well.