manyeyedhydra
patreon
Update 23rd Nov '25
🕑 Added 2025-11-23 14:08:12 +0000 UTCThis week was print book boot camp.
I was supposed to put out print versions back in 2022 after I re-published all my existing books under my own name. It didn't happen for one reason or another, and I didn't want the same thing happening again.
Formatting ebooks is fairly straightforward. Formatting print books is slightly more annoying as you have to worry about things like gutter margins, bleed and various other settings on MS Word barely anyone cares about.
Amazon does put out a free program (Kindle Creator) that theoretically is capable of handling all this, but it's kind of shit to work with. It will put the text in the right place, but you'll have very limited control over how some things appear with respect to font, table of contents, and other things. I got something out for A Succubus for Social Justice, but the little succubus silhouette illustrations I use to adorn the chapter headings in the Succubus Summoning series caused Kindle Creator to explode.
The thing is, the print books are expensive because they're print-on-demand. If people are going to spend $15-20 on a paperback, I want that paperback to look good. I want my little succubus silhouettes, titles to be in the Olde English font, new chapters to start on the right page, and for the table of contents to at least have some options for formatting.
That means junking Kindle Creator and doing it in MS Word. That is a little fiddly as you need to go in and play around with settings for paper size, margins, headers and footers, and swearing a lot when the known bug for switching section breaks from Odd Page to Next Page kicks in and you have to go back and redo them manually. Grr.
Thankfully, Amazon does have a nice previewer, so I was able to fiddle about with settings until everything fell within the correct dotted lines. And once I had that as a template, I was able to apply it to all of my existing book manuscripts.
The end result is I now have print-ready manuscripts for all my previous books and collections. Once new cover art comes in, I should be able to make paperback versions available for people who want them. Currently I have marwmellow working on a new succubus pic for A Succubus for Christmas and my brother trying to reconstitute the old Succubus Summoning covers from the old files.
My plan is to put the three of them out together as soon as the cover art is in - maybe in a month or so. After that I'll add a cover commission to the regular HoHH H-scene commissions and slowly update the rest of the A Succubus for collections throughout 2026.
This is also the last big chunk of work related to regular book writing. With the manuscripts all formatted for print, I'm now done with that side of things until the various new cover art comes in. This means I can finally get back to giving HoHH 100%, which is what I'll be doing next week.
Thanks for the support and patience.
- manyeyedhydra
Comments
Many-Eyed Hydra
I'm hoping to get back to it. I have some good ideas for 301 now. Main issue is I need to get HoHH finished first, and that ended up being a more complex project than I initially thought (a bit of an understatement!). Next year I'll probably put out another collection as I only need to write a couple of new short stories for that. Regardless of where HoHH is, I'll be continuing to put some months aside every year for pure writing projects, so 2026 for collection #8 and 2027 for Succubus Summoning 301.
Wandering Kaiju
Hi, any chance of seeing Succubus Summoning 301 at some point. Really looking forward to a continuation of it. 201 really built up some suspense and there characters are far more than just succubus. Leaving lot out questions that stirred up my curiosity. I thought of those characters very often and really wish to see them more.
