Special Friday Update: Formatting, Argh!

So, I don’t make the hardcover file until I’m pretty sure I’ve got most of the typos, because I don’t want to have to do it twice.

Wait, let me back up. Here is the flow of events. This takes place during final tweaking and proofing.

–Make a version for the ppbk version so I can tell the cover artist the number of pages and also confirm that the title page is on the right and so on with the very big formatting issues.

–Read through a draft on my phone and make a thousand little tweaks. (Actually about a hundred, but it seems like more.)

–Make those corrections to the ebook file.

–Get back proofing comments from a lot of people and make those corrections to the ebook file.

–Send myself the updated version so I can read it again on my phone.

–Delete all the chapter text from the ppbk file and replace it with the text from the corrected ebook. Make a paper copy for my mother to read.

–Get more proofing comments and this time it isn’t SO many, so it’s probably more efficient to make those changes to both the ebook file and the paperback file.

–Decide there can’t be many more corrections to come and make the hardcover file and get the number of pages to send the cover artist.

NOW there are THREE files, and any future corrections need to be made to all three files, unless I once again delete all the text and replace it. But wait, there’s more!

–Use Draft to Digital to create the epub file, now required for Patreon.

This, it turns out, is annoying. What you do is, you load the ebook file to Draft to Digital as though you’re going to publish it through them, which you are not in my case. I’m grateful for their tools, but if you don’t want to do it that way, you could do it with Calibre. Regardless, you need to create the epub file and it turns out this is annoying because –>

–The conversion process is going to screw up the title page and the copyright page and the table of contents, AND ALSO you will lose all line breaks where nothing is in the line. I mean if you created a line break with two hard line stops, you are going to lose those. This is one reason, but not the only reason, the title page gets screwed up. The fonts change and also you lose any line spaces between the title and the author’s name.

–Many iterations of loading one file after another to Draft to Digital and previewing that file over and over to see if the spacing is now tolerable. I can’t even tell you how annoying this was. Here are some tips:

–You can put a centered * on a line, drop it to font 1 so that it is practically invisible, and the conversion process now sees there is a line there. This can be really helpful to create line spaces. A larger * can be used as a separator to create line spaces in the text of the chapters and also between any lines you want separated anywhere else. I mean anywhere where you don’t mind an * in the center of that line.

–The best way to put in separators if you haven’t done it already — I honestly do not really like separators and prefer just a blank line — but if you have to use separators, then you can Find ^p^p and that will find all the line breaks throughout your book, which is very handy.

–It also works better to put in the title page yourself, but let DtoD put in the copyright page. It’s the only way to get the copyright page on the right page, as far as I can tell. You must also let DtoD put in the table of contents. If you were actually going to publish through DtoD, you would have to take out every hyperlink to Amazon or Goodreads because various platforms won’t accept your book with those links in place, which makes sense. You know what is sensible? Making a Word file with your “Other Works by” page both with and without links so that you can rapidly replace one with the other at any moment.

–BUT, and I bet you saw this coming, that means that at this point you have FOUR correctly formatted files, so you must either make each correction four times, or else make the corrections just once, but delete and replace the text for the other three: the ebook file, the ppbk file, the hardcover file, and the epub file.

Thus, AARGGH.

I’m going to get through this TODAY so I do not have to fuss with it over the upcoming three day weekend. I’ve just tipped over 50,000 words for RIHASI and should move well ahead with it over the weekend if nothing else gets in the way.

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