For the past month, most of my time has gone into editing my cookbook “The Best of The Rice of Life: Over 70 Gluten-free, Dairy-free, and Nut-free Recipes.” (Available now in print on Amazon and Create Space, and as an e-book for Kindle, iBooks, nook, Kobo, and Smashwords) I’m glad its done, and I’m glad I self-published it, because I don’t think it would have found a place in the traditional market. But it has made me even more positive that I want a traditional publisher for my novels. It was so much work formatting, and editing, and checking everything, and I would rather have somebody else do all that work so I can write more. Sure, I could have hired somebody to do that, but there’s also the time in finding such a person.
Anyway, I learned that Sigil is an awesome tool for e-book editing. I am definitely using it more in the future. Future tips – don’t try to do any linking within the document in Word before importing to Sigil. I had to redo it all. Same with the pictures. Word shrank them down farther than I wanted.
As for formatting for Create Space for the print version, it went a lot easier than I thought it would. The trickiest part was getting the page numbers to work with the double columns of the index. I also learned that I know nothing about formatting things to make it pretty. The text is very plain vanilla, as I used all the defaults for paragraphs and headings. It works, but a professional would have made a difference.
And the timing I used worked well. While waiting for the proof copy to arrive (which took way longer than I expected), I worked on formatting the e-book copy. They were ready to go by the time the proof copy arrived, so everything was ready to go at the same time. Except for the fact that the print copy will take 3-5 days to show up on Amazon.
Now, on to my next project!
Speed vs Craft
That struck me, because I believe it’s also true in writing, at least for this stage of my career. It seems the only people interested in knowing how long a story took to write are other writers looking to learn the craft. They’re not going to be particularly impressed by how many or few hours went in to it. Most readers, if they like my stories, will only be interested in following my career so that they can read more.
And so, my time right now is spent on learning craft. I don’t care how many drafts it takes to get a story told as long as it gets told right. Speed can come later once I’ve mastered craft. Right now, if I were to focus on speed, my craft would suffer, and I won’t earn as many readers.
So, I will stop fretting about how many hours have gone into “Changestone” and if that means I will be able to earn minimum wage if it sells. Because I won’t earn anything if its not the best I can make it.