by PublicDomainImages on Pixabay

You know the old cliche about the swan?  All serene on the surface and peddling away like mad beneath?  It’s been a bit like that this week, what with the distraction of Goodreads, Facebook and other forum posting.  But something has been happening behind the scenes, without being visible or furthering the cause of editing the WIP, unfortunately.  Another call upon the time of the writer of today: maintaining websites.

As this is a bit of an anorack subject, I won’t bore you with the details, but I needed to upgrade my websites to a new theme, the old one being discontinued.  I did the two imprint sites in October, but didn’t manage to get round to doing the same on my pen name site until earlier this week.  Finally, I’ve been able to start to tackle the main site, this one, which has a lot more content than any of the others.  As with them, I’m doing a test migration first, so I’ve been setting up the test site as a clone, and had a few glitches that I didn’t have before with the others.  However, it is now set up ready to do the migration.  Once I’m happy all is OK and I know what to do on the main site, I’ll be doing this one and hopefully that will be one backroom job ticked off my to do list.

Once I’ve got that out of the way, I fully intend to get back to the editing because time is running out to complete my goal of another four chapters fully edited by the end of next week.

In the meantime, I’ve been reading with my researcher’s hat on, and checked what a new publisher has to do to obtain ISBNs from Nielsen (the company that supplies them in the UK).  As well as completing the relevant form, I also need to supply dummy title and copyright pages for the first book I intend to publish.  Nielsen provide ISBNs either in batches of 10 or 100, depending on your publishing plans over the next two to three years.  The publishing plan must be realistic and achievable.  It works out a lot cheaper to buy 100 because that costs only about twice the price of 10, but Nielsen reserve the right to determine what they sell you.  You need an ISBN for each edition of a book, but it seems that if you publish on Kindle, the ASIN supplied by Amazon will do, and you don’t need an ISBN as well.  I have heard this from a number of sources, but need to be sure it is correct as the whole point of creating imprint sites and paying for logos is so that my book listings on sales sites look professional.  I know that if you don’t do this, and publish a Print on Demand version on CreateSpace, for example, then CreateSpace shows as the publisher.

As I need to set the publication date of the first novel, I can’t apply to Nielsen yet, because I have to get this final edit done and then obtain some quotes from pro editors to see how affordable it is.  So far, I’ve calculated, from those who give pricing information, that an edit of a book this long would work out well over £1K, which is not feasible, so we’ll have to see.

So, to the ROW80 goals:

1. Return to the edit and get the next 4 chapters rechecked for the nitpicking edits, by the end of next week.
2. Continue the edit and get it done by end March (fingers crossed)
3. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those

And here are those nice ROW80 people: