Things I never expected to find whilst searching stock photo archives for possible cover photos:
A series of photos of cyborg girls kissing cyborg horses. Whatever the book is that that would make a good cover for, I think I’m fairly safe in saying that I haven’t written it.
I’ve had a look at some of the artist’s other work and it’s gorgeous, I’m just wholly puzzled that the ‘two girls, one horse’ photo showed up when I was searching on something mostly unrelated. (And, yes, I had ‘exclude adult images’ on.)
Actually, the books have no horses in at all, the main reason for that being that I know very little about horses but have been involved in a lot of arguments during roleplaying games, between (a) people who know about horses, (b) people who know what the rules say about horses and are determined to push them to their absolute creaking limits, and (c) people who think they should be allowed to keep a horse in their backpack as long as they’re under their encumbrance limit.
In other news, the first book is slowly being copied over into Lulu’s Word template for the appropriate size book. The slowness is partly my unfamiliarity with Word 2010, and partly due to the book having been converted into AbiWord format and back which for some reason causes the text to keep showing up as a bulleted list. Anyway, it looks like pages in a book, which is making me ridiculously excited.
Also, if it now turns out that most of the hits to this blog are from hopeful people searching on ‘girls kissing horses’, or ‘two girls, one horse’ I will be amused.
Ankaret Wells 
‘Two girls, one horse’ sounds like a Pullein-Thompson book. At least, those are the only images I’m letting into my mind.
Pages of a book is an awesome feeling. I remember when I had my truly terrible Nanowrimo book printed as a free Lulu copy. It just… looked like a real book. Amazing! Enjoy it.
I didn’t know you had your Nanowrimo book printed as a free Lulu book! Awesome.
They did a deal for anyone who ‘won’ to get one free copy if you did all the formatting and stuff within a certain time limit. It sits very proudly on my shelf, though I never actually read it because it peters out so badly after the first 5000 words or so. I also once had a friend’s HP fic printed up as a Lulu book to send as a present for her (though now I think it was probably against their ToS). It was amazing how different the story appeared in print and I know it made a huge difference to the way it made her feel about her writing.
Oh, cool! I was wondering if it was something like that. Did it take you very long to do the formatting, and did it come out more or less as you expected?
I can’t remember how long I took to do the formatting, though I do remember having some issues with pdf conversions not working the way I wanted. The finished book is lovely, but the font is a bit small. I think the second one that I did for the friend worked out much better. I would definitely recommend ordering a sample copy before putting the book on sale, especially if you’re using a cover image which I think was the hardest thing to line up properly.
Thanks! I’d seen on the Lulu forums that people were having issues with fonts coming out unexpectedly small, so I’ll keep an eye out for that. That’s very good advice about ordering a sample copy, and I plan to take it. 🙂
I think it really *is* at least one of the Monica Edwards series.
But were any of them cyborgs in that?
photos of cyborg girls kissing cyborg horses
DOEZ NOT WANT!
But it sounds as if things are going well otherwise.
The heroine of the third book probably would snog a cyborg horse if someone dared her to or she thought it’d get her ahead in life, but the heroine of the first two would just take it to bits to see whether she could work out from first principles whether it had all its feet on the ground when galloping.
It does all seem to be going well. The Lulu forums are substantially more helpful than the actual help pages, but I suspect that’s true of a lot of online places.