The Archons

I just hit the publish button on the paperback for The Archons. It took me at least 50 iterations to get the cover art lined up, the gutter wide enough to prevent text from overlapping, and the page numbers to appear only on the first page (and I even started it on page 1 after the contents) not to mention other little annoyances, like zeroing out the footer, because there is no footer and the white space allocated for a footer was odd looking. Paperbacks are always painful to get right, but I know what looks good and I want my own paperback copy, so I put in the effort. I’ve also learned a lot of tricks since the first books I formatted for Amazon. Some day… when I have tons of time to kill, I’ll go back and reformat all of my earlier books to bring them up to my latest standard. Or, I’ll hire someone to do it.

I applied the A+ content, but it’s still in review. That’ll show up sometime this week. I also noticed that the series data showed up and includes the optional material, which is the paperback version of the Tome.

Goodreads picked up the data from that book before I went to their site and updated it. It was confusing at first because I usually hand-enter the data. After I typed it all in, it gave me an error that another book with the same title already existed. Plus, it knew it belonged to me, so it allowed me to edit the book and add the cover art. Nice.

Problems Downloading Free Materials

As I mentioned in an earlier post, when you download the free eBooks, there’s an issue where the Kindle for the iPad no longer accepts mobi format. The ePub format is available, but the downloader only lists the Apple reader to transfer it to. Sooooo….. you have to go to the download files and transfer it from there to the Kindle app. Here’s the instructions, if you have issues:

How to transfer ePub to Kindle

My Next Book…

I made up my mind (It didn’t take as long as I thought it would). I’m going to forge ahead with the second book of the Abyss series. I’ve already been plotting the second novel and I’m saddled with the terrible choice of choosing 3 main sub-plots to base the book on (oh, that’s so terrible). I have 9 ideas listed. Each one has a lot of material that could be applied to a book.

I’m already looking at artwork. I’d like to get a cover designed before I get too deep into the book. Artwork is kind of hit or miss. I know it when I see it, but I can’t describe what I want before that. I just sift through a lot of garbage until I see something that makes me go “Wow.”