My updated website shows that the second Quill
Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away,
will be available on May 1, so last weekend my ace technical team (composed of
my wife, Linda, and me) set to work. We were full of excitement, brimming with
confidence, and looking forward to meeting or beating the announced publication
date.
And then we read the directions on Amazon.
The directions, as far as we could tell, were
different from the ones last time, and they explained one of the problems we
had publishing the first book in the series, The McHenry Inheritance. Namely, why the indents were bigger than I
would have liked. Apparently, you are not supposed to submit the document with tab
indents; What you are supposed to do is send them a Word document with formatted
indents. A bit problematic when you have a novel-length book with a lot of
short, dialogue paragraphs, all indented with a tab. A Google search turned up no
easy solutions, so this meant going through the book and taking out each
paragraph indent — some 2,000 to 3,000 of them — one at a time.
A Litter of Kittens
It all reminded me, somehow, of what Mehitabel,
the comic female cat created by American humorist Don Marquis, used to say:
“Life is just one damn kitten after another.”
This seems like an exceptionally large litter,
rather than just one, but I take the point. Famous writers don’t have to do
this sort of thing because their publishing houses pay someone to do it for
them. But when you’re publishing your own books, this is an example, albeit an
extreme one, of the sort of mind-numbing, detailed formatting you have to do in
order to get the book up and available.
And actually, the kitten analogy is germane in
another way. When you’re this close to publication, you just want to get it
done, and you chafe at any delay. I started writing the book in December of
2012, and I’m ready to move on. At this point it feels as if I’m carrying a
baby that’s a month past its due date, and I’m ready to let it go. It’s
probably the closest that any male can come to understanding the experience of
childbirth.
Just One More Thing
And then, just when we thought the paragraphing
issue was all taken care of, we tried submitting the book to Amazon. They allow
you to do a preview to see what it looks like, and when we checked it out,
guess what — The paragraph indents were still too big. Not only that, but the
sub-chapter headings within the chapter were gibberish. Apparently some vestige
of a previous format remained.
So we went through the whole book, making the
paragraph indents 40 percent of what they were, which could at least be done on
an auto basis, though only one section at a time. And we went back and
formatted the sub-chapter headings so that they were the numbers they were
supposed to be. We submitted again, and the indents were better, but the
sub-chapter headings weren’t centered as they should have been, so we had to go
back and reformat all 60 or so of them one at a time.
At 8:30 last night we tried for the third time,
and it all looked good, so we hit publish and sent it off to Amazon. Shortly
before noon today, there was an email notification that the book had been
successfully published and is now available for sale. Buy it here. Please.
