I picked up where I left off yesterday in Scribus, until I at last had 2 new books interiors ready, one of each French/English type. Following that, some fun in Pixelmator Pro making cover images for the 2 new books, which as with everything else took a bit of getting back in the swing of, by re-aquainting myself with the templates I use to create covers. Once back up and running it's a fairly straightforward exercise of re-wording and moving some things around and so on, adding relevant graphics, and working out a contrasting colour scheme. The latter is the hardest bit if anything - trying to come up with a look I haven't used before, which is almost impossible given there's only so many colour combinations.
With the interiors and the covers created it's was just a case of getting to grips again with Amazon KDP itself. Uploading the content is simple enough, the tricky part is setting up categories, keywords and also information text and so on. Keywords is an art form in itself, which I'm still only learning to understand. Early evening I had at last submitted 2 new puzzle books for publications; I say submitted because after hitting the 'publish' button you have a review process and up to a 3 day wait. If it fails the review, you have to tinker with it then submit again, and maybe wait another up to 3 days. It's a tedious long winded process that can get pretty frustrating to be honest. With nothing more to be done with KDP, besides starting on another new book, I decided to give myself the rest of the evening off to do the next installment in my Spider-man movies re-watch, with 2004's Spider-man 2. Again I have a set of notes waiting to be written up, with all sorts of thoughts on them, which I shall save for the moment.
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Monday morning has since the first COVID lockdown, when I took over responsibility for the household shopping, become my customary weekly shopping day/time. I'm in a habit of waking up with a 7am alarm, something I initially did to try and avoid the crowds (read virus ridden hordes!). I'm thinking it's about time I relaxed this to a bit later in the day, as between the lack of sleep and my general physical challenges doing the whole thing, it absolutely wipes me out for a large chunk of the day. Between the walking around various shops and fighting with an unco-operative shopping trolley, while trying to dodge the numerous online shopper carts, replenishers and of course other customers, my left ankle and knee especially absolutely kill me by the end. In a word - knackering!
Having got myself full back into KDP mode and wanted to crack on, being wiped out aching all over with a headache is a real pain (literally!). I was determined to get at least a couple of new books live asap, but annoyingly the afternoon was total write off - I kipped through part of it! During the evening I carried on where I left off the day before. Truth be told I didn't have time to finish all of the second lot of puzzle generation for the Spanish language books. I therefore cracked on and got that the set of puzzles completed before moving on. With puzzles ready to go in the form of folders full of sets of images of crosswords, it was time to load up my free desktop publishing software Scribus and re-familiarise myself with the process of involved in using it to turn the content into a format that can actually become a book. Having located the files I was previously using as crossword book templates, I set up new copies to work on for the new book volumes. That's somewhat easier said than done as I wound up needing to spend quite a bit of time a playing around with the template to get it in a state ready to be used, such that it looked neat and would meet KDP's margin requirements and so forth. Anyway I got stuck into that and began making my first new book interior for several months. Finally, a bit of chill out with some YouTube and Netflix watching (I'm working through season 2 of the The Witcher). A new year rolls around again. This year I thought I'd actually do as we often ponder in passing - keeping a blog. It could equally have been a journal, a diary or whatever is your preference, I just happen to be in the media of writing a blog.
I'm going to aim to at least record my activity to some extent each day, as a way to prevent one blurring into the other as much as anything. Some days maybe a list of a few points only; other days I may get my waffle on and write at length. Let's just see where it leads. As for the first day of 2022 then, it turned out to be quite a busy one, as I returned to some sort of post-Christmas normal activity: - I started the day (well about midday) by belatedly getting a set of screenshots done for The Repair Shop at Christmas 2021, shown on Christmas Eve. I had wantonly deliberately not even considered working on it over Christmas, deciding it would just have to wait this time. Screenshots plus capturing shots for the customary Secret Santa gift making and giving between the experts present, and also a handful of general festive shots. The screenshot taking was as ever followed by uploading them to episode guide post on The Repair Shop Guide, and then in turn a post to the group TRS Friendly Fans. - Have got in a general Mac working type of a place, I then at long last returned to working on my Amazon KDP. I had recently realised that the books I already had passively making a modest amount of money which in about 8 months had added up to about £75. Amongst them by far the most successful had been the English to French and French to English crossword books. I obviously needed to make some further volumes of these, to see if there was an appetite for more out there. The afternoon was mostly spent getting myself back up to speed which what was where on my Mac, and I started generating a few new puzzles too. - Come the evening, having done my customary dinner and quiz viewing, I felt the need to just chill out and watch something. My friend Fran is watching for the first time all of the Spider-man movies in order, starting with Tobey Maguire's first one in 2002. Wanting to be able to talk about it in some detail, having not seen most of the films for many years now, I sort of just default fell into joining her on this viewing journey. So I sat with my notepad and remote at hand - the occasional pause to write so I didn't miss anything while doing so - and watched Spider-man (2002). I came out of it with over 3 pages of notepad scribblings of my various thoughts and feelings as I watched. I plan to write this and further viewing notes up into some sort of review/discussion articles. |