It’s been a while since I posted an update! Things have been kind of frustrating. Mercury turned direct on Tuesday the 11th and it seemed like everything slammed to a complete halt, rather than starting to unblock as you’d expect. I’m having such a complicated conglomeration of simultaneous related transits to my natal chart, it’s no wonder that my life feels gridlocked at the moment, but most of the transits are favorable, and with all the Venus, Jupiter, Uranus, 8th house, 5th house, and 2nd house involved I spend a lot of time grumpily wondering why more money hasn’t shown up. Oh, well.
Publishing news: right after my last post, the LCCN arrived for Blood Justice, and I sent the Advance Review Copy (ARC) to the printer. With a misspelled word on the back cover, arrrgggh! Fortunately I ordered a proof. That arrived promptly–I sure can’t fault Lulu.com for their turnaround time, that’s another reason I use them for ARCs. I fixed the cover, re-uploaded it and ordered the review ARCs, which should arrive any minute.
I’m just chewing over whether to send them right out or not. Library Journal has changed offices and asks that no more books be sent until after June 1. I’ll have to double-check Publishers Weekly, too, because they just changed owners and management. I can send all the ARCs except Library Journal’s now, or send them all on June 1. I just want to be sure I don’t forget to send the Library Journal copy, but I’ll also need to send Library Journal follow-up finished copies of The Longer the Fall.
And speaking of The Longer the Fall…gods. This book fought and fought against being written, now it’s resisting its own publication! This is BLUM’s fifth title and I’ve had more problems getting it into the supply channel than any of our books so far!
Back when I was entering the ISBN numbers into Books In Print, for some reason, Bowkerlink wouldn’t accept the number for the hardcover edition. It was the last ISBN number in my original block of 10 numbers, and I couldn’t find any evidence that it was assigned to anything else. I emailed Bowker, and they finally replied apologizing. Whatever the hangup was, they’d fixed it, but it was annoying.
I started to set up the wholesale hardcover and paperback editions for The Longer the Fall on Lightning Source last Thursday, and I made the stupidest mistake. I selected the wrong option for the hardcover (from the long, crowded and very teeny font drop-down menu), and selected “trade cloth” instead of “trade cloth with dust jacket.” Lightning Source does not have a friendly user interface. If you screw up, you have to call your rep to fix it.
So I had to wait until the next day to call my rep, Joan, and correct the cover option. Then, she told me that the setup information said that I would be mailing them a cover to scan! I’d already uploaded the interior files for both editions and the cover file for the paperback, and I told Joan no way, I upload everything as digital files. She changed that. It wasn’t until I got off the phone that my neurons caught up and I thought, “wait a sec. Since I screwed up and chose NO dust jacket, how could I have said how I’d be sending the cover file??” The option to upload the cover file never reappeared, and I finally uploaded it as a “revision” which normally you get charged for. So far, I don’t seem to have been charged, but I wound up calling Joan again this week to make sure they had everything, because the titles seemed to be sitting “In Premedia” for a long time. I may have just been over-nervous, because Lightning Source typically has a 5-day turnaround from initial setup.
At this point, it looks as though the Lightning Source proofs are being printed and shipped–finally. In the meantime, I decided to upload The Longer the Fall to Smashwords, in hopes of making their shipment to the Sony eBookstore yesterday. I’d already gotten the file set up for Smashwords’ conversion system (which they colorfully call “the Meatgrinder”). That is…I thought I’d gotten a nice clean file ready.
I guess I hadn’t. I had to re-upload the Smashwords edition at least five times because it kept coming up with errors. Uploading wasn’t a speedy process, either. Once you upload to Smashwords, your book goes into “the queue” and twice the queue hung and hung and hung for hours. The first time I uploaded The Longer the Fall, it wasn’t finished until the next day!! And then it had error messages! I finally found and fixed all the nitty little formating anomalies (Smashwords insists on a Word file, which means I have to back-convert to Word from InDesign because I do all my final edits and changes in InDesign, and then go through the new Word file line by line. What…a…bitch) and got the book through the Meatgrinder without an error on Tuesday night. I put in the ISBN and distribution options and submitted The Longer the Fall for approval in Smashwords’ Premium Catalog. But it’s still “pending approval” now, so I’m starting to wonder if there are some other problems in there I’ll have to fix.
So, I didn’t make the Sony shipment this week, and I have no idea when the next shipments, to any of the venders, will go out from Smashwords. *sigh*
I hand-coded the html file for the Kindle edition, and uploaded it to Amazon with the cover image. The Kindle edition is all ready to go–I hope!!!! It looks okay in the viewer, anyway. I’m waiting until June 1 to push the button that makes it “live.”
I’ve been sending out review copies and review queries for Krymsin Nocturnes. So far, I’ve only gotten one positive response to a review query, and several declines. The nay-sayers all plead a huge backlog of review books, and that may well be true. But I’m cynical enough to wonder if “sorry, I’m buried in review books” isn’t just a nice way of saying, “I don’t think that book looks worth wasting my time on.” It only got reviewed by Publishers Weekly and Library Journal! But I’m still sending queries out. There are a lot of book review blogs!
Along with all this, I’ve been playing telephone tag and sending out fruitless emails. I’ve been trying to get in touch with someone at Borders–Borders.com only lists Mortal Touch of BLUM’s titles although our entire catalog meets their stated specifications (listed in Books In Print and available from Baker & Taylor). I’m trying to find out why the rest of the titles aren’t listed. You can buy BLUM’s books in South Africa, fer cryin’ out loud! We’re not good enough for Borders.com? I’m not demanding shelf space, mind, I just want to be listed on their website! I missed a call back from them today so now we’re officially playing tag. And I’m trying once more to track down the copyright information for a book I badly want to reprint. This one has really proven a hard nut to crack (author is deceased but some of his other titles are still in print. Who’s getting his royalty payments?).
I uploaded the rest of BLUM’s titles to Google Books because if Google does launch Google Editions (as rumor has it) and if Google Editions blows the book market out of the water (as rumor has it), I want BLUM to be right there with them. Of course, all these people who are so scared of Google must not have read the FAQ that explains that it can take two months for a submitted title to go “Live” on Google Books! Fortunately, I’d uploaded nice clean PDF files (actually, they’re the files I use for Amazon’s Search Inside This Book) and they went Live after only ten days.
When the going gets tough, tough geeks buy electronics–software, in this case. I pondered buying Adobe Creative Suite for so long, they launched CS5 while I was still making up my mind! So, the “upgrade” (based on the fact that I had InDesign CS4) was a little bit more expensive than for CS4. I decided it was an investment I really needed, though, especially after a fuss-up with a three-page PDF feature for the Readercon Souvenir Book, which I had to jump through hoops to adjust because I didn’t have the optimum software. Now I do! I ordered CS5 last week, paid a little extra for faster shipping (as a percentage of the total, it was diddly-squat) and it arrived on Tuesday. I’ve installed it but I still need to start learning Photoshop and Illustrator.
I think I’m going to have to continue this update in another post! It’s starting to get light outside, which means it’s my bedtime!
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