A Week in Writing #253
By: David Hankins
Tags: Writers On Medium, Writers On Writing, Entrepreneurship, Writers Life, Comic Books

It seems that no matter what the intentions might be, every week turns into a Powers Squared week.

Sunday night, after I had published my last blog, we received pages from Rachel. These were jpegs before the tiffs. Our last chance to make any comments. We had none on the artwork, but we did exchange emails about the depiction of one of the characters. I won’t go into who since she has yet to appear in the book, but it was good to come to an agreement. We got tiffs later on Monday.

Monday got off to a start with information from the U.S. Copyright office. It seems like every time we file for copyright, there is something that we’ve done wrong. Now it takes something like half a year from the time we applied to when we hear if we’ve made a mistake. And when I asked for direction on how to avoid making the same mistake in the future, surprise, they didn’t respond. However, we should get the paperwork shortly. This delay is something that people never tell you when they tell you to get something copyrighted. Now, I guess you could pay a lot extra to have it expedited, but that doesn’t work for me. Just remember it takes about six months to get a copyright.

On Tuesday, I got an email from another creator asking me questions about our print on demand service. He had good questions and I tried to give him my positive, but realistic assessment. Of course, I invited him to learn more about Powers Squared and, of course, he made no commitment to check us out.

We also received four new pages from Nina, which we passed on to Trevor, however, I’m not expecting him to get right on them, since he had a fall on Monday and fractured his radius in his left arm near the elbow. He has his arm in a splint and a sling so he’s slowed down, to say the least. The work can wait, of course.

I also spent part of the Tuesday night listening to another installment of the List Launch, the podcast series that’s supposed to help us build up our list prior to launching a Kickstarter. This was the reason behind our wanting to name our “fan base.” We asked readers last week and, well, the response was underwhelming, to say the least. Despite that, we did decide to call the group “The Hound Dogs” and rename our newsletter, the Hound Dogs’ Howl, after the fictitious newspaper of the community college the Twins attend in the book.

The new image we’re using on social media.

Listening to it this time made me decide to update our banner image on social media, which we did on Wednesday, changing out the old image for one that’s more dynamic and more reflective of our current books.

Posting last week’s Peek-of-the-Week on Instagram got more discussion than we normally get, which was nice. Hopefully, we can get that sort of interaction across other social media.

We did receive more pages from Nina later in the week, on Friday. Everything was good but we did ask for a couple of changes in some of the colors. It’s funny how important some things seem, like the color of a character’s eyes. As usual, she made the changes very quickly, so no complaints here.

I did manage to work on The Runaway, doing at least a chapter a day for the first four nights of the week. Any progress is good, though there is still plenty more to do.

As with every week recently, nothing new to report with queries or contacting the editor on Familiar Stranger. I’m going to have to call him and work out the best time to do that.

I did write a review this week for Yesterday, a film we watched on Friday afternoon and published as our Saturday Morning Review on Trophy Unlocked.

Well, that’s about all for this week. So until next time, keep writing.