We’re almost finished with a round of editing for Tragic Wonders. In prior posts, you’ve seen some of the stories and essays that we dropped from TW because of thematic duplication. We’ve also separated out two poems that now provide a transition from the stories to the essays. The next step is copy editing. Seems the company is geared towards Microsoft Office production but, for the money, they’ll accommodate Amazon Kindle requirements. Whew! Actually, they’ve been encouraging, cooperative, and fast. We’ll see how much we can say about them at a later date.

At this point, we plan to get TW out before Christmas (Thanksgiving is the real goal, but…). To do that, I want to have at least two professional reviews in place before issuing the press release and posting the Kindle book to Amazon and registering with the LOC and Red City Reviews usually posts to Goodreads but Goodreads requires an ASIN, Amazon’s ISBN equivalent… You get the idea, the timing will be tricky. Also, we were planning on switching from PRWeb to PR Newswire. You know, the PR firm recently hacked for customer data.

We’ve had several favorable reviews on TW’s all important cover. Yes, it turns out we do judge a book by its cover (among other things, like favorable excerpts from perhaps unfavorable professional reviews).

Right now, we have Tiānmìng – Mandate of Heaven priced at 99 cents. We’re going to raise the price back to $2.99 when TW comes out at 99 cents. In other news, we’ve decided to postpone publication of A Digital Carol until next Christmas. Actually, we’ll get it out before Thanksgiving 2014 to pick up on the buying season. We’ve already got the cover concept roughed in.

Yup, we’ll get this marketing thing down, yet. Hopefully, before we’re out of funds.

We plan to start Who Shall be God early in 2014 while ADC is in editing (yes, book three, that became book four, is book three again). The WSBG themes are coming together. It turns out that the 38th parallel not only runs through the Korean DMZ but through Virginia and Maryland. Hmm, I wonder if that’s significant given what DC has been doing lately?

Book five is about China. We’re still waiting for Xi and company to declare their intent after the Third Plenum meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Other news of interest is that China has twice the shale gas reserves as the US does. That should swing the balance all other things being equal. We’ll see.

And finally, we’ve updated our links page.