Things You Should Know About Writing a Book - Our Journey (Part 5)

By: Stan Washington
Date: February 26, 2015

We were in the homestretch, or at least we thought so. After months of late nights and hundreds of hours logged on phone calls, we could finally see the end of the tunnel. Our scheduled end date for this project had past but only by a couple of days. Our thoughts of being "done" were dashed to bits instantly when we threw the book over the wall at the editor.

"This is just the beginning of your journey" implied the editor with that steely eyed look that would terrify the fearless! Okay, enough exaggerating. She read our sample chapter and sent it back with a huge number of strikethroughs, corrections and suggestions. We thought we were finished!

Hire a professional editor. We hired a professional editing company, L Marie Editing. This was part of the project budget and worth every penny!  We thought we would put down our content and have someone simply modify our words into something coherent. Wow, were we wrong!  With thirty years in the book business and several books published, she asked us the right questions.

When she asked "Where is your back of the book copy?" we looked at each other like she was a martian. That was just the beginning.  We soon realized that she is an editor in this project and not an author. She pointed out missing or vague information. Fortunately for us, she was great at following up to see if we had the missing content.  Here is the link to our editor's blog: https://lmarie7b.wordpress.com 

Be careful of quotes. We put a ton of quotes in the book thinking it would be so cool if we would mention words from a particular expert. Our editor stopped us dead in our tracks. There are a ton of rules regarding quotes that we had no idea of. Siting the sources became more of a task than a pleasure.

Format after editing. With red pen flying, we received countless cuts, additions, and changes but eventually we were finished! We frantically grabbed the CreateSpace 6 x 9 template and began stuffing in our content. Use the blank template if you can. Here are the Create Space templates. https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/InteriorPDF.jsp.

Use quality pictures. After the final review of the book, we were ready to upload to CreateSpace and Smashwords, or at least we thought so. When we uploaded our book, it took 24 hours to get comments. We sat and sat and finally received an email. To our dismay it said "The book interior has issues that need to be corrected." Our pictures were not high quality and could be blurry in the final print. We changed the pictures and inadvertently changed the spacing of the content.

We uploaded the book and it was accepted, but upon closer review, we noticed a number of formatting errors that we did not catch in our final review. The inadvertent shift caused many problems that rippled throughout the book. We made the change to the picture sizes and waited yet another 24 hours! We finished our books and celebrated when everything was in, formatted and uploaded.

I hope you enjoyed our journey!  We learned a lot and will be coming out with more resources for our followers.  Blessings on your book!

Our books have been featured in Small Business Trends!

Blessings to you!