Thank you all for your comments about Allen Wold’s Books. I will migrate the site from the provider which hosts it now, to the provider which hosts this blog, Allen Wold on Writing, so that it won’t go down as often. I’ll have to do it when I have some spare time (ahem), but sooner rather than later.

I was ready to publish my current project back on October 9, but I didn’t have a cover. I mentioned this to Darcy, and she took five seconds to make a promising start. Then I told her that I had changed the title from The Empty House to That Which Dwells Below, with the subtitle, A Greater Evil. Her inspiration, based on the idea of a house, evaporated, and she couldn’t go further. That Which is not a book that she would ever want to read, so she had no inspiration for it. This is perfectly natural, and I understand it completely, having experienced it myself. That, and that she did not feel well for the next few days, meant that I had to do my own cover. I’ve done it before (The Gift and the Price for example), but this one was going to have to be different. And it wouldn’t be up to Darcy’s standards.

I used a number of different graphic applications to finally achieve something which I felt comfortable using. I used Live Home 3D Pro to create the image of the doorway which the heroes dared not enter in the last chapter. I used a fractal generator, Chaotica, for the image of what was beyond the door which they slammed shut as soon as they opened it, and used Chaotica for the fractal images which I layered over each other for the background. I used Graphic, (a poor use of a generic name for a specific program), a vector design application which can leave transparent areas, which I used to convert title and author and so on into graphic images rather than using live text on the cover, which wouldn’t justify. I used Nisus Writer Pro for that text, as well as to prepare and format the text of the book itself, which I had written using Scrivener, which is best for creating and assembling the individual chapters of a long work, before combining them into a complete manuscript, uh, typescript, uh, processor-script? Using Scrivener, I could jump from one chapter to another, which I had to do with the continuity check, without having to scroll through a lot of pages.

I had used the graphics applications before, but that had been a while ago, and I had to learn them all over again, which took more time than I had hoped it would. And, like the text of the story, the cover picture needed several drafts, revisions and corrections, and final polishing during, which I discovered other things which needed fixing. I used SketchbookPro for the assembly of images and words, getting it all to fit the cover template with which I had been provided, so that I could produce the 300 dpi pdf that I needed for the text edition, and a simpler image of the front cover for the digital edition. All this is why it took more than six weeks to do the cover, and why I am so late on uploading this post. The final cover was version 11c. 

Bowker provided the isbn, and I registered my book at the U. S. Copyright Office, a branch of the Library of Congress.

And now it’s done. Darcy approved it, and I have gone through the rather complicated publishing process. Both paper and digital versions are now available on Amazon.