Self Publishing…The Glamorous Life

I’ve finally finished revising the book – at this point, it is what it is…I think I could just endlessly revise and still find something that needs attention, but at this point, I’m running with it as is.  So now I’m at the stage where I’m going to start the publishing process.

Publishing a Physical Book

I’ve opted to use CreateSpace for the physical book and I started the process of getting my book set up.  First step, reformat the book for the 6″ x 9″ page side of the book.  Check.

Import it into CreateSpace – and find that although I’ve religiously used the formatting like I should, I found I did NOT have it formatted in with each chapter as its own section, with three different headers (first page, odd page, even page).  So I went through the book and did all of that.

Import it into CreateSpace – and find that the fonts I used in my book weren’t embedded (and I later find out can’t be because I’ve used Word for Mac).

So now, I have to covert it to a PDF…and I find I no longer have page numbers.  I left it there because I still need to scan the artwork and design the cover.

Publishing an iBook

I have a Mac, so a long time ago, I got the iBook Author program.  When I opened it at first, I thought I was going to have to cut and paste each section separately to build the book.  Turns out, I can just drop the Word document in…except the version of the book I set aside for e-publishing isn’t formatted in sections for each chapter and guess how iBook Author wanted each chapter formatted….you got it, as a unique section…so I decided to quit right there and right this blog.

The Thing Is…

I didn’t go into this completely blind.  I had done some research into what was needed and how to best format my book so it would drop into these magical publishing vessels…and I don’t remember a single one telling me the importance of Sections.  If only I had known.  So now, I either have to re-format the ebook version of my document or make a copy of the physical book version of the document and resize it for normal pages.  Either way, it’s fun times with Word…

And For Something We Hope You’ll Really Like…

And as promised, I’m happy to provide another excerpt from the novel.  I hope you enjoy it and again, would love to hear any feedback.

Until next time, Happy Journeys!

Mike

Click here for the second excerpt from The Reluctant Captain

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Countdown to Lift Off…

Welcome to a new year…I hope that the new year finds you healthy and happy!

For Christmas, my wife had my book professionally edited! As a result, The Reluctant Captain is nearly ready for publishing. I’m going to take one last read through it, make one last round of tweaks, and then I will start getting it ready for actual publishing.  My goal is to release it by the end of February.  Stay tuned to this blog for more details as they become available!

In my day job, I’m a software developer and I compare this stage of my book to that final stage when most of the bugs have been found in testing and it’s the last round of programming and testing to make sure as many bugs have been shaken out as possible; only in this case, it’s typos, wrong words, or even missing words.  It’s good because it means you’re almost done, but you kind of feel like you might go mad if you have to look at the code one more time.  Fortunately, I like reading my book, so I’m not at that stage yet.

The next stage will be getting the book ready for publication.  I’m planning to offer it as both a physical book, as well as having electronic versions for Kindle, iBooks, and Nook. This stage is like getting a new system configured for production – it’s all nuts and bolts details. I’m sure I’ll be having tons of fun navigating the various software platforms for creating a new version – good thing I’m a software developer too!

As a thank you for the people who read my blog as well as a tease of the future, I’ve uploaded an excerpt of the first three chapters of my novel. I hope you enjoy and I look forward to being able to share the completed book with you. Feel free to leave comments here as I’m interested in feedback.

Happy journeys!

Mike

Click here for an excerpt from The Reluctant Captain

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