Hello folks.
The updates to the fifth (and last, so far) of the Dragonlinked Chronicles books, new edits and new covers, are live on Amazon. Buyers of this book (any of them, now) will get the new covers and edits. The new covers for book 5 are shown below.
Now I can focus on the next Books of Veer and Magic volume, of which various ideas have been percolating. I know the over-arching conflict, I just needs me some details.
Until next time, happy reading!
Hello folks.
Dragonlinked Chronicles Book 4, with its updates and new covers, is available for purchase on Amazon’s sites. Thumbnails of its covers are below. Click on each to bring up a larger preview in a new browser tab.
I’m currently working on finishing the cover of book 5, only have the last bits on the new back image (inside image of eBooks) to do.
Until next time, happy reading!
Hello folks.
The updated A Storm in the Desert, featuring new edits and new covers for eBook and trade paperback versions, is now available for purchase on Amazon. Previews of the new covers are below. Click the thumbnails to open a larger version of the preview in a new browser tab.
On to book 4!
Until next time, happy reading!
Hello folks.
It took longer than expected for this because I noticed a couple of issues with the new cover AFTER I had already submitted it for the trade paperback version. That version takes about a day to be approved, and you cannot make changes during the approval process. Anyway, I fixed the issue and resubmitted both books yesterday, and they are both now available (with the corrected new covers).
Thumbnails of the new fancy covers are shown below. Click to open a larger version in a new browser tab.
Next is book 3, of which I’ve almost finished the extra part of the new cover (what goes on the back of the trade paperback version and inside the eBook version).
Until next time, happy reading!
Hello folks.
I have completed uploading the update and new cover for the first book in my young adult fantasy series, Dragonlinked Chronicles, titled Dragonlinked, and its new version is available for purchase in both eBook and trade paperback formats. The links in the menu at the top of the blog, in the book section of the library, will send you to the Dragonlinked page on Amazon, though I do not have all marketplace links there (I will when I update those entries).
Thumbnails for previews of said new covers are below. Click on them to open a larger preview image in a new browser tab. Yes, that is a baby Anaya (well, as close as I could get her) on the back of new trade paperback cover. eBook readers get a cropped version (but with her full glory) on the title page of the interior of the eBook, so they get to see the little cutie, too.
I’m waiting for word on The Bond, atm, for notification that both formats are approved and available, while I work on A Storm in the Desert.
Until next time, happy reading!
EDIT: Oops. Put the wrong preview of the paperback cover. It was even smaller than I intended. Correct one is up now, to show off Anaya even better.
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!
Hey all,
I have finished re-reading and editing the entire Dragonlinked Chronicles series, I have completed their much snazzier (and more genre appropriate) covers, I have even re-read the new book and have started prepping the Amazon book page for it, going so far as to have already ordered a proof which will supposedly be here by Saturday.
I am currently working feverishly to get the Dragonlinked books formatted for both print and ebook, a process not made easier by strange indents that came along for the ride when I imported them into Scrivener. After having set up, tested, and verified the print formats for the five books, I began proofing the first book for epub format. Something was very strange. I discovered that on most—but not all!—sections of text (scenes, I guess you could call them, though some sections take place over time or across a few places) have a very strange right indent at 6 inches (from the left). An oddity that does not show up when proofing a 6×9 print book because its margins are smaller than that. An ebook, however, shows the weird indent quite plainly. There is a quick way to strip the offending right margin across all sections in the books, but that is to overwrite all margins with the (correct) default margins. The thing is, I use custom indents in various places for text that comes from letters, messages, books a character is reading, posters, and the like. If I used the big bat method, those custom right and left margins would be stripped, too. Soooo, I had to go in manually into the Amazon kindle preview app, scroll through until I saw a wonky right margin, go to that section in Scrivener, check if custom margins for previously stated reasons were used, and then fix the offending right margin to be ‘no margin’ where appropriate. Then lather, rinse, repeat. Finding the problem (Why does it look like that! Argh!), learning what I had to do to fix it, and then fixing it, took me about two hours. For the first book. I am fearful that the odd margins are in the other four books, too. I will, of course, check them and fix them as needed.
So anyway, I’m working like crazy, hoping to have all the books up and ready (including the new one!) in the next week or so.
Until next time, happy reading!
Hello folks.
Because I’m so close to releasing the new book, I got a crazy idea. Why not re-read and edit the entire Dragonlinked Chronicles series, make new covers for the books, and re-release the whole series just before I put the new book out? So that’s what I’ve been doing. In fact, I’ve already read (and re-edited) the first four books, come up with new (and pretty cool) covers for those books, covers that are more traditional fantasy covers (oil-painting style) like the one I’ve worked on for the new book, and I have started the fifth book, in which I’m up to chapter eight, as of right now.
Doing all this lets me accomplish a few things. First, I brought the five books into their own Scrivener project (‘Dragonlinked Chroinicles’), so they’re all together in one place. The biggest benefit of that is they’re in a format that is for a current writing program. It also lets me search across all books at the same time (or just one book, or just select chapters/sections) for anything I want. And that has come in VERY handy for maintaining and fixing continuity, and fixing plot errors that crept in from one book to another because it was so difficult (in the old word processor) to find a particular scene from previous books in order to verify a name, a character/organization quirk, or what-have-you. Second, it has let me revisit the earlier books again, now that I’ve got many more years of writing experience under my belt. And let me tell you, the first book had a few things (narrative sentences, dialog, and the like) that I definitely would have done slightly differently now, and I tweaked those. There were also some embarrassing (to me) things across the whole series, word choices I made in an attempt to make the narrative and dialog feel slightly different, but which upon re-reading pulls me, throws me, out of the story when I read them. I’ve edited them and reading the corrected passages feels much better. There were also the typical minor things found during re-reads, which were all corrected. The other thing this whole process does is make the series ready for any new readers that might pick it up after reading the new book. Not all will, because Dragonlinked Chronicles is young adult fantasy and the new book is regular fantasy, but some may.
At any rate, if things go well, I’ll re-release the entire Dragonlinked Chronicles series, featuring the edits and their new covers, sometime in November or early December, and the new book will release shortly after. /CrossedFingers
Until next time, happy reading.
I got the printed proof and all seems well, so I flagged it for publication. You can get a copy HERE.
Interesting side-note: If I had used the same formatting as my previous trade paperbacks (11 point font size), this one would have come in at 865 pages, including the prologue, etc. That is larger than Amazon allows for trade paperbacks, however, and I have to assume it is because the binding would tend to fall apart with such a thick volume. That means this book would have been 70 pages longer than book 4, had I not changed the font size to 10.5 to get the page count down under the max pages limit, and even with the tweak, it comes in at 801 pages.
As far as the Dragonlinked Chronicles, like Aeron, I had a few things I wanted to see happen in the stories, and they now have, so this likely brings the Chronicles to a close. When more tales about Lethera, the dragons and people living there, come, they will be stand-alone stories or will be part of a new series. As for what I will be jumping into next, I have an idea for something a little different in a new fantasy universe. Where it stands now, there will be humans, magical creatures and beings, and of course magic, including transformational magic. I’m still playing around with the idea, tossing around various ways to expand on it, so I can’t go into more detail than that right now.
Until I talk to you again, happy reading!
I have to apologize to you all. Last week, I was so excited to get the news out about the Kindle version of That Which Elevates Us going live, was working so furiously on the trade paperback version, that I forgot to include the actual link to the book page on Amazon. I just don’t know how I could have forgotten that. At any rate, the link is HERE, and I have updated the announcement post to include it.
And speaking of that paperback version, all is ready (I think) and I am waiting for the printed proof that is on the way. If it looks good, then I will publish it and make a post here letting you all know. And I will include an actual link. /embarrassed
Adventures in Lethera 