The #publishing process!

Hello again!

A whole week has gone in a flash, some of which went with joyous celebrations of Doorways To The Past Anthology having been published on the 30th July. Yipee! Time to relax a little bit on that one. 

The rest of it went with blearie eyes and some very frayed temper as I got the final files ready for publishing the paperback versions of Beathan The Brigante. 

My cover designer Karen Barrett did a fabulously quick turnaround with the paperback cover files when I gave her the eventual page counts. They were duly labelled and saved in an appropriate file on my laptop. 

I've written before about my trials and tribulations with publishing on Ingram Spark and the fact that I've found (in the past) that publishing on Amazon was easier. Not so this week!

Beathan The Brigante , Book 5 of my Celtic Fervour Series, has been on Amazon Kindle Pre-order for a few weeks now, with the official launch on the 20th August 2020. This week I spent my writing time pouring over my MS Word 'KDP' manuscript to make sure it was perfect. I'd looked at Amazon KDP guidelines to see if anything was different from my last publishing foray in Nov 2019, that I needed to address before uploading the new files. Based on what I read, I decided to change my margins a little bit from previously published books and double, even multiple checked the formatting of the whole ms after making the inside margin a little bit more than the minimum suggested for my page count.

I checked that my word.dox file was acceptable to upload... and KDP declares it is an acceptable format. (I had sent up a Word format to Createspace, and I thought to KDP last year) 

A couple of days ago, it was time to load up my data!

Problem number 1: My interior file was all wonky and instead of 305 pages it was something like 356 pages. An error report said my margin for the page count had been selected wrongly and the inside margin was too small since I had left in a gutter of 0.33 cm.  ???

My cover file was also rejected as not being the correct size for a 5 X 8 inch book. 

Try 2 that my designer sent was still wrong, although that was accounted for as a 'bleed' problem which my designer sorted on Try 3.

My formatting change to a wider inside margin sounds easy enough but anyone who has done formatting knows it's a labour intensive, tedious job to ensure all bottom lines of the pages are matching and at full use of the page. And it has to be said that the more often an author reads their own work (definitely me), the more chances there are of wanting to make tiny little changes to what was there. 

My KDP interior file was rechecked, again multiple times, and uploaded as a PDF file this time with Try 3 of the cover file. They seem to have passed first stages of quality control and I'm very very hopeful that the proof copy I've ordered will prove that the publishing/ printing is acceptable for my KDP paperback.  

I dreaded sending up the files to IngramSpark.com  in case there would be issues. There were! 

But hopefully NOT with the cover file, or with the interior file- though as I write this I am awaiting the checks before they email a proofing check. The problem with the Ingram Spark setup of files was getting the site to accept my data (pricing and discounts etc). On the IS set up process you cannot input information for a subsequent page until the previous page is accepted. I have fingers crossed that both interior and cover files are 'good to go'!

Update to come on that, but since I've been forgetting to promote Beathan The Brigante, which I have loved to write, I need to do lots of that in the coming days!

Slàinte!