{"id":923,"date":"2010-05-10T01:08:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T01:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/?p=923"},"modified":"2010-05-10T01:08:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-10T01:08:00","slug":"weekend-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/?p=923","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Updates"},"content":{"rendered":"

News on the publishing front is largely good. The Advance Review Copy (ARC) of Blood Justice<\/i><\/a> is almost ready to go to the printer. I finished going through the author’s edits, cleaned up the file, laid it out in InDesign and it looks great.<\/p>\n

Layout is where the manuscript turns into a book, like the caterpillar into a butterfly, and it’s always exciting to watch that happening before my eyes. It’s just amazing how much difference the visual presentation of the material makes. I always agonize over fonts and decorative little dingbats, and every book has its own idiosyncracies: with Blood Justice<\/i>, it’s short chapters, which called for different handling for the chapter headers. And I like to vary the styles of headers and footers and page numbers, too, just for fun. I’ll keep a series in the same style for consistency but BLUM doesn’t have a set style for all titles, like some small presses adopt. We offer a variety of fictional genres–contemporary fantasy, YA, gay historical romance, horror, thriller–and I try to design the books to reflect the fictional style.<\/p>\n

The ARC cover is all set up, and I applied to the Library of Congress for the LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number, important if you sell to libraries, which I do). As soon as that arrives, off to the printer the ARC goes, but I’ll need to check the proof before I order the review copies. So far, I’ve always gotten the LCCN very fast, so I expect to be sending the files off in just another day or two.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I downloaded the cover templates from Lightning Source for the paperback cover and hardcover dustjacket for The Longer the Fall<\/i><\/a>, and I just need to drop my cover art into those and finish up all the text and design, and I can send those files off to Lightning Source and order proof copies. (Remember, release date is June 1 and you can pre-order an autographed copy from BLUM now!)<\/p>\n

I tried running a Facebook ad for 30 days, and this time I set the amount I paid them high enough to actually get placement–1,476,080 impressions and 354 click-throughs to be precise, giving me a click-through rate of 0.024%. I have no idea whether that’s good or not, but it cost me a bundle and I don’t see any evidence that it increased either sales or traffic to my website, so I’m not going to continue the Facebook ads at this time. I’m still considering Google AdWords, and I am extending the ad I’ve been running on Bitten By Books<\/a>. I’m going to add the thumbnail of Blood Justice’s<\/i> cover to it as soon as the art is done.<\/p>\n

Aside from publishing progress, the last several days have been rather demoralizing, for several reasons, which I mostly don’t want to get into. \ud83d\ude41 But they include calls from National Grid’s credit department alerting me to the fact that I forgot to pay the electric bill last month–totally my fault.<\/p>\n

I got up on Friday so groggy and sleepy that I walked right past the carnage in the living room to get my towel from the laundry room and didn’t even notice it. Not until I was about to get into the shower did I realize that I was looking at a big splotch of blood on the bathroom floor. That was nothing compared to the mess in the living room–the cats caught some little varmint and, well, you don’t need to know. I’m used to cleaning up barf every day when I get up, but peeling little bodies and scrubbing blood off the floors takes the eye-opener to a whole other level. I think the cats just got their revenge on me for the chipmunk.<\/p>\n

After that I went up to Nashua and dropped a UPS package off at Staples, where three robed Buddhist monks were leaving the store just ahead of me, having bought, it appeared, a printer. But the rest of my planned errands in Nashua were a waste of time: the gas station was jammed with cars so I didn’t get gas, and there were picketers at Shaw’s. I won’t cross a picket line (and I knew about this labor dispute with Shaw’s<\/a> and really don’t want to shop there anymore, anyway), so I came back to Pepperell and shopped at Donelan’s. Today, the Sunday Globe<\/i> was delivered with all the ad inserts, magazine section and so on from last week’s paper! The newspaper is dated May 9, all the supplements are May 2!<\/p>\n

I’m going to be so<\/i> glad when Mercury turns direct! Although what’s hitting me has a lot more to do with long-term Saturn and Uranus transits and they’re going to be in effect for a while. \ud83d\ude41 I took blankets off my bed, washed them and put them away, and now it’s freezing cold; I’m still struggling with my eating and meal patterns, making another rearrangement of those today in hopes of getting them under tighter control. I’m on the last episode of Season One of Fringe<\/i> and I’ve already downloaded the Season Two opener for tomorrow’s cycling. I’m hooked! And I’m trying very hard to ignore what day it is today. *sigh* I did have a nice chat with Dad today, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News on the publishing front is largely good. The Advance Review Copy (ARC) of Blood Justice is almost ready to go to the printer. I finished going through the author’s edits, cleaned up the file, laid it out in InDesign … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}