In all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself.
In the run-up to Raether’s launch, staging and scheduling the e-book was easily done and completed early. The other preparations filled me with so much excitement and terror that I had little time to think about the Kindle edition. If Amazon KDP prompted me to provide X-ray content, I missed it. You may be familiar with X-ray from Prime Video. It will pop up information about who is in a scene in the movie you’re watching. Some clever combination of annotators and algorithms connects the content of the movie to IMDB, which Amazon owns.
X-ray annotations are available for Kindle e-books. They are not folded into the e-book file directly, but live in a database in the Amazonian cloud. Launching the annotation web app is cleverly hidden in the ellipsis menu. Like so.
Launch X-Ray, if you can find it.
I stumbled onto this a week after launch. Given the choice between writing about and around the book vs. trying to figure out how to market it, I took what I thought was the easy road and got to work annotating.
Everything’s automated.
Except the things that aren’t. The system does a decent job of combing the text for character names and specialized terminology. Some of the terms will have Wikipedia content pre-selected. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to visit each and every character and term and:
- Write a short character profile or term definition.
- Chose a Wikipedia entry to supply the definition.
- Exclude the entry from X-Ray.
- Realize that this entry is a nickname for a character and needs to be added to that character’s profile as an alternate spelling.
Sample character entry.
I expected Operation X-Ray to run over a couple of sessions in as many days. I was wrong.
Terms real and imagined
Raether is written in close third person perspective with multiple point-of-view characters who come from different backgrounds. The narration uses vocabulary from the POV characters’ worlds without slowing down to explain the terms. It mixes real and fictitious Pacific Northwest geography. It coins new jargon around the recently discovered Raether’s enzyme. The number of people who will get all the references is a demographic of me, because I wrote the story and the story required the research.
I like to think that you can enjoy the story without knowing the details of the Ruger firearms catalog or all the Native American names for Washington’s stratovolcanoes. The story doesn’t hinge on any of these details and provides enough context that you should have enough of the idea to keep reading. X-Ray is there for readers who enjoy stopping to indulge their curiosity. For the real-world terms, the Wikipedia text does a fine job. For the products of my imagination, I provide more details to flesh out the story’s world.
In the current X-Ray, there are 24 custom entries and 163 Wikipedia terms.
Characters central and minor
The core cast of Raether numbers about twenty. There are a great many more secondary and named minor characters. X-Ray’s automated search counted a total of 143. Some of those were false-positives. ‘Roooowf’ is a noise a character makes, not a new character. After coalescing the nicknames and excluding the super-minor characters, the current X-Ray has entries for eighty fictitious people.
The character profiles should enrich the reader’s understanding of the major characters but not reveal anything that would revise that understanding. The text of the novel should be the reader’s guide to the characters. This sets up a balancing act for the X-Ray profiles. They need to be interesting enough to reward the reader, but not reveal secrets. I erred on the side of being shorter and less interesting. X-Ray content can be revised at any time, so I may revisit this in the future.
For the minor characters, I recapped what we already know about them as an aid for readers who might have lost track and explained a few that came up in passing conversations.
Beyond Raether’s X-Ray
X-Ray is a nice supplemental feature that I would like to provide for future books. To make it easier, I’ll need to keep better track characters and terms. In Raether, it was all in my head. I should at least maintain a spreadsheet of who’s who and what’s what. Such accounting will help during rewrites by challenging me to justify keeping minor characters. I’m looking at you, Timothy Wood, Esq. Scrivener has facilities for keeping track of characters built in, so The Gray God will start in a better place when its time under the X-Ray comes.