[FIlling your worlds] Update 22: Almost finished!
2 months ago
– Fri, Sep 20, 2024 at 05:01:11 AM
Hi, everyone! Sorry for the long silence. I hope the book plates made it to everyone who ordered one; I haven't heard from anyone that they didn't.
Two backers still need to fill out their surveys! If you are one of them, check your spam folder.
The big news is that I have something like a final (probably penultimate) draft of this thing! The handful of volunteers who did beta testing on the draft from June had comments that were very helpful, and I think they improved the text.
It currently stands at 50,700 words, which Scrivener thinks is about 150 pages in paperback. It'll probably gain some more when I get the annotated bibliography of SFF with linguistic worldbuilding in it more uniform, and there are some definitions in the glossary that I will probably expand on, or I'll realize I should include something else. But I made my self-imposed deadline of getting all the words written by the end of September, so that's good.
This means that I'll be spending October figuring out how to get Scrivener to export an epub that isn't broken (the last epub with a table of contents that it exported wouldn't work in Google Play Books) or seeing if Apple's Pages word processor's epub export is as good as various sources on the internet claim. I want to add some images (which I still need to source or create), too.
I'll also be figuring out what the formatting requirements are for the POD source I'm using so I can wrangle a print layout (in Affinity Publisher, which is actually a lot of fun to play with). I'm hoping to just use the PDF export of that file as the PDF version of the ebook. (Affinity doesn't export to epub, unfortunately.)
If that timeline works out, I'll be able to get the ebooks out in November and start the print process shortly thereafter. (I assume there will be proofs and that sort of thing, then payment, production, and shipping, so the physical books will take a bit longer. I'm planning on using Lulu Direct.) With any luck, the print books will be done just in time to get stuck in the Christmas shipping nightmare! I'll be sure to send a final notice to update your addresses before I start shipping. If your address is already locked (from shipping the stickers), contact me through Backerkit, and I'll unlock it.
Thank you again for supporting this project! I look forward to sharing it with you.
CD
[Filling your Worlds] Bookplates -- progress
7 months ago
– Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 11:36:10 AM
Hello, everyone! Thank you for your patience as I try to wrangle this book into existence.
If you emailed me about google drive access for the writer's toolkit PDFs, please email me again. My inbox is a nightmare (mostly of my own making).
On a slight personal note, I've got a 15-hour-a-week copy editing gig that's eating into the time I would use to write the book; on the plus side, on my writing days, I'm a lot more motivated to get stuff done.
Book plates
I've finalized the design (thanks to Clarissa CS Ryan), and the book plate will have the cover art (now also finalized!) on a minty green background, with a blank space at the bottom for me to sign.
I've also chosen a print shop to make them for me. I was originally going to use Moo, since I've had good luck with them in the past, but an acquaintance told me about a local shop that has much better prices. I've ordered a sample kit and am eagerly awaiting that so I can decide what type of paper to get. They have a really quick turnaround time, so once I place the order, I'll have them pretty quickly. This means that non-US backers (including Canada) will probably be getting them toward the end of May or beginning of June. I'll be mailing to US backers in the second half of June, when I'm in the country for a visit.
If you'll be at 4th St Fantasy convention, I can deliver it to you personally.
(Yes, you'll be getting your book plates before the book is finished; I'm sorry. It would cost me twice as much to mail them from Germany, and since most of you are in the US, well, it's a lot of money. And I'm only in the US once a year.)
Book progress
I'm approaching something like a draft that I can revise. There are a handful of sections that I need to write entirely, and I'm not really satisfied with the state of some other sections, but my goal is to have everything written by the end of this month so I can spend May getting it to a state I'm more or less satisfied with and have something ready for beta readers while I'm travelling in June.
Then I'll revise it in July and/or August and start wrangling the formatting part. (Also figuring out how I'm even going to lay it out and forcing Scrivener to do it, then probably redoing it in Calibre. For the print and PDF versions, I'm going to use Affinity Publisher.)
IF everything goes to plan, I can start shipping in September. But we know what they say about the best laid schemes of mice and men, so we'll see how that goes.
Newsletter
In case you didn't already sign up for my newsletter and you're interested in it, you can sign up here. I'm writing mostly about things I think are interesting that won't fit in the book (because they're off topic or too long or whatever else).
That's all for now!
Until next time!
