I swear, this book is never going to get published. Maybe I just better give up and read it aloud chapter-by-chapter on YouTube, because no one is ever going to get to read it, the way things are going.
The paperback proof arrived on Friday, but I was waiting to have both proofs in hand so I could check them together, and then I’d approve both at the same time. Lightning Source emailed me on Friday that the hardcover proof had shipped. It should have been delivered yesterday. I was outside working in the yard until nearly sunset, and when I finished I walked down to get the newspaper. The UPS driver had left the hardcover proof, in a very small box, just lying on the grass at the base of the newspaper box! Right there on the bare ground–the cardboard was already softening with the damp. I suppose I should be grateful he found the right house, but, really!!!!! I almost lost the Verizon pre-paid debit card because the UPS driver stuffed that into the newspaper box, it was a very windy day and the envelope had blown out of the box and was on the ground by the time I found it. It was sheer luck it didn’t just go tumbling off down the street!
UPS = EPIC FAIL.
So, today I sat down to give both proofs a close look. I found that both of them have unacceptable covers. The cover art somehow rendered at low resolution on both PDFs. It’s all pixelated and looks like holy hell. I have to re-upload both covers and I’ll probably get charged for both of those. I’m not sure how that happened! I’m completely baffled! But I didn’t catch it before I sent the PDFs off so now I’m stuck. I’ll have to call my rep at LSI tomorrow (you have to call your rep for everything with LSI) and order new proofs, and wait and wait and wait for those…I just feel like killing something, I really do. I am so upset. At least the interiors look okay. And I’m actually glad this is happening with my book and not one of my authors’ books! But it’s still both infuriating and creepy. This book didn’t want to be written and now it’s pulling down every “Murphy’s Law” it possibly can to stop itself from getting published!
The Longer the Fall is still “Pending Approval” for the Premium Catalog on Smashwords, after eight days now. (It has to be in the Premium Catalog to go out to all the retail outlets.) I emailed them and Mark Coker replied, “Inanna, as we mention everywhere, you should plan on it taking up to a week for us to review, sometimes longer. We do the reviews in batches (one is happening now), which means some authors will see their books approved within 2 minutes of publishing, and others who’ve been waiting 5 days will also get their’s approved.”
Well, fine, but that was Saturday and now it’s Tuesday night–and this is after the utterly hellish time I had getting all the bugs out of the book file and getting it to go through Smashwords’ “Autovetter” to begin with. It took me two days just to upload the effing book! So, for it to also be taking so long to pass the review for the Premium Catalog is just…just…non-obscene words fail me.
And I don’t think BLUM’s titles will ever appear in the Sony Reader Store. According to Smashwords, our first three titles (Mortal Touch, Gideon Redoak and Cat the Vamp) were shipped to Sony on April 12. They’re supposed to take about two weeks to be processed and appear in the Sony store. But Sony won’t add them. I emailed Mark (I’ve been pestering him a lot and I don’t feel like I should keep it up) and asked if any Smashwords titles are actually in the Sony Reader Store. He replied, about 200 of them so far–but I don’t know which ones those could be. I don’t think the books that had already been shipped went out again in the shipment that supposedly was sent on May 19, because the date hasn’t changed in my dashboard information on Smashwords. So, if the titles were shipped six weeks ago and haven’t shown up in the store, and they’re not going to be shipped again, and Sony doesn’t want to add Smashwords titles at all…well, I don’t have any recourse. Sony is very, very, very unfriendly to small publishers.
Back on April 30, I even tried to call Sony. I hunted on their website for ages looking for any form of contact information at all–email, snail mail, phone, anything. One of the Customer Support pages for the Reader Store gives a tech support number and I finally called that. Well…it wasn’t the right number, even though it was on the Reader Store page. The Customer Service Assistant did try hard to help, but he was baffled. He had an accent and I’m sure he was in Singapore or someplace, but that wasn’t the issue. The real issue was the call quality. It was just horrible. It sounded as though I was talking to someone on a cheap cell phone at the very edge of a tower range, driving at high speed on an Interstate, and going through tunnels every few minutes. The audio was almost unintelligible and the sound would just go dead for several seconds every few minutes. I was thankful I wasn’t calling about some real technical support problem, because it would have been a nightmare. The CSA kept putting me on hold, trying to find somewhere to refer me for a question about the Reader Store. Finally he took a message and promised to pass it on.
He must have done, because I got an email asking for feedback on Sony’s tech support services!
Wow, did I let them have it. But I never got a reply of any kind to my question. Take it from me, though: if you have a Sony product and you need tech support…don’t bother calling them!
Frankly, at this point I’m fervently hoping that the Sony Reader tanks like the Sony Betamax did, because their attitude just plain stinks. I own Sony Vegas Movie Studio software, and I downloaded a trial version of the Sony Acid music editing software and was seriously planning to buy it. Now I don’t want to, because I don’t want to give Sony another dime. I’d write and tell them that–if they had a mailing address!
The ARCs for Blood Justice have arrived, at least, but they can’t go out to Library Journal until June 1.
On top of all this, I got a notification yesterday that I did not win one of the grants I applied for. I’m still waiting to hear on another one but it’s a pretty long shot. So, yeah…not a happy camper at the moment. 🙁