Owl Update #3: The Proof

Well, that took far too long. But then it always does, every bloody time I have to format a paperback.

I have been sitting here all day – and I do mean all day – transforming The Owl in the Labyrinth from the ebook manuscript into its printable, tangible form. You’d think that in this modern day and age it wouldn’t be that difficult: document has words in, books have words in; KDP knows this, takes one, makes the other. Some transformative fiddling about in the middle to make it look right, sure, but it should be simple.

Instead, I want Microsoft to bring back Clippy, the Office Assistant, so I can throttle him to death with my bare hands. If you can even strangle a paperclip. How does that little guy breathe?

Resize the paper, change the font: fine. Remember to change the line spacing so suddenly the book is 300 pages shorter (seriously!): also fine, actually quite helpful, even. Add the table of contents and the title page. Change the size and font of the page numbers: fine, because all the sections are linked together, so changing the first one changes the lot. Its going great. So far.

Change the headers, so that it’s author name/title name repeating every other page, like my other books. Except that because each section used to have its own header – Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc. – they’re not linked together. So I click through 70 chapter headings, changing each one individually. Annoying, but at least that’s done, so now I can – what’s that? Half the page numbers have disappeared? Every other page is missing? Right. Because I’ve messed with the headers, the footers now decide to mutate. So I put those back too, and it all looks good. Great.

Then I remember that the on-page chapter numbers also need to be resized and moved. So I scroll through again, section by section, and change them all. Fine. While I’m at it, I update the table of contents so the part numbers are up to date – and the frontmatter numbering too, which is separate ‘cause I like i, ii, iii etc. for that part.

What’s that? Half the page numbers have disappeared again? Give me strength. But some fiddling puts it right. The map goes in, the ISBN goes in, and I have a ready manuscript! I feed the numbers into KDP and find out how wide the spine of the cover needs to be – aha, I think smugly, it’s a good thing I already made the cover. This will be an easy fix: just make it a bit wider. And it actually isn’t so bad, especially once I realise that the entire cover of Nightingale’s Sword is for some reason hiding underneath this one. The program starts running a lot more smoothly once it’s gone. Funny, that.

I have a cover! I have a manuscript! Up it gets loaded to KDP; a quick glance at the previewer and –

Why is there an extra blank page at page 8? That’s not in the Word document. I check. I check twice. I upload it again. It’s still there.

Ok, let’s take a blank frontmatter page out and see what happens – why are there now 707 pages, when there were 709, and I have removed one of them? And why, when I upload it to KDP, is there still an extra blank page but now in a different spot? I can’t count them properly, because this is frontmatter: the actual page numbers haven’t started yet because I already made them that way.

I remove pages, I add them, I change back and forth and every single time there is either an extra page on KDP, a mysterious phantom page on Word, or both!

It took hours, dear reader. Literally. I eventually managed to luck on a frontmatter alignment that everything liked (the book is now 705 pages long; why that worked I have no idea), and got it uploaded again. I looked at the printing costs…

Ye gods. This is a big book. I knew it was going to cost more than my other ones. But it’s a lot. I just hope it actually looks good, which I’ll hopefully find out by next weekend when my proof copy arrives.

Because it’s coming. A hard copy of The Owl in the Labyrinth will be in my hands within the week. And that is exciting enough to make all this faffing about and frustration worth it.

All I need now is people to read it. If you want to, let me know. If you want to read it early, let me know too.