Every new publication at Amazon is another learning experience. Fire-Rider Book 7 — The Battle of Loma Alda — is online. Click on the link to the right and take a look at it!
It’s taken SIX efforts at publishing these damn serials to figure out how to force Amazon to publish them in a way that distinguishes them from each other more clearly. I’ve tried every which way from Sunday, and every goddamn time they publish the thing as “Fire-Rider,” in one iteration or another.
Even though Amazon claims it will number serials and post them in the order of the serial number, that does not happen consistently. Sometimes they appear in order, sometimes not. But most of them do not have the whole title or the correct title.
I’m kind of literal-minded, clearly too much so to survive in the Digital Age. I tend to think that if you have a series that has a number of bookoids, any given bookoid’s title should be SERIES TITLE: Bookoid’s Title. The series is not a subtitle. The book’s title is not a subtitle. But there’s no easy way to indicate to Amazon that thus-and-such a book is part of a series until you’re well after the fact: you have to have already submitted the title & subtitle before you can tell Amazon’s endless form that the thing is part of a series, and here’s the damn series title.
Today it dawned on me that instead of telling Amazon the title is Fire-Rider: The Battle of Loma Alda, I should go the other way around and say it’s The Battle of Loma Alda: Fire-Rider.
The problem is much worse at Bowker, where you can NOT convince the software that anything coming after a colon is part of the book’s title. The result of that is, as we speak, 13 ISBN’s for books titled “Fire-Rider.” Over there, too, a colon signifies a subtitle, even if it’s punctuation in a series of words typed into the “Title” slot. Extremely annoying.
Oh well.
Book VII is lively stuff! You should read it. I really need people to review these things, and so if you’d like to do so, please let me know and I’ll arrange (if I can figure out how) to put one or two installments up as freebies. Sooner or later I’ll need to do that anyway, but will move the task forward if one of you indicates you’d like a peek.
Just put up a pretty erotic image (speaking of lively stuff) at Camptown Ladies Talk — a famous and very lush painting by Gustav Courbet. The occasion: a nifty poem that appears in today’s NY Times Magazine.