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Publishing, Site Updates

Victory of the Hawk cover copy, site housekeeping, and SFWA

In the midst of all this HEY BONE WALKER IS OUT excitement, do not forget, Victory of the Hawk is ALSO on its way. And there’s official cover copy for it now and everything, so I have updated the official Victory of the Hawk page with it! AND, I have also found it up on iBooks for preordering goodness, so I’ve added that link to the page too.

I have also taken the time to update various high-level pages on the site to be current with the status of Victory and of Bone Walker. The About Me, FAQ, and Books pages have all been updated too with current data, including how to get print copies of Faerie Blood and Bone Walker by ordering via Bandcamp!

Likewise, I have made sure that the current main places to get all of my books are called out on the overall Books page. This includes the direct links to go to the Crime and the Forces of Evil merch pages on Bandcamp, where you can order the aforementioned print editions.

It ALSO includes a direct link to the Audible page for the audiobook edition of Valor of the Healer, which IS a thing that exists, let me remind you all. 😀

***

Last but not least, I saw the news break last night courtesy of James Nicoll’s LJ that SFWA has opened membership to self-pubbed and small press authors.

To wit, awesome.

I still don’t qualify for membership by the criteria they’re discussing, which are based around “how much income do you pull in from your writing?” They are setting that bar at a level that’d be the equivalent of what authors can get from an advance from a traditional publisher. And honestly, that seems reasonable to me.

Now, though, this changes my likelihood of ever joining SFWA from “well, THAT ain’t gonna happen” over to “possibly feasible, if I keep growing my available titles and sales”. And this does please me. So as I said on the comment I left on the post, I would like to thank the folks in SFWA for making this policy change.

Meanwhile, I am still very pleased that NIWA is a thing that exists, and have renewed my membership with them. The opportunity to be in an organized group of independent authors IS very valuable–if nothing else, the chance to team up to sell books at local conventions is very, very welcome. And I do recommend that fellow indie authors who aren’t yet at SFWA-qualifying levels of sales consider checking them out.

February 4, 2015 by
Site Updates

Housekeeping-type site updates

As a general note of interest, I’ve updated a few things on the site today.

First, I’ve added several bits to the FAQ, to update the references to Vengeance of the Hunter, to add references to Victory of the Hawk, and to clarify what genres I write in and what other authors are useful to compare me to. Also, for giggles, I’ve added in a bit about this whole Quebecois trad thing I can’t shut up about, the Trilingual Hobbit Reread, and what other things you can expect me to start posting about once the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy is done.

Secondly, I’ve activated pages for both Victory of the Hawk and Bone Walker. Both are pretty bare-bones at this point, but they ARE the official sources of data for both of these books. Watch them for further updates. You’ll be able to find both of these books on the site’s Books menu now.

Third, the Rebels of Adalonia page has been updated to include Victory‘s official release date of April 6, 2015.

October 29, 2014 by
Site Updates

Some site housekeeping

In the name of cleaning a bit of house, I’ve done some rearranging of my site menu. In particular, I’ve moved the links for my FAQ and my Contact page under “About Me” on the menu, to free up top-level space for a couple things I’m adding.

One of these is the new “Blog Post Series” menu item. This is to serve as a reference for the various ongoing topics I post about, including album reviews, book reviews, Great Big Sea, Quebec trad, the Trilingual Hobbit Reread, self-publishing, and how to read ebooks. These things now have their own individual items on the dropdown under “Blog Post Series”, too.

And, while the new Boosting the Signal project legitimately falls into “Blog Post Series”, it’s also getting its own top-level menu item because it’ll be a special feature and will involve posts by guest authors. Plus I want everybody who comes by to visit to see that quickly.

Lastly, I’ve done a bit of cleanup of categories and tags, to try to organize my posts a bit better.

Pardon the dust!

February 17, 2014 by
Music, Site Updates

Quebec tunes sheet music

I had a couple different people hitting my site today looking for sheet music to La Bottine Souriante tunes–specifically, “Hommage à Philippe Brunea” and “Valse d’hiver”.

Since I am not actually a sheet music site, I direct interested parties to these links:

Failing either of those, TheSession.org may be able to help you. I’ve periodically found Quebec tunes there, though I use it as a tertiary resource.

You may or may not be able to find tunes composed by specific Quebec artists. I’ve found things composed by André Brunet (who in fact has a few of his tunes available in PDF form here, along with tunes by a couple of other people), and a couple of things composed by Olivier Demers (“Gigue à trois”, which is on the Montreal session tunebook site) and the guys in Genticorum (again on the Montreal site, but a couple on TheSession.org as well–notably for them I’ve found “Violon guérisseur” and “Valse de poeles”, the first on the Montreal session site and the second on TheSession.org).

I will also note that the lovely people at the core of the session I go to, La Famille Leger, have a collection of accordion-friendly tunes right over here. I note also that I am NOT an accordion player, but as I am a flautist, stuff that’s easily playable in D is very friendly to my flutes.

Happy tunes hunting, my fellow instrumentalists!

August 4, 2013 by
Site Updates

Google Analytics on my site

I finally decided to install Google Analytics, just to try to get an idea of how many site visitors I get on any given day. I’ve had it up for three days now, and have made a few observations I thought it’d be fun to share!

Unsurprisingly, most of my visitors are coming in from US sites. But I also see notable action from Canada (HI CANADA, I love you too <3), and at least in the last three days, I've had visits from the UK, France, and Sweden. Search terms that have had people land on my site include:

  • “a turn of light czerneda mobi”–Because I have indeed recently bought that book, although not in MOBI format
  • “carina press contract terms”–A topic on which I could probably actually speak, if called upon to do so
  • “gigue du pere mathias”–HA! This is of course one of the few Quebec tunes I know how to play so far. 😀
  • “hades and persephone erotic”–Again, HA! I’ve written Hades/Persephone, of course, but Queen of Souls isn’t even on the query circuit yet, and it ain’t smut, either! Sorry, whoever was searching!
  • “have lot of books”–It’s TRUE. I DO.
  • “kobo vs. nook”–A topic on which I have in fact spoken
  • “spotted at great big sea concert”–A phrase which can be said of me at least once a year, and sometimes twice 😀
  • “where ti buy fairies writing paper and note books”–Can’t help you there, person who was searching! Sorry!

Two people came in from Goodreads, two from Dara’s journal, one from my friend userinfokisanthe, and one from annathepiper.org, which IS still up even if I’m not actively posting to it.

On Friday, or so the analytics claim, I had 11 visits. On Saturday, I had 15. Yesterday, I had 24. So hi folks, whoever you are! Thanks for coming by. Grab a chair, raise a jar, and try the cake vodka milkshakes. They’re delicious.

April 22, 2013 by
Site Updates

Comment test followup

Thank you to all who dropped test comments on the last angelahighland.com post. That was very helpful and I really appreciate it!

Basically I was trying to solve two related problems. One was that I was not getting any WordPress mail when a comment showed up from an address I had not moderated before. The other was that when I DID moderate a comment, I still wasn’t getting any mail.

Issue #1 appears to have been caused by a thing we do on our mail server called greylisting. This is a spam prevention technique, and it essentially means that when it gets mail, our server give its the Dubious Face and says to it, “If you’re a legitimate address, come back in 15 minutes and I’ll let you through.” Most mail coming from legitimate sources will in fact pass this test. Most spam mail will not.

However, our greylisting system had not been set up to whitelist mail coming from other servers on the LAN. And since our mail and our web servers are two different machines, mail was telling all the comment mail generated by WordPress to bugger off. Dara checked the settings, saw that 1) we needed to add the addresses of all our servers and 2) the address that was in there was old anyway, and updated accordingly!

Issue #2 was actually WordPress’ fault. They took out the functionality that sent mail after you moderated a comment in a much earlier revision of the code than the one I’m running. Now, you can argue that that’s a decent decision if you think that getting post-moderation mail is redundant–after all, you already got a mail asking you to moderate the comment, right? So why would you need to see the second one?

However, I LIKE getting that second mail. And apparently others did as well, enough that there’s a plugin to put that functionality back in. I installed it.

And now I’m getting all the comment mail I need, as near as I can tell. If you happen to see this post or the previous one, go ahead and drop a comment anyway–I do want to verify that the fixes we’ve done work past just an initial 24-hour period. And, of course, comments are always welcome in general on any of my posts!

(Do note that if you read me primarily on LJ or Dreamwidth, for testing purposes, I don’t actually need comments dropped on either of those systems–the issues I was testing were WordPress-specific. LJ and Dreamwidth’s commenting systems are generally reliable. Generally. 😉 )

Again, thanks to all for your help!

January 4, 2013 by
Site Updates

If you see this, please drop a comment!

We’re doing a bit of server tweaking tonight to see if we can solve a problem with WordPress installations not sending us mail when comments are left on posts. This is a test post to see if I can get comment mail to show up correctly in my inbox.

If you see this, please drop a comment! (And if you’re seeing this mirrored on LJ or Dreamwidth or Facebook, can you please click over to the original post on angelahighland.com and drop a comment from there?)

I’d like to doublecheck the tweaking with comments left frome external sites as well as ones I leave myself. Thanks in advance for any help, folks!

January 3, 2013 by