Formatting - just one of several nightmares

On Sunday afternoons, my plan for this Blog is to post my goals for the week and what I did or didn’t accomplish. One of my goals is to make this post short and sweet, saving my ramblings for other days.

To make things easy, I use color-coding:  Green highlight is goal accomplished, yellow highlight is worked on and red lettering is a failure.

Goals for last week:

1) My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”. 

a. Finalize the back cover. Done.

b. Format the e-version. I thought I was all done with this, but I have to do some kind of tortuous hoop-jumping to get the chapters to be accessible by a tap on the Kindle. It was painful, but I got it done.

c. Scan through the formatted paper version one last time. Done, like six times. First, I couldn’t get the page numbers or the headers to be on only the pages they needed to be. I sent it to my son to fix, which of course he did in a matter of minutes.

Then every time I uploaded it to Amazon to look at a proof, it came out looking frightful. At the bottom of about every fifth or sixth page, the paragraphs jumped to the next page, leaving a massive gap at the bottom of the page. I lost track of how many times I went through the entire manuscript. The only plus is that in desperation (am I doing something wrong here?), I emailed a writer-friend who recently self-published and she had the same problem.

If you read my other blog, The Dino Chronicles, you’ll see that I finally even resorted to prayer. Always blows my mind when that works !

d. Publish both the e-version and paper version on Amazon. Went halfsies. I published the e-version, but am gun-shy on the print version. I finished it this afternoon but ordered a proof to review before I submit it for the world to order.   

e. Market, market, market. Not sure what I’m going to do there yet; there’s a lot in my head. Never did decide what to do for this, that’s why there’s next week!  

Goals for the coming week:

1)    My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”

a.     The proof isn’t supposed to get here until the 13^th, but on the off-chance it gets here sooner, I need to read it page by page as quickly as I can and submit the final approval to Amazon.

b.     Marketing. Oh, what shall I do?

                                                              i.     Continue blogging about it, either here or on my other blog.

                                                            ii.     Send out an email via Mail Chimp to all my followers.

                                                          iii.     Make a list of who I need to send a copy to when I get my author copies.

2)    Other writing

a.     “Holding all the Aces”, the memoir of my sister.

                                                              i.     I should read it over to see how much more work it needs. I’m thinking that while the whole Amazon publishing thing is fresh in my head, I should publish this too. It would be more as a family gift, but who knows.

b.     Research places to submit a couple of the short stories I’ve written recently.

c.      Submit the fantastic pictures of loons I took last month.

3)    Other stuff (this list used to be quite lengthy and complex, but I am going to try to keep it simple; I’ve got enough going on and it is summer!)                   

a.     If the weather is nice next weekend, put up the camper and clean it out to get it ready for our next camping trip.

b.     Try to help Hubby organize our new garden shed. 

I think that’s it for now. Have a great week and enjoy the good weather (hoping that you have good weather where you live!).

(And look at this post more closely and you’ll see why I hate formatting and why it hates me.)