First off, are you signed up to the LandisBooks mailing list? If not, please consider signing up to it! It’s just me, not some big marketing company, and I promise to never, ever spam you, but it’s an incredibly handy way for me to update a lot of people at once when I have something important to share, like “Hey, The Ocypete is up for Pre-Order on Amazon.com!” (It isn’t yet, but it’s going to be very soon.) Mailing lists are the beating heart of an author’s reader group, and building mine is a big priority for me.
Another week gone by, and so it’s time for another Weekly Update as we continue to work toward The Ocypete being released! As always, here’s the graphic:
Let’s break it down in a little more detail!
Editing is Proceeding Well!
The editor and I are working closely and moving at a good pace. They had to take a few days away from the project this week, but still managed to clear 5 chapters from the board. We worked a bit each day to incorporate some of the backlog as well, so our overall Phase 2 progress has jumped quite a bit for a “short” week! Additionally, I spent one full day going over the formatting, as well as printing out some large sections in various formats (with different font sizes, margins, and trim sizes) to get a feel for the book “in hand.” I should have done that a long time ago; it made it very easy to tweak the formatting and get it to print the way I want. We now have locked in the trim sizes and margins for the paperback and hardback editions, which gives us a rough idea of the page counts! Any guesses?
Website Tweaks
I didn’t make many visible changes to the website this week, but I reworked a lot of the back end to run down some odd errors that had cropped up. It’s all humming smoothly now, and it’s ready for me to throw the switch when The Ocypete is released! I’ve tested everything in the shop up to the point of actually shipping myself a book, and a few intrepid helpers have also gone through the ordering process for me to verify it works in a variety of browsers, on desktop and mobile, etc.
Artist Concepts are coming!
No, I won’t be able to share them, but even though we only just got our artist signed on, they’re already hard at work and hope to have some concepts very soon! We talked about scheduling and they also showed me a little sneak peek of a concept of the concept and all I can say is… wow. Wow. WOW. It really blows me away to see the placeholder cover coming to life. They’re also working on some original designs in various motifs, which I’m eager to see! I couldn’t be happier with this part of the update!
Audiobook Apocalypse!
The artist mentioned that listening to the book is very helpful to set the mood while they work, so I’ve spent some time this week working on the audio recordings. If you’d like to listen to a copy of the rough draft of The Ocypete, as read by the VERY non-professional-voice-actor author, you can go to the Beacon Field discord server (see the graphic above or go to https://discord.gg/vS6SyEGCFM) and get cozy, there’s a whole channel for the recordings! I had managed up through chapter 5 before, and just today, I recorded 6-10.
… and I’m going to crawl into a bottle and nurse my aching throat all weekend, but it was worth it!
Next Week’s Plans
- More Editing; aiming for finishing through chapter 25.
- Possible Art Concepts (not promised; they’ll be ready when they’re ready.)
- Audio for Chapters 11-15.
- Mailing List Push?
