Woohoo. I have a bill of lading in my inbox this morning. Two hundred and nineteen books are on their way to me, and should get here around Halloween!
I’d contracted for 400 but there was a bit of an overrun, so I seem to be getting 420 books. *eyes the multi-chambered smoking device on her desk* *decides to take a shower first*
Oookay. I decided to start working on the Rita PDF today. And very quickly the scope of the problem crept to “hey maybe I should put it out as .mobi and ibooks as well”.
And… no. Just no. Trying to wrap a bunch of landscape-format images in either of these formats is a royal pain in the ass. Amazon’s .mobi plugin for Indesign gives me a file that displays as four tiny thumbnails that won’t zoom in. iBooks Author is… oh god this thing is a fucking nightmare there is no way to say “please give me 40 blank pages”, I have to fucking select the “insert->pages->pages->blank” menu item BY HAND, REPEATEDLY, because there are no keyboard shortcuts for it. There’s an “insert chapter from Pages or Word document” menu item, which sounds like a good idea… until I discover that there seems to be NO WAY to make TextEdit save a new document as a Word document in Mountain Lion, and iBooks Author won’t import fucking RTFs. WHYYYYY APPLE WHYYYYY. There is no fucking way I am going to drop in sixty pages by hand, especially not when they all come in at like a quarter of the screen and have to be resized individually. *headdesk*
And Indesign’s epub output, which supposedly can go into iBooks, just generates a one-page file.
So yeah I don’t think I’m going to be making my comics available on Amazon or iBookstore any time soon. Not unless someone pops up who has done this before and is willing to do the conversion for me. Graphicly‘s cost of $150 to turn a PDF into these formats and a few others suddenly seems a lot less steep now that I’ve actually poked at this stuff; it is a royal pain.
And also oh god why is iBooks shifting color like crazy when I dump a PDF onto my iPad. It looks perfect on my computer. Aaagh. The Kindle reader seems to handle it okay at least. But aggh.
Oho, if I tell Indesign to convert the colors to the Apple RGB space during the PDF export, iBooks then displays the right hues. Good. Okay now I just need to generate new images for the pages with gloss, scale everything down to like 150dpi instead of the ~400dpi I sent to the printer, and I’m in business.
(Other little tweaks to do for the PDF release: scale up the ask blog excerpts because they’re illegible on the iPad, add a final page that tells people they can share it all they like in a non-commercial fashion and has a little pitch for the printed books with the cool gloss.)
I just got some proofs for the book and they look great, except for one thing: somewhere in the process the fact that these are CMYK + spot gloss books got lost, and the printer diligently converted all my sweet spot gloss overlays into opaque CMYK stuff, which pretty much looks terrible. Books at Rainfurrest are definitely not happening, and I’m now thinking of aborting APE since I don’t feel confident I’ll have them for that. Oh well, they should be in hand for Further Confusion, and for other cons next year!
There’s a new page of Rita up. It’s got a big money shot of the Vespa spaceport in it. If you click on the thumbnail above you’ll be taken to a hugemungous copy of that spaceport without the dialogue or other panels cluttering it up! Enjoy.
Well this page is taking a while. Lots more to do in both the blue track and the red track, as well. Draw draw draw…
I’m laying out the back end of the Rita book. Two pages that I originally had allocated for design drawings ended up being used for stuff from the Ask Rita tumblr instead.
I’m mostly putting serious answers that fill in a little bit about the world, but there’s a couple silly ones that make me laugh. Including this one. I figure I’ll include its sequel in the back of the second book. I really hope I get a question that works with that answer – or lets me do something that obviously SHOULD get that answer, but lets me do something unexpected.
(There’s a few more questions piled up, including some pretty good ones that will be pretty easy to answer well – I’ll get around to them when I actually have some spare time! If you’ve got one that’s been waiting forever, don’t despair; some of them just take longer to spark good answers.)
Left to do: two donor pictures, title page, publication data, dedication. Then it’s time for THE PROOFS!
(Also, anyone who contributed at the “get your name in the back of the book” levels – $80 or more – should have some e-mail pointing them to a draft of the sponsor list page. Unless Kickstarter “messages” don’t actually turn into e-mail. I’m pretty sure they do but not entirely sure, let me know if it’s only showing up on KS’s messaging system!)
I woke up at around 4AM from a dream. I didn’t note down much, except that it involved Nick and I in some kind of post-apocalypse scenario, and he was talking about making a game based on this sitcom about a robot. Suddenly, the dream just… stopped very distinctly, and I was awake. Weird. I puttered around the net with the iPad for a while, then went back to sleep.
When I got up, I had a real hard time getting started. Maybe I’m all tired from getting the fourth chunk of my tattoo done yesterday? I figure having four needles being repeatedly jammed into your skin for a couple hours is going to annoy your body some, I dunno. I didn’t have a headache so I don’t think it was a hangover from the beer over dinner last night. For whatever reason, I just lounged around all day until my mother called to tell me that she’s back in her place in New Orleans, with power restored a little earlier in the day.
I talked to her about bits of stuff, and asked her to please send me a photo of her for the sponsor page of the Rita book (yes, she’s one of them). She’d replied to the original request with something like “You know what I look like!” – which I do, but not well enough to feel like I can knock out a decent portrait of her without reference! She suggested that I just look in the mirror and add a few decades, and I was like, no, really, I don’t think either of us will like how that comes out, please send me a photo. We tried to dig up a picture from the webpage of an organization whose board of directors she’s on, but they just have a text list now.
Thinking about that made me decide to get things ready for doing those drawings, as I’d been hoping to do today. So I went through my e-mail, found all the pictures people sent me, and dropped them into an Illustrator document next to their names. One other person hadn’t sent any that I could find, but luckily I’m friended to her on Facebook and snagged her profile pics to work fro. There’s going to end up being three drawings of people’s furry characters in here, and I’m fine with that!
I figure that now that I’m actually pondering work, finally, instead of lying around with the iPad and the internet, I may as well grab the computer, go out somewhere, and try to get some of these things drawn. If not today then they’re certainly at the top of the task list for tomorrow.
…and that’s the fourth session of work on the wings down. I now have the black and brown laid in on both wings; next week we start on the blues at the top, most likely. I’d been worried that I was mistreating the first serious chunks of color from last week and that they were flaking off, but Alexis looked at it and proclaimed them just fine. The skin’s kinda opaque now but she assures me it’ll be less so once it’s all settled down.
Nick had come along, so afterwards we had dinner at the pizza place next door, which ended up being pretty damn good. I got quite tizzly off of just one beer; I’m such a lightweight. He was originally going to stick around tonight and take off early in the morning for a trip to his parents, but double checking bus routes after getting to my place made him decide to go back home and lean on the housemates for a lift to the airport. Ah well. At least he petted me a lot before taking off.
Meanwhile, earlier today I processed all the pages for the Rita collection and got them into InDesign, complete with gloss. It ended up being less trouble than I was afraid it would be. And I think my page process in the future is going to involve generating the TIFFs for the print volume right after I generate the GIF that I post, so that I never need to be a human batch processor on fifty-something pages again. At least not until I move on to the next story with a different page size. If all goes well with drawing the sponsor pics tomorrow, I should have it ready to go to press in a couple of days – I might even have books at Rainfurrest.
Phew. I just spent three hours checking off all but a couple of the checkmarks in the list I made the other day of stuff that needed to be fixed before I could go to press. There’s a couple things that need tweaking in book 2, but I’ll deal with those LATER. And there’s also one page where I just decided I’m gonna see how it looks without the tweak I marked down.
I even uploaded most of the changes to the web site, since about half of them were “Carol1’s hair is not stripey like Carol2/3’s hair”. Now it’s hopefully a little more obvious to the eye that the different incarnations of Carol are variants of the same person.
Now all I need to do is generate the print-res bitmaps, draw the images for the sponsor page, and put it all together.
(If you sponsored at $120 or more and haven’t sent me reference for that, please send me something today!)