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Coming Soon!

 


So, I am getting ready to put out another book. It’s been a while. Eight years, in fact (doesn’t seem like that long) since my first book came out. This time I had it professionally edited, and now I can’t imagine what I was thinking with the first one. I had gone over it many, many times as had my wife and my friends. I thought it was about as error free as it could be. It was not. Feedback was eye-opening. So, this time I spent the money. I probably spent more money than I will make back from the sale of the book, but I don’t want to produce something to be embarrassed about. And who knows? Maybe I will sell enough books to make a profit. It could happen.

So, getting my edits back from the editor meant I had tasks that now needed to be complete. Yeah, a whole lot of tasks. Getting the edits back meant now I had to get serious. First, I had to go through all those edits. Most of the time I accepted the editor’s suggestion, but it was not 100%, so I had to go through them one by one. I’ve got to tell you; there was a lot of red on the copy I got back. It was time-consuming. But, it is what it is. I got through it.

Then came formatting. If you are not going through a publisher, you get to do all the work yourself! That includes formatting your (in my case MS Word) file so that it can be sent to the place that will print it or get it out as an e-book. You can’t just send in your Word file as is. There are a whole series of steps to take. I did this with my first book Star Liner, but that was eight years ago, and I had forgotten most of it. “How to” help is on the internet, but it is at times a frustrating process that is about as fun as doing your taxes. One problem I ran into was page numbering. You have to create a “section break” so it won’t start numbering on your title page and copyright page. Then unlink the sections. I know how it is supposed to work. Why doesn’t it? When you check the box that says “Different first page” it is supposed to number all the pages except page 1. Instead, I got a number on page 1 and no numbering on the rest of the pages. I tried various things. This went back and forth for seemingly hours. I managed to get something workable if not completely right. I saved it. I went out and worked on something else, and when I came back my page numbers were all gone. To quote Charlie Brown, “aaugh!” Again, trial and error with much futzing about, I eventually got something that works.

But there are more things you have to set up. Setting the page size, margins, indents, and line spacing, entering page breaks for the chapters, making the chapters “headings,” justifying. Then go back through the whole document to see what you have screwed up by changing these settings. There were times when I felt like chucking the whole thing in the bin and retreating to my room to binge watch The Boroughs.

All that being said, this is entirely doable for the average person who is willing to have patience and endure some frustration. There are some good tutorials on Youtube that help you through it (though, like everything else on the internet, some are very good and some are useless). I have a few more tasks yet to do, but sometime in the next month or so I should have a new book out called The Methane Sea. I hope it was all worth 

Star Liner

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