Sunday, May 22, 2011

Post-editing work

My edit is finally done. The .doc and the .html file are both adjusted accordingly, and everything is essentially ready to upload again and check out. But not quite yet. This first time, I was concerned most with the formatting of the novel itself, as well as doing one final read-through. Now that that's done, and I'm on step closer to actual publication, I have a little more work ahead of me.

There's more to a book than just the story itself, and I have a little more writing to do. The easy part: the acknowledgments page. Easy because I don't want a long, rambling list of names. I guess in my case it's more of a dedication page: one line to thank the people I most want to thank. That's already written, and easy enough to format. Center, start down a few lines, italics, end page. Done.

The bigger ordeal, in the case of this book, is the research notes. Because most of the book is historical, I want to be sure I give credit where it's due and include a list of sources I used. Or, given my spotty record-keeping (oops!), as many sources as I can remember. Luckily, I bought the majority of books I used, so they're on my bookshelf right now. I also wanted to include some notes about the historical figures involved and who they were. While I made every effort to stay true to the real people in my book, I couldn't go into too much detail about them (they weren't the main characters, after all, and my heroine isn't omniscient). So as a little bonus, I wanted to include short bios of them to give the reader some added information about who they were and what happened to them after the ship sank. I've been working on this all week when I can, and have it mostly done. All that's left is the bibliography portion. And after that, an "about the author" page. I'm kind of putting that one off to the end. I never know what to say about myself.

One thing I'm going to have to look into soon is the rest of the front matter involved in a book: the copyright page and legal notices and whatnot. I'm guessing that will be generated automatically when it comes time to publish, but I know better than to assume, so I will be doing some research on it later. My goal for now is to have the rest of the extras done and formatted, and a new file uploaded to my Kindle, by the end of the week.  That way I'll have Memorial Day weekend to go through it one last time and fix any lingering errors. After that's done, it'll be time to focus on building my website while also formatting the book in InDesign for print. (Not to mention doing some research on other ebook formats. I'm hoping that by having it in .html I can bypass some of the headaches of converting from Word to ebook.)

Oh, and there's also the small matter of a title. Have I mentioned before how much I hate titles?

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