I have one thing to say about formatting your book.

God bless your heart if you can do it.

So, today was a migraine of a morning. Bri and I spent the late morning and early afternoon tandem editing the last of the book. Then we compiled it. We tried to get it appropriately formatted, but what she was seeing and what I saw didn’t match.

What in the butt, dude!? We were looking at the same document on the same program, on the same type of computers. Hers showed it being off by a line. When I exported it as a PDF, sure enough, it was off by a line! I couldn’t even see it to fix it!

It was a conspiracy to see my brain leak out my eyeball, as migraines try to do.

So, then we had a little fun because I got to teach Bri how to export to .ePub and convert to .mobi. Of course, this was to put the book on our Kindles, where we found that the formatting was balls.

Bri, who I called a fancy devil earlier today, had to do a ton of convo juggling and info wrangling to find us some formatting info. And amongst this, we found out we didn’t need to do ISBN and Copyright the way we were going to do them.

We are so in the weeds on this first book. I swear to you, if it weren’t for Bri, I’d have lost my mind already.

So then we spent two hours researching book formatting services.

I still have to read the book tonight to do the last pass on it. I can’t tell you how spoiled this book baby is! It has all this attention and coddling. It better grow up to be successful.

It’s 21:35, I do 24 hour time in my house, it’s 9:35 for you civvies, and I just had to start pulling together everything we’d need for our book formatting. And when I went to purchase the copyright, the US Copyright online registration was offline. I don’t need this. Bri already has a freaking ulcer–she doesn’t need another one, and me not getting copyright done will give her one!

Did I mention that formatting a book requires the stuff that goes, you know… inside the book???

It might be the seven cups of coffee I drank today. Or the migraine that never went away. The fact that the only thing I ate today was a PB&J and some spaghetti sauce, not together. Maybe it’s that I’m overtired. I really want to see the backend of this book today. I’m ready to start writing book two.

But before that… I want a shower, more Excedrin, and would it be too much to ask for some In-n-Out? I’d die or kill for some fries right now.

Hello! 

Welcome to the ‘Behind the Scenes’ of my book writing and publishing journey. Today I’m going to talk a little about the final draft read… cry, cry, cry. 

It’s not going the way I’d hoped. 

First of all, this is the 4th trip through this with Bri and easily the 8th draft overall. I wrote the book for NaNoWriMo in 2014. The Dream Keepers is a very well-loved story. When I decided to publish it, I printed out my last copy of the manuscript and rewrote a whole new draft into the Scrivener application. I then would export the files and import them to Google Docs and compile them for Bri. Bri and my friend Raylene read my ‘beta’ file. I took all their comments and notes and made them on a physical draft. I then posted them to Bri’s manuscript and the Scrivener one.

Why was I making extra work for myself? I don’t know yet. We will see how Scrivener works out to determine if it is worth it or not, okay!?

So, Bri and I went through the copy twice more, and then we recompiled it for this final proof. Which I again made a physical copy. 

I stress writers to do two things: 

1. Read your book out loud or have someone read it to you if you have the luxury.
2. Create a physical copy you can read to see what it looks like and make notes on that copy. I can’t tell you how different a physical copy looks compared to a digital one.

So, why am I crying? 

Because we might as well be looking at this from the beta version for all the things I see format-wise and content-wise that are wrong. It’s heartbreaking and deadline threatening since we need the final copy no later than the 16th, which probably means one more read-through, making it late.

Why, oh, why?

I guess this is just because Bri and I are being very thorough. We don’t want to publish rubbish. I want to put the best I can out there for people to read. I don’t want anyone to read and review my book and leave a comment saying, ‘this wasn’t worth the money because the grammar and punctuation were a mess.’ I worked very hard on The Dream Keepers and I want it to reflect that.

So, this time it is me reading my book like it’s the first time I’m looking at it, after reading it at least twenty times before. I have notes to droplines to a new paragraph. Notes to explain terminology that seems unusual. Notes to move apostrophes and correct tenses. And

notes to ask Bri why I am using tenses in some places that seem antithetical. 

None of this includes Bri’s comments! 

Wah, wah, wah. 

All I want to do at this point is burn it and start over.

That said, I’m looking for ARC readers and bloggers, and bookstagrammers interested in signing up for my book tours. I will have a 100% readable product ready for release. 😁 

Here is the sign-up for the book tour with Enticing Journey. https://forms.gle/Lwidgprz8fEwzTqH8