Inverarity is not a Scottish village

I got my proof copy back from Lulu. It took a couple of weeks longer than Barnes & Noble Press. So I can now compare the two presses.

In both pictures, the Lulu copy is on the left, the B&N copy is on the right.


Godzilla for scale.


Mechagodzilla for scale.

The most obvious difference is that Lulu doesn't include a mandatory barcode. B&N adds one automatically, even if the book isn't for sale. Obviously I prefer no barcode.

The colors reproduced nearly identically, as far as I can tell.

Print quality is very similar. However, I am going to give a slight edge to B&N. The B&N copy feels just a little more solid. When I pick up the books and page through them, the attachment of the cover and spine on the Lulu copy feels a little more wobbly. Also, the pages in the Lulu copy feel slightly thinner, even though the Lulu copy is supposed to be 60# cream paper while the B&N copy is 50# cream paper.

The Lulu pages are slightly brighter, and the cover and pages feel slicker. That's not good or bad - your preferences may vary.


Lulu copy is on top, B&N on the bottom.

POD printing is inherently cheap and therefore not the greatest quality, so neither one is going to stand up to a lot of rough treatment, but based on these proofs, and the fact that B&N is slightly cheaper (especially when printing multiple copies), I judge B&N the overall winner here, with Lulu having the advantage that it doesn't require a stupid barcode.

I made a few minor color adjustments on the cover and the interior, and ordered more copies from B&N (which so far has not shipped them out as quickly as they did the single copy).

If you are printing a single copy for yourself, I would say that if the barcode bothers you, order from Lulu. Otherwise, I think B&N is slightly better.

If anyone does print their own copies, please send me pics!

Alexandra Quick and the Very Big Bloated Hard-to-Print Paperback

Now that print copies of Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle are a Real Thing that exists in the world, I have begun creating the POD draft for Alexandra Quick and the Lands Below. In fact, I have completed the layout. I don't have illustrations or a cover yet, and I need to do proofreading, but it's mostly done.



Aaaaand here's the problem: it's 838 pages. (Note: this includes frontmatter, backmatter, TOC, etc.) Lulu and B&N and pretty much every POD service around have a hard limit of 800 pages for paperbacks. :(

Yes, I could shrink the margins and the font size and do some other tricks to get it under 800 pages, but it would look crappy. And book two is not the longest book in the series.

(Honestly, I am pretty proud of the production quality I've achieved just trying to imitate the Harry Potter design with Affinity Publisher. IMO, AQATTC looks better than some of the professionally published small press books on my shelf.)

So... right now my options are:

(a) Print it as a hardcover. Significantly more expensive, and B&N and Lulu seem to have a max page count of 800 for hardcovers too.
(b) Split it into two volumes. (Which means eventually my seven-book series will be more like a 13-volume series...)
(c) Find a local print shop that can do custom print jobs. This will also be more expensive, and I suspect most of them will probably tell me that they could print it, but at a certain thickness, the book is just going to fall apart quickly. OTOH, I have a paperback copy of Stephen King's The Stand which is over 1100 pages. So it can be done, somehow.

I'll do some investigating and see how much more money I am going to spend on this mad self-indulgent venture.

Barnes & Noble Press approved my manuscript!

So, I decided to order one copy each from B&N and Lulu, to compare the quality. Due to COVID, printing and shipping times are slower than usual (surprise), so it'll probably be a couple of weeks before I actually have my copies in hand. Assuming they are acceptable and I don't find any horrible mistakes that need fixing, I will then order more copies which I'll mail out.

It turns out with shipping & handling and taxes, there isn't that much difference in price between B&N and Lulu for a single copy: $16.84 at B&N Press, $18.09 at Lulu.

Once I get the proof copies, I will post photos.

In the meantime, the artist who did the cover, Mikołaj Szonecki, has posted the step by step process by which he created the final version at his ArtStation page. Go check it out! (And yes, I intend to commission him for future covers. Alexandra Quick and the Lands Below is next!)

Meanwhile, I, uh, spent way too much on commissioned art for the last book. It was fun (and I already went and commissioned a few pieces for the next book while I was on a buying spree - you'll see them eventually) but AQATWW is going to have a dramatically reduced art budget. Which means you get more of my awesome Poser images! :D

I have actually started taking a couple of Udemy courses on Photoshop and Affinity Photo, to try to learn proper techniques. I do not expect to ever actually become a competent artist, but maybe my work will go from "embarrassing janky crap" to "marginally less embarrassing janky crap."

WIP. Minimally spoilery.


It is possible Archie will regret letting Alexandra get a learner's permit.


(I actually like the composition of the elements here, but obviously I am still terrible at filters and adjustment layers.)

OMG. I want one.

Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle print copies

Remember I said I was going to stick with my Word layout? Well, I thought my layout was pretty slick, an almost professional-looking imitation of the Harry Potter books, and then I went further down the rabbit-hole of book design and layout, and found out about things like optical alignment and leading and lining vs. oldstyle and bleed and everything else I was doing wrong.

There are lots of book designers out there with free advice (usually ending with "You should hire me to do this for you") but I am a DIY kind of guy, and I persevered with Affinity Publisher. I am now a first-level Publisher ninja, and I ended up spending most of two days importing my Word layout and massaging it into a print-ready PDF.

There are a few things that aren't quite perfect (actual professionals do manual spot adjustments on kerning and justification spacing and line grouping and stuff, and I simply don't have the expertise for that), but I think it's pretty damn close.

However. Publisher is still in "active development" (they don't want to say "beta," but in my opinion, it's still beta software), and I've found it does... unexpected things sometimes. Like, after I update the Table of Contents, I would keep finding that pages in some later chapter had inexplicably been flowed on top of each other, and I'd have to manually redo the text flow. So every time I change the structure, I have to look at the entire manuscript again to see if there is a new gotcha.

Now, people have asked if I would share the print-ready file. And I have decided... yes. Kind of.

Here's the deal. Right now, it's print-ready minus a cover. Anyone can submit this file to a POD service and get a print copy.

Those of you who helped me by proofreading the first layout, and a select few others who know who they are, are going to get actual print copies, once I get my cover and order my own print run.

For everyone else... I am going to crowd-source the final proofreading. The link below is the semi-final print-ready PDF. Submit it to the POD service of your choice and you can have your own print copy. However, you will have to supply your own cover file.

AQATTC print-ready PDF

Now, here's a preview of the exclusive reward for anyone who finds an error or helps me make other corrections in the above file:



That's a black and white sketch of the cover I am commissioning. When I get the (full-color) final, anyone who contributed a correction will get an exclusive link to the final final file, including the cover.

Note that the above file is formatted for a 6" x 9" trade paperback. The Scholastic U.S. paperback editions of the Harry Potter books are actually closer to 5.5" x 7.625". Most POD services don't handle non-standard sizes, and at 6" x 9", AQATTC is already 568 pages. I am still experimenting with layouts and might try to produce something closer to the "official" HP book form, but I suspect that I won't even be able to fit a longer book like AQATSA into one volume with a standard POD printing.

So what kind of gotchas do I need help catching? Consider these two pages:





Notice the difference? The first paragraph following a section break should not have a first-line indent. I think I got them all, but it's the sort of thing that's easy to miss when importing hundreds of pages and then manually adjusting the style formatting page by page. Also any obvious things, like a blank page or a missing header or footer, or a block of text or illustration that somehow wandered off the center line, or one of those damn reflowed pages with text flowed on top of itself. I can look and look again and triple-check every page one more time, and I know there is still going to be something I miss.

AQATWW: The Mess

I am now sort of out of The Grind and into The Mess. Which means, I am writing more pages, but I have this grinding feeling that I'm writing entire chapters that will have to be cut, because I now have all the scenes and more or less their sequential order laid out, but there are so many plot holes and "how do I get there from here?" and other questions that are not resolving themselves. It would sure be nice if I could just say "Poof, suddenly Alexandra is in the next chapter, never mind that highway battle with manticores, we'll figure out how that ended later." Actually, sometimes I do leave plot holes behind, knowing I will have to go back and fix them. This is actually somewhat more productive than spending days gnawing on a problem and not writing until I figure out a way around it, but then I know I have a bigger mess to clean up later.

Besides plot holes and loose threads, there are issues of characterization and tone. Like, how far AU is AQ going to go in book six? Because the Wizard War is definitely attracting the attention of Muggles. Now, the Harry Potter tone would be what we saw in Rowling's books, and to a lesser extent in mine up until the last book: the U.S. government is kind of aware of the wizarding world, but doesn't really do much about it because they live in parallel worlds that try to avoid each other.

In a realistic setting, of course, this would not be at all plausible. Fucking wizards with magic powers, and elves and goblins and monsters, hundreds of thousands of them around the world? The U.S. government (all governments, really) would be all over that, trying to recruit Muggle-born wizards and infiltrate the wizarding world, while the Confederation would have plans for casting Imperius on the President and Congress, and the DoD and intelligence agencies would have top secret plans anticipating that, and... you get the idea. We wind up with a "gritty" realistic urban fantasy series that might be interesting, but would no longer feel like it was at all the same world. I know some fanfic authors have taken that idea and run with it, but it's not exactly the direction I intended to go.

On the other hand, I hate handwaving away all pretense at verisimilitude because "It doesn't fit the setting." So we're probably going a little bit in that direction, but I don't want this to be Alexandra Quick and the Men In Black.

(If you do like that kind of gritty, rational take on what it would look like if a magical world got dumped into the mundane real world, I recommend Bill Willingham's Fables. And no, please do not recommend fucking HPMOR to me.)

So, I am still muddling my way through, and there will be a hella mess to clean up and probably a lot of harsh comments from my betas, and I worry it's all going to fall apart and this will be the book where I reach the end of my rope and everyone realizes I don't know wtf I'm doing. (I feel like that with every book, at some point.)

Right now, I have 43 chapters of AQATWW outlined, with 21 chapters and 115K words actually written. I have 15 chapters of book seven roughly outlined.

As I have posted previously, I intend to print trade paperback editions of my Alexandra Quick novels - not for sale. I will be giving them exclusively to friends, family, my beta-readers, etc.

Eventually, I'll be doing this for all the books, but right now, I'm just preparing for a trial print run of Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle.

I've got a semifinal draft of the PDF I'll be using for the POD service. Do you want access to it so you can print your own copies? A number of people have asked for this. I may or may not make it publicly available in the future, but if you want early access and you are a super-nitpicky proofreader, preferably with some knowledge of layout and design, font selection, etc., here is your opportunity.



Basically, I want people to go over the layout with a fine-toothed comb to find any tiny little mistakes I might have made. A missing line break between paragraphs. A first-in-the-section paragraph that wasn't indented. A page number that got left off somewhere, or maybe the little icons in the corner margins got missed in one chapter. Are the pictures too large, too small? How does the font I used for Abraham Thorn's letter to Alexandra look? (I don't like the current one. I haven't found the perfect font yet.) Also, proofreading and comments on the frontmatter (disclaimer, dedication, etc.) and Author's Notes. Basically, any nitpicky thing that will make it look as much like a professionally-printed book as possible.

I am not looking for proofreading of the book itself. I mean, if you actually find a typo, I would definitely like to correct those, but otherwise, I am absolutely not revising the text. This is just layout and design. If you know your fonts and have an eye for whitespace and can do the boring gruntwork of going over every page looking for oopses, let me know. Your reward will be an advance copy of the final POD document, whether or not I make it publicly available in the future. (I'd like to offer an actual printed copy of the book, but I can only afford to print and give out so many of those. However, if you have the document, you can use your choice of POD printers to print your own.)

If you would like to be considered, please send me an email at inverarity.author at gmail dot com. Let me know what your qualifications are (basically, something besides "I really want a copy!") Those I select will be given a link to the PDF. Those who actually send useful comments and corrections will get a copy of the final, including the cover (which I don't have yet).

Check out this awesomeness!



Is that not a beautiful piece of art? Yes, it's totally going on the cover of the next edition of the ebook.

Courtesy of Pierre Raveneau, asahisuperdry on DeviantArt

Chapter 20 — Larry's Wager.

( In which Alexandra and Larry can't stay away from each other, and David continues to put his foot in his mouth around Ozarkers. )