Mara is back with the ebook professionals. Hopefully, this will be quick.
I haven’t heard anything about the paperback, but that one usually takes a little longer.
Mara
Corrections are done, and MS is back to the layout professionals.
Mara
I’m doing grammar edits because this is my life now, but I gotta tell you, some of the jokes in this thing are wonderful.
Capitalization
There’s a bit of subtlety in the way Mara narrates things.
She’s five. Mara doesn’t really understand that other people have houses and apartments, that those homes have kitchens and bathrooms, and that people live there.
To Mara the kitchen isn’t just the kitchen in her house that she and her family use. It is the Kitchen, singular, the only one. It isn’t a common noun because other kitchens don’t exist in her world view. It’s a proper noun because when discussing kitchens, she is going to be discussing the Kitchen which is as distinct as the Atlantic Ocean is from other oceans. Probably more accurately, the Kitchen is as distinct as Mom is distinct. There aren’t lots of moms, there is one Mom: hers.
Cassie and Jack would not see it that way. They’ve seen a lot of kitchens, homes, and foster parents. Mara and Hector haven’t. To them, the mom issue would be: there are many moms but this Mom is mine. To Mara, there is only one Mom.
Nor have the younger twins really had the time to think about it. What’s the age of reason? About five? They’re suddenly understanding that yeah, these are things. There are many kitchens. Their parents are teachers. Wait until the fireworks happen when they realize that their teachers may also be parents.
Self Publishing
Recent events have certainly helped me put my difficulties with Amazon in perspective.
I think I’ve fixed the carriage return issue. It will take a few days to propagate. The error did not appear on the ebook page, so that’s good.
Mara and the Trolls will come down from AO3 in a few weeks, perhaps a month, when I shift to Kindle Preferred Publishing. That enables me to run sales and advertisements more easily, but they require that Amazon have the lowest price. MatT (heh) can’t be available for free anywhere.
Obviously Matt’s (heh) writing will remain most places, including AO3. And if it matters, I encourage all not-for-profit use of my works, including fanfiction, provided they’re disseminated for free. There’s a GNU that covers this, and I’ll figure out which one it is.
The Story of the Carriage Return pt 1 of a lot
Once upon a time in a mythical land called Denver, a boy tried to self publish his book, Mara and the Trolls. After many years and many character building moments, he had obtained a manuscript and was ready to submit to Nile Direct Publishing, or NDP for short.
In the world of self publishing, small errors abound. They are the biggest and most common complaints among readers. Dropped commas, bad hyphenation, and misspellings lead the list of problems. If you’ve ever seen anyone complain about the use of Comic Sans as a font, understand that using the wrong their/there/they’re is met with derision a hundred times worse.
It is for this reason that the boy OneTrueStudent went to immense and unpleasant lengths to make sure no such errors existed in his manuscript. He relied on two content editors and a copy editor, employed a layout specialist, and spent hours poring over the material. To make the book the best it could be, he went fishing for errors and tried to catch every one.
After three-ish years working on this, not including the years of writing the book, he submitted his manuscript to NDP.
NDP rejected it.
He submitted it again.
It got rejected again.
It turned out that NDP didn’t actually explain their cover bleed criteria in the texts of ancient lore, and the cover he had didn’t meet their standards. This took him several weeks to fix. However, in the fullness of time, the book was submitted, and in the process of submission, OneTrueStudent wrote a description of the book for the NDP page.
NDP used an html parser (American pronunciation) to create his book description page, and that parser stripped out a carriage return. Thus began the next phase of his opus.
A carriage return is a hard enter. The term comes from old typewriters because hitting the enter key moved the wheel with the paper on it back to the left, or ‘returned’ it, and rotated the printing drum one line. In modern English, a carriage return, hard return, hard enter, etc. is hitting the ‘Enter’ key to manually indicate the line ends. On paper, most paragraphs are broken up by a carriage return and an indent, but in online reading, most paragraphs use two carriage returns. The latter is easier on the eyes, the former is cheaper (because paper costs money) and since reading physical books is usually a bit easier on the eyes than screen reading anyway, the formatting has largely bifurcated to everyone’s satisfaction.
But not to the satisfaction of Nile Publishing.
Nile decided that they would remove OneTrueStudent’s carriage return and merge the second paragraph of the book description with the first. They decided this after the preview and submission. Since OneTrueStudent used a double carriage return, he didn’t include a space after the final punctuation in the first paragraph, which meant the new long, run-on paragraph had two sentences stuck together with no space between them.
Remember how in the world of self publishing typos are a great bane? Most readers avoid books with excessive typos like the plague. Now imagine how bad it would look for a book to have a typo in its description!
Obviously, this was unacceptable, and OneTrueStudent went to NDP to get it fixed.
‘No,’ said the Nile Customer Service Representative. ‘You should have fixed it before you submitted it.’
‘I did,’ said OneTrueStudent. ‘The parser messed up.’
‘Then submit the whole work again.’
This would take a week or so, but OneTrueStudent did.
‘No,’ said the next Nile Customer Service Representative. ‘We don’t like your cover anymore.’
‘But it’s the same cover you approved before,’ said OneTrueStudent.
‘Tough. We don’t like it anymore. Get a new one.’
So OneTrueStudent went back to his designer and commissioned a new cover based on NDP’s new standards. These new standards were fickle and changing lore, unwritten in any of NDP’s ancient texts.
But the wait is now on, for another week must pass before the designer will create a new cover, and another week must pass after that for NDP to review and approve it, and the description with NDP’s typo remains.
Part One of an ongoing tale.
Mara and the Trolls
The paperback version of Mara and the Trolls is now available on Amazon. Not for preorder or other, the book itself is available. I found a typo in the way their parser converted the blurb to html, but the correction for that is already submitted.
I’m exhausted. I am bone deep weary beyond anything else, and it’s hard to be excited given how tired I am. But it’s done. The job is accomplished. I did it.
I don’t know what to say. God, I’m tired.
Thank you, everyone. I’m working on the next Elegy book, and I hope to get that out in less than a year. Self publishing is hard, though, and I’m not sure if I can make it work.
Good luck to you all. Toil is a part of accomplishing your goals.
Status
Mara and the Trolls still hasn’t appeared on Amazon. It’s been radio silence for a few days after an initial reply.
Nothing to report. Perspective remains critical. I wish I had some antacids.
Submission
Mara and the Trolls is submitted. We’ll see what happens.
Mara and the Trolls
The ebook preorder link is here: Mara and the Trolls
I’ve never done a preorder before.
I still don’t know what’s going on with preordering the paperback, but I’m working on it.
Stay safe, everyone.