The Prediction about Publishing This Weekend was Premature!

       Unfortunately, I never got an answer to he high priority email with my offer to pay the expediting fee for the permission to quote Evangeline Walton.  So I called the publisher this morning and learned ... that the Permissions person was not there!  I also was told they were really backed up.  So all I can do is wait for them to call me back.  I didn't really ask why the Permissions person wasn't there -- I assumed she hadn't come in to work yet.  However, now I think maybe she was sick or on vacation or something.  In that case, I may not hear till next week.  So I ask your pardon for jumping the gun and I ask for patience for those of you who are all ready to buy the book -- and I know there are some.

       I left a query with Smashwords as to whether there is any way to upload a sample of text and find out if their system can take the strange characters.  I haven't heard back from them, either.  They said, 72 hours, however, and that much time hasn't elapsed yet.  I think I probably can do the book on Kindle, but I'm not sure there, either.  I need to find out because I will need to get the permission on Robert Graves, where the e-rights were held by a different publisher from the print rights.  So don't expect an e-book any time soon.

       However, I think I know a way that I could edit the conlang so that "The Termite Queen" will work with those fussy e-formats.  I could simply cut out all the strange, unacceptable characters and put an explanatory note at the beginning of the book, saying that if people really want to know what the true conlang looks like, they could buy the paperback or refer to http://termitespeaker.blogspot.com.  The story itself won't change at all. 

       And as for the Bird language, a couple of the strange marks are just punctuation -- equivalent to exclamation and question marks.  Nobody would ever miss the exclamation mark and I could substitute an English question mark for the other one.  Some of the symbols, like < [whistle] and ^ [chirp] and ~ [tonal slide] are on the keyboard, so I figure any ebook would take those.  And if other symbols, like [∙], which is a cough, were left out, nobody would notice, except me.   

       But the musical notes are something else.  They have to be there.  Two notes is a warble and one note is a trill, and sometimes Prf. A'a'ma will just say "♫♪" (see, this blog will take it, if you copy and paste).  So what I could do is write out "[warble-trill]."  It's stupid, but at least then people who simply won't read the novel any other way than on an e-reader will be able to access it! 

And so ... the wait continues!

Publishing Update on "The Termite Queen"

I want to thank two people who have recently reviewed

 "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder."

  Your interest is much appreciated!

  David Lever (http://www.aliquot.ca) and Jack A. Urquhart (http://www.jaurquhart.com)

 both have interesting blogs and good books of their own for sale.

       Before I tackle another post on my extraterrestrial species, I want to talk about how my preparations for publishing "The Termite Queen" are coming along. I did decide to publish it in two volumes.  They will be entitled, respectively, "The Speaking of the Dead"  and "The Wound That Has No Healing." The first is working out to be a little over 300 pages. The second will be longer.

        First, a word on the status of the permissions thing. I have received permission to publish quotes from Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf." I still haven't heard from Evangeline Walton's publisher -- it was the last one I sent -- but I'm expecting it day-to-day. After I get the Walton, there will be nothing standing in the way of publishing the first volume. I have one more outstanding request that belongs with v.2, and I still have to pick some substitute poems for that volume. I found satisfactory substitutes for the Stephen Spender, the Auden, and the Ezra Pound.   Then I will have to create a cover drawing for v.2 from scratch, which will take some time.  That will give people time to digest the first volume and grow impatient for the second.

        As for preparing the book, I'm engaged right now in formatting v.1 for paperback in CreateSpace. I think I've done about half and have conquered the formatting problems with the headings and page numbers. Honestly, that's the most difficult thing you can do in Word.

        I've also made up my mind about the cover art -- I used the more edge-on elliptical galaxy -- gives more depth, I think. And I've finished the back cover as well. GIMP worked! I tried a sample of my drawing and it was extremely easy to upgrade the DPI using that program, so when I actually get ready to upload everything, it should go really fast!

        I hope to be ready to do that by the middle of February at the latest!

        Now the ebook problem. It turned out that not every publisher who holds print rights also holds the e-rights to an author. That's the case with Robert Graves. I will have to shell out another 300 bucks or so if I want to obtain his e-rights. I'll have to see what the case is with the other permissions that are still outstanding. I may try to publish on ebook even though it costs me extra, because I know some people just love their ebooks. If I do, the price is going to be the same as the paperback, however, because I want to encourage people to buy "real" books (I'm planning another curmudgeonly post on that subject later).

        I will also need to upload a sample if I put the book on Kindle, to make sure it will properly display the strange characters of my conlang. 

       So e-publication depends on those two things -- whether I want to spend the money to get additional permissions to publish, and whether Kindle will accept my copy.

      

Some Curmudgeonly Quibbles about eReaders

     "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder" just appeared on Kindle this morning (see http://amzn.to/u9bYWa).  You can see there that I was able to use my own cover drawing.  Naturally, I purchased a copy of the piece for my own Kindle and I can't resist comparing the process of reading it in that format with the experience of doing the same with a "real" book.  And that's the difference; the first is a process while the second is an experience.  

     There is nothing aesthetic about words scrolling down a screen; the simplest and most humble physical book is a work of art compared to the formless blob of words you get with an eReader.  Now, some of that may be my own fault (I consider all this to be a learning experience).  For example, next time I would begin the words on the title page right at the top because most of the time centering them makes them run off the bottom and onto the next page.  I say, "most of the time" because you never seem to get the same display twice.  If I start with the cover and page forward once, I get a display with the author's name on the second page.  But if I use the Go To  feature to go to the Beginning, it displays the title right at the top of the page with the word "Monster" shifted over against the left margin.  Why?

     There was the problem that certain parts of the t.p. and headings emerged underlined, even though I didn't underline them in the uploaded text.  I fixed the title by taking it out and retyping it, but one other place remained underlined and I just left it.  I think it's something I did, but I have no idea what and it really doesn't detract from the reading of the text.  There are also a couple of gratuitous little centered dashes that just appeared out of nowhere.  One of them is at the very beginning of the text and I now cannot find the other one; maybe it disappeared.  Somewhere I read that people sometimes leave stray bits of HTML stuck in the text.  Could that be what that is? 

     Somewhere I think I mentioned the fact that Kindle wouldn't accept hanging indention so I had to reformat the last section with normal paragraph indention.  I can accept that, but on the reader, if you go to the end and page backwards, it refuses to indent paragraphs that begin the tops of pages.  When you page forward as you normally would, it seems to do OK.  And of course with the small size of the page and the variability of the type size, there is no way to prevent the rather long section headings from splitting between pages. 

     It's aesthetically formless, that's all you can say.  But the text is all there and you can read it just fine if you choose to buy the Kindle version, and what I want to do is get people to read my books.  Personally, I will always prefer the physical artifact of a real book -- something where you can feel the texture of the paper, smell the ink and the paper (and maybe the leather if you're lucky enough to read a really old book), stick your finger or a slip of paper in a later spot if you want to compare two places in the text -- well, you know.  As an old librarian who worked mostly in the pre-computer days, that will always be my preference!  By the way, just now I tried smelling the CreateSpace copy of "Monster" and it smells a little lemony!  Maybe they should add an ink, paper, and leather smell to the Kindle!