Day: February 18, 2017

I am not going to finish those paperbacks today

Lynn

Dang it. I’m not going to finish those paperbacks today. I got caught up with tweaking the look of the interior and spent too much time on the cover of one of them today (perfectionism is a trap), and here it is just about bedtime for me (oh, my tired eyes!) and I’ve submitted the files for only one paperback today.

So 2 down and 5 to go. Except I’ve realized that I still need to correct a book I found an error in a few weeks ago, so that means 6 to go. But that one doesn’t need a cover, just a few changes to the interior.

I’m very close to finishing a second tonight, and I think I’ll try to get it submitted before I call it a night. The other paperbacks are just going to have to wait. I want to do some writing tomorrow before I come back to them, maybe in the later afternoon. We’ll see.

I definitely want to wrap these up ASAP, because they’re one of the few things left that I need to do sooner rather than later, and when I’m done with them, I can truly focus for a while on just writing my books.

I’m going to finish those paperbacks today

Lynn

I’m going to finish those paperbacks today. All of them.

I’m not going to batch process them the way I’d planned either. I’m just going to start one and work it all the way to the end. Format the book, then make the wraparound cover.

Since I’m not worrying about creating the perfect paperback style set in Word, things are going much more smoothly now, and faster. I swear, that perfectionism bug is hard to get over. I’m going to quit looking for the perfect system (in anything I do) and just concentrate on finding one that works, something that makes my work easier, even if it’s not the easiest it could possibly be, because setting things up to be the easiest it can be is fraught with trouble. One little thing breaks and I’m right back where I started (example: the paperback style set for yesterday’s book).

What happened, you ask?Ah. Let me tell you. :)

Since I use a slightly different paperback interior look for every series, I had to create a generic set of styles and then modify the set for each series. So I ended up with six sets. It was a lot of work. And I’m not sure I finished it, because as I said yesterday, when I went to use the style sheet for the paperback I was creating, the set for that particular series didn’t work right. My copyright page styles were all messed up, my paragraphs indenting where they weren’t supposed to, things like that.

I’ve decided it just isn’t worth the trouble to maintain these style sheets. My ebook style set works great and I’ll just modify those styles on a per book basis going forward. It’s just easier that way. Sure I do a bit more hands on adjustments, but sometimes easier doesn’t turn out to be faster when you look at the entire picture.

So I’m moving on. I’ve got a system now that is working and I’m just going to keep doing it this way for the foreseeable future.