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Heavens, I’ve been so busy recently that I quite forgot to update you on my progress.  The crazy thing is that I am working on two Planks at once – the audiobook of “Fatal Forgery” and the final draft of “Portraits of Pretence”.

Audiobook first.  This is now published, and you can buy it all over the place – well, on Amazon, Audible and iTunes.  So far we’ve sold four!  A friend who is very big in the charity sector suggested that I should get it listed in the Talking Books catalogue for the Royal National Institute for the Blind, so I am finding out about that.  The narrator (known technically as the producer, as he did all of the fancy stuff with the audio files) has received his ten free download codes from ACX and is busy promoting them.  I am waiting for mine, and plan to use them to tempt reviewers.  I’ve not dealt with audiobook reviewers before, but I am going to assume that they are like all book reviewers: they have too many books to review, and you need to convince them that yours is worthwhile, so choosing the right reviewer who likes your genre of book is crucial.  (For instance, I was considering one until I looked more closely and realised that s/he reviews mainly erotic audiobooks – one of the questions is “How steamy does it get?”.  Sam is many things, but steamy he ain’t.)

Now for “Portraits of Pretence”.  Well, it’s been a busy weekend.  I’ve made the main edits suggested by Roy the beta reader – a mixture of typos, better phrasing suggestions, and actual alternations and clarifications.  I have registered the book with Createspace: at this point, all I have to give is the title, and this means that I can get the (free, Createspace-issued) ISBN.  I need to quote this inside the book as well as on the cover, so it’s good to have it.  I have cut and pasted all of the plain Word text into the book template, so that “Portraits of Pretence” will have the same interior look and feel as the other three.  This is a painstaking job that required a whole bag of chocolate buttons.  I have given a title to each chapter – this is a fun job.  I have worked out the (almost final) page count (334 – about twenty pages longer than “Worm in the Blossom”) which enabled me to set up the Createspace cover template that the cover designer needs and I have sent that to him.  (Until you have the page count you can’t calculate the spine width.)  So I have done all I can to facilitate the cover, and my remaining (big) task is to do my final read-through of the formatted text.  Thankfully my husband is away on Thursday and Friday, so I will have a mini-retreat for that.  In short, Sam and I are on track.