formatting

Book 7 Update

/ xeyeti / Leave a comment

Summer’s almost here, and I’m sure everyone would love a new book to read over said summer vacation. Well, have I got news for you!

See, I know it’s been far too long since I posted anything on here about a book I’m actually working on. I got edits done on Book 7 back in December, and they just sat there for six months as I didn’t even bother opening up the document and working on it.

That changed this week. I completed edits earlier today and I have started work on the (always tedious) formatting. Tomorrow, I’ll order the cover from my cover artist. All of this means that Book 7: The Armageddon Seed will be available probably by the end of June.

It’s been too long since the last book. Yeah, I did the short story collection late last year, but it was 2019 when book 6 came out. That’s a long time to sit on a cliffhanger.

But hey! I’ll have a cover reveal for you folks here before too long, and information on the arrival date for the book around that same time. It’s exciting! And I’m already neck-deep in the follow-up, so hopefully things will flow a little smoother from here on out. Fingers crossed!

Format

/ xeyeti / Leave a comment

I’ve been busy since last week, getting files formatted and polished for the upcoming release. Book 3’s Kindle .mobi file is all formatted and uploaded; I’m currently looking at a PDF of the paperback version to make sure everything is in order there before final approval (which, thank goodness I am, ’cause I just noticed a pretty glaring typo in the title for Part Three of the book).

It’s got me going back to reexamine the eBook files for the first two books, just to ensure consistency (I did this with the paperbacks already; when I got the rights back to The Invisible Crown, I re-formatted the paperback completely so I could (1) understand how book formatting really worked and (2) so I could credit the new cover artist). What I’ve discovered is that I…wasn’t very consistent with how I set up the first two books’ .mobi files.

Yesterday, I fixed up The Hidden Throne‘s eBook file and re-uploaded it; that corrected version is now the one available on Amazon.

But I apparently never did anything to Book 1 other than slap a new cover on it and call it a day (probably because I didn’t put the new cover on it until a few months after the rights had reverted back to me). I’m having to go back and create a whole new .mobi file from the original text, setting up all the chapter breaks and the hyperlinked table of contents and all that. Thankfully, it’s a simple matter of copying and pasting from the original Word document into a Scrivener file, though I then have to fiddle with all sorts of formatting details to make it look right.

The upshot will be greater consistency in formatting and styling across the three books. The downside is it’s a tedious pain in the ass. But I think it will ultimately be worth it when everything is all done and all the books have a more uniform formatting.