The new audiobooks have the Inari Seal of Approval!

 

July Newsletter

Harper-Collins have sent me six author copies of the audiobook for book five, ‘Hell to Heaven’. I have not received any author copies of book four. Inari was particularly unimpressed by my excitement to receive them, and is happier to sit in the sunshine bask – right on top of my notes. I’ll be offering these copies to my Patrons on Patreon – who have nearly read all of the new (tenth) Dark Heavens book – as a perk for helping my travel fund.
 

Overseas release for ‘Minds of Sand and Light’

‘Minds’ is only available to Australian readers at the moment – Harper-Collins only bought the Australian rights and I kept the rest of the world to self-publish. I am in the process of typesetting the book for the slightly smaller US standard size, but the book will have a very similar cover. This is what ‘typesetting’ looks like:

 

Each page in the Publisher software (Affinity Publisher, not Microsoft) is the page that will actually print on the printer. The software produces a .pdf file that plugs directly into the print-on-demand machine (which is actually just a really massive inkjet printer – like 20m long) along with another .pdf of the cover, and the machine prints it, puts it all together, and produces a book.

Any recently sold copies of ‘Dark Heavens’ will have been produced by print-on-demand. I use IngramSpark to self-publish, and I’ve noticed that some of the author copies I’ve received of ‘White Tiger’ have been done on the same machine!

Oh goodness, I just noticed that the double-MIP talking at the top of page 151 there has a blank line at the start of the left MIP. Quick, I need to fix that!
 

Self-Publishing Workshop

‘Dragon Empire’ was self-published outside Australia, and I’ll do the same for ‘Minds of Sand and Light’ (I did look for a traditional publisher but received more than 50 rejections for it). I’m becoming something of an expert at self-publishing, and have developed a full-day course where attendees can bring their laptop and their manuscript and walk out at the end of the day with a digitally-published book – and be well on the way to a print one as well. That’s my additional project for the second half of this year – to take this course on the road and show more people how it easy it is!

I will be doing a free quick intro course to self-publishing at Zillmere Library in Brisbane on Saturday July 29, from 12.30 to 2.00pm. Here’s a link to the program (that is not a photo of me). Click on the photo to see the details.

Now back to work with Affinity Publisher! Typesetting the two MIPs talking was an absolute nightmare, and I apologise to the typesetter employed by Harper-Collins. Hopefully I can have ‘Minds’ available world-wide by the end of the month.