So a massive part of this never-ending admin has been a long-standing need to convert most of my CE Murphy titles into the book-making software I’m currently using. I’d done, eh, half or so, of them previously, but even that stuff needs a certain amount of regular updating. It gets easier with each iteration of the software, but still: basically, scut work.
I spent a full day doing the ‘easy’ stuff, the stuff that only required a relatively minor update to the backmatter to be ok, which got me through 16 titles. I KNEW I wasn’t going to get through the remaining, uh…eighteen…in one go, but I got through 13 of them, all the series except Inheritors’ Cycle which is going to be complicated so I didn’t even try, and even one of the single titles. So it has been an insanely productive day and I have not enjoyed any of it.
I am once more trying to remind myself that this will make Future Catie’s life so much easier. And it will. But it’s tedious–what I’m doing is cleaning up all the random things that came from the conversion into the Vellum software, updating the copyright, covers, title pages, backmatter and magnet links, and uploading them to Amazon. Which on one hand doesn’t sound too bad but on the other requires going and finding and often resizing the cover images, the title page images if they exist, making them if they don’t, fixing weird italics in the middle of paragraphs, fixing other formatting issues, figuring out what ‘magnets’ to put in to draw people to the newsletter, etc. It’s not exactly hard but it’s a lot of paying attention and it’s also definitely not fast.
And it’s literally only half my books: I haven’t even looked at the paranormal romances yet. But they’ll be easier, in part because they’re all already IN the right software and it’s mostly about fixing the back matter, for them. Still, god it’s tedious.
But when it’s done it’ll be done for good, and going forward (barring the deprication of the software) it’ll be much, much easier. Just. So tedious. ::cries::