At last! I published a paperback!

Full Canva cover

I’ve been sharing friend links to Facebook for the Night Crawler chapters on Medium religiously as I’ve been publishing them. But on Tuesday night, when I sent a friend link for the Little John article to the poet, it wouldn’t let him read it.

He tried logging out (he created an account so that he could ‘clap’) and tried again, but it still wouldn’t let him. So then I asked him to uninstall the app from his phone and see if he could read it from mobile web version.

That worked. But he was a bit narked that it didn’t work in the app.

I’d already lodged a ticket with support that it wasn’t working, and once I knew it was only in the app that it wasn’t working, I sent them an update. On Thursday I received a reply from them saying that their engineers are looking into it and thanks for the notification.

I wonder how many other people had tried to follow a friend link via the app and just given up? I must admit, I did think it might just be me missing something. But I’m glad that it’s a fault and that they seem to be addressing it.

Thursday

On Thursday I tried again with the book covers for the paperback versions of Twee Tales. I used my bookcoverly software, but I wasn’t at all happy with it. The colours weren’t as vibrant as they are on the ebook covers.

I’m about fed up with bookcoverly in any case.

  • There are no guides to snap anything to.
  • You can’t curve the text.
  • You can’t link several elements and move them all at the same time.
  • It doesn’t see the fonts I’ve imported, and the ones available are really limited.
  • You can’t easily duplicate something, you have to use keystrokes.
  • The interface is really old-fashioned – about ten years out of date.
  • There is no ‘help’ facility, you have to email the owner.
  • The owner replies to emails with either ‘yes it should do that’ or ‘we’ll be adding it to the update’, but they don’t say how it should do it and the update never turns up.
  • And now, the colours are really dull and the colour palette is, again, very old-fashioned and limited.

In fact, it’s the worst eighty-odd quid I’ve ever not spent. (It was a birthday present.) And they don’t provide refunds unless the software is faulty.

So, once I decided to assign bookcoverly to the archives (the owner is not paying me to beta-test her product), I spent time learning how to do full book covers on Canva and how to apply templates that the PoD publishers provide.

By the time the poet came back from Manchester (with tonsilitis in tow), I’d only finished one book cover and was tweaking and proofreading the interior pdf. I still have the other two books to do.

I proof-read the first section of book 1, uploaded a Scaredy Cat chapter to Medium, and then I proof-read the next section. I uploaded a Night Crawler chapter to Medium, and then I proof-read the third section. I corrected it as I went along.

Finally, at 6pm, I published the paperback of Twee Tales. Phew! What a palaver. Hopefully, I can finish the rest today.

No list today. I had to get ready to go to fat club.

Have a great weekend!