Saturday updates from BLUM

A quiet day on this holiday weekend. I tend to buckle down to work around sunset. It reached 81 degrees and is a pleasant, warm, sunny day, but it feels like spring, not summer. Donelan’s was going to get some dates in from one of its other stores for me by today, but I’m loathe to go out. The Nashua River hasn’t dropped below flood stage yet, although it’s receding quickly. But Rte. 119 is still closed, and may not be opened until Monday after Mass. Highway checks the road for damage. (And that’s assuming there isn’t any, with a second inundation in two weeks.) So, we have Saturday traffic + detour traffic + shopping day before big family holiday traffic, and…I don’t need the dates for life support. *wry smile*

Anyway, I got mandatory Friday errands (mail and local newspaper) done yesterday, and I must have timed them perfectly because the traffic wasn’t too bad. I went to the Farmer’s Exchange for bunny pellets. They had baby chicks. 🙂

Last night I finished hand-editing and coding files for the ebook editions of Krymsin Nocturnes and uploaded them: Smashwords for ePub and other formats, Amazon for the Kindle edition. For Smashwords, I need to create a special Word .doc file with reviews at the front, text formated to their specifications, and a customized copyright page. For the Kindle, I am now hand-coding an html file of the entire book, which gives me the closest control over their conversion system. Then, both of those need to wait for vetting and approval. The Kindle edition is still waiting, on Amazon. The Smashwords edition is up and ready on Smashwords (and already getting some “sampling”) but is still pending approval for the “Premium Catalog” so it can go out to all the retail outlets: Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, and the Apple iBookstore. Mark Coker’s latest email update to publishers promises some new retail outlets coming soon, but evidently these are top-secret negotiations, because that’s all he’ll say.

I’ve set up Krymsin Nocturnes on Lightning Source for the hardcover and paperback editions and I’m waiting for the proofs now. I already have purchase orders from Brodart to fill, thanks to the Publishers Weekly review.

Meanwhile, all the information I can access says that Mortal Touch, Gideon Redoak and Cat the Vamp were all “shipped” to Apple on April 1 and should be in the iBookstore now. Trouble is…I can’t figure out how to verify this. You can’t access the iBookstore without an iPad. If any of you has an iPad and could check for BLUM’s titles, I’d be very grateful! I have iTunes but all I can see are the book “apps” that were already there for the iPhone. The iBookstore, it seems, is not something just anybody can browse–it’s an exclusive iPad club. My iTunes ran a full update on March 31, too, and has iPad options in it, but BLUM’s book titles don’t show if I run searches in the iTunes store, so they’re not there.

There doesn’t seem to be as much news about the iPad launch as I might have thought. All the turmoil that Apple is throwing the big publishers into with the “agency pricing” thing doesn’t affect me at all. I read the pricing requirements Apple gave Smashwords and just shrugged–except for the “end all prices in 99” bit, I was already there. Sony, apparently, is going through some big re-negotiating of price structures, and some of its ebooks have been pulled temporarily while that’s settled–this is according to the Sony ebookstore site. Smashwords still hasn’t “shipped” titles to Sony, they say that will happen any minute now.

I forebear to make any predictions about the ultimate impact of the iPad on publishing, computing, or anything else. The iPad reviews I’ve been reading fall into two camps: A) “It’s incredible, you can sit on your couch and watch TV on it!” B) “It sucks, all you can do is sit on your couch and watch TV on it.” But then, the very first Mac sucked, too, and we all know how that one turned out!

I just caught up with several days of news and absorbed a headline from yesterday for the first time: Health care hikes rejected: State tells insurers no on 235 plans for small groups. “Making good on Governor Deval Patrick’s promise to reject health insurance rate increases deemed excessive, the state Division of Insurance yesterday denied 235 of 274 increases proposed by insurers for plans covering individuals and small businesses.” That includes the huge announced hike from Fallon that forced me to downgrade my coverage to a higher copay/deductible plan. The insurance companies are squealing, and they’re going to appeal, but I could be getting a refund and a break on my health insurance, which would sure be nice! We “small group market” people are the ones who consistently get screwed over but good by all the insurance companies, and I’m really sick of it. I’m already paying a lot more for property taxes after the override vote to save the library last year, and now the library still might lose its accreditation, which I’m very unhappy about.