I’m so pleased! I meant to have this done back in 2019, I think, but between this and that . . . well, it’s done now. And it was an excellent exercise in skill-building and review!
One thing that I chose to do a little differently with this platform: I really wanted to keep the fully-justified text, which ePub formatting doesn’t like, so I took the time to screenshot each double-page spread (two columns on landscape orientation) and then pasted the images into the Microsoft Word document. As a result, the eBook’s text won’t respond to commands for increasing or decreasing size, which some readers may not like. However, the document will respond to zooming.
Was this the right or most effective choice for me to make? Time will tell. I remind myself, writing and story craft is subjective, and it’s important to me that it looks right. But I also want my readers to be happy. If you gift yourself or someone you enjoy an electronic copy of my anthology — just click the image above to get to the bookstore page — will you tell me what you think of the formatting, please?
And please, also, send good vibes for the advertising campaign I’ve started on Facebook! 500 copies sold in a month is still a reasonable goal, right?
In other news, I’ve begun the process of reformatting Mist and Midnight for the second edition! Again, reviewing skills and embarking on a steep learning curve. If I stay with Lulu Books as my printer, I won’t be able to get away with screenshooting pages now, given the lengths of the works in The Talbot Trilogy, so I have to consider that factor and maybe look at options. I’ve also decided to include, at the end of the novella, the prologue and first three chapters of Wind and Shadow: Book One of the Talbot Trilogy, as part of marketing and to help show the connections between the stories. (I always enjoy additional sample chapters at the end of a book . . . they’re so enticing!)
While I was adding those chapters, I discovered a problem that a reviewer had once noticed and noted but that escaped me and my editors until now: the spelling of my protagonist’s name, Rayvin Woods, is misspelled several times in the first three chapters. How embarrassing! Especially when I thought I had checked it over and over . . . it’s the “yv” / “vy” combination that is sneaky. I did it to myself, fellow readers and writers. But now it’s getting fixed! Huzzah!
Another element I am considering is whether to continue using the beautiful cover designs for my series (huge shout-out to my cover designer, the amazing Caroline Andrus of Mélange Books) or to refresh the works with something new. I am gaining a better understanding of why various books and book series end up with different covers and bindings over time!
Should I come up with different designs? Or continue to use the images initially chosen when the novels were first published?
I really do want to re-introduce The Talbot Trilogy over the next six weeks. What do you think — can it be done?
As a last note for today: On top of all of the above, I’m also working on a short story for ‘tweens and teens that I first wrote when I was 10. I’ve kept the original since getting it back from my teacher sometime in the spring of 1990, and every time I looked at it, the pages haunted me. When I was an adolescent, I desperately wanted to get published before I was 13. And then before I was 15. And 16. Really, I just kept pushing the bar back . . . and now I think it is past time to give that 10 year old her moment in the sun. Plus, with the cleaned-up story, I’ll be including a section with images of the original! I always was (and continue to be) a proponent of keeping all of one’s notes and handing them in as evidence of process. And I don’t mind letting readers see the scribbles and notes of my grade 5 brain — it’s both sweet and a giggle.
There’s actually another story lurking in my house, a horror short that I had written and illustrated a bit and gotten my classmates to review when I was in grade 5 or 6, but I cannot find it. Please, Universe, I beg you — let me not have thrown it out in a fit of depression-fuelled cleaning and purging. Please.
Never toss your writing, kids. Keep it all. That was advice from my beloved Grandma Phyllis, and it still holds.
All right. I now have to choose whether to look into how to structure the copyright and publishing information in a second-edition book, or washing dishes. There is also (always) laundry to sort. And a delicate shawl that I want to keep working on. A Hallowe’en door sign that’s been waiting for paint since mid-August. A spooky dollhouse that needs furnishing — or should I do the exterior finishing first? Probably a better idea. I do want to try embellishing the roof and shingles with tissue paper instead of only dry-brushing (partly because I’m terrible at dry-brushing, thank you Bad Depth Perception) . . . But before and in order to do that properly, I need the dining table cleared off, and that’s a whole other mess that needs looking after.
Given this list, what would you do first?
Tori L. Ridgewood 