Friday night was again a rough night for me. I had a lot of pain and hardly slept, so Saturday I kind of dozed off-and-on during the day (I promise I’ll write about my medical condition soon). Our mail comes late in the day, and so, groggy as I was, I was still happy to see a nice brown box in the mail. And yes, the title gives it away. My Davina’s Magical Radio proofs were in the box.
I can not begin to tell you what it was like to hold in my hands a book that I wrote. Although, mostly it was surreal. However, I did smile a bit as well.
I was pretty surprised they came that fast. So far I’ve been impressed with CreateSpace, the print-on-demand publisher I’m using. Before I started the process I read a lot about the company. Repeatedly I read that the process to get the book ready to print was a tough one, and to be prepared for numerous revisions.
I read that even if you try to follow all of the suggested guidelines before you upload your book, you still will most likely get it rejected and have to make modifications. I’ll admit putting my document into their format was grueling (I plan to blog about the process soon), but I didn’t find it unreasonable given what they need for the final output. However, I was delighted when my first upload was accepted within 48 hours without any changes to the text or cover. And now here they deliver the proofs over a week earlier than I expected. I’m hoping they keep up the good work.
At the moment I’m pouring over the book to make sure everything looks right before we go to final print. And so far it’s looking great. There were several tricky formatting sections where I was introducing cryptograms and solutions, and I was worried about those, but they all turned out looking cool.
So, I’m guessing sometime in April the books will be available from Amazon in print form.
Woot me! I’m an author. Wow that sounds and looks weird. It felt way safer just being a writer.
That is awesome! It must be amazing to hold a book you have written in your hands!
ReplyDeleteWill you please post about Create Space? I did NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org) last November, and they offered a free proof copy of your novel from Create space. I don't know exactly what I'm doing, going about and getting the free novel, so insight from someone who has done it would be great!
I'm actually putting together a series of posts about the process for formatting and then uploading a book to CreateSpace. There are tons of blogs and posts from other people about the process, and CreateSpace has a great help section, but I use an older version of Word and I had some problems, so I'm going to discuss those. And yes, holding my first book was clearly one of the coolest things I've ever done. It didn't even feel like me. I looked at the name on the book and thought, "Who's that?"
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