Jane Austen with me in Kathmandu, Nepal

Boy, it sure has been awhile, hasn't it? So long that Blogger has significantly changed its layout for designing posts.

I have been back from India for the last month, and insanely busy for all of it. I arrived on top of Passover, then had to begin to catch up at my job and finish my Kickstarter project, which has had just hours and hours of audio to transcribe. And I've been working on book 5. I'm doing the last of the copyediting issues now and from then it's formatting, layout, then publication.

A couple things of note:

- The size of the book will be the size of The Ballad of Gregoire Darcy, as those proportions are easily available on Createspace, whereas the proportions that Sourcebooks used (shorter with wider pages) are not allowed for wide distribution

- All of the previous books have used a creme-colored paper to some extent; book 5 will be whiter. Again, this is a distribution requirement. I am making an effort to have the books look similar, but I also want to get it to the most people possible, because I know a lot of people are going to want the hard copy.

- The price for the hard copy will probably be around $14.95, or less on discount, and the price of the eBook will vary depending on sales and promotional periods, but stay between $2.99-$4.99 for the most part. I don't think I'd put it way above that. Please watch my group page and blog for announcements of specials. I may even reduce it to .99c a couple times for a day or something.

- Because this is a POD book, there will be a delay on shipping. I don't have any control over this. If you want to buy a copy directly from me because POD is not available in your area (non-US), you can contact me and I'll set that up.

- While I'm trying to keep the general layout from book 4, I won't have as much freedom for fancy flourishes that Sourcebooks did a lot of at the beginning of chapters and between scenes, but I'll do what I can for the hard copy. The eBook will pretty much just be text because it has to work on all formats. The Kindle version has more room to move.

- It's 80,000 words, so it'll be somewhere in the 300-350 land of page numbers. Again, this is only relevant if you're buying the hard copy. Book 5 is not as long as the previous books because it has a more concentrated plot. Book 6 is the shortest book by far, at least 67,000 words or something like that, and after they get longer and longer as I have more and more to do with the younger cast. The final book is something crazy, like 200,000 words. Man, I hope we get there.