Sunday, March 24, 2013

Writing Redux

I set to work yesterday on the short story collection.  I didn't intend to finish it in one day but once I was started, I kept going and finished it....I thought.

I sent an attachment to Susan to start on proofing.

Next, I started the process of putting the collection in book form at Create Space and immediately ran into a problem with the gutter. The gutter is the extra space needed to make up for the book's binding.  All of my pages had that space on the left side, which would only work on the odd numbered pages.  Take a look at a book and you will see what I mean.  That took another hour to straighten out but then somehow, the page numbers were in the wrong place.

OK, I took care of that and entered the entire book into the self-publishing format later.The numbers were still wrong.

I'll think about something else for a while, I thought, and come back to the number problem.  I'll do something fun.  I'll work on the cover. I'd thought it over before.  I loved the cover for my previous book, Yesterday's Secrets, Tomorrow's Promises.  (It's to the right of this post, the green one.)  I thought I would use the same format in another color, but there was a new problem:  the book wasn't long enough.

Short story collections shouldn't be too long.  They are intended for people who don't have much time, who can read a story now and again.  However, I do want my name on the spine of that book and that requires a wider book.  When Wade and I published Black Coffee Fiction (the other book to the right), it wasn't wide enough and that means the spine is blank.

So it was back to the computer to change the format.  This time the space between the lines would be a space and a half.  This will add over 40 pages to the book.  The problem with this is that the page numbers are still off, so I have to go over every page again.  I hope to have that done yet tonight.

When all that is done, I'll try entering the book into the Create Space format again, but if the book is still too short, I'll have to add another story.

Next I need a great photograph.  I found one in my own collection last time. This time...we'll see.

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