For any of y’all who have published a book, especially if you also did the formatting for it, you’re going to understand me when I say I hate the formatting process.
Lest you accuse me of ignorance, this ain’t my first rodeo at the book printing process, so it in theory should be simpler. Except, it’s not. It’s infuriating and getting worse. I employ Microsoft Word to size my pages to XX by XX dimensions; count the total number of pages, and create a table of contents. And it matches everything in the file, and everything is good. Until it isn’t.
When I upload said file to the publisher’s program, everything changes. The page numbers are different. The table of contents doesn’t bear any resemblance to the page numbers in the ready-for-print document. Worse yet, subheaders on the page end up on entirely different pages, often standing alone at the bottom of a page, which means more formatting. And re-formatting. And re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-formatting. Ad nauseam.
I finally got ‘er done and submitted, using a third party publisher this time, but not (thankfully) the Penguin folks. I’m ridiculously done with them. With this company, it’s more work, but I retain more rights (and more of the profits from every sale.)
After futzing forever with the interior file, I realized the cover I submitted has typos. Y’all will have to insert your own facepalm here, because I’m too far out of it to do even that. I’m sure the publisher will kick me kick it back to me, but it’s still annoying. (Working with the cover in Photoshop, which makes it nearly impossible to read as you go. I had to copy the text to notepad to proofread it. Ugh.)
I’ve got the website up for Aunt CannaBea’s but not sure where to take it, with the fiasco out of Washington throwing the industry into disarray. I haven’t done anything with affiliate marketing or anything else, all things considered.
I sometimes really enjoy being ignorant. It’s a lot less stressful (if more expensive).
Good for you though. Typo and all, I’m very thrilled for you!
🙂
This is my fourth personal foray into publishing, and my first with this publisher, but I’ve formatted for countless other people along the way. This particular manuscript was fussy, though, so I had to yank here and pull there to make it fit. There were some diagrams and some specialized formatting. I think it would’ve been a pain in the ass no matter what I did.
I know just what you mean about editing and formatting. I don’t know nearly as much as you do and I could just scream sometimes. But I want my book published so I just plow on. Good luck with the other business.
Same here. This one had so much specialized formatting it was making me batty. If it had been a typical novel, no big deal. Those are a walk in the park. But this was a nonfiction work with diagrams and reference materials, so…
Can you submit your manuscript as a pdf? PDF is a more stable format when shipping documents through cyberspace.
I have an email from a listserv out of Tufts that starts a conversation about the grey area CBD resides in I will wait and see what comes out of it and if it is worthwhile I will pass it along to you.
I tried the PDF approach too, but there were several reasons I stuck with the doc formatting. In retrospect I probably should’ve just converted each revision and called it good enough.