{"id":52188,"date":"2021-04-27T06:00:46","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T10:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=52188"},"modified":"2021-04-27T22:49:27","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T02:49:27","slug":"i-need-blurbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=52188","title":{"rendered":"I Need Blurbs!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m almost done with the print version of Mess Effect. The images are converted to black and white,<span class='snote' title='1'>They don&#8217;t look bad! Although I had to remove about 30 images because they were too dark \/ unreadable for print. Mostly these removals were from the last three games. Mass Effect 1 was lit properly all the way through.<\/span> the layout is finished,<span class='snote' title='2'>I needed to move images around to avoid wasting large blocks of space at the end of a page. Wasting a couple of inches of page space is harmless in ebook format, but it literally makes the book more expensive in print. We managed to lower the page count from 877 to 809.<\/span> and the front cover has been adjusted. <span class='snote' title='3'>I&#8217;m not sure why it didn&#8217;t fit. The commissioned art was 2:3 aspect ratio and the book is going to be 6&#215;9 inches, but for whatever reason the two didn&#8217;t line up and we had to pad the image vertically to make it fit. I&#8217;m too lazy to do the measurements and figure out where the problem was.<\/span> The only thing I need now is a handful of quotes for the back cover.<\/p>\n<h3>If You&#8217;re Curious&#8230;<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>193,487 words, which is 6k words longer than <em>Fellowship of the Ring<\/em>, which is the longest of Tolkien&#8217;s books.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0809 pages. That&#8217;s a doorstopper of a book.<\/li>\n<li>425 color images for the ebook version. 396 for the print version.<\/li>\n<li>Kai Leng is mentioned 51 times.<\/li>\n<li>New material: A Preface that explains some important concepts (like <a href=\"?p=17692\">trusting the storyteller<\/a>) for people who haven&#8217;t read the blog. Also, there are many short passages added in here and there.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"?p=31567\">Mass Effect Retrospective 44: Boss Fight<\/a> was edited to fix the incorrect calculations I did for orbital bombardment.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"?p=31575\">Mass Effect Retrospective 45: The Temple of Duh<\/a> is almost totally re-written to correct the way I bungled the description of Asari religion.<\/li>\n<li>The final entry, <a href=\"?p=46012\">Andromeda Part 25: BioWare is Dead<\/a> has been expanded to make the ending less abrupt. Abrupt is fine on a blog, but at the end of a long book it feels like you need a little something extra.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Also, I have no idea what the price will be. The forms on the webpage must be completed in a specific order, so we can&#8217;t find out until we finalize the cover.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, getting back to the topic of back-cover blurbs&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3>BLURBS!<\/h3>\n<p>I need a handful of quotes for the\u00a0 back cover. What I&#8217;m looking for:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This isn&#8217;t really serious. We&#8217;re doing this just to have SOMETHING on the back, and this is the path of least resistance.<\/li>\n<li>A blurb should be short &#8211; one or two sentences is the ideal. I&#8217;ll entertain longer or shorter blurbs if they&#8217;re witty \/ insightful enough.<\/li>\n<li>It doesn&#8217;t need to be positive! It can be negative, just make sure it&#8217;s funny \/ charming.<\/li>\n<li>Remember that the goal of these blurbs is to tell people why they should \/ shouldn&#8217;t read the book.<\/li>\n<li>For the name behind the quote, just use your username. If you want it to look like the person giving the quote is Kai Leng, then post under that name.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know how many I&#8217;ll need.\u00a0 I think we could get by with just four, but if there are a lot of great ones then we might use a smaller font and pack a bunch of them on there.<\/p>\n<p>Also, we&#8217;re cutting things very close. We need to upload the final book, order a copy, and wait for them to send it to us using the cheapest (slowest) USPS option. No, we can&#8217;t pay for faster shipping. I don&#8217;t know why. Then we need to look at it and make sure there&#8217;s nothing horribly wrong.<\/p>\n<p>That process can take up to two weeks, and we have less than three weeks before the launch of the Mass Effect remaster. So I&#8217;m going to take whatever we get today<span class='snote' title='4'>Tuesday April 27 2021.<\/span> and go with that. So if you&#8217;re a couple days late to this post, then please don&#8217;t sit there for twenty minutes trying to come up with a witty quote. It will be too late.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll have some real content tomorrow. In the meantime, thanks for the help!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m almost done with the print version of Mess Effect. The images are converted to black and white,They don&#8217;t look bad! Although I had to remove about 30 images because they were too dark \/ unreadable for print. Mostly these removals were from the last three games. Mass Effect 1 was lit properly all the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52188"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52198,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52188\/revisions\/52198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}