It’s publication day today for my VERY SHORT STORY Happy Valentine, Flash Fiction #12. This is a story I wrote a long time ago and it appeared in Flash Fiction 3. But for some reason, it never made it into one of the Twee Tales volumes, and it wasn’t published as a standalone. Until now.
You can buy it here.
Friday started well. I made us both a drink (dirty tea for me, clean coffee for him – he was working from home), I hung up a washload and put another load through while he fed the birds, and I did some shredding. And when I say ‘shredding’, I mean the waste paper variety.
As one of the loudest to argue against AI scraping and one of the first to find out how to turn it off or stop using whatever’s foisting it onto us, I think it’s only right to shred old drafts of stories rather than dump them in landfill where anyone can nick them. I also shred printouts of the books I edit for clients.
I shared Friday’s blog post and started today’s. I checked Draft2Digital and Books2Read and two of my latest books were already on there. Unfortunately, they were all still stuck on Google Play. But I had to wait 24 hours before contacting them. So I waited. As soon as the clock ticked around, I contacted them again, only to be told that it’s now a known issue and it’s been escalated to the team responsible.
I do hope the writing isn’t on the wall for Google Play Books. They’re a great alternative to the Zon.
The entire rest of the day was spent making a start on updating all of my published books. First of all I came up with a guide for pricing depending on the length of the books, Then I went right back to the beginning and went through changing the prices on the first 25 books I published. Where I’ve also got a new cover, I updated the cover. And where this had an impact on the interior (i.e. the cover credit), I changed the interior.
Other changes to the interior when I made them included the new Baggy Bottom Books logo, which had a knock-on effect with any affected meta data, and the removal of my old end matter. Then I moved the auto-end matter to the end of the books, and I changed the teaser chapters to the previously published book or the next one if there wasn’t an earlier version.
I also deleted the 3 delisted books. And then I went through saving the doc file, the epub file, the mobi file and a 5×8 pdf file for each changed book. I finished at 6pm and my back was in bits after being hunched over the computer for so many hours.
So I closed down and called it a week.
Busy day, but all that detail work will pay off in the future. I hope you had a great weekend.
Thank you!