Gearing up for a book launch always makes for a busy week…especially when there’s other books to coddle and cope with, too!

Pressing Matters: Week of October 15-19, 2012

Editing

1. Managed to make sense of the OpenOffice-destroyed comments and edits on the sequel to  Green Light Delivery by Anne E. Johnson. Hopefully she will not murder us for poking at the plot holes towards the end. There’s just so much going on! Even Zatell would have trouble juggling it all.
2. Could’ve sworn edits on the tie-in stories for the pre-order of Debris Dreams were done. They weren’t, or they were beamed off into an alternate universe. Edits re-done and sent to the author for realz this time.
   1. Have been informed that “Working on an MS you’ve looked at is like playing Diablo! Lots of clicks, followed by the occasional pause to compare stats until I decide which I want more, DPS or knockback percentage.

      …except, those pauses are when I have to actually re-write stuff rather than just accept the changes you’ve made. ”

      Am distressingly pleased by this.

3. Still going through rewrites on Gayleen Froese’s The Dominion; once again, having comment-tracking issues. They never end.

Production

1. Candlemark & Gleam books are now, finally, finally available in the Kobo store. Hooray!
2. Going completely mad trying to figure out the origins of a typesetting error in the Other Half of the Sky galley. Does anyone know why InDesign might be embedding a font with two different encodings – Ansi and Identity-H – when it’s the same ruddy font throughout?
3. Finalized digital version of Mr Blank for release to pre-order backers. A special edition is going to be available to certain early adopters…
4. Trying to smooth italics and rendering of Mandarin characters in the digital version of Debris Dreams. Going slightly mad.
5. Samples of the back cover for Debris Dreams coming through from artist Karen Gadient. Very excited to see the HUD treatment coming together!
6. Talking with the talented Rio Griffiths (of the amazing Erekos cover) about art for The Daughter Star by Susan Jane Bigelow. Very eager to see what she comes up with…

Promotions

1. Starting to see requests and reviews coming through for titles through NetGalley. Neat!
2. Justin Robinson is getting ready for his Mr Blank blog tour next week. We’ve got some great stops booked, with plenty of giveaways and fun going on!
3. Making an absurd number of stuffed chupacabras for the top backers of the Mr Blank pre-order. I swear you people just do this to drive me crazy. Especially because the chupacabras are shaping up to be the EASY extra bonus. You do NOT want to hear about the 14lb of lava rocks currently in the trunk of my car. Other publishers do not have these problems, I suspect.
4. Sent out the October newsletter. Have you signed up yet?

Sundries

1. In slightly better slushpile shape this week. A few submissions read over the weekend, one of which was really, really promising but really, really short. Talking with the author about how it might be possible to flesh it out to novel-length without ruining the clarity of the manuscript.
2. Seriously, is it REALLY that hard to put a “comment” function – or even “track changes” in a word processor? Gah. This is why Microsoft Office is the eternal default, people. Just sayin’.