Day: December 29, 2016

Changes coming to categories and tags

Lynn

It’s about time for my annual sweep up of categories and tags on this blog. I haven’t figured out a better system for organizing my many posts yet, but as soon as I get a good idea, I’m going to make some changes. I really hate the current arrangement of categories and tags. They just don’t work well at all for me!

Update: I’ve started making changes. They’re small so far, but more are coming.

Update the second: I think I’ve decided to let the old posts rest as they are, updating them as I feel like it, and go forward with the changes I want. That’ll mean a bit of a mess, but not too much of one. :)

The new year… I’m not ready!

Lynn

Well, back in mid-December sometime, I decided I was going to get myself to 2,000 words a day and stick there so I’d be all ready for the new year and my goal of 2,000 a day. :o

Then the holidays came. Then I got sick. I felt better yesterday, but stuff happened and I ended up doing other things (necessary things, actually). Today I don’t feel so well, because the headache is more present today, and I found out my phone lines were down after a storm yesterday evening. I hadn’t noticed because I hadn’t tried to call anyone and my DSL internet service was still working, although it was acting up a bit.

So, another derail. And as I’m typing this, my connection is gone again. I assume it’s the repairman still trying to fix things. He’s been at it for a while now, because the outage isn’t just with my house; there are several houses in the area that are out according to him.

Still, I think I can drum up the energy to get back to writing today. Only, what I really feel like doing is working on a plan for 2017. Or taking a nap. I could really use a nap right now.

Anyway, all that’s just to say I’m not ready for the new year. I barely got into this one.

All Romance Ebooks is closing, and despite losing money I’m owed, I’m not that sad about it

Lynn

As a general rule, I prefer to not spend a lot of my time letting negative thoughts go round and round in my head, mostly because I tend toward obsession and I don’t want to obsess over negative thoughts!

So here are some not so negative things about the All Romance Ebooks closing.

I’m going to shave anywhere from 1 to 3 hours off my total publishing time for every book I publish.

  • 5 to 10 minutes to make a wider cover (1:1.5 vs. 1:1.6) that I have to shrink to 200 x 300
  • 30 to 60 minutes formatting a copy of my master book file for PDF
  • 5 minutes to generate a custom sized cover image for the PDF file (because I always forget to export this image when I’m exporting my usual sizes)
  • 10 to 20 minutes importing my EPUB from Jutoh into Calibre, making some tweaks, and exporting as a MOBI
  • 30 minutes actually publishing the files to ARe

If there are issues, or I get caught up in what I’m doing, all these things can take longer. :)

And now I don’t have to do any of those things!

I need only EPUB files and my Word file for everywhere else. Smashwords uses doc files instead of docx, but I use the same file, make a quick save as doc, add one line to note it’s the Smashwords edition, and save again. I do nothing else to my file for Smashwords.

So getting rid of ARe is a real boon to my process.

One more vendor who pays only quarterly is gone.

I hate having to deal with payments like that in my sales spreadsheet, because it’s monthly, and ARe is always off by pennies and I have to make adjustments that annoy me because they aren’t right.

My cover design process just got easier!

I don’t have to worry about making my covers wide enough for the 1:1.5 200 x 300 covers I needed for ARe.

I’ve been designing my covers to the 1:1.6 ratio from the beginning and I like them. That size looks best to me on all my differently sized reading devices and apps, but I always had to make the 1:1.5 covers for ARe because I couldn’t stand stretching the covers and making them look misshapen.

In fact, I’m thinking about using this opportunity to revisit my cover template.

I’m pretty happy about all these things, to be honest. :)

Derailed from writing yesterday by All Romance Ebooks news

Lynn

All Romance Ebooks (aka Omnilit) is closing and I received the notice yesterday. So instead of writing I spent the day inactivating my books, removing links to them from my author websites, adjusting my sales spreadsheet, and reading reactions to the news.

This led me to doing my receipts and bills which is something I usually do on Tuesdays after my bank posts weekend transactions but didn’t do this Tuesday because I was sick. Then I caught up the accounting for my writing business because I’m going to be out about $780 because of ARe’s closure.

They’re offering to settle to avoid bankruptcy and legal action but I’m undecided.

Accept $0.10 on the dollar?

That’s $78 in lieu of the $780 that I’m owed. Knowing I can sue is worth $78 to me and $0.10 on the dollar is ridiculous.

But my cost benefit analysis tells me I should take the settlement because I won’t recoup the money owed and the stress of suing would not be good for me and my writing.

If I had the money, I’d sue for the principle of the thing, but 2016 has not been my best year. I didn’t publish enough and what I did publish wasn’t the stuff I can count on to make good money.

Priorities, huh?

Maybe I’ll get them right in 2017.