Hello, my friends! I thought I would give you a quick update on how things are going as I walk the rocky path to the publication for my book, Handling It. Now that I’ve made a commitment to a date and all.
And that date’s coming right along.
Yup. Right along.
Pretty soon. Preeetttyy goldarned soon.
Eeep!
Okay, um, well I’m not going to think about it now. This is just about reporting what I’ve been doing. Or not doing, as the case may be.
By the end of May, I had finished the edits I’d gotten from the editor. After they were done, I thought I would read the manuscript again to make sure everything flowed properly. If you don’t know, when you do edits, you tend to focus on the details, but you can lose track of the big picture and how the changes you’ve made will impact the piece as a whole.
So, I started reading it again. I expected this to take a couple of days, as the intent was that it would be a quick thing. Because, you know, publication.
However, as I was reading, I found several scenes that struck me as wrong – out of place, discordant notes in the story, or just plain dumb. That’s the advantage of looking at something after it’s rested for a little while – you see things with fresh eyes. Some of these scenes had been in the manuscript since the beginning (so maybe I should have caught them sooner), but some of them didn’t fit in with changes I’d made, or had been questioned by the editor.
Anyway, the upshot of the whole thing was, my short little read-through turned into a bigger endeavor, culminating with a scene where I got completely stuck until I finally broke down and just cut it. It’s funny how your subconscious tries to tell you something and, if you don’t listen, it just shuts you down.
The good news is, I’m basically (finally) finished with the read-through. But, of course, now I’ve made some additional major changes so I shall have to read it AGAIN. Gah! But this time it will be very quick. It WILL!! *shakes fist at sky* (well, it kind of has to be, doesn’t it? Because, you know, publication…)
The other good news is, because I’m going independent, I have the flexibility to make changes right up to the publication date. But that’s not going to happen. Right?
Whilst grappling with these manuscript issues, I was able to set up vendor accounts with three of the major retailers – Kindle, Kobo, and Nook. I had hoped to have the book up for preorder by now, but since it’s not finished yet, that didn’t happen. I expect I’ll still get it up for preorder – even if it’s just by a few days (on Kindle and Kobo – Nook doesn’t allow preorders).
iBooks is another story. Because Apple is, well, Apple, the only way you can load a book to iBooks is through a Mac. Not even an iPad can do it (the publishing program doesn’t work on that operating system). I’ll be renting time on a virtual Mac site to load the book, but that will add to the learning curve. So, I hope Handling It will be available on iBooks on June 22, but it may be a few days later.
I also want to put the book on Smashwords because that’s a way to distribute to Overdrive (libraries) and FlipKart (the biggest ebook retailer in India), as well as Scribd, Oyster, and other places. Since Smashwords will only accept a Word document with strict formatting requirements, not an ePub file, that might be a few days later, too. I’m going to focus on the other four first.
And so what is the moral of this story? What have I learned in the last couple of weeks? I think it can all be summed up as: “no project is ever as finished as you think it is”, or “everything takes longer than you think it will”, or “nothing’s as easy as you think it should be”.
Or all of the above.
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