Publishing Update on The Storm-Wing!

Finished cover for The Storm-Wing

 

       This post is partially brought over from Ruminations of a Remembrancer.  I thought that since the current blog was originally meant as a vehicle for publicizing The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head series, and since it probably has a different readership from the termitewriter blog, I ought to post it here, too.

 

       I've been completing the formatting of The Storm-Wing (v.2 of The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head) and I've uploaded it on CreateSpace. I had a couple of dinky but pesky problems that took a good bit of the weekend to solve. One involved pagination (sigh -- the eternal flaw in Word). There are quite a few preliminary pages and I wanted them paged a certain way, with small Roman numerals. And I couldn't get "ii" off a blank page without causing the numbers to disappear from some of the subsequent pages. Blank pages are not supposed to have numbers on them. I finally solved the problem -- don't ask me how.

       Then CreateSpace told me my little title page drawing (shown below) didn't have enough DPI. I was puzzled, because I thought that the t.p. drawings on The Termite Queen were simply copied over from Word and not even put in .jpg format. It turned out that the problem was the eyes. I have used a fill containing little dots for the eyes in my cover drawings, but the strange thing with the fill is that it doesn't change size if you change the size of the drawing. After a couple of unsuccessful adjustments I just deleted the fill with the dots and made the eyes solid gray. Then it took the plain drawing without a quibble.

       I got the approval to publish this morning, but I've decided to order a printed proof copy this time.  It was hard to tell in the online mock-up whether the t.p. drawing is going to look right. I'm not in any hurry to publish, anyway, so I don't mind waiting the 10 days or so that CS requires to get the proof shipped. In the meantime I can work on the Kindle and Smashwords editions -- I haven't even begun that formatting. However, it's pretty easy once you've done it a few times. The only time-consuming aspects are embedding the footnotes in the text and linking up the ToC. Then, once all three are available, I'll put up some kind of celebratory special offer! So stay tuned!