Almost Ready

I said in yesterday’s blog that the print edition of The Hard Years, the fourth book in my Tinder Street family saga, was being formatted and that I hoped to have it back any day. Then it would be a simple matter of getting the print cover formatted and uploading it to Amazon.

As it turns out, my book formatter returned the manuscript to me yesterday, all ready to go. So I reached out to Elizabeth Mackey, my cover artist, with the final page count for print and ask her to get started on the cover. Elizabeth is a whiz at what she does and very fast, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets it back to me sometime today or this evening. If so, it will only take an hour or so to get the book uploaded to Amazon, and then we have to wait for them to do their thing before it is ready to go.

They always say that can take up to 72 hours, but it’s been my experience that it’s very seldom more than three or four hours. Maybe that’s because I’ve published so many books by now that they don’t have to give every page scrutiny. Then again, it’s probably some sort of artificial intelligence that reviews things and I’ve just been lucky. Either way, the book is almost ready and as soon as it’s out I’ll be letting people know.

In other book news, I cranked out another three chapters in Pucker Factor, my latest work in progress, and printed them out for Miss Terry to proofread. And for the first time in a long time, I actually think I know who did it and how this one is going to turn out. But, of course, my characters may know something I don’t. This is often the case, and the story might take off in a whole different direction by the time it’s done. I’m looking forward to finding out.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Congratulations Margaret Bergen, winner of our drawing for an audiobook of Luminous: The Story of a Radium Girl by Samantha Wilcoxson. It’s a novel about Catherine Donohue, who worked at Radium Dial in Ottawa, Illinois, and the secret lurking in the greenish-grey paint the company used that magically made things glow in the dark.

We had 27 entries this time around. Stay tuned, a new contest starts soon. Note: Due to the high shipping cost of printed books and Amazon restrictions on e-books to foreign countries, only entries with US addresses and e-mail addresses are allowed.

Thought For The Day – 100 years ago everyone owned a horse and only the rich had cars. Today everyone has cars and only the rich own horses.