May 9, 2023

Tides of Acerba is published and live on Kindle and other retailers!

Daily Diary, Day 980: Tides of Acerba is now live on Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Smashwords! And boy, has it been a very busy two days.

Yesterday, as I reported, the Heat Pump people came and started the installation. They stopped around 3, and then three of the six came back this morning to complete, which they did around noon. It is so quiet!!! Of course we are finally having summery weather, so, except to experiment a bit with the thermostat, we will probably be turning it off until about late July, when we will give the AC a try.

Meanwhile, I finished making the changes the proof reader found around 6:30 last night. There were seldom more than one or two errors a scene, almost all of them commas or hyphens (I seem to put both of these in when I shouldn't and leave them out when I should), although I am getting better, the proofed copies used to have many more of these errors!

This meant that this morning, I immediately started the process of compiling a document in Scrivener, to import into Vellum (which formats for different bookstores). Then I proofed the Vellum copy, tweaking here and there, making sure all the backmatter (bibliography, etc.) was up to date.

Then I uploaded to Kindle. What always takes the longest is remembering what keywords and categories to put in. When you upload the text-Amazon checks the spelling. There were 30 errors---29 of them were simply Ddaeran words they didn't recognize--so I could tell them to ignore, but one was a typo, with a stray s. So back I went to Vellum, find that word, correct, generate a new formatted copy for Kindle, and re-load. This took less than 10 minutes to do.

Then I proofed the preview copy they generate (showing what it would look like on a phone!) all looked ok (Vellum really does a good job), then I finished filling in things like the categories and price, and hit publish. It went live within an hour!

Then I did my 45 minute walk, came back and did this process all over again for Kobo, GooglePlay, and Draft to Digital (which distributes to Nook, and Apple, Smashwords and a bunch of smaller international stores) Whew.

Finally, since the Heat Pump people had just left, and there are bits of drywall, and dog hair, etc everywhere), I spent 45 minutes upstairs doing a super thorough dusting (even the lamp shades), with an air purifier on, so that my husband could take his after lunch nap without breathing in particulates from the installation! I will do the downstairs tomorrow. Then I had lunch.

And now I'm pretty tuckered out, but will work a bit on some of the things on the post publication to-do list. For example, I just made a Books2Read link, which works well for those of you who are international readers). Tomorrow, besides some more cleaning, and more publishing stuff (will upload the print copy), I do hope to work more on the Dandy and the Dognappers story. I appreciate the comments from those of you who enjoyed the bio. Tomorrow I will put up the biography of Ian Hennessey.

Over all, getting our heating and cooling needs taken care of, and getting this book I have been working on for a year, in just 2 days, really feels like a great accomplishment, so I thought I would include a celebratory picture!

Photo by Kier in Sight on Unsplash