As I slog through the putting-together of my movie-review book, I'm becoming a bit discouraged by the sheer amount of formatting work that has to be done for every single chapter (each movie review is basically its own chapter). Fonts have to be changed, but also font sizes, line spacing, paragraph spacing, text justification, chapter-title alignment, page size, etc. It's a lot of work, and I'm actually sort of glad I decided not to make illustrations for each chapter; that would have stretched the project out by several months.
Ultimately, the book needs to be formatted two ways: (1) as a PDF that will serve as a dead-tree version for both Amazon's print-on-demand service and for me to print locally, and (2) as a Kindle e-book. Right now, the focus is still on just putting the ms together and formatting everything. I then have to read through the entire book and make changes to the wording of some reviews (and some of my older reviews are, frankly, embarrassing enough for me to think I should just leave them out of the book entirely). After that, I need to focus on things like making a title, designing cover art, creating front matter, writing an introduction, and putting this all together into a coherent whole.
The sheer size of the volume makes the book-making task daunting, but I'll continue to chip away at it until it's finally done. Am still aiming for July, but we'll see.
1 comment:
I honestly had no idea of all the behind-the-scenes work involved in self-publishing. I thought the challenge was just putting words on paper. I've fantasized about taking my favorite LTG posts and publishing them as sort of an autobiography someday before I die. I thought the hard part would be sludging through my archives (and finding enough worthy stuff). Now that I see where the real work is, I'm thinking it's not worth it. Or maybe I'll hire someone to do it for me.
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