Today I put the finishing touches on a new set of edits for Trajectory Book 1 and sent it forth into the cloud.

This is probably the biggest update since v2.0, which was itself a fairly major milestone in the book’s existence. I can say with total certainty that today it’s a better book than it was when I released it back in November of 2015. The incomparable Scarlett R. Algee did her thing and cleaned up a bunch of krufty remnants that were kicking around and brought it in line with the style and formatting in Book 3.

To make my workflow more consistent with my next books going forward, I brought Book 1 into Scrivener and spent the time making the formatting and titles work. The final output looks pretty damned snazzy, if I may say so.

Book 2 should be getting the same treatment shortly.

Indie publishing is a funny thing. Not unlike software development, is an iterative process. Build early, build often applies just as much to a book as it does to software. Scrivener’s great for this. It can make use of an installed copy of Amazon’s KindleGen tools to produce an error-free .mobi file. I was using a hodgepodge of Pages > Word export > Calibre before and the whole process felt a little gross and I didn’t really trust those intervening stages. I trust sending a Word formatted .doc file to Amazon even less so it’s nice being able to create the thing locally and test on my devices before shipping it out to the world.

Another way writing and publishing is a lot like software development is that these things have a lifetime. Maybe some people publish and forget, but I want to keep improving it for new readers. You get bugs or issues, sometimes even with a suggested fix and then, when you have enough of them, you push out a new version. I still like the idea of making these as good as they can be and new readers get a much more polished version. Thanks for everyone who sent in corrections or locations of errors along the way. It’s a big help.

To celebrate the new version, I grunged up a shiny new version of the cover for Book 1. Oh, it’s also on sale this week in the US and UK for 99¢/p. If you haven’t read it, this is a great time to pick it up before the release of Book 3 next week. The new cover graphic is still propagating through Amazon’s network, but as of right now, you’ll see the new version in a purchased copy, or you can take a peek right here.

Ignoring the fact that they might not be lined up exactly – thanks WordPress, I’d love to hear what you think of the new vs. old cover. Does one work better than the other? Why? Why not? Drop me a word in the talk hole!