The last mile…

(TL;DR = NEW BOOK PICS BELOW!)

I’m pretty late with an update, but I have plenty that I’ll be sharing over the next month!

So, the book is behind schedule… Like, waay behind schedule. Slowly but surely the book is getting done. The writing has been done for months, but I had to take a step back and stop forcing myself to hit my arbitrary dates. I’ll save all the deadline stress for book #2 when I’ll actually know what I’m doing  (that’s my new super-cool Mizgot emoji… feel free to use it 😀 )

There have been a lot of surprises and unexpected learnings for this first book. For instance, I had no idea how odd and nuanced the layout process would be. I probably should have hired out the layout work, per the advice of many smart folks. But I really wanted to learn this process myself so that I could better communicate what I wanted instead of paying for something that didn’t make me happy.

Plus I’m a control freak…

It’s been a blast to learn the different tools and everything. I’m totally geeked out on the whole thing. But getting the layout as close as I can to my goal has been somewhat exhausting. I’m quite capable of spending hour upon hour in front of the computer as I nudge a graphic all over the page one pixel at a time, or subtly and endlessly change the shade of some pic only to go back to the one I started with.

Good news is that the Print layout is done!!… I think… I hope!!

I just ordered my 2nd printed proof from CreateSpace, so we’ll see how it turns out.

I’ve also been working on the eBook layouts here and there for a couple of months. An author friend told me to quit messing about with tools and just type the book up in HTML, which is what I’ve been doing. Super long process and eReaders are not nearly as forgiving as browsers. It’s amazing how different each eReader will display the text and pictures (“amazing”=“crazy f@*#ed up”).

Some eReaders are very responsive to the underlying HTML while others seem to follow no logic, only chaos. The Kindle alone has ~10 different versions, each with its own unique peculiarities. Anyway, I won’t go into details. Suffice it to say that there’s been a good amount of compromise to get acceptable formatting across the major readers.

I will be releasing Chapter One in the next week in ebook format! Partly I’m doing this to give another teaser and partly as a beta for the book, so I’ll be looking for feedback & screenshots around any display problem (especially on Apple).

By the way, here are some pics of the first printed proof showing the new cover pic. I’ve decided to use “Helric” as my nom de plume, mainly out of a desire to be able to say “nom de plume”… 

Front cover of the first printed proof

Back cover of the first printed proof

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