Happy Labor Day!
Nice to have a long weekend off, even if I didn’t do too much relaxing. Anyway, Mani is off to the printers! (for the second time—should be the last. I knew I’d have to do some small revisions on it still, but there was a little more to do than I expected. A lot of formatting . . . IngramSpark has been great to work with so far, and getting the right PDF formats for my files was my only main issue. Formats, color profiles . . . I’m learning. I also uploaded Mani to the U.S. Copyright Office, a first for me, so that was both interesting and satisfying.
(For my U.S. writer friends, your work is automatically copyrighted by law. Can’t speak for other countries, but basically, the formality is just to register it so it can hold up better in court.)
With all of that done, I’m back to having time for Tales from the Earthen Sky progress, among other projects. I’m hoping to get some more followers on that by the end of the year.
Gaea, Book 2 of The Mother Trilogy, is also back to revisions. I printed out a few “proof copies” through Amazon KDP, and they were great to work with. Easy interface, cheap printing, fast shipping. There’s a small “Not For Resale” banner across the middle, but that didn’t exactly mar the beauty of my ten-minute Canva placeholder cover. (The final cover is being worked on by my artist at the moment.) So the red pen is at work.
Lastly, I made a decision I might regret . . . and that is to record my own audiobook. So starting today, Monday the 2nd, I’m going to be posting some chapters for free on YouTube, read by moi, and you can make fun of them. For free! We’ll see, I may actually complete it if I get enough engagement on it. I count the production time and “loss” of royalties worth it if it gets the book out there.
That pretty much covers everything, no pun intended, so hopefully I’ll see you soon! The release date for Mani is Sept. 23. I should be able to set up preorders soon, but I’m not quite there yet. In the meantime, you can check out the start of my audiobook on YouTube here, and my website page for Mani here.
Thanks as always, and God bless your Labor Day!
— Jacob Gamber