As I had said in the last post it took about two weeks to do the edits from my editor. She pushed me which I truly appreciated. I felt like my manuscript was worth creating a book with. One reason it took so long was as I would reread my writing and push the scene a little more I would cry, not just tear up but tears streaming down my cheeks; not being able to see the screen crying. I would get up walk a bit around the house till my eyes and emotions cleared up then back at it. By now I had also started my author blog site, this one to be specific. I used the same schedule as I did to write.
To take breaks between editing I would work on the graphics of my book and the order I wanted the pages to be in. Created my bio for the book as well as the dedications page. Please know I had hoped to have at least my ePub files created to share for reviews and rankings. We were in middle of June and I pushed my original release date from June 21st, my mother’s birthday to a month from that, then ended up pushing it to Aug 1st.
With the document edited and ready for my typesetter we began to work on it. Again my time line expectations were not realistic. My typesetter even said we will be going back and forth a few times. I said ok and continued to lay out how I wanted the book to look on the interior, the size a 9″X6″ format on cream paper. Interior picture placement and style. I wanted a “Penny Dreadful” style to the art that I submitted to be used in the book. Only the image of Lilith is my original work. The other two image plates are graphically designed from my descriptions and a few rounds of corrections.
While waiting for the first typeset copy to come back I started writing my blog story “Under a Dark Star” to keep in the practice of writing. It is very easy to get out of the habit of creating stories or posts such as this one. One of my cousins and I were talking and she purchased my book directly from me so she could have it signed. I thanked her and I cried. She aske why would I cry. I told here that it is very humbling to have someone purchase your work. I write and hope that people will like my work. I don’t know, I do test it with friends reading it and thinking about the story if it’s worth telling. There are a lot of stories that don’t even get past my thoughts. Some I really just don’t think are interesting or would be worth someone’s time to read.
As I write I become invested in my characters and what I am going to do to them. I cry, laugh, and such as I write their tales. I know what I am going to do to them, my stories are not rainbows and unicorns, it is science fantasy but tragic and bittersweet. My stories generally center around love and the heart regardless if that was my intent at the start of the story creation process. My work is pulp fiction, speculative, science fantasy, not something that will change society or predicts any great future-scapes to come true. Just plain old sci-fi/f tragic love stories with a dark “Night Gallery” type of twist. I worked through this to help refine my target genre and marketing/ad copy with use of AI. A stack I had put together to help me with marketing and creating images for Under a Dark Star blog poems.
My files came back. I went through them with a pdf reader then printed them out to see how it laid out. I noticed that most of my 3 line breaks to indicate time passage or point of view change were missing. This will break a short story especially mine that may move hours to years and sometimes eons in the story timeline. This took was unreal in the back and forth it took to get the files. The pdf files were finally set but the ePub files were still missing not just some but ALL the 3 line spaces throughout all three stories. It took a week to have a picture corrected. My Aug 1st release date was approaching and nothing was being corrected. I told my typesetter thankyou, you have been paid, I will take these files and work with them.
I found another typesetter to get the files corrected with all my line edits from the author copy I had printed on Amazon KDP. That was all I needed but in my panic I was over sold on what I wanted in services and mislead on marketing services. It cost me another $800.00 to have the files I needed to go to print and Kindle. Looking back now and what I have built with my AI stack I will probably be able to do my own typesetting for my next book due out late Winter.
At this point in the story I now have my files to submit to KDP, booksy.by, and Ingram/Spark for publishing.
Next week I will talk about tools and being lost in where to go now.
-d²
