I'd rather be reading

I really want to be reading my book. Isn't that awful? I want to be reading, not writing. Well, technically, I'm in-between writing books.

I've finished editing the second in my YA series and have sent it off to my editor (if anyone needs a professional editor, tell me and I'll pass on her name, she's terrific!!). And I've finished going through her edits of the first book in my series.

So, I've been working on the grunt work of self-publishing: formatting my manuscript so that the Smashwords meatgrinder won't spit my work back at me when it tries to do its thing. It's not hard work, just boring — going through the manuscript and making sure all of my dashes are 'm' dashes, all the ellipses are ellipses and have the right spacing before and after, making sure all the styles are correct, etc., etc. It's totally mindless work.

Once that's done, I'll see what I need to do to format it for Kindle and then PubIt, since I've heard that it's better to upload directly to Amazon and B&N and not use Smashwords for that — apparently it's easier and quicker to do it yourself and makes getting paid for sales easier too. But Smashwords is terrific for all the other outlets: ibooks, Kobo, Sony, etc. And all of this work is going to pay off in a number of different ways — not only will I get my books published (always a good thing since I haven't managed to find the right traditional publishing house for my work), but after it's out there and I've done the whole thing, I will be able to teach others how I did it. I'm already signed up to teach self-publishing at Frederick Community College next semester. I'm very excited to do that! I love teaching and now I'll have something new to teach.

So back to the grunt work, even though I'd rather be reading.

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