Hello, friends!
What a busy week it’s been! G had a week of a half-day summer camp at the local private school. This past week was fencing, which she fell in love with. I may need to sell plasma in order for her to continue with it. There were also two basketball games, doctors’ appointments for me and my wife, and a special day we’re honoring all weekend.
Let’s talk about writing, though, with updates and findings.
Welcome to the 76th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and using why too much technology is bad.
Becoming a paid Patron on my Patreon would help me write even more. On Patreon, I write about things in more detail than I do in the newsletter or on my website and include the actual names of my works-in-progress and not just codenames. The lowest tier for Patreon is $1 but at $5/month, we’re looking at some serious help.
I mean, if every subscriber or reader of this newsletter, or every social media follower I have became a Patron at even just the $1 tier, I could write more and pay my bills better. The same would happen if they bought copies of my books.
You can also buy me a coffee through Ko-Fi.
Grab Echoes on the Pond if you haven’t already. If you have bought it already, books make great gifts! And if you’ve read Echoes on the Pond, please consider reviewing on Amazon or Goodreads, and wherever else books are sold and reviewed.
You can also get my collection Catalysts or my novellas Alice on the Shelf and Shadowed.
Anyway, let’s do this!
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I’m still editing Project: Monster. There were more tech issues this week and I’m going to write about those issues in more detail below. Some of those issues have hampered some of the progress I’d been making and has slowed me down. With two basketball games, etc., this week, I was also slowed down there, too. Suffice to say, it’s still going.
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I also submitted story to a magazine around 2:30 on Thursday afternoon and it was rejected by 4:45. Now that’s punctuality! Onward!
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Over on Patreon, I showed some art I’m playing with! Become a Patron to find out more.
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Last week I mentioned that I’d approached some bookstores about events. As I was writing last week’s update, I got an email from a local Barnes & Noble finalizing a signing. Part of this week was spent designing ads for social media for it. Here are the results.
This is one I did for Instagram. And here’s what I did for a Facebook Event:
Here’s the Facebook Event link. Please go on over and check it out!
It’s been interesting trying to set up book signings. So far, the one place I thought would be the most difficult to get was the most enthusiastic. The Barnes & Noble in Wareham was so enthusiastic, it really moved me. As for the indie bookshops I reached out to, two said no (unless I wanted to have the books carried through consignment, which I don’t have the money for) and no others responded.
I write this without any anger or malice. I get it. A small press book that can’t be returned if it doesn’t sell is a liability for a store. But it also highlights the problem with the publishing industry for the last…well…half century or more? Bookstores can order books and return them for full credit if they don’t sell. The big publishers do this because they (almost) can. Smaller publishers can’t do that because they’d go out of business if they did.
This inherently means that bookstores won’t take a chance on smaller publishers, which means authors who have smaller publishers have trouble breaking into brick-and-mortar stores.
So my novel comes out in June 2023. Echoes on the Pond is a book I’m very proud of. People go into stores looking for it but can’t buy it. They have to go through an online store. That means people browsing won’t see it.
That means, unless I can get a store (like the local Barnes & Noble) to order it through their distributor for a signing, they won’t order it.
So here I am. I’ll be reaching out to other Barnes & Noble stores, too, and will continue trying independent stores and we’ll see where this goes.
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A few weeks ago I wrote about how I was editing Project: Monster using a PDF on my iPad. I like to edit by hand but the amount of paper to do that, the printing, and then the amount of space required to store draft after draft are a lot. I felt pretty accomplished realizing I could do it on my iPad using my Apple Pencil.
I still think it’s a good idea but there’ve been issues. The further along I go, the more issues. For the last two weeks, the PDF will begin saving and then throw me back to page one. I was around page 200 so this was an inconvenience, and the farther along I go, the worse it became. If that was the only problem, that’d be a pain in the ass but alright. The real issue was that it’d delete the edits I’d just made. It started to get worse and worse.
One night as I tried to figure out how to fix it, I noticed that the file size for the PDF with edits was 793.4 MB. To put that in perspective, the same PDF without the edits is 1.7 MB. That is a huge difference!
The reason I’d been having so many issues is because the file is ballooning to nearly 1 GB! Apparently, this is an issue when one is annotating on an iPad through Apple’s Preview app (or the Files app).
That’s a pretty fucking big issue!
So now I’m attempting it through Adobe Acrobat. I’m not as fond as the interface but it hasn’t crashed since I started working with it, although I’ve also only used it once so far.
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Well, I think I’ve come to the end of this week’s update. Please keep the word out there about Echoes on the Pond and my signing(s). Thank you for reading!
If you’d like to see what I could do if I wrote full-time, share this newsletter with others and consider a paid subscription.
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Of course, you could also become a Patron on my Patreon, which has a lot more information about my works-in-progress and the books I’ll be querying, including titles and some simple, non-spoiler details.
Get my collection Catalysts, my novellas Alice on the Shelf and Shadowed, and definitely order Echoes on the Pond, out now!
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And maybe call your local brick-and-mortar bookstore and demand they carry it! I’ll even sign copies! Well, if they’re local to me. That means Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and maybe some of the other New England states.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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