word

Kindle Select Progress

/ ginny200 / 2 Comments

Two months ago, I decided to take my books into Kindle Select. Since that time, my sales have continued, although somewhat lower than my best month. However, the pages read in Kindle Unlimited have made up for the lack of sales and extended my readership, so I am pleased with the result.

The Jewelled Egg Murders is on track for release on December 1. I haven’t decided about taking it into Kindle Select, although doing so would give me more options for sales and promotions. My current chore is proofreading.

Steps in Editing and Proofreading.

  1. I reviewed the manuscript in Autocrit, correcting as I went.

2.  I ran it through Grammarly.

3.  I submitted it to Books Go Social for their Quality Mark programme. The manuscript received a Gold Mark, but the reviewer noted that it needed further proofreading. As well, she found a mix of British and American spellings, i.e. Canadian. She suggested I choose one, but I prefer to write in Canadian English.

4.  I used Word for Mac 2016 to identify spelling and grammatical errors. Word does allow one to choose Canadian English as the default.

5.  Now, I shall upload to Vellum and use its proofreading tool.

Why not engage a professional proofreader? Cost.

I shall rely on Books Go Social for most of my marketing efforts and turn my attention to the next book.

I have a collection of short stories in mind, five of which are Anne McPhail adventures and the remainder Dangerous Journeys of other kinds. Taking a page from Agatha Christie, I could expand one of them into a novel as she did with her short story, Yellow Iris.

That’s all for today from the beautiful Kawartha Lakes.

Se’nnight

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

Se’nnight, a word from Middle English that means a week, seven nights. It was derived from Old English, seafon nihta, and has relatives in many languages including Italian(settimana), French(semaine) and Catalan(setimana).
I first met it in a Rex Stout short story, used, not by the erudite Nero Wolfe, Stout’s polymath main character, but by a low level hood. “Where did you pick that up?” he is asked.
“Oh some wag started it around last summer.”
The Oxford English revised says it is archaic, Middle English(1150-1500), but there are references to its use later than that period.
Dr. Donald Straughan, in directing the transcribers of the Bath Chronicle(1760-1800) for the Georgian Newspaper Project, instructs them that the word is se’nnight, sometimes fe’nnight, and means a week, not a fortnight.
Se’nnight is included in the Emily Dickinson Lexicon for her 19th Century poems, and Virginia Woolf used it in 1928’s Orlando. The Rex Stout short story I mentioned is called Easter Parade and was published in 1957.
Perhaps the old words aren’t dead, just waiting to be rediscovered.
I’ll write again, Sunday se’nnight.