Any day now, I’ll have a pre-sale to announce! Bone of Contention, the third and final novel in the XK9 “Bones” Trilogy, will be available for pre-sale orders in advance of its September 24, 2024 publication date.

My plan (check back in a few weeks to see how well it went 😳) is to offer ebooks through Amazon, paperbacks through the Weird Sisters Publishing website, and both (if possible) through IngramSpark’s new e-commerce portal. Amazon doesn’t allow tiny publishers like Weird Sisters to offer paperbacks for pre-sale, but a lot of my readers prefer them. So, here’s hoping I’ll have good success with my “waterfowl alignment issues.”

But there’s still a lot of setup left to do, even though I’ve been working on this project hammer and tongs for months. I’ll have more updates to share through this blog and via my newsletter . . . any day now.

Wait a Minute. What the Heck?

Why “any day now?” Why don’t I know for sure?

Because I’m human, which means I’m capable of making mistakes (I also need to eat and occasionally sleep). And because there are about a bajillion moving parts when a person publishes a book. Not all of them are in one’s control. After several titles in the rearview, some patterns begin to emerge. But it’s hard to predict everything.

You’d think that with three prior XK9 books, plus three Deep Ellum books, I’d be better at this. But curveballs happen. A policy changes. Maybe it takes an extra day for Amazon or IngramSpark to finish reviewing the submitted files. Maybe a new requirement pops up. Sometimes there’s a flaw in a print cover’s measurements. You thought you got everything right, but somehow you mis-measured (see my hand in the air? Yeah, did that). Then it has to be re-done and proofed all over again. Sometimes (and this is the bane of my existence with this book) things simply take longer than expected.

I expected the cover art to arrive on a certain date. For a variety of legitimate reasons, it arrived a month late. I expected to be done with rewrites on a certain date. It was more than three weeks after that, before I could finally submit the rewrites for proofing. I expected that adapting the “Who’s Who and What’s What” appendix would take a couple of days. It took a week.

The Bigger the Book, the Bigger the Production Headaches

One of the reasons I have to say “any day now” instead of “it’s available now!” (which was the original clever plan for this blog post) is that I keep underestimating how much stuff needs to be done, and how long it takes. It might surprise someone who’s never published a book to know that there’s a whole lot of stuff that goes into any book.

Start with a new thing that popped up this time. I don’t remember that getting a number from of my block of ISBNs involved quite such a form to fill out with Bowker before. Then there’s all the work to make sure the ebook cover is ready to upload. The print cover? That’s a whole other thing.

What are the parts of a book? There’s the “front matter” (title page, wording on the copyright page – did I include all the copyright information? – the dedication, etc.). It all must be, at least to a certain extent, custom-written. This book has 66 chapters, all with subheads and final adjustments to be added. The “What’s Next?” section that points readers to future XK9 stories, my newsletter, and the website needs to be adapted a little each time.

It’s a good practice to include a sample chapter of another book at the end, and of course we need a cover for that sample chapter. There also is the previously-mentioned “Who’s Who and What’s What” directory, which is longer in this book than in the earlier ones. And I updated my “About the Author” bio, too, while I was at it.

But Wait! There’s More!

In response to beta-reader suggestions, I also commissioned a local graphic designer to help me bring some of the locations within Rana Station to clearer vision. I thought it might go faster if I hired help. Well, maybe it did. Working with him definitely helped me refine and focus my ideas. But some things didn’t translate perfectly.

Sid Quade and I have developed four visualizations. There’s an “outside view” of Rana Station (minus the docking structures, which I figured would just confuse things). There also are three different views of places inside the station. Those parts of the structure turned out to be hard to describe in text alone. At least, to describe in a way that worked for all readers. Gotta say, even with repeated description attempts and my own drawings, they also were hard to describe effectively to Sid! No wonder we need those location map illustrations!

Now I must decide where in the book to publish them. I’m currently considering two approaches, depending on format. In an ebook, it’s harder to flip back and forth to the back or front in that format. Thus, I thought I’d publish the relevant internal location map at the start of the chapter when the characters enter that location in the ebook edition. In the print edition, I’ll probably publish them all together in one place. I’m thinking just before the “Who’s Who and What’s What,” as part of the appendix. If you have opinions about these plans, please share them in the Comments!

As I write this I’m still in the process of preparing and annotating the illustrations. Look for another blog post with more specifics about the pre-sale, coming soon. Because this book will at last be ready . . . any day now.

About the Author

Author Jan S. Gephardt hasn’t yet started tearing out her hair over her current publishing process, but there are rumors of wailing and a gnashing of teeth. She is the author of the soon-to-be-complete XK9 “Bones” Trilogy, which chronicles the adventures of the Orangeboro XK9s. They are large, uplifted police dog detectives who live on Rana Station. They will indeed finally bring the Izgubil case to a close (with a little help from human, ozzirikkian, and cyberbeing friends) in the final installment. Jan insists that Bone of Contention will be available for presale any day now.

IMAGE CREDITS

The artwork’s all internally generated this week. As noted above, the cover for Bone of Contention is © 2024 by Tom Kidd. In the second illustration, the cover for The Other Side of Fear is © 2020 by Lucy A. Synk. The covers for What’s Bred in the Bone and A Bone to Pick are © 2019 and 2020, respectively, by Jody A. Lee. In the third illustration, The Sirius River Valley is © 2022, and Green City of the Future is © 2023, both by Lucy A. Synk.