A long and tiring day yesterday after a night of no sleep. I spotted an error in the printing of some of the Neorenaissance books, the colour illustrations were ruined with strong yellow ink. Less visible on full colour images (though every colour image appears sickly and ugly), but on the lighter pictures, the error is clear:
It appeared to affect lots of the books. A moment of panic ensued as I had already sent out, at expense, batches of books to the poets and the British Library. I counted and found that 12 of the books I had here had the error, about half, and I would expect that 6 to 12 of those sent now need replacements, perhaps 24 of the 37 books sent to me need to be replaced.
This is really bad by Amazon. My last book order for The Burning Circus also had obvious damage to the books. It appears that every book of every order needs checking by hand and that every order has a percentage of books that instantly need to be returned and replaced; so expensive and time consuming, and of course losing money on a project that was already destined to make a loss. A job that should have taken two hours will now take a week or two due to the incompetence of Kindle Direct Publishing. I wonder how many other authors this affects.
11 books have been prepared for the slow return process and I've sent a message about the problem with the hope of resolution. I've not had a reply yet.
I spent most of yesterday working on the vocals for God Infinity. There are lots of vocal tracks; the main 'god' vocals, some more gentle ones for an 'angels' section, some vocoder parts, a separate track for the chorus with more reverb, some tracks for spoken vocals, and some for the main protagonist. In the original version, the protagonist lines were in the same tone as the main vocals sung by 'god'. I've changed this to make the god vocals a little distorted and narrower. The angelic descriptions of heaven remain vocoded, and with a different melody from the original plan. This works well, it helps paint a picture of something perfect and Elysian.
Later, I worked on a new audio effect, Band Distortion II. I never really use equalisation in my production work. I use low pass filters, usually when designing sounds, and high pass, most usually to remove the bass on certain tracks. I rarely use anything else apart from an effect called Band Distortion which is a band-pass filter with gain, to push the sound in a certain way. Over the years this has been one of my most used effects.
Yesterday I designed a new version which has a curve control to (optionally) boost the signal of lower values more than that of higher values. I also permitted negative gain, which makes the effect a band-exclude-boost. I rarely use band-exclude filters, their effect is much more subtle, a sweep can sound like a phaser; but adding the option is very easy so I did so in case it became useful.
January has been an exhausting rush; the exhibition set up, a Fall in Green website, a complete re-release and re-organising of the 54 IndieSFX sound effect packs, the Heart of Snow album, the re-recording of Burn of God and creating the Neorenaissance book. At least a few weeks of February will be finishing and filing these things. The artwork for Heart of Snow, and lyric videos for that album and all of Burn of God, and Spotify canvases, need doing.
