Every cover has a story, and so does this one, but I am simply too exhausted to write that up right now. Please look out for a blog post on that soon. Suffice it to say that I almost signed off on a rather different version, and only last-minute feedback from a Facebook
group of savvy authors stopped me from probably making a grave mistake. We'll see how well this one works!
I also signed off on the interior pages! Getting to that point caused me major anxiety over the last three weeks, and being anxious it not really my style. About four weeks ago, I sent the copy-edited, proofread, and formatted interior pages to my advance team. Bless their hearts, I ended up with 263 edits to a 145-page draft! It took me three days to plow through their feedback. Was the manuscript that messy?
No! But it turns out, for example, that the formatting of a how-to book is a much bigger challenge than a straight narrative with "just" text and photos like Jumping Over Shadows was. This smaller book has lists, bullet points, prompts, call-outs, and citations. The latter were a particular challenge.
This book is also a younger text, meaning I didn't spend years polishing my prose (like I had with Jumping Over Shadows), and so eleven smart readers had some good suggestions for improvement. They also found genuine word errors, some of which only one of them spotted. Goes to show that we all read what we think is there, rather than what is actually on the page,
which makes creating an error-free text such a frustrating process. Just when you think it's clean, someone else finds something!
For your entertainment, here are some of those word errors:
It will not to teach you...
I hope this book with will help you...
bring that time period to live life...
"innate" instead of "inanimate"
morale-filled
I was so distraught by the sheer amount of revisions that I ended up asking two more friends to go over the next version, one of them a professional proofreader, even though that meant there was no way I could publish the book before Thanksgiving.
This also meant that on my recent trip to London with my siblings to celebrate my sister's 50th birthday, one evening found me at my laptop yet again, plowing through revisions. And guess what I did on the flight home? Exactly, plow through revisions! At least by then there were relatively few. Speaking of our sibling trip to London, we did have a grand time--four days of just the three of us, my brother and I
showing our sister, who'd never been to London before, around. We live in different countries, my sister in Germany, my brother in Austria, and I in the U.S., so time together is always a blessing, but this trip was a special one.
