Becoming Mother

So much going on! So let’s take stock of where I am right now:

1) New blog content posted

The most heavily trafficked post from last week was “What Labor and Death Have in Common.” No surprise there–it was definitely a heavy-hitter. Thank you for all your kind words and for all the Facebook shares! It is truly the best thing in the world for me to get a message from someone who says that something I wrote helped them.

If you haven’t gotten the chance to check out the Book Club Discussions, you’ll see them listed on The Blog page. These posts have excerpts from the book, followed by commentary and a question to consider. The two discussions that are posted right now are related to breastfeeding (or not).

2) Library of Congress Control Number–acquired

Want to be as geeky as me and drool over it? Here it is: 2015911015. Doesn’t it have a nice ring to it?

3) New Press FAQ page posted

Tell your press friends.

4) Author Interviews–recorded and edited

It’s a fun experience (and by fun, I mean strange) to interview yourself: going back and forth from chair to camera to check lighting and angles, smiling for an invisible audience, and telling a tripod and camera “cut” when you flub up. But as I review the footage, I think they’re pretty good! You can see for yourself–I’ve posted the full recorded interview on the Press FAQ page.

5) Facebook Promotion

I bit the bullet and decided to buy some advertising space on Facebook in these last few weeks before publication. It’s definitely a scatter-shot approach, but hey, I love that this is helping to reach people that I wouldn’t be able to reach via my own circles. Which leads me to the next news:

6) New followers!

Thanks for joining! You are why I do this.

Coming up for this week

1) Start converting my files to Kindle-ready e-publishing files via Adobe InDesign.

Now that we’re about two weeks away from my scheduled release date, I have given myself over to the Adobe InDesign gods. Lord, have mercy on me, if I watch one more tutorial that says, “It’s so easy! All you have to do is…”–I really might punch myself in the face.

If you aren’t familiar with this software, my reason for using it is to convert a Microsoft Word file into EPUB and MOBI files–which are the files that I need for publishing on Kindle. So it seems that I will have to brave the unknown yet again and feel my way through this one.

2) Final touches on the print version of the book.

Final proofing. Final pain-staking proofing.

3) Publish more blog content

I’ll post at least one traditional blog post and one book-club discussion post. I’m still deciding the content of those posts, so stay tuned this week!