It's LIVE!

After spending most of yesterday on formatting, SONG OF STORM AND SHROUD went live on Amazon last night.  Of course... Amazon is the easiest to format and so it uploaded without a hitch.  Draft 2 Digital decided to be a picky bitch, but I finally got all the wrinkles hammered out and I uploaded the dratted thing everywhere before dinner last night.  

Today, I'll be formatting for print.  Woohoo.  So expect that to be available some time in the next couple of weeks.  (Takes time to get and approve the book for sale, doncha know.)

I did something with this book I've never done before.  I added graphics at the beginning of each chapter and a different graphic for the scene breaks.  I usually just laze out on the scene breaks and use some combination of symbols to denote a change of scenes, and I never do graphics for the chapter headings.  There's a little wyvern for the chapter breaks (looks like a dragon, but only two legs instead of four) and four little arrows for the scene breaks.  I'm pretty pleased.  All in all, the graphics added about 200,000 kilobytes to the file size, so I'll be losing a little bit of my royalties there, but it's worth it.  It's so SHINY.

Wouldn't you know it, though?  I was formatting and found a typo.  Aryl spelled Ayrl.  So, I went through the whole damn manuscript again.  And found a bunch more that I had missed AGAIN.  Aryl spelled wrong again, a couple other characters' names messed up, too.  Lucky for me, I had already added the names to my Word dictionary, so all the snafus had red squiggles underneath them.  The final draft was my SIXTH edit pass.  So, make it 7 passes on this sucker before it went live.  If there are errors now, they're masters of camouflage.  

You should've seen me yesterday, chain smoking cigarettes and talking to... err, yelling at... my computer.  D2D kept trying to put my wyvern at the end of the chapters instead of the beginnings.  I thought I had it fixed, but Chapter Two wouldn't behave.  Then I got Chapter Two fixed and all the other chapters went to hell.  I finally figured out it was trying to make my graphic be a Header instead of Normal.  I got that cleared up and it was then trying to put my chapter number on a different page entirely.  I had to switch it so the number came first and then the picture, which is a little odd, but hey, it works now, so I can deal with odd.  (The Amazon ebook has the pic first, so if you read it and have no idea what I'm talking about, you're on a Kindle.)

In the middle of the mess, I NEEDED a walk, so Hubs and I went for one.  I was burning off frustration, so the poor man kept having to tell me to slow down.  I hit the crest of that first hill panting like a sick dog, lemme tell ya.  But it burned the worst of it off, so when I got home, I went back at it and it worked FINALLY.  I probably spent 4 hours yesterday just on that annoying niggle.

Anyway, I'm toast.  If you're interested in epic fantasy, coming of age, action/adventure fiction, give the book a whirl.  It's $4.99, but that's not bad for a 110K word novel, eh?  And from what my beta readers told me, it's a fast read, too.  I hope you all enjoy it.