That’s right y’all, episode 005 of The Magic of Eyri is now online. Give ‘er a listen.

And some good news–I was checking my Lulu sales today and three copies of The Magic of Eyri were bought in the past week. 2 downloads and 1 print copy–which was ordered in the U.K., very neat. Counting a sale right after my appearance at PenguiCon, that puts me at 4 copies sold in the past month. That’s really great, looks like the podcast is paying dividends.

Mirrored from Daniel J. Hogan. If something doesn't look right or show up, view the original blog post.

I attended the "Go Local" event at the Grosse Pointe War Memorial yesterday to sell/sign copies of The Magic of Eyri--and I sold all my copies!

I brought six copies with me and thankfully I didn't have to take any of them home.  I usually only bring around five copies to something like that (selling around five copies tends to be my average, which is pretty good actually), but I'm glad I had the number of copies I did--one very nice lady bought four copies at once (for grandkids and such), which was amazing.

I could have brought four additional copies, but I wanted to keep those in reserve to sell at ConClave next month. As part of my Get Out of Book-Related Debt By The End of the Year Plan, I'm trying not to have to order any new books before ConClave.  I also won't be ordering the ever popular mini-pins again any time soon. I know four copies may not seem like a lot, but as I said I usually only sell around five copies and I'll be on a bunch of panels, so I don't know how much time I'll have for selling anyway.  And I'm not staying at the hotel (another cost saving measure), so I'll have to carry stuff with me at all times and I won't be there all day and night.

We'll see. This could change and I'll end up getting a couple more copies, but we'll see.

In other good news, it looks like I sold another copy of The Magic of Eyri on Lulu.com last week (give or take).  So I've sold seven copies in the past few weeks.  That's pretty great.  As of today I've sold 134 copies of the book and have 217 copies in print ( includes freebies and donations).

Now the bad news--I got a pair of rejections last week for my short stories Slow and Steady and A Queen's Tale.  Oh well.  I'll dig through my copy of Writer's Market '07 and find new places to try.  Slow and Steady will be a bit easier because it is shorter (under 4,000 words I think), I'll have a hard time finding a magazine willing to take the 10,000+ word A Queen's Tale. I'll get back on the horse and try again.

So I'm revising The Magic of Eyri and let me tell ya, it ain't as easy as ya'd think.

The problem? I didn't originally write it in standard manuscript format. Since I learned that I should be doing that for everything I write (because of me starting to send out short stories), I realized that I need to convert my original 'manuscript' to manuscript format. Here's part of the problem: when I was putting everything together to publish the book via Lulu, I just wrote everything in the style of the final book format--this meant different page sizes (6x9 instead of 8x10), different margins, different line spacings, drop caps--all kinds of annoying fun stuff.

That looks great when you finally publish it, but for submitting things and revising stuff it ain't the way to go. And because MS Word is the unholy demon beast it is, I can't easily change all that stuff in a 500+ page Word Document. Sure, some things I can but fixing all of it took a lot of work. I pretty much have to copy everything chapter by chapter and paste each into a new document to make sure the correct changes are made. The separate chapter files make going over stuff a lot easier and Word has an easier time with a 20-something page file than a 700+ page file (what the book size was when I converted it to manuscript format with double-spacing).

But so far so good. I'm kind of behind schedule as to what I wanted to have done but I've been really busy lately. I also have a hard time writing when it is really nice outside, I get way more writing done in the fall and winter.

Anyway, the moral of the story kids is: always write things in manuscript format.  You'll save yourself a lot of work later. If I had a file of the finished book in this format all I would of had to do was do a Save As and get to work. Plus if I had wanted to send it out, to say an agent or other publisher, all I would have to do is print 'er out and send it out.

Watching Batman Begins after work with friends and then we are off to catch a late night IMAX show of The Dark Knight. Woo-ooooooo.

That's right kids, I'll be at Motor City Comic Con all weekend! I'll be a guest there and I'll be selling copies of The Magic of Eyri for a special Convention Only price. So if you're in the 'hood, swing by and say hi. I'll have free mini-pins and Air Heads candy at my table.

Learn more at: http://www.motorcityconventions.com/motor_city_comic_con/

In other news, my promo cards from lulu.com didn't come yesterday so I WON'T have them for this weekend. I'm all kinds of pissed off about that.  I only have about 50 cards left, which should be OK...but having a fresh batch of 500 would have been nice *grumble* I blame the pokey process that lulu.com uses for ordering said cards. They should really stream line it. Watch, I bet they'll show up today, but I won't be there to get 'em. Grrr. So I whipped up some proxy cards last night before getting on the road. They ain't that pretty, but it is better than nothing. Gotta make due "Adapt. Improvise. Overcome," as Dad likes to say.

You can now read the first two chapters (about 20 something pages) of The Magic of Eyri online. And actually...you can buy it now if you want. I put it on sale on lulu.com last night so I'd have enough time to get all the website stuff done for May 1st, which is the 'official' launch date.

However, it'll be about six weeks before anyone can buy it through amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Borders. I didn't know that (well, maybe I did) ahead of time, but it doesn't matter because I couldn't have put it up for sale six weeks ago anyway. Here's the details from an email lulu.com sent me:

"Your book information will be sent to Bowker's Books In Print and once approved by Bowker, Lulu will upload your title to our distribution network. When this occurs, you will be notified by email. Should there be any problems with your title in Books In Print, you will also be notified. This process is generally completed within 2-3 weeks. You can expect to see your book listed on Amazon and other online retailers within the next 6 to 8 weeks."

Hopefully everything should be fine with it. Lord knows I toiled over everything long enough for the past week to make it as perfect as possible. I have grown to loathe Microsoft Word because of it. I don't get how to do something as simple as removing a header and footer from a single page at the end of  a .doc can be such a hassle. Sheesh.

So, in maybe six to eight weeks real stores will carry the book...but it is up to them and part of that is up to me to promote it. This next phase is going to be as hard, if not harder, as writing the book itself. But people can buy it right away via my site.

Speaking of shameless self promotion, I designed some more things for the Eyri Store yesterday. I'll upload those later today. I'm really enjoying designing stuff for the store, it's fun.