Peschel Press News: 10/9/2020

This week has been very busy, even for me.

Career Indie Author

I’ve revised the first edition that was published last month. Yes, it’s a bit early, but it’s part of the process that arose while working on the ebook version of all my books. I find mistakes or decide on a better way to express a thought.

In the case of CIA, I corrected a few minor errors. A tip icon still had a box around it, and I forgot to credit the Broadside artist who generously let us reprint one of his cartoons in the time management section. The book’s spine was a little off-center and that needed fixing.

Best of all, I filled in the social media section with quotes from authors like Dave Chesson and Jane Friedman that offer pertinent advice.
Both Amazon and IngramSpark have the new and improved version 1.1 of CIA.

Career Indie Author ebook

A work in progress. I integrated the quotes from each chapter into a section at the end, and added a few more for those which had only one quote. This meant adding them to CIA (above), which in one instance meant coming up with a creative way to insert them in the available space:

I’m hoping to get this done within a few days and out there. While I’m sure you’ll get a lot of information from it, the print version is much prettier and has a LOT of art in it that couldn’t be carried over to the ebook version.

Career Indie Author Quote Book

The collection part is done, and I’m busy laying out the quotes. Affinity Publisher is a wonderful alternative to InDesign, but it also encourages you to bring out the best layout you can get. Teresa tells the story of when typewriters were replaced by computers, and instead of saving time when it came to composing letters, it took more time. Instead of accepting three misspellings on a page, officers expected perfect letters, and they would revise letters until they were satisfied.

Still, if it means designing pages like this (with quotes from Harper Lee and Leigh Brackett on censorship), it’s worth it. (Right-click and select View Image to embiggen)

Other projects

I’m slowly putting together “Kill Like Christie and Solve Like Sayers,” a CIA book categorizing TV Tropes style the way detectives solve their fictional cases. It treats them with a light touch, but should provide a great source of ideas while writing your mystery story or novel. I’ll focus on stories by the great writers of the Golden Age — Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Nero Wolfe, and Ellery Queen — but I’m also throwing in a lot of other writers, as well as contemporary writers to show that many of these tropes can still be effectively used. This is not a top-level project yet; I’m reading stories and gathering ideas and revising the manuscript as I go, but it looks like it’ll be great fun to read and use.

The big project — as CIA and the Quote Book move onto the bookshelves real and virtual — is “The Complete, Annotated Secret of Chimneys.” This Agatha Christie lighthearted suspense novel will come into the public domain in the U.S. on Jan. 1, 2021, and we want to be ready to release it then. The family has read the book and marked what they wanted more information on, and I’m busy writing the footnotes and essays to accompany the manuscript. Its course is already plotted: 600 finished words a day until Dec. 15, when it’ll be edited, produced and prepared to spring onto an unsuspecting world.

There’ll be more to talk about, but this is enough for now. I want to provide these weekly updates to keep readers aware of what’s coming, and I’ll be sharing tidbits from my researches that’ll amuse you.