At a friend’s house yesterday, we both admitted that we’re not up to much creatively these days. She, because of back surgery and a fairly recent retirement from a demanding job. Me? The book I guess. “It takes up energy even when I’m not doing much,” I lamented.

But then I gave her a rundown of the tasks I had completed on the day before. Just the one day. It shocked me how much there was to recite.

I’ll post at the end for my own sake. I don’t expect anyone (except maybe someone in the middle of self-publishing) to be interested.

The mood in my circle of friends is unanimously ebullient. There’s hope again. Relief and energy too. Many of us had no idea just how much dread and fear we were holding in our bodies. I feel like I can breathe again, I kept saying.

On my almost-weekly Tuesday call (the one that’s been going since Trump got elected), there’s been a need during the final moments of our half-hour together to find something positive to report. It’s often been so grim that it’s difficult to think of something.

How wonderful, then, to not need the flourish of positivity at the end of this week’s call. The entire half-hour was buoyed by optimism.

Here we go! Are you ready to pitch in? I just asked for 25 more addresses from #PostcardstoVoters but I want to do more.

Now the boring book details:

Wrote a third person, short “about page” for blog like they recommend. Researched how to pin it to top of blog and nearly gave up (invariably the first three buttons I’m supposed to “just click” are not in evidence). But then when I finally figured it out, I promptly undid it because it left a huge white space below, making accessing the blog inconvenient.

Revised longer ABOUT. It was very dated.

Spent a couple hours scanning the proof copy of my book and making notes for HISTORY post (this time Hell Hole Swamp and George Whitefield got written up and posted in draft).

Waited anxiously for my designer to send the copy of book cover for Amazon that includes the bar code. I had to ask him to take D2D’s out because their barcode override button is broken. Then I had to ask for both versions of the cover to have wider images so that the white stripe would disappear. He didn’t answer right away and I thought he might not at all because there have been a lot of changes. He complained. I paid him more than 20% extra on Sunday so I perhaps should’ve been comfortable expecting him to get the Amazon cover correct but I wasn’t. (It arrived the next day).

Signed in to Twitter and Instagram on my laptop. Still have to do Facebook. Naturally this involves changing passwords. Learned that FB is taxing the ads that you post there (which everyone says to do to promote your book) and that you can avoid that tax by accessing your account through a laptop. I don’t actually know.

As I was pondering whether to offer some free ARCs (advanced reader copies), I was dismayed to learn that Amazon might be making it difficult for someone who did not purchase the book through them to post a review (it’s the whole reason you give ARCs away). Okay, so maybe skip them.

Then I learned that Amazon is running bots to prevent review-scams. There are some scams out there, but friends and family of a self-published author posting reviews is hardly one of them. I’ve seen threads where authors crow about getting their first non-acquaintance review, so maybe this isn’t happening to the degree that I read it is.

Definitively decided not to post to Barnes & Noble directly because of the apparent demand that that they be supplied with a Barnes & Noble-specific ISBN. What bullshit! And honestly, the threads about this are contradictory and confusing even in the Barnes & Noble frequently asked questions section. So at this point I just can’t be bothered.