The Judge of the Dead now just a few weeks away (touch wood)

Today I got CreateSpace to send me a proof of The Judge of the Dead. Supposedly it will arrive Wednesday. I doubt the cover will cut the mustard. More of that later. That’s now the only doubt I have over publishing on my intended date of 11 August. If I can pull the trigger before then it could be even earlier.

I did manage to get the cover done before the 4th July deadline but of course it wasn’t hassle-free, me not being an Adobe dude. I couldn’t work out how to export the cover as a single-page pdf; it kept saving it as 3 files: back cover, spine, front cover. Fortunately Bob Levine on the Adobe forums came to the rescue. There’s an option on one of the menus to save as a ‘spread’. I uploaded the file to CS and it was accepted. Job done.

A couple of people on the CreateSpace forums are similarly helpful, namely ‘Walton’ and ‘Lighthouse24’. They seem to operate as a deadly duo, fighting incompetence on every street corner in CreateSpace City. I had a horrendous time using the CreateSpace pre-formatted Word templates, which I’m sure had some kind of hidden section break messing up all the formatting. Anyway, eventually I abandoned the template, building up replicas using the same settings on blank documents, eventually producing my front matter (title page, copyright page, dedication, blank pages where appropriate e.g. to keep page 1 of the manuscript as a recto page, not verso). Word for Mac 2008 was creating multiple pdfs but Lighthouse24 came to the rescue, advising that multiple pdfs could be merged together using certain software. For me that meant Preview on my MacBook. Sure enough, with the help of one of those invaluable webpages you somehow just seem to sniff out (see link below – only useful for people running ‘big cats’ OSX on older Macs)…

How to merge two pdf files in OSX

…I managed to merge my front matter, back matter, and 331-page manuscript into a 338-page pdf ready for upload to CreateSpace. It was accepted. Job done. Not quite.

It’s reasonable to expect to go through one last time looking at punctuation, re-running spellcheck, that sort of thing, but when I started all this I never really expected to learn about type-setting. I had read a blog post from a woman who claimed to have gone through her manuscript and made little rewrites where there was too much space between words. I dismissed it at the time, thinking it was just nuts to be doing that, but when I came to my finalfinalfinalfinal read-through, I noticed that Word does vary the space between words as a result of justifying text to the left and right margins. Having already spent almost a week going through the MS expanding or condensing the spacing on pages and paragraphs by as little as 0.1 points, I was really not enamoured with the idea of doing another major exercise to combat wide gaps between words, but it is obvious at times (even more so when you are aware of the issue, like you are now) so I decided if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly…

I spent a couple of days fixing this up as best I could. There is a secret to it, and here it is…

A line of text is likely to have wider gaps the longer the first word is on the following line. For example, if the first word on the following line is ‘unambitious’, that’s an 11-character word that the first line can’t host without it rolling onto the next line. If the first line had space at the end for a 3- or 4-letter word, the gaps between words on that line might not look that bad, as Word only has to spread out the shortfall of 3 or 4 letters’ worth of space over the rest of the line. However, if the first line could have hosted a 9-letter word, say ‘ambitious’, but can’t fit in ‘unambitious’, that’s a lot of space to spread out over the rest of the line; the gaps between words will be pretty obvious.

I decided that I would review any line of text that began with a word 10 or more letters long, in conjunction with the preceding line. There is really no option but to rewrite sentences, so I did, substituting a longer word for a shorter, or vice versa, or rewrote phrases, or even entire sentences. When doing this is it is important not to change the number of lines in the paragraph, because that risks creating new widows and orphans, thus the prospect of having to go through the entire MS all over again doing another sweep for widows and orphans: a nightmare scenario. Anyway, I would say there were 1-4 rewrites per chapter, which over 25 chapters means less than 100 minor rewrites. It’s not too bad; it just feels like the tail wagging the dog, having to edit the manuscript due to type-setting issues. The blank spaces control which words I can write. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? Looking at it positively, that’s up to 100 sentences that I had the chance to tighten up before the book hits the shelves. That’s the way to think about it.

Of course the >10-letter word cut-off means I didn’t catch the 9-letter worders, or the 8-letter ones, but there’s only so much you can realistically do. The type-setting might look a bit odd from time to time but it shouldn’t take over the writing process.

That still wasn’t the end. The fly in the ointment was that my CreateSpace manuscript was different to my ebook one. I had tried to adjust both in real-time by juxtaposing the two files, but inevitably I missed a few adjustments so had to go through the two files trying to identify where they were different.

Finally I ended up with two files containing exactly the same story, word for word, even if the formats are different depending on the requirements of CreateSpace or KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). I converted them to pdfs with my new pdf wizard’s spells, loaded them to the relevant Amazon websites, and got the thumbs up. My interior files are done. That’s it. No more.

My only concern now is the paperback cover. I had a message back from CS saying it could be printed, but that some part of the image was at a resolution of less than the recommended 300 dpi (dots per inch), thus it could be blurry or pixellated. Blurry should be fine, even possibly quite cool. Pixellated would be dreadful, and require re-designing the cover, at which point I would just scream and hand it over, with some money, to someone else to do. I’ve really had enough with messing around with graphic design programs. Not my bag.

I could do the big ‘cover reveal’ thing, get some marketing energy going, but I don’t want to jinx it. I’ll wait for the proof to come in the post. If the cover’s okay, it’ll be time to set the publishing date, set the price, make it available for pre-order, and start the fanfares. What I really want to start talking about on here is characters, plot, themes, the writing, not publishing mechanics and lists of problems encountered and how they were resolved. But I said months ago when I started this blog that it would be altruistic to an extent, logging the journey so that others that follow might have some materials to help them light their own way. That altruistic element has probably just come to an end. I feel like Doctor Frankenstein, spending months explaining how I built my monster. You’re probably not interested. You just want to see the bloody thing. Hopefully in the next 24 days I can unleash him on an unsuspecting world…