You can't judge a book...

 Judge it? Chance'd be a fine thing: you can't even FIND it!

Tales from the Word-Face

Visitors to my author page could be forgiven for being a little confused.

When I published the paperback of #WVGTbook I thought ahead. At the Author Central page an author can Add a Book. You click the button and a number of possibilities appear. You select one and then click the This is my Book button (a strangely satisfying process).

So I thought the thing to do was to call the paperback When Vowels Get Together – the Paperback. (I put the words 'the Paperback' in the Cover† Subtitle field of Create Spaces's automatic cover-creation tool, and if I didn't want it to be a subtitle I'd have had to create my own jacket artwork – which I probably should have done in the first place [but it didn't fit in to my Ten-Day {hollow laugh} Plan, mentioned here). Then I could Add a Book and select the paperback one as a separate title, with a separate cover. There would then be three books on my author page:

1. When Vowels Get Together V5.2
   This is the Kindle version
2. When Vowels Get Together – Sampler
   This is an early release (A* and E* only). It gives more than the Look Inside feature, but not the whole picture.
3. When Vowels Get Together – the Paperback

This was the plan, but – as Thomas Aquinas so nearly said – Man disposes and Amazon disposes. They've decided – I don't know how – that 1 and 3 on that list are the same book (which, largely, they are at the moment). But the result is that my author page shows only 2 items (and when I visited it to Add a Book it was already there and the full Kindle version seemed to have disappeared). The items are‡:

1. When Vowels Get Together – the Paperback
2. When Vowels Get Together – Sampler

When you click on the first of these you get this page with a paradoxical choice of formats:

I mean to do something about this in the fulness of time, though I'm not sure what. If anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

b

Update 2014.03.06.13:40 – Typo fix (†)
Update 2014.03.07.16:30 – PS added
‡ That is, it was like this. They've sorted it out now, with the paperback as an alternative medium  (there are still only two entries,  and I feel a bit uncomfortable expanding the Kindle version without amending the paperback).

This applies particularly to the Index that I'm working on at the moment, which uses colour. And if you want to see how that works, wait a while – next month maybe. When this is available, and the paperback honestly isn't an equivalent, I'll have to change the name of one of them: perhaps Digraphs and Diphthongs...?


Update 2014.03.09.17:30 – Updated footer

Update 2014.05.02.14:15 – And again:

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 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 40.300 views  and well over 5,600 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with well over 2,000 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.