Books 4 & 5

I've got the covers finalized for Books 4 & 5 and I'm trying to publish them to KDP. Paperbacks should be soon, I was having issues with the spine text. And the Kindle versions are live, I think, but the formatting may be weird. Kindle keeps splitting my text in weird places (where I don't have a line break or a page break or a section break) so the title pages goes:

The Vampires --- (turn page)
A Saccharin Valley Twits-- (turn another page)
Evil Parody

Also, it didn't like my fonts or my dingbats, so in Book 4 there are two jpgs in the ebook that I hope are legible.

I also just finished Book 6 in a fit of mania. Now I'll go write proper books*.

*or not

covers for Books 4 5 & 6!

OK I finished the covers for books 4-6. (After that, it's beating a dead Unicorn, but I have bits of other Evil Stories that I could do something with).

Here they are (with the aforementioned "in poor taste" Book 6)

I really love playing in Illustrator (I'm subscribing to the Creative Cloud now). And messing with stock vector graphics to make cute witches.

I also added footnotes to Book 1 so it notes every SVT book I reference:
#3, The Haunted House,
Super Chiller #7, The Haunted Burial Ground,
Super Chiller #9, Evil Elizabeth,
#97-100, The Frightening Four miniseries
#110, Pumpkin Fever
#54, The Big Party Weekend
#50, Jessica and the Secret Star
#80 The Gossip War
Super Chiller #1, The Christmas Ghost
Magna Edition #1, The Magic Christmas
Magna Edition #2, A Christmas Without Elizabeth
Magna Edition #3, BIG for Christmas
 #78, Steven the Zombie
#15, The Older Boy
#42, Jessica’s Secret
Super Chiller #4, The Ghost in the Belltower
Books #97-100, The Frightening Four miniseries
#64, The Charm School Mystery

daaaamn. (I did my homework! unlike some of the ghostwriters)

New Paperback covers coming soon

I just spent the weekend working in Illustrator to clean up my cover illustrations. I improved them, although you maybe can't tell unless you're looking at them side by side. Uploading them to Amazon KDP so the paperbacks will be available in 72 hours. Then I'm going to publish Book 4, and maybe Book 5 too. I finished cover illustrations for those earlier but I needed to finalize the text.
Behold:

For book 1 I added the "Sunny Spanish-tiled kitchen" that is always mentioned. Book 2 pretty much the same, that background was a quick clip-art thing with a filter. Book 3 I fixed the curtain/ background and cleaned up the light on "Lady Ostara"'s hands. And the crystal ball stand. (Sorry if you have an older paperback copy with the messiness.)
I've been really motivated lately.

More Honest SVT Book Titles

because I'm bored at work bad at life

7. Does Anyone Really Care About Mary? The Twins Do, At Least for Now
8. Lila has a Horse and Elizabeth is JEALOUSE*
9. Sophia is Trash, No She Isn't, We Like Her. Do We? YES
10. Ye Random Character Pamela Has a Heart Defect, but also Jessica Wants to Fake Being Sick for the Attention
11. Jessica and Ellen Found Buried Treasure and Wanted to Keep the Money for Themselves, Those WHORES
12. Everyone is Interested in Our Stupid Made-Up Language
13. Mary Hates Her Stepdad's Boat (Although this book is about Mary, for some reason Jessica and Ye Random Dude are on the cover)

14. Jessica Would Make a Terrible Class President (or Treasurer? Can't remember)
15. Older Boys Still Want to Date** You Even if You're Clearly TWELVE

That's just off the top of my head, from memory. I should post altered photos of the book covers.

*SA REMEMBER THIS?? LOL

**they want to do more than that, but this book is for 12-year-olds so instead of him forcing her to have sex with him, he takes her on a surprise double date to the CIRCUS

Book 3 improvements

I just found a bunch of typos/ things I wanted to change in Book 3, The Fortune Teller (of course I did). I fixed them and saved a copy as a Word Doc and as a pdf and something else, maybe rtf. I really have to remember how to upload them to Kindle. Like, what format they need to be in. I could probably redo the paperback with the pdf. (ETA: I forgot, just export it as .epub, duh.)
I want to publish Books 4 & 5, at least in paperback for myself. But I still don't have the cover pictures right. I tried to depict Jessica as a vampire and it ended up looking like Kristen Chenowith.

ETA: OK now both paperback and Kindle ebook should be updated. Check your "Digital Account" on Amazon, and "Manage Content and Devices" and look for The Fortune Teller (if you bought it, obvs) and see if there are updates. I always hope it happens this way. (As opposed to everything becoming messed up). I'm not sure if anyone actually bothers to do this (update their Kindle books to correct mistakes), but I hope they do.

Maybe I'll post that Illustration. But it's in the Creative Cloud.
ETA: OK here it is. I was working on the cover for book 5 recently. You may even see them published soon.  Behold the disembodied head:

 

 

ETA 2: THIS is what I wanted it to look like. Bwahaha.

 

Still here

Well I obviously didn't delete all this shit.
I got a new MacBook, last fall, and looking at my files for Books 4 & 5 I realized I had lost all my fonts. So I had to reinstall them, and then I noticed my formatting (section break, insert blank page, no header on new chapter pages etc) was all weird. So I'm still working on that. But I still like to read them. And Book 6, The Babysitter II, which is really messed up and will probably never be published.
There was a piece on Francine Pascal in Entertainment Weekly. She says people tell her "I used to hate to read... " and then they found SVH books. Which I first misread as, I Used to Hate to Read SVH Books (because they were terrible, LOL). She did admit to the thorough Whiteness of Sweet Valley. "Those were different times," ugh.
I still kind of hope there will be an SVH movie, but I don't care as much about SVH as I do SVT. SVT, they were younger so there could be ghosts and curses and shit that didn't make sense like Eva Sullivan (staying 8 years old for 25 years, apparently. Or being 33 but still girl-sized, so she still fit into her nightgown and stupid bunny slippers?) And their mom was Alice "Wakefield" even at age 12, with her married name because the ghostwriter was too lazy to look up her maiden name (Robertson, which we as readers knew) or else they thought readers would be confused. (We were more confused by your weak-ass plot. Spoiler alert: Eva wasn't a dead Freddy Kreuger-esque monster influencing the twins' [and their friends'] dreams; she was a child who had been babysat by the twins' mom back in the day, who was sleepwalking and walked off a balcony. And didn't die but stuck around planning her "revenge". Suddenly, Alice [Robertson] Wakefield has this aversion to Halloween that was never mentioned before. How handy!).
I'm just rambling at this point. You know all of this (fictional fan of my Saccharin Valley Twits books, who is reading this blog and is a person not a bot, and is well-versed in Sweet Valley Twins).

Super Blue Blood Moon

You'd think, with the Super Blue Blood Moon coming up tonight/ tomorrow (even tho we won't be able to see it from the US), this would be the appropriate time to publish/ promote Book 4, The Vampires Part 1: Blood Moon. In which Jessica gets a crush on an eighth grade boy who is actually a vampire. And Piper is a new student at Saccharin Valley Middle School, yet again but under a different name, and Tobias runs a Halloween costume store reminiscent of the one in Buffy Season Two. Also there's a creepy old house, because there's always a creepy old house. I stole the "Old Luna Place" (hence the Blood Moon) from Super Chiller #9 and instead made another character live there. Who is aNOTHER vampire, pretending to be an author. Whom Elizabeth interviews for the Sixers, because of course she does. Instead of turning evil from wearing a mask she got from a dog's mouth, in this book Elizabeth has to go rescue Jessica because Jessica has gotten herself turned into a vampire. That's actually at the end of Part 1. Book 5 is Part 2.
Anyway, I didn't plan properly (the book is finished, but I'm still not happy with the cover picture) and I don't care because I'm too depressed. So, very likely I am not going to do that, but instead I am going to shut all this shit down. Delete this blog, delete my other blog, delete my books from Kindle Direct Publishing, and my account with them. Sorry, handful of people who allegedly read and/or liked (or people who hated them but didn't say anything) my books. I mean, you will still have them on your respective Kindles, probably.
Also I can do this at home now that I have internet service at my apartment, but I'm doing it at work because I'm a terrible person.