Hello everyone.
After weeks and weeks of furious work, my newest book, Handlers of the Wondrous and Strange, Volume 1 of the Books of Veer and Magic series, has been submitted to KDP in both trade paperback and ebook formats. It can take a day or three for it to be available. I will then place the A Plus content on the book, which can’t be done until it is available for purchase.
Previews of the covers for the two formats are as follows. Click either thumbnail to open full preview image in a new tab.
Over the next couple of days, I’ll submit the updates and new covers for the Dragonlinked series books, previews of which I’ll put here when they are submitted. I’ll also have to spend some time working on updating the blog menu to include the new series and to feature the new covers for the other books.
I will make additional posts when books are available for purchase, along with direct links.
Having the books in Scrivener, the Dragonlinked series in one project and HotWaS in another, made it so easy to coordinate changes and bring changes from one series to another (both projects could be open at the same time, enabling copying things from one to the other). For example, I decided to use the margins required for 800 page trade paperback books across the board, just to keep things simple. Otherwise I’d have had to set up a separate PDF format for each book with a differing number of pages. Not going to happen. Also, to keep the larger books from having too many pages, I had to skinny those margins to nearly their limits. That necessitated getting the page headers (I eliminated footers—having page numbers down there—several books ago in order to not lose two or three lines of text per page) pretty close to the edge of the page (which looked weird) or closer to the top of the page’s text. To make it easier for a reader’s eye to ‘ignore’ the much closer header text as they read along, I swiped a technique I saw in several published books, which is to bold the headers. It worked very well and looks quite nice.
Scrivener also made it easier for me to coordinate indents and internal margins across all the books, margins and indents I use based on ‘text type.’ You see, as an author you have NO control over font face (nor line spacing) on an ebook unless you want to hand-craft each ebook file, which I have neither the skill nor the time to do, especially as you’d have to do so for every ebook reader brand separately. It is the ebook reader’s owner who has most control over the font. They choose what font they want to display to make it easier for them to read. So, if you are going to offer your book in printed versions AND ebook versions, you can’t pick a fancy font to use, say, for the text from letters or hand-written messages you want to directly show in the book, or for poster text, or what-have-you. The thing is, I do that a lot. But the way I got around that limitation was to use margins. That separates the text from the surrounding text because a different margin catches the eye. And for written letters or messages, I add an additional thing: ragged right text. My books are put out fully justified, meaning the text on a full line goes all the way from the left margin to the right margin. So, when a bit of text using different margins shows up, it catches the eye, as I mentioned. And having ragged right text, meaning lines of text end at different places on the right side, that makes it look more like a hand-written letter because that’s how we write. We don’t space out our words as we write a letter to perfectly fill a line to the right margin. Anyway, having all 5 dragonlinked books in the same project, for example, made it easy to go through and find those bits of special text and set them to specific, crafted styles (with custom margins), made it easy, then, to tweak a style, and have those tweaks automatically affect all bits of text across all the books with the same style. Once I perfected a set of margins for a letter/message/poster/advertisement/whatever to look good in both print and ebook, I could them set them up in the other project and have everything not only work, but have it look the same in all the books, too.
Anyway, that’s my update. I’ll post back when something’s available or updated.
Happy reading!
Adventures in Lethera 