Mary Sisson's Blog, page 24

Progress report

I didn’t have a lot of time today, so I focused on getting the headers and page numbers right for the Introduction and Part 1. Yes, I’m still on Part 1 and am not done yet, but it’s been a lot of figuring out how I want the layout to look overall. The other parts will go a lot faster for having the layout sorted in Part 1, instead of me deciding that I absolutely hate how it looks and must do it again after it’s all laid out….

Progress report

Well, I’m still working on Part 1 of the large-print layout. I decided that not having the bottoms aligned was driving me crazy, especially because it was happening when there was no real reason for it to happen—i.e. in situations other than, That’s the way this particular letter fell. The issue (and I have a vague recollection of this being a problem in my earlier books as well) is that the APH guidelines set you up so that if you don’t have the exact same number of hard returns on each side of the page, the text blocks won’t line up. So I fixed that by putting less space between paragraphs—which, if memory serves, is why all my books are mostly APH compliant rather than entirely APH compliant.

Because you don’t indent the first line of paragraphs in APH, you automatically put line space between paragraphs. So the places where I had inserted line spaces between paragraphs in the trade paperback now look like this:

Which is completely ridiculous. So I fixed that…I think to my satisfaction, although I’ll give it another look tomorrow. I’m leaving a lot of line spacing in some situations, just because I think it gets confusing not to. This is just a tricky book to lay out, because you have the letters and you have my commentary, and it’s important that readers are able to tell the letters apart both from each other and from the commentary.

Progress report

Since yesterday went well enough, today I was like, “I should get going on that large-print edition.”

Dear God.

For starters, LibreOffice decided to crash rather spectacularly. It crashes so much less often than Word that I get confused when it does. And this was one of those sneaky stealth crashes, where it pretends like it’s saving what you’re doing, but then you realize that you’ll have to do it all over again.

So I restarted everything and worked in a manner designed to put the fewest expectations on LibreOffice, and I managed to get each part saved so that it’s at least roughly ready to be laid out.

Then I laid out the Introduction and started on Part 1—oy. The very large parts of this book mean that the large-print sections are HUGE. The main design issue is that I don’t think I can line up the bottoms given the fact that there are letters and explanatory passages that I’m trying to make look different from each other in a way that doesn't utterly run afoul of the APH guidelines. I’m not thrilled about that—I think uneven columns in a layout look really amateurish and shitty—but if you’re following APH you’re already sacrificing design for accessibility, so I guess I just have to accept it. I mean, it’s World War II nonfiction—which skews to an older audience that is more likely to be visually-impaired—so arguably this is the most-important book for me to make accessible.

ETA: I updated LibreOffice, which will either make things better or SO MUCH WORSE…..

Progress report

The allergies are interfering with sleep, so I decided to prep Dislocated World for when it leaves Amazon and goes to other e-retailers. So, a lot of removing tabs and that sort of routine stuff—the main concern is that when the file is converted, it will fuck up all the italics and underlines and strike-thrus, but there’s not a lot I can do about that at this point. Just got it as clean as I could, and fingers crossed that the conversion goes well.

Waiting to upload

I got the proof for A Dislocated World last night, and sure enough there were things that needed fixing that were not apparent in my printouts. I also went through the interior layout and index and made a couple of fixes there. (I’ll order a second proof once this is all uploaded.)

I didn’t sleep well last night, and I did the edit this morning before any caffeine, when I was at Peak Grumpiness. This often does help my copy editing (as long as I’m not actually too tired to function or care), and it’s why I think it was probably a good thing I never actually worked in an office as a copy editor—to be at Peak Effectiveness, it often helps for me to be at Peak You-Don’t-Want-Me-As-Your-Co-Worker.

Progress report

I went over chapters 3-6. There are nine chapters—I feel like I’m not 100% able to edit from a pacing standpoint without, you know, having the book written, but I should reacquaint myself with what’s already written before I push ahead with more.

Progress report

I figured I should get back to work on Trials, so today I went over and edited the first two chapters again. I was laughing out loud! The Trang series is kind of a pain in a lot of ways because there’s so much to keep track of, but I do enjoy it….

At least it's done

Yesterday and today were committed to 1. inputting corrections to the e-book that I caught while laying out the paper book, and 2. uploading the interior manuscript and cover for the paper version to Amazon.

It took two days, and it wasn’t like #1 was the problem. Amazon’s changed the old CreateSpace platform—I don’t know if it’s any less fiddly than CreateSpace, but it’s fiddly in a different way. You make a PDF this way, and it works just fine, but if you make a PDF that way, all is lost.

I did a PDF of the cover and uploaded it—and the software oriented it vertically rather than horizontally, which of course was confusing for all concerned. There was no way to adjust that in Amazon’s software that I could find, so I decided that the best way around was to upload a PNG file into Amazon’s “Cover Creator” program, which worked…except Cover Creator did the whole 90/10 thing Amazon tends to do, where 90% of their software is really intuitive and easy to use, while 10% is completely opaque.

Case in point: I decided after previewing my cover that I wanted to adjust a few things, so I needed to swap out the PNG file (which was the entire cover) for a new one. Well, good luck figuring out how to do that! The very simple, easy-to-use interface had nothing telling you how to do that, you couldn’t go back to an “upload my image” page, and it was all saved so that shutting everything down and starting over helped not at all—the old PNG file was, to all appearances, there to stay.

Finally I found instructions on a completely separate page that wasn’t part of Cover Creator—and all you have to do is click on a certain part of your image, and then this super-easy, super-clear drop-down menu will emerge from hiding and you’re back in the Good 90% of Amazon. I mean, I’m grateful that they’ve got The Good up to 90%, but one unintended side effect of the 90/10 contrast is that it makes you feel really stupid—this tool is so easy to use, once you’ve unearthed it from its secret tomb.

Anyway, I’ve ordered a proof (always always order a proof!), and assuming that looks OK, the paper book will be up on Amazon sooner rather than later. (ETA: Well, Amazon’s proofs are definitely cheaper than CreateSpace—you can splurge on expedited shipping, but I didn’t, and it was less than $10.)

After that, I have some non-book stuff that needs attention, but then I’ll get back to writing Trials until Tribulations comes back from the copy editor. I do still intend to do large-print editions, but I’m a little layout-out’d at the moment, and I’m going to have to do more with layouts once Tribulations returns.

Progress report

I proofed the index and then did a spot check—not surprisingly, when there were typos, the page number tended to not be accurate. But the post-proofread spot check revealed all of one error, and in all honestly I don’t know whether that should please or worry me. I didn’t see any errors in the Part 3 page numbers that came up.

I’ll do the cover tomorrow, probably—it’s spring, and if I don’t pay some attention to the garden, I’m going to be overrun.

Progress report

The index & final proofread is DONE!!! WHoooOOOOoooo! And I laid out the index, which is pretty much the easiest part. I’ll proofread & spot check it tomorrow, and hopefully get the cover done as well.