If you follow the progress meters to the right of this post at all, you’ll see that I’m making progress on the final edit of Shattered. I’m trying to get two chapters done each day.
It’s harder than I imagined. I had several readers read it, and I compiled their comments into a single Word doc, and I’m now going through it, line by line, and fixing whatever they complained about. Occasionally, I see something that everyone missed, and I fix that, too. It’s tedious work for me, but I couldn’t imagine putting Shattered out without having put in this effort.
After this “Final” edit, I’ll export it to ePub and read through it again, more than likely finding additional problems I need to fix. In this, publishing a book seems to be like publishing software. There’s always one more problem that you missed.
I also have seen the initial sketch for the cover art, and I’m pretty much thrilled with it. There were a few minor changes, but I pretty much feel the initial sketch was amazing. I can’t wait to show it to you.
If everything goes well, the eBook versions of Shattered should be out mid-April. The paper version may take a little longer, but I hope it will be available by the end of April. I’ve heard of teething problems from others with their first trip through CreateSpace, so any time estimate there is likely off.
I’m really excited to be able to see the finish line. Of course, once I cross, I have to do it all over again with Questioner’s Shadow, and with the second book of A Wizard’s Work, which I’ll start writing as soon as I’m done with QS.
Though my run through with Createspace wasn’t flawless, it wasn’t too bad. A few things I didn’t realize before my first upload but probably would have known if I’d read the instructions more carefully.
*I had to add page numbers myself (I had to teach myself to suppress headers on all the chapter pages, which was the longest part of the entire process).
*I had to set the page margins to the size of the book (it’s not something automatic like uploading for an ebook).
*It’s important to keep important details of the cover art within the specified guidelines (lettering and images).
It took less than 24 hours from the time I started the formatting process until I received an approval (which included one rejection because of items 2 and 3).
For someone as computer savvy as you, I doubt you’ll have many problems. I think it’s more about taking the time to do it right than anything.
I should probably check my cover art mock-up against CS requirements. I’d hate to find out after it’s done that I made a fatal mistake.