Tuesday, January 6, 2026

All Writing, All Day

I was focused today. Most of what I did as writing work. This morning and after lunch I uploaded Spies Don't Retire to Voices by INaudio which is a service that puts my audiobooks on 22 different outlets so they have a lot more opportunities to be seen and purchased. That's the three books of The Seaview Series on there. The three standalone books are next. It's a time-consuming process because I have to download each track separately, then upload them in the correct order and fix the chapter names of each track. You have to make sure it's right because there's no changing it once it's submitted and approved.

 

Then in the late afternoon and evening I worked on finishing Anneke's Legacy (formerly The Summer of Blue Black Nights) final Kindle edits, transferring those notations to the manuscript, and then uploading the manuscript to Kindle Create to format it. While doing that I realized that I needed a blurb to nail down an ISBN number for it. I learned from a writing friend that it's a better idea to buy and use my own ISBN numbers than to use Amazon's free ones because then you're stuck distributing through Amazon. Which means that eventually I'll have to republish all seven of my previous titles both eBooks and paperbacks with my own ISBNs. I'm not looking forward to that.

 

To get away from the computer for a little while, I spent a some time collapsing and packing up the Christmas tree and carrying it downstairs in its box. I carried up the box that the Three Kings are stored in and replaced the things that live on top of the TV armoire and the table in front of the window. The plant that used to live on that table died so I need to either get another plant or find something that can live there. Maybe I'll move the Christmas cactus there for the time being.

So I didn't draw and I didn't paint and I didn't write something new but I realized yesterday that I have a lot of projects incomplete that need to get finished. I emailed GetCovers about designing a cover for Anneke's Legacy. I have a very sketchy idea of what I want on the cover and am not sure I'll be able to communicate it clearly.

I changed the title of Anneke's Legacy because I realized after working on the manuscript for months that it couldn't be summer if the main character is sitting at her desk in the States watching snowflakes fall. It took an embarrassingly long time to figure that out. 

--Barbara 

1 comment:

Aunt Barb said...

All that uploading and downloading sounds complicated to me. You've mastered so many skills on top of writing six (or is it seven?) books. Bravo 👏.