Latest Update on Progress of D-Lux 4 Book Project

Nothing too dramatic to report today, though things are looking better now than ever before for getting the book about the D-Lux 4 in final shape and actually printed for publication. Today I received my business license back in the mail from the county office that processes the applications. I wanted to be completely legal and official in my business setup, so I sent the application in about two weeks ago. The county's questionnaire had a lot of questions, which I tried to answer honestly. One of the questions was whether the business (which is located in my home) has any equipment not ordinarily found in the home. I said yes, because of the binding machine. A gentleman called me the other day to discuss that response. He said that the county code prohibits having any equipment not ordinarily found in the home in a home-based business. So I told him this is not some huge, loud, powerful machine; it's just a desktop binding machine, similar to what you can buy in Staples or Office Depot (though you can't really buy this particular type of machine there.) In the end, we agreed that the question should be answered "No," because this machine is not the type of machine that would cause any problems.

Then, a couple of days ago a lady from another county office called to ask me exactly what my business does. I told her I write books, print them, and then try to sell them to people online. She asked if I will sell them to stores; I guess if I said yes that would mean I'm a wholesaler, and would be subject to different regulations. Anyway, I said no, because I probably won't try to sell books to stores, at least not at first. She said that was all she needed to know, and today I received the business license. The only new catch was that I can't use the business name "White Knight Press" on my business license unless I get another form notarized and filed with the county court. So tomorrow I'll try to get that done. At least the county sent me the form and told me how to get this done, so I have no complaints. The red tape has been quite manageable, and I'll be glad to have the business properly registered and approved.

On the publishing end, my wife is doing a great job of giving the latest draft another very thorough read-through to spot inconsistencies, typos, and anything else that needs adjusting. She had never read it before, so it's great to have her fresh look at it. She's excellent with grammar and details, so I believe this will be the last round of edits before I start printing up a small inventory for my on-demand setup. Then I just need to wait for some "demand."

Yesterday I also installed a newly available Postscript printer driver for the Brother HL-4070CDW color laser printer; that driver does seem to yield better results with photographs than the standard driver, so that's another step forward to better printing quality.

The only other thing I'm waiting for is to see if Leica will release another firmware upgrade for the Leica D-Lux 4 camera. There's some indication that another upgrade will be released around the end of October, and I'd like to include some information about it in the book, if possible. So I'll wait a while and see if that happens. Either way, it now looks as if I'll be publishing the book by early November.