reddragdiva | Libra Shrugged is out on Monday! What I've been doing

Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money is out on Monday!

Here's the book page. This contains all the sale links.

(You can order the paperback now, in most countries. You won't get it before next week, though.)

I'm off work for two weeks so I can finish the book up. What I've been doing:

Finishing off the artwork, with my genius artist Alli Kirkham. I am paying her 50% more than she asked because dammit artists, ask for money. You should give Alli work because she's fucking great, and you'll end up with a cover that punches out of the screen like that one.

CMYK is the syphilitic pus of Satan. We ended up doing the ebook cover (RGB, different aspect ratio), then hand-tweaking that to be non-shit CMYK for the paperback, then that ending up amazingly screen-punching, then reverse-engineering that for the ebook to be just as punchy. Both are great now!

Indexing is the most tedious thing in human existence.

Shitloads of last-second editing. The trouble with being able to edit right up to deadline is that you do. I discovered that cross-referenced footnotes are completely messed up by Calibre, coming from either ODT or DOCX. Solution: edit XHTML by hand! If you ever have to edit XHTML by hand, your life is cursed.

The developer of Calibre considers epubcheck broken, which it is, and wrong about the written ePub spec, which it is. Unfortunately, Apple Books requires your book to pass epubcheck anyway. More editing XHTML by hand.

Also, FBReader, the ebook reader of choice on Android, craps itself on the headings. No other reader does this. But I use this one. More XHTML editing!

Q. What's duller than indexing?
A. Indexing a second time, to get the ePub index right.

You might correctly note that indexes are superfluous in ebooks, where search exists — but professional ePubs tend to have them, and they do indeed look professional as hell. And when you're self-publishing, you need everything you can get.

pdfjam --fitpaper true 'print layout no numbers.pdf' '1-5' 'libra shrugged p6.pdf' '1' print layout page numbers.pdf' '7-166' 'print layout no footnote separator.pdf' '167-179' 'libra shrugged p180.pdf' '1' --outfile 'print final 2020-11.pdf'

Uploaded the ePub (thank fuck Amazon accepts ePubs now) and the PDF and cover.

Spent today doing promotion. Two podcasts arranged for next week. If you are any sort of journalist, or even a popular blogger, ping me for an ePub or PDF — dgerard@gmail.com.

If you buy the book on Amazon, PLEASE REVIEW IT. Our dear friend the algorithm loves reviews.

Next: catch up on my blogging. Perhaps actually rest this week, given it's my "holiday." Work out plan for next book: "World's Worst ICOs."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sabotabby

Pre-order placed (through Google. Which is as evil as Amazon but where there is a choice, I will always take not-Amazon).

kraig

Kobo, or at least the Canadian site, seems to unfortunately not be showing your cover. There's probably nothing you can do about this, but maybe the information is useful to you in some way, IDK.